Dave Clark
Founder and CEO, Auger. On 1 show, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
executivefounder@davehclark ↗auger.com ↗
During a 23-year career at Amazon, Dave Clark rose to CEO of Worldwide Consumer, overseeing more than one million employees and building its logistics network. He later served as CEO of Flexport before launching the AI-driven supply chain startup Auger in 2024.
1shows
2appearances
25statements
2resolved
1supported
0contradicted
50%fully supported
8said about them ↓ Everything Dave Clark said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Clark: One-hour delivery lacks a feasible, profitable business model
“There's not a real feasible, like one hour delivery profitable model. Yeah. Despite, you know, all the efforts, you know, all the subsidized, you know, funding processes to the contrary, there's not a lot of great profitable models for that.”
Clark: Unscaled last-mile delivery startups will fail, not be acquired
“And the people without scale just won't make it. They'll go away. I don't expect a lot of acquisition, because there's not a lot of value in acquisition for those.”
Clark: Amazon culture evaluates people solely on yesterday's performance
“Amazon's a fairly intense place, you know, and it's a you know, Amazon, I think you kind of, you know, it's very, you know, you're as good as what you did yesterday kind of thing. There's not a lot of longitudinal, you know, stickiness in that way.”
Clark: Hire for the job needed three to five years out
“And I think too many people look for somebody who's going to do what they're told. Like, you know, they want somebody who's going to fill the job of the now. And what I want is somebody who's gonna fill the job that's gonna be the job three years from now, or …”
Clark: Jeff Bezos excels at context shifting and focusing on critical 10%
“He is one of the best simplifiers, if not the best simplifiers I've ever met, which is he can context shift incredibly well. You have a meeting, you know, this hour on AWS, the next hour on the consumer business, the next hour on labor, and be perfectly in the…”
Clark: Amazon was late to ultra-fast shipping due to my hesitation
“Like things that we omitted, like I think we were late getting to the ultra fast shipping piece when we were at Amazon. And I think some of that was, you know, a decent amount of that was probably on me”
Clark: US last-mile delivery requires five to six deliveries per hour
“If you're net averaging 20, 25 dollars an hour for, you know, a delivery or an hour for somebody who's doing deliveries in the US. You know, you really need to net You know, five or six deliveries an hour to get good scaled costs there.”
Clark: Companies are performance-based teams, not families
“But we're not a family because we're all here to do a job and we have a set of roles and responsibilities and You know, you have to deliver on performance. You know, it is a team. I think that's a much better way of framing it than a family.”
Clark: Hire college graduates directly to avoid bad habits
“And I like to hire entry level jobs out right out of colleges. Yeah. Because you don't have, you haven't learned any bad behavior. You know, you haven't gone to a company that's not very good at things and learned a bunch of foundational elements that Are wron…”
Clark: High-intensity work blinds people to their own overextension
“You know, when you're in the shit, you often don't realize that you're in the shit. You know, if you're just, if you're working until 11 o'clock night, you don't, you kind of don't even recognize that you're doing it to a degree, or that you don't recognize th…”
Clark: Leaders limit employee potential out of fear of overstretching them
“And, you know, I think people too often put limits on what they think their people are capable of out of fear of overstretching them in some way.”
Clark: Stretch goals deliver greater net gains than realistic targets
“Like your net gain of stretching farther is much better than setting something you think is a more realistic target.”
Clark: Top performers are simplifiers, possess grit, and are smart
“What I find to be most consistent is that the three biggest traits, and maybe in order, they're simplifiers they have great grit, and they're smart.”
Clark: Simplifiers shed 90% of complexity to focus on core innovation
“Almost all the problems that you think are too complicated to do are like Things that aren't too complicated to do, and 10% of the thing is. And they quickly shed the 90, and they know exactly what to go to, that, where the real innovation or the real hard pie…”
Clark: Grit cannot be simulated and requires real workload pressure
“You put them under load and see what happens. There's no simulation for it.”
Clark: Public perception of Jeff Bezos as a top-down dictator is wrong
“I think the world tends to think of Jeff as like, you know, it's like Moses coming down from the mountain with the 10 Commandments and is like, Shazam, here is what we shall, and it's not like that.”
Clark: Prioritize avoiding getting fired over seeking promotion
“I do first, I do the things that will get me fired. And second, I do the things that get me promoted. So like I do on a straight up prioritization mechanism, I have a similar structure to that, you know, but I have a more Amazon one way. What's going to get me…”
Clark: Acquiring delivery startups does not add driver capacity
“The drivers work on almost all the platforms today or on many of the platforms today. So you're not really picking up capacity.”
Clark: Global supply chains need multi-tenant logistics platforms
“What I saw was the power of multi-tenant, you know, the power of you know, multiple companies being able to benefit from the scale of the total, and the rest of the world needs that, you know, the rest of the world needs that for the environment to pull carbon…”
Clark: True customer centricity requires sacrificing short-term revenue
“You really only know if you're customer-centric in a very, very hard moment where you're faced with doing something that the customer would like, but it's going to cost you a lot of money that you really, really, really don't want to spend.”
Clark: Rapidly scaling companies need external hires to teach internal teams
“But in fast growth environments, like I was at Amazon and like we're in it flexed work you often have to intersperse more senior external talent because the business, the people who grew up internally, they haven't, don't have exposure to the business you're b…”
Clark: The biggest M&A mistake is delaying post-acquisition integration
“In my own experience, the thing that, You know, he's waiting too long to hit the ground running and to just make the moves to integrate.”
The other half of the tape: Dave Clark's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 8 times in 5 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 6Ryan Petersen 1Jason Lemkin 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 8
2025 1 mention in 1 episode
2023 3 mentions in 3 episodes 1 per episode
- Ryan Petersen: Why Velocity not Speed is Most Important in Company Building | E1081 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Scooter Braun on Being Enough, Insecurity, Wealth, Investing, Fame, Marriage and Much More | E1002 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Ring CEO Jamie Siminoff: The $1BN Amazon Acquisition; How Richard Branson Invested | 20VC #984 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2023, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Dave's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20VCLEDGER | Founder and CEO, Auger | 2 | 25 | 50% 1/2 | full record on 20VC → |