Amazon

“Amazon had actually approached us several years before 2009. They just wanted to acquire us, and then basically the company being acquired ends up joining the mothership, and kind of loses its original identity, and so we said, Know very quickly.”

“Happy to report seven years later, they've remained totally true to their word. And we've been able to continue doing our own thing and our culture is very different and distinct from Amazon's”

“I realized in order to sort of really compete with them, I would have to do something that's meaningfully different, and it couldn't be something that was just, it was like cheaper or anything like that, because Amazon has gobs and gobs of money, so it wasn't …”

“What would be fulfilling for me is to make a material difference in this world, and I wouldn't be able to do that working in a bigger company.”

“If you're in any of these other categories, certainly there's a big business there, but that's effectively the business that the Walmarts and the Amazons and the Targets and the Costcos, they're all in that business, selling the same exact items to everybody. …”

“For internet businesses, payments is actually part of the strategy that matters. It's part of the product experience. And so basically, I think this used to be a fairly tactical vendor decision for the business, where it was just something that needs to be tak…”

“The original payment he got was me buying stuff off his Amazon wishlist.”

“Trying to compete with Amazon 15 years late. I mean, you don't wish on your worst enemy competing against Amazon in their core category, right?”

“They approached us again and said, okay, we will let you guys be your own separate subsidiary with your own separate culture and own separate way of doing business. And happy to report seven years later, they've remained totally true to their word. And we've b…”

“Amazon had actually approached us several years before 2009. They just wanted to acquire us and then basically the company being acquired ends up joining the mothership and kind of loses its original identity. And so we said no very quickly.”

“If you bought something online, and it wasn't on Amazon, and you liked the experience, it was Shopify.”

“For internet businesses, payments is actually part of the strategy that matters. It's part of the product experience. And so basically, I think this used to be a fairly tactical vendor decision for the business, where it was just something that needs to be tak…”

“The unit economics were strong, but the market changed. I think that it was a Perfect storm of there being some formidable competition and having, not having access to capital that was limitless. All of a sudden, it was just this question around direct-to-cons…”

“We just launched Into Whole Foods and I think Next Week on Amazon.”

“Amazon was the only large company that I saw or felt When they bought companies truly like brought it to the next level. Like I, you know, with audible and IMDB and Zappos and I mean, you look at Twitch, like you look at all the, they've just kept founders and…”

“We had just started shooting Our second season of The Morning Show, and we were meant to have a show, start production for Amazon, a show called Daisy Jones and the Six was going to start in April, and then we had another show for Netflix called From Scratch t…”

“I was our customer service I personally would call the doctor and confirm the appointment was all set, and if it wasn't, I'd Personally contact the patient to let them know and then I would offer them an Amazon gift card alongside with an apology.”

“I don't rely at all on Amazon reviews because I don't think they take the system very seriously. I think they use it as a way to just sell stuff.”

“And there is this like false, I would call it very false belief That if you prove that someone transacted, then that review is therefore trustworthy, but all you have to do is, like, read one of the 20 stories on Amazon about how people still easily game that …”

“They approached us again and said, okay, we will let you guys be your own separate subsidiary with your own separate culture and own separate way of doing business. And happy to report seven years later, they've remained totally true to their word. And we've b…”

“Amazon had actually approached us several years before 2009. They just wanted to acquire us, and then basically the company being acquired ends up joining the mothership, and kind of loses its original identity, and so we said, Know very quickly. And then they…”

“They're not the best employer. They're not taking care of their people. But they're also not supporting small businesses that allow our local economies to thrive.”

“And Amazon is never going to help us be successful in the long run. They're going to help Amazon be successful, and I don't believe that's good for Powell's. It's certainly not good for our community, so it wasn't something we had to put a lot of brain power b…”

“Full stop. It was probably something like 50 to a hundred units a day, and Martha White was number two.”

“We tried to curtail SKU's assortment because it made for an easier and smoother shopping experience. And so you didn't have this kind of paralysis by analysis. And so people would come through the app and hunt and pack and just build this, suddenly build a bas…”

“Anyone can get a book from any other place. You can go to Amazon, you can go to thrift stores, Barnes & Noble. There's places people can get books, but people shop with Me and my mom because of our story and because of our passion and what we bring to the spac…”

“It was unheard of at the time, you know, the idea that a commodity product that already lost money, it's already a loss leader, that you would lose another 30%. That's unheard of, unprecedented in the history of retail.”

“It might've been 2003, 2004, somewhere around there. You could not buy diapers at a normal price. They were like, prices were like jacked to ridiculous levels. It just wasn't a thing. Nobody bought them online.”

“Yeah, it's even, even worse that we got a higher offer that we didn't take.”

“They said, well, yeah, we're gonna take the price of diapers to zero, and we're gonna, you know, and they made some analogies to some other, used explicit language, and it was pretty scary stuff.”

“Eventually, yep. We look at our journey similar to Amazon or Netflix which started in the third party world. Consumer goods in the case of Amazon, content in the case of Netflix, and they eventually moved from third party to first party, where they were actual…”

“Amazon canceled our account because they thought we were reselling them, which we weren't, but we were buying hundreds of these arrow beds just to help people sleep.”

“And also, you know, come on, let's face it, most people know that, you know, senior people at Amazon get paid in Amazon stock. And so we did the transaction, the stock was like 50 dollars a share.”

“In 2007, your annual revenue at Audible was like one hundred and ten million dollars. And in January of 2008, Amazon announced that they would acquire Audible for three hundred million dollars in cash”

“At this time, Amazon was really starting to explode, so we put this item on Amazon, and it became the number one selling aquarium. And stayed that way for quite some time.”

“Amazon was not a place where you go to cruise.”

“Amazon wanted to invest in social, and I finally had permission to Go unprofitable. So we grew from 35 employees to over a hundred, I think in two or three years.”

“Yeah, but we owned most of a website that was one of the top hundred websites in the U.S. By traffic.”

“But no, I mean, it turns out Amazon could not have built a successful social product because they are wired for commerce. This is my impression. You know, they shared with us a bunch of thinking they had in the social space, and it was just clear that they, wh…”

“And then literally two weeks before we were going to launch, we discovered Shelfari, which had two co-founders, three employees, and a million dollars in seed from Amazon.”

“And so we had this strong vision, and we met with Amazon, like I said, four or five times over the years, kind of talking about, would we do this? And they were always into it. The issue was, it required deep integration to pull off, and they weren't comfortab…”

“There was definitely a month, which was probably the most stressful month of our lives, where we couldn't talk to anybody, we had to stop talking to all the VCs, we had to stop talking to anybody else, and all we did, probably 18 hours a day, was due diligence…”

“Amazon made it a little easy in that they told us they would want to run us as an independent subsidiary and an independent brand, just like they run Audible and IMDB and Zappos and now Twitch, and they have a long list of track record of doing this.”

“So affiliate was, we get, you know, an eight percent cut of a book when we refer a customer to Amazon or Barnes and Noble or somewhere where they buy a book.”

“And we haven't changed our price since. In fact, during Delta and Omicron Amazon went really high on their prices. People were complaining, but we have stayed exactly the same, but it is expensive because it costs more money to make it here.”

“The last round we raised had been a hundred million dollar valuation, not that long ago, a year ago, year and a half ago.”

“Amazon is now our largest shareholder.”

“The affiliate program was, like, super cheap marketing for them, and it was designed to live on mom-and-pop Blogs. So they would have all these, like, cheesy widgets. If I'm, if like, some blogger wrote about something they like, and they could link on Amazon …”

“We got to a hundred million without Costco, Walmart, Amazon, any of those big retailers that are usually a big part of it.”

“When it became an Amazon bestseller months before it came out, That was for two reasons. One was that I announced that I was going to sign the entire first printing of the book. So that was a 150,000 copies. And then the second reason was that I read the first…”

“Amazon back then was the exclusive retailer for the Segway.”

“Eventually, we went on, we moved to Amazon because they became so expensive but largely because we had implemented them in not a very efficient way.”

“I was one of the first protein companies to put an Amazon up Amazon listing up.”

“If we could create a site that sold a 100,000 dollars and we repeat those little niche sites 10 times, well, that's a million dollars. And for me, who was making 40, 45,000 dollars a year, that's a big deal.”

“And we had hundreds of shareholders including every single employee in Wondery was a stakeholder.”

“We then launched on Amazon, very quickly actually became the number one best selling cereal on Amazon.”

“What we were worried about is that Apple, Amazon, and Google would ultimately get into this space, and they understood software clearly they had a global footprint, They could do an amazing job, so we knew down the road we would compete, be competing with them…”

“You're not really competing against the whole company. You're competing against the section that's making a competitive product.”

“There was a couple essays I wrote that were, the only one I remember is why Amazon shouldn't expand beyond books.”

“I think the biggest thing is that you can't scale that retail without significantly increasing your team, but whether or not you sell a thousand dollars a day on Amazon or a 100,000 dollars a day, you can still do it with one person online.”

“The number one selling pasta sauce on Amazon is in a 45 ounce plastic jar, right?”

“There were months in 19 and 20 and 21 where we'd shut down 500 Resellers or sellers on Amazon because they're copying us.”

“Amazon was this incredibly powerful, but corrosive force in affecting the way consumer behavior was going to be direct to consumer online.”

“And it could have, maybe it could have been, were it not for some execution mistakes that happened after we made that decision.”

“Our average customer drove 21 minutes to get to our store. 21 minute drive time on average. So we began to lose our under 25 dollar sales. Because if you're going to buy three sweater boxes you might as well just buy it online from Amazon, you know, sweater bo…”

“We had a big vision for what we wanted to accomplish, and it was cut short. So, yeah, it was, I mean, you would think after a sale like that, we made, obviously, a lot of money, me and my co-founder, but we said, do you want to celebrate? You want to go grab a…”

“I think within 90 days we had run out of our initial inventory, so, and I remember before launch we were talking about, like, how long do you think it's going to take us to sell through 10,000 units? Would it take us a year? Is it going to take us six months? …”

“No, we didn't. I mean. Luckily, we were in the channels that were still deemed, like, essential retailers, so Amazon was still online, Target was deemed essential retailers, so so we really didn't see much impact.”

“Amazon for us was a very profitable channel, and the money we made from Amazon, we put towards launching our DTC site, launching slowly in retail, and I mean, we were, we bootstrapped for the first three years, and I think largely the economics of our product …”

“I think the idea is that eventually over time you build, build a brand that people recognize and you grow out of your reliance on the, on a platform like Amazon and have your own distribution channels that are independent. But I think at this stage, you know, …”

“The model for European VCs at the time was to invest in a copycat of a U.S. Internet company, and use the language barrier as a moat. So you kind of was really smart to invest in say a German copycat of eBay because eBay would probably buy them or a Nordic ver…”

“We're just starting to, but yeah, most predominantly we're a direct to consumer in Amazon. We wanted to start direct to consumer because you can service people directly. You don't have to plan your innovation around a retailer.”

“Amazon's like a force of nature you can't avoid. So it's not, it should never be a question. Are we on Amazon or not? I think it should be, how do we optimize it?”

“They knocked the product off. There's no question. And by the way, it was so egregious that one of the lead product manager from Amazon, when it came out, posted on Twitter, whoop, there it is announcing the new Amazon Halo.”

“Yeah, we spent a lot of time with them, and they included their product team in the diligence, and then they ultimately did not invest in Whoop, to our surprise.”

“I also think no one has won local. Google hasn't. Meta hasn't. Apple hasn't. Amazon hasn't, right?”

“We're doing, like, 3000 on Amazon quickly over the next few months. We're doing 250,000 on Amazon a month.”

“Honestly, one night, I sat down on the couch, and I just told my story. I did it in one minute or less of, started this in my kitchen, got a deal on Shark Tank, it's five grams of sugar, it's apple cider vinegar, it's this, dah, dah, dah, and I posted it and w…”

“It was like the normal Amazon order had two items, and Amazon Fresh had a hundred items because it was groceries.”

“Like, truthfully, getting a job at Microsoft was much more prestigious than getting a job at Amazon at that time in Seattle.”

“Since day one, the idea was to democratize it for all funding ideas. We just started with film because trying to take a, you know, page out of the playbook of Amazon, you know, starting with books only and then expanding to other stuff.”

“I think it's the biggest distributor of pet supplies. I think it's bigger than Amazon when it comes to pet supplies in the U.S.”

“And it failed so badly that Amazon gave us all their soon-to-be former customers and mailed them a Square reader and said, we're out, go to Square.”

“I remember one guy telling me, oh, Amazon's gonna attack you? Don't worry, I'm on the board of Amazon, and I developed Amazon Prime, and we can get them to leave you alone. Like, if you take our money, we'll guarantee that Amazon doesn't attack you.”

“If you invent something truly new, you're not inventing one thing. You're inventing a stack of things, and that invention becomes its own protection. And as long as you behave properly, I mean, it turns out there are a bunch of rules that if you follow these r…”

“It might have been 2003, 2004, somewhere around there. You could not buy diapers at a normal price. They were, like, prices were, like, jacked to ridiculous levels. It just wasn't a thing. Nobody bought them online.”

“They said, well, yeah, we're gonna take the price of diapers to zero, and we're gonna, you know, and they made some analogies to some other, used explicit language, and it was pretty scary stuff. I'll just leave it at that.”

“Because Amazon very clearly stated that if we took that offer, they would do even more to harm the business.”

“Like, Amazon didn't even, when they brought us in, say, hey, we want you guys to run the mom, baby, parent category within Amazon. They said, you know what, just keep doing what you're doing. Just continue to keep competing with us.”

“We had only raised 50,000,055 million dollars up until that point, which was pretty modest amount of money raised compared to today's standards, but we went out and we needed another hundred million to keep all the websites going and to really blow it out. We …”

“And really that was what led me to saying, hey iRobot and Amazon might have some pretty interesting synergies, and because Scuba hadn't succeeded, because Terra hadn't succeeded, then when Amazon started to be interested in iRobot, it felt like a good idea.”