Walmart

“In specialty retailing, it's not enough Just to have the classic holy trinity of price selection and convenience that Walmart and Costco and Amazon are all built on. You also need to serve the customer in ways that are wholly unique and specific to each specia…”

“They took gross margin up, which results, of course, in more profits, but prices that aren't blow away. They're closer to market competitive. And actually, if you look at their gross margin profile, it's remained elevated ever since. So it's not a huge differe…”

“Home Depot is the only specialty retailer in the world that is in the same universe as Costco and Walmart and Amazon retail.”

“A small sporting goods store with limited square footage, they can't make any money off of a 40 dollar cooler, you know... It's all about, at these small shops, it's inventory turns, you know, Dollars generated per square foot, and so here we are, we showed up…”

“If you want to pay with your phone today, the only way to pay at Walmart is with OnePay. If you want to have a debit card, it's the only way you want to loan from Klarna. It goes through OnePay. If you want an installment loan, you want a credit card, it goes …”

“If you take SAP out of a large automobile manufacturer, there's no automobile manufacturer left. Or Walmart. Like the company just evaporates. Because the company is defined, not just by purchasing the software, not even by just using it, but by how they codif…”

“Some of the biggest businesses we have today in the US and the world Were not created with venture capital, Ford Motor Company, Walmart, Microsoft, you know, the most of these companies, Ikea were created on a kitchen table with nothing.”

“Like he used to go and lay down on the ground with a tape measure between aisles of all of his competitors. He knew everything about their business.”

“And, you know, funny enough that the first customer for our MLOps product was Walmart, the largest giant in, in retail. And, you know, they bought it not for themselves, but they wanted to open it up for all their suppliers.”

“So, the boldest thing that we did was we did not renew the contract with Walmart, because they said, you know, continue the MLOps product, and we said, we'll be an LLM Ops company, and Walmart was not ready for LLM Ops at that point, but we said, okay, fine, w…”

“One of the most significant dangers is when a buyer loves you because sometimes you're not ready and you couldn't say no to Walmart.”

“Now think about the implications on commerce, branding, web. Companies where brand itself is the entire business. All of that vanishes.”

“There are some cases where internet is not more efficient, like groceries, which is why Walmart is still a giant business, because it's actually more efficient to drive to the supermarket Than it is to deliver all of that product with the cold chain, and the s…”

“I think one of the things that's really, I stole this from Walmart, which I thought was great. They have a Friday meeting called in it to win it. They have their leaders from across the company, not just like super senior leaders, but leaders from across the c…”

“We launched with Sprouts in October of twenty-twenty-four Target in February of twenty-twenty-five, and then Walmart in April of twenty-twenty-five, and then a bunch of other amazing retailers after that.”

“The most strategic part of the plan was to change the narrative. I knew that we didn't have the talent inside of Walmart at the time to do what we needed to do. We had to attract the best people in the world, and at that point, you know, honestly, that wasn't …”

“We incubated a, you know, a deodorant company and I think the president basically. Yeah, called W. Available nationwide Walmart, and the president was, like, basically, you know, endorse that as long as well as endorsing for future political office.”

“And the Bed Bath & Beyond person that wouldn't talk to us before called us, and Walmart called us, and Lori was really gracious, and, you know, she joined a bunch of the calls and brought star power, and they were, like, blown away and instantly took the produ…”

“CodePuppy is a coding agent built by an amazing guy called Michael Faffersberger at Walmart built with Pydantic AI. And it's got like, hasn't got very many stars. Hasn't got lots of like hype around it, but I don't know how much I'm allowed to say publicly, bu…”

“In US, the median sort of income is around, say, 50, 60 K US dollars. That's what Walmart is catering to. Costco is catering to 80,000 to 90,000 sort of USD per capita income.”

“So retail, Walmart, and everybody will be charging 21, 22% gross margin. Costco operates at 11, 12% gross margin.”

“Don't try to compete with Walmart, Amazon, and Costco. That's, or if you're going to do that, you need to put Two billion dollars on the balance sheet and you need to make that like a 10 year journey.”

“We're not going to be able to out supply chain, out trucking, out logistics, out warehouse, you know, Walmart and Kroger and the major retailers in the U S especially with consumables, but we still feel like we can, you know, out technology them.”

“We won three golden tickets at Walmart's open call, and in a few weeks, we're gonna be launched at every Petco nationwide, so.”

“We were buying close to a million batteries from EverReady. A day. We were second only to Walmart and battery purchases at the time.”

“If you're a large retailer, be it a Walmart and Amazon or Costco. If you own the relationship with your customers, you have this ability to disintermediate the company selling to you.”

“Pretty much any CPG company in the US is going to have a third of the business or so, sometimes more with Walmart or another big chunk with Costco or, and it's short in other countries as well, where between one and three retailers, you're going to have the bu…”

“Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway famously sold a large portion of its longtime stake that year and fully exited the position by 2018.”

“The company accelerated home delivery capabilities and can now deliver orders the same day to 95% of U.S. Households.”

“Things like Costco and Walmart are the two largest sellers of organic products in the country.”

“So many companies have, you know, people just get all excited thinking, okay, this is validation. If I get into Target, if I get into Walmart, if I get into Whole Foods, That's validation that this is great, and they presume that being on their shelves is goin…”

“You know, I think ignorance in some ways is bliss. I knew so little about the promotional dollars required to sit on the shelf of a Target or a Walmart or a Kroger, and yet we went after it, and I think if I knew that, oh my gosh, those promotional dollars wer…”

“Zipline works with amazing global brands like Walmart, Chipotle, Sweetgreen, Mendocino Farms, Wendy's, Buffalo Wild Wings, many, many others. We all also this year are launching our healthcare business in the US. We're partnered with folks like Cleveland Clini…”

“We now deliver almost a 100,000 SKUs for a Walmart Supercenter of I think the a 110 to a 120,000 total SKUs in that store.”

“The vast majority of people signing up and, ah, receiving those prescriptions had never placed a, ah, prescription with that pharmacy before.”

“They were hypnotized by Walmart. They were so scared about Walmart that they ignored us.”

“We had, you know, 20, 20 to 25 years where nobody paid any attention to us, and that allowed us to scale and compound, and they just dismissed us.”

“Walton would basically talk about how he drove a 100,000 miles a year with one goal to visit the stores and ask managers, what is your goal today?”

“What is interesting is now there are more and more Chinese brands that are playing a game that might have been The preserve of Americans and Europeans and other first world nations in that they are trying to build sustainable brands. When they come to North Am…”

“You've got Amazon now, which is 25 times next year's street EPS, which, that's GAAP EPS, cheaper than Walmart, cheaper than Costco.”

“And had the stake in Walmart not been sold, the stake in Walmart would have been greater than the sum total of everything that I was managing.”

“And since they basically, you know, got on the same curve, 62% of all retail has gone to those three.”

“Home Depot was spending over three percent of gross sales on advertising, while Walmart was only spending 1.5%.”

“So we recently announced we signed Walmart. We're working with AT&T, a bunch of these fortune, 500 large private equity firms, global 2000, kind of the largest consumers of legal services.”

“When we start working with the Walmarts, the very large banks, the Fortune 500, they're much less standardized than these law firms, and so there is just this massive amount of work where we go to a large bank and they say, we don't have any document managemen…”

“GitHub was so special of a company that for a long period of time, they never actually talked to customers. So the first time I ever met GitHub, They were like, we got to tell you this is so awesome. We sold to Walmart, and they're paying us 400,000 bucks, and…”

“At Walmart, he wouldn't let purchasing agents accept so much as a hot dog from vendors.”

“They want to take a cut of both the discovery and the transaction when someone searches For a product using ChatGPT. This is already happening with Walmart, Etsy, Shopify, all announced on dev, on their dev day.”

“About half of the people that work in America today do not have working. It's not something you and I really think about, but you know, Walmart has two million employees don't have it. Walmart.com email addresses, right? UPS has 300,000 drivers and people work…”

“We did these two things, and then we did a little partnership with Walmart where we said, hey, we have fixed pricing. Your merchants at that time did not have FBA-like equivalent where Amazon guys have FBA. You can use Deliver for Walmart merchants to sell on …”

“And we did that, and suddenly most of merchant sales was like two X, three X, because the delivery promise was there. Plus, the pricing was flat. The moment these two things happened, I mean, I'm kidding, you know, we went from trying to find the next merchant…”

“So no matter how big you get as an EDI company, you have to integrate every single one of your vendors one by one with Walmart or Tractor Supply or Target. There isn't this such thing as you connect once and the transactions just start flowing. In healthcare, …”

“In the last couple of days, Walmart and Sands Club have just signed up to also make their inventory purchasable Through ChatGPT and the Agentic Commerce Protocol, which, like, I don't think that there is a bigger signal on a big retailer being up for it than W…”

“Trader Joe's today average about, call it 15 thousand-ish, maybe a little less square feet per store. The average supermarket is like 50,000 square feet, and the average Walmart is like a 150,000 square feet.”

“It was Walgreens. It was Walmart. Like we created an inventory management system for options trading. And nobody had talked about that before. We literally had off the shelf models where everybody was like the smartest people were using, were creating the best…”

“These Toys R Us and Walmart were paying COD for scooters to me.”

“The most saddest dramatic shift for razor has been the loss of Toys R Us. You know, not only is it a loss from the kids perspective of a fantasy place to go, but they actually always carried our entire line. And when we came out with something innovative, they…”

“Once Walmart has like, 50 AI agents deployed, they're not going to want each individual provider to ensure them. They're going to want to have one big coverage policy.”

“I sometimes joke that the big AI companies should become LBO shops. And what they can do is they can partner with KKR or Blackstone and all they get is the data. KKR and Blackstone pride the capital, get all the returns. Fine. But all the data comes back to, y…”

“For the de minimis thing in particular, I think Amazon's better off with de minimis not existing. Because de minimis is shipping direct from China to the U.S. Consumer. It skips their fulfillment network. Which is where they put all the capex and huge competit…”