Walmart, every mention
495 scenes, the whole family · ← back to Walmart
tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone David Rosenthal 244Ben Gilbert 221David Senra 5Michael Mauboussin 3Jim Weber 2Dara Khosrowshahi 2Charlie Munger 2Steve Ballmer 1Michael Lewis 1Daniel Ek 1
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Walmart comes up
Lockheed Martin (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 44:34 David Rosenthal Kelly Johnson is sort of like Sam Walton in his prop plane, scouting out for, you know, Walmart locations, flying sideways.
Spotify CEO Daniel Ek · Acquired
- ▶ 1:19:53 Daniel Ek Um, you know, on the one hand, um, you, you had physical infrastructure, urbanization driving these kind of things where we both created these, uh, mega, uh, Walmarts of the world, um, as a direct consequence, but actually the complete…
- ▶ 1:22:01 Ben Gilbert Unique constellation of revenue streams are, because it's not just gonna be Walmart or Target is gonna cut me the check from selling CDs.
Sessions: David Senra (Founders Podcast) · Acquired
- ▶ 10:57 David Senra You mentioned it on the Walmart episode, where it's like, everybody says, oh, Sam Walton didn't start Walmart until he's 44.
- ▶ 11:06 Ben Gilbert Starting a bunch of stuff that looked an awful lot like Walmart.
- ▶ 11:17 David Rosenthal I think both an advantage that, like, we have, all three of us, and, like, kind of a secret that we have, which is that, like, we wanted, we did Walmart because we wanted to do Amazon, and so we were like, how do we do Amazon, right?
- ▶ 11:28 David Rosenthal We gotta do Walmart first.
- ▶ 15:37 David Senra We're not building the next Walmart.
- ▶ 37:32 David Senra Yes, Walmart is a huge success.
- ▶ 54:51 David Senra I'm pretty sure like the thesis behind Walmart is like, will they just drive far distances just to save money?
- ▶ 2:33:03 David Senra If you give a Walmart salesperson like a bottle of gin or something, it's going to influence them where he's just like, I want your price.
Holiday Special 2022 · Acquired
- ▶ 31:05 David Rosenthal Then we did Amazon, and I include Walmart in Amazon.
- ▶ 31:09 David Rosenthal I'm so glad we did Walmart first.
- ▶ 31:19 David Rosenthal Episode one was Walmart.
- ▶ 31:38 Ben Gilbert And I totally didn't get that before doing the Walmart episode.
- ▶ 31:41 Ben Gilbert I was like, well, there's like stores, like Walmart and Target, and there's department stores, which are like more expensive and opinionated, and then the brands that have sort of their own stores.
- ▶ 31:58 Ben Gilbert And Walmart
- ▶ 32:12 David Rosenthal Well, and I was so blown away learning about with Walmart how much of a tech company they were.
- ▶ 33:54 David Rosenthal I just feel like today, like, Walmart would have been, like, a hot venture-backed startup.
- ▶ 35:00 David Rosenthal But Walmart is a perfect example of a tech-enabled business that is, like, the right way to do it.
- ▶ 35:13 David Rosenthal Well, certainly the coordination of the distribution and the way Walmart built their supply chain
- ▶ 1:24:58 Ben Gilbert I want to continue going back in time from Walmart and do Sears.
Qualcomm · Acquired
- ▶ 34:50 Ben Gilbert Did they do Walmart satellite network?
- ▶ 35:17 David Rosenthal For Walmart.
- ▶ 35:19 Ben Gilbert Listeners, for anyone who didn't listen to our Walmart episode, Walmart was for a very long time the most innovative retailer on the planet.
- ▶ 36:07 David Rosenthal Wait, there's more Walmart to come a little later in the episode.
- ▶ 36:44 David Rosenthal Ok, so the next thing that they get into is, um, because they're in, they're in video, they're, they're in satellite, they're in video now with Walmart, uh, and they're doing these two-way communications, they build the video scrambling…
- ▶ 58:36 David Rosenthal This is the next Walmart.
- ▶ 59:24 David Rosenthal And they make it work, and one of the very first customers is, of course, Walmart, which implemented on their own proprietary fleet of trucks, building further their technical advantage over just about every other retailer in America.
- ▶ 59:59 David Rosenthal So they focus on this, and they also have, like, a lot of the business, you know, relationships already from the previous iteration of what they were doing in Linkovit, including with Walmart and many of the other large companies and…
- ▶ 1:01:16 David Rosenthal You know, remember Walmart was their customer for the link of it satellite, you know, thing.
- ▶ 1:01:19 David Rosenthal Walmart is very happy to integrate and implement technology themselves.
Benchmark Part I · Acquired
- ▶ 1:01:52 David Rosenthal Start with groceries and move toward an online Walmart.
- ▶ 1:03:27 Ben Gilbert We probably hit it on Walmart and Amazon.
- ▶ 1:03:46 David Rosenthal He knew about Kmart, Walmart.
Amazon Web Services · Acquired
- ▶ 45:52 David Rosenthal I don't think we mentioned in the previous episode, Rick was an army ranger before going to work at Walmart and that he would just terrorize everybody, all the developers.
Howard Marks & Andrew Marks: Something of Value · Acquired
- ▶ 11:54 Andrew Marks Starbucks or the auto parts companies or Walmart or Costco, all that type of stuff.
Amazon.com · Acquired
- ▶ 3:29 David Rosenthal I'm so glad we did Walmart first.
- ▶ 4:47 Ben Gilbert On the Walmart episode, they broke some news right here on Acquired about a fascinating new product called the Fundrise Innovation Fund.
- ▶ 11:07 David Rosenthal Well, we start in a very fun place today, which is the end of the most recent Acquired episode on Walmart.
- ▶ 11:35 David Rosenthal Writes at the end of the biography, could a Walmart type story still occur in this day and age?
- ▶ 41:32 David Rosenthal So, you know, the discounters, Walmart, Kmart, you know, Sears, all that physical stuff, you're just gonna cut them all out
- ▶ 1:10:38 David Rosenthal This takes me back to the Walmart episode and gosh, so smart of like having your employees
- ▶ 1:28:45 David Rosenthal And we're going to talk about eBay in a minute here, but it's just like the Walmart story and fighting against Kmart and other people like Amazon now
- ▶ 1:29:09 David Rosenthal Not Walmart, not Kmart, not Barnes and Noble.
- ▶ 1:29:39 Ben Gilbert That is a totally different combinatorial problem to solve than the Walmart thing of, hey, we need to make sure that a truck goes from this distribution center to this store once a day with about this stuff, and you know, maybe there could…
- ▶ 1:30:03 Ben Gilbert And packing tables is such a great first paradigm of, oh, our warehouses will need these, but other distribution centers in the Walmart land and that old school world don't.
- ▶ 1:30:19 David Rosenthal Well, and what's cool is like, yeah, there are big differences between the Walmart supply chain and the Barnes and Noble supply chain and Amazon, but eBay sure as hell isn't building packing tables.
- ▶ 1:46:28 David Rosenthal Well, like we learned on the Walmart episode, if the infrastructure off the shelf for what you need to do to make your beer doesn't exist, if you want to make your beer taste better, you got to build your own infrastructure.
- ▶ 1:52:04 David Rosenthal But now we know from the Walmart episode, Borders was out of the game.
- ▶ 1:59:10 David Rosenthal He knows the Walmart story.
- ▶ 1:59:12 Ben Gilbert By the way, listeners, we weren't gonna do the Walmart story.
- ▶ 1:59:16 Ben Gilbert We actually were gonna do this as the first episode of the season, and we got into researching Amazon and realized how much Jeff respected and borrowed from the Walmart strategy, and we're like, I guess we gotta tell that story first.
- ▶ 1:59:29 David Rosenthal There are a couple moments coming up where he interacts with Walmart, and he brings along his
- ▶ 2:00:06 David Rosenthal And it is different enough that just like Walmart could build native distribution for their network of Walmart super centers.
- ▶ 2:01:13 Ben Gilbert He's an important part of Walmart.
- ▶ 2:01:25 David Rosenthal It at Walmart.
- ▶ 2:01:26 David Rosenthal And as we talked about last episode, you naively might hear that sentence and be like number two person in IT at Walmart.
- ▶ 2:01:33 David Rosenthal No, Walmart was a amazing technology company and especially distribution supply chain logistics.
- ▶ 2:02:27 David Rosenthal He calls them back because Lee Scott, Walmart CEO, the third CEO of Walmart in history, takes Rick aside when he hears this and he's like, Rick, you've got a future here.
- ▶ 2:02:40 David Rosenthal A future CEO of Walmart.
- ▶ 2:02:51 David Rosenthal Walmart is no Barnes and Noble.
- ▶ 2:04:27 David Rosenthal He also airlifts about a dozen executives out of Walmart to come join him.
- ▶ 2:04:35 David Rosenthal Walmart's like, you're dead to us.
- ▶ 2:04:37 David Rosenthal And so he gets escorted out of his office by security, the whole thing, which in retrospect was a mistake by Walmart because that just makes everybody more curious inside Walmart.
- ▶ 2:05:13 David Rosenthal And Walmart.
- ▶ 2:05:14 Ben Gilbert And Walmart.
- ▶ 2:06:10 David Rosenthal I actually would put Dalzell on the Walmart crew.
- ▶ 2:06:31 David Rosenthal The Andy Jassies, the Jason Kylars, the Harrison Millers, the Jeff Blackburns, and then there were the Walmart people.
- ▶ 2:06:40 David Rosenthal Jeff Wilkie didn't come from Walmart, but he's very much cut from that cloth.
- ▶ 2:06:53 David Rosenthal So on the distribution and supply chain front, more than a dozen Walmart executives come over to Amazon.
- ▶ 2:06:59 David Rosenthal In late 1998, Walmart sues Amazon for trying to steal trade secrets.
- ▶ 2:07:09 David Rosenthal That DNA came right out of Walmart and right into Amazon.
- ▶ 2:07:14 David Rosenthal And to be fair, like we said, it's a different thing than the Walmart supply chain that they're building.
- ▶ 2:07:25 Ben Gilbert There was all sorts of false starts in Amazon getting good at distribution because even though they knew better, they sort of were copying the Walmart playbook and they were doing the classic Amazon thing.
- ▶ 2:07:44 David Rosenthal So when Dalzell comes over and all the Walmart folks, they had the warehouse in Seattle and
- ▶ 2:07:51 David Rosenthal They say, like, no, no, no, you don't want a warehouse, you want a distribution center, because a distribution center, that's the Walmart model.
- ▶ 2:07:56 David Rosenthal That's Walmart where the first distribution center is, like, you want something more sophisticated.
- ▶ 2:09:30 David Rosenthal Jeff obviously wasn't envisioning that specifically, but like, this is why they're gonna beat Barnes and Noble, and this is why they're gonna beat eBay, and this is eventually why they're gonna beat Walmart in e-commerce.
- ▶ 2:22:57 Ben Gilbert Yes, which was referenced on the Walmart episode.
- ▶ 2:23:46 Ben Gilbert Which by the way, then they would go on to ultimately start the thing that would be acquired by Walmart, which became Walmart labs, which became
- ▶ 2:23:53 Ben Gilbert Probably the second biggest reason that Walmart is a very real competitor in e-commerce now, second only to Jet and Mark Loray.
- ▶ 2:42:23 David Rosenthal They even go pitch the idea to Walmart to do the same thing with Walmart.
- ▶ 2:42:27 David Rosenthal Walmart is, uh, they're like,
- ▶ 2:55:27 David Rosenthal It's kind of like the Walmart episode.
- ▶ 3:23:23 David Rosenthal You could say similar things of Walmart, especially now that they have Walmart plus you could very certainly say the same thing of another one of our favorite companies that we have not covered on acquired that we have to now after these…
- ▶ 3:26:38 Ben Gilbert I think I looked into this when we were working on the Walmart episode, something like five to seven percent gross margin business.
- ▶ 3:27:22 David Rosenthal You can just walk into a Walmart.
- ▶ 3:30:27 David Rosenthal It's a little less convenient to shop at Costco versus Walmart of
- ▶ 3:32:35 David Rosenthal I like Walmart doesn't have their own airline with 96 planes.
- ▶ 3:35:30 Ben Gilbert And Amazon would win so consistently because they do the Walmart thing where they would go out and scrape every other site and create a bot and make sure that they could be the lowest price anywhere of any reputable retailer.
- ▶ 3:38:52 Ben Gilbert There's counter-positioning in the era that we're talking about, Barnes & Noble, and subsequently Walmart, because those folks would have to invest so much and did, well Walmart did at least, to completely reinvent the way that they do…
- ▶ 3:39:20 David Rosenthal We talked at the end of the Walmart episode about how Walmart is currently closing down Sam's clubs and turning them into online walmart.com fulfillment centers.
- ▶ 3:50:29 David Rosenthal Even Walmart, where Walmart stores are not in multi-hundred-dollar-a-square-foot prime, prime, funny choice of word, primo urban real estate,
From NFL to Startup COO to Congressman Regulating Crypto (with Rep. Anthony Gonzalez) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:38:39 David Rosenthal Like this is exactly what Berkshire does when they acquire a company or like Walmart did that we talked about with the early stores where they were partnerships.
Walmart · Acquired
- ▶ 1:38 Ben Gilbert Some astonishing stats on the company.
- ▶ 1:41 Ben Gilbert It is the largest by revenue in the world, doing nearly six hundred billion dollars a year in sales.
- ▶ 1:52 Ben Gilbert It is the world's largest employer, other than public entities like governments employing nearly 2.3 million people around the world.
- ▶ 1:59 Ben Gilbert It is still controlled by the Walton family, who owns just over 50% of the business a full 60 years after it was founded.
- ▶ 2:14 David Rosenthal Today, 90% of America lives within 10 miles of a Walmart, but there are three places where that is not true, and a fourth kind of where it's technically true but not in spirit.