The Ledger, every show

“Early on, I was a big proponent of that e-commerce was going to clean the clock of the department stores. I got the thesis half right. Share did shift. No one could make money other than Amazon because of there's just no defensibility, no barriers to entry.”

“So, you know, one of the big secrets in e-commerce is virtually no companies get big and make money in the United States on e-commerce. I can name five e-commerce companies in the U.S. After two decades of investing and God knows how many tens of billions of d…”

“That's not a categorical rule, because TikTok buys users at monstrous scale. But, you know, Google really didn't buy many users, Facebook didn't buy many users, you know, tick, tick, tick, tick.”

“From recollection, they were billing something like 10 or 12 dollars per order when we invested, and they were losing 20, 25 dollars per order on each one”

“All the companies that are getting challenged, growing, continuing to grow DTC sales are turning to offline retail in different forms. Every company I've worked with is trying to do that because incremental sales.”

“What's driven the constantly escalating value of the sports teams is almost exclusively these media dollars that have flown in. But media dollars typically follow eyeballs, and if eyeballs are declining rapidly, the media dollars disappear.”

“Most of the best businesses in the internet age of technology haven't spent a ton on paid acquisition.”

“A lot of the best networks that are platformed here aren't spending anything on, on acquisition. I mean, it's just, it's kind of an interesting thing in marketplace. Facebook, no. WhatsApp, no. Medium, no. You know, just OpenTable, no. Just, you know, just, th…”

“We've had a couple companies that Shifted in the current capital environments and the uncertainty there shifted from growth at all costs to, you know, kind of smart growth mode or whatever you want to call it. The amazing thing, the profitability improved dram…”

“Open table got raised enough money and spent it so slowly they were able to survive. The two direct competitors didn't open table ran unopposed for five years, which is the only reason they were able to get to their network effect.”

“Most of the fraud on eBay and PayPal was organized crime, typically out of Eastern Europe. Where they had incredibly talented computer science professionals who lacked a lot of commercial opportunity.”

“I've got a thesis that they will soon be, I think they are already entering the shipping market cherry picking the best the, low, the lowest cost shipments they are starting to do themselves. Increasingly and just leave UPS with the higher cost shipments, whic…”

“Facebook and Snapchat increasingly are aggregating similar size audiences. So the concept of reach isn't going to be a sustainable differentiator over time.”

“And Craigslist, which was one of the largest and fastest growing internet properties in the world, particularly in the US, Has now stopped growing, and it's basically, you know, essentially being hollowed out.”

“That channel conflict is something that Instacart has no desire to do. They want to be the go to partner for the for the gross, the physical grocer.”

“No one could make money other than Amazon because of there's just no defensibility, no barriers to entry.”

“Airbnb raised way less money than, you know, the other leading marketplaces at the time. It's got a couple of characteristics and that are very nice. One of which is they get paid in advance. And so, you know, when you make your summer vacation over the holida…”

“A year out, you know, the number of users declined something like three quarters But the users that stayed spent you know, three or four times more money. So their cohorts were actually on revenue basis were, you know, close to staying at 100%.”

“It's something like 10% of the target market supply where diners finally said, okay, this is so much more convenient than calling a restaurant one at a time, getting put on hold, getting voicemail, getting all this and that. So I would, I'm going to forego the…”

“Airbnb raised way less money than, you know, the other leading marketplaces at the time. It's got a couple of characteristics and that are very nice. One of which is they get paid in advance. And so, you know, when you make your summer vacation over the holida…”

“In the case of Instacart the number of users declined pretty precipitously from, you know, first purchase to, you know, 10 purchase a year out, you know, they, the number of users declined something like three quarters. But the users that stayed spent you know…”

“Each of those took, you know, many minutes off of each order, and, you know, time is money, and so, you know, that's just the example of the kind of continuous optimizations they were making, trying to get, take minutes and seconds out of the process, and in d…”

“Beanie Babies were something like seven percent of all gross merchandise sales when eBay went public. In fact, that was not highlighted in the S-One.”

“OfferUp has engagement that's similar to social sites like Instagram and Snap.”

“OpenTable, when I was managing it, did not pay any money at all to acquire consumers.”

“And what happens when the window opens, the early people to go out typically perform very well as public company stocks. And then as more time goes by and you get towards the end of a window, the companies that then are going out kind of rushing, I got to get …”

“53% of everyone who had ever signed up for the service was active the day before, and that, by the way, has only grown as, you know, the, their installed base age, it gets bigger in ages, that number's grown”

“He hacked the directories in each of the houses, and so he pre-populated everyone on the Harvard campus into Facebook and then let people claim their identities, but you could then friend, it was populated when the first person showed up.”

“The other was we forced a redirect from the Morton's website to the OpenTable, Morton's page on OpenTable to create the brand awareness, and that forced off, that forced redirect, the fact that we Converted restaurant people searching on Google for Morton Chic…”

“It's about the best performing funds in the history of venture capital, about half the companies lost all the money.”

“Amazon and Yahoo launch auction businesses early in eBay's life and they went for free. So every seller in the world said, I'll list, list my site there. It didn't work cause they hadn't, they couldn't get the buyers to show up there. So eBay, even though we w…”

“One of the secrets of it, dirty secrets of Amazon is they their first party business isn't growing very fast at all. Their third party business is exploding.”

“So I think credulous indirectly is spawning tens of hundreds of billions of dollars of market cap.”

“I've done some back of the envelope calculations that Amazon, if you take their first party business and their third party business and normalize it for consumer sales, they represent about one in five dollars spent on the internet. Interestingly, eBay also re…”

“Tesla recently launched a pre-order for their Model Three, and in one week, they got to reserve demand for 300,000 cars, starting at 35,000 dollars per car. That represents demand of at least fourteen billion dollars. What is more interesting on that is they d…”

“The total audience for prime time viewing over the last few decades has gone to something like 14, fifteen million to something like four million.”

“Both launched auction businesses to compete with eBay early in the day. And both quickly got a lot of supply because they listed it, there were no listing fees. They required no economics. And no consumers went. Both businesses were DOA, and they abandoned it …”

“One competitor Urban Spoon, built a competing service on an iPad and gave the iPad to the restaurants with the free service. And said, you know, you don't have to use OpenTable anymore. A lot of restaurants tried it, and they came right back to OpenTable becau…”

“Airbnb this year is just blown by HomeAway in terms of total total user spend, or nights, user spend on the system.”

“Airbnb right now is doing about a million nights a day people staying in Airbnbs.”

“So Amazon's gross margins as a retailer are just around 25%. Their gross margin as a marketplace are 80, 90%.”

“Jeff Skoll wrote the business plan for eBay with Pierre. And I got a copy of it when I joined the business and they were focused entirely on the collectibles market. Now their argument was collectibles market in in the U S I think was a hundred, you know, it w…”

“The iconic Sports media properties, ESPN and Sports Illustrated are both in decline. Sports Illustrated, they're, like, trying to give it away. I mean, it's now down to, like, a dozen issues a year, and, you know, literally they're trying to sell it, and they'…”

“Now the value of sports teams haven't gone down since I've been alive and I've been alive a while. So, I mean, people have been calling the top multiple times and it hasn't happened yet. So I could be wrong too.”

“I just read the number of unredeemed season tickets is increasing. They're selling the tickets, just fewer fans are showing up.”

“The smartphone penetration is so ubiquitous out there now that the playing field has been leveled.”

“Most women in America have downloaded the Pinterest app.”

“Facebook Hasn't had any users in the U.S. Forever because they have them all.”