Audible

“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…”

“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.”

“We moved in with a 120 people and nobody left.”

“We were becoming at that point the largest employer of actors in the New York area, which we've been for a while.”

“The first download when it finally happened was in, I remember October 31st of 97, it was Men Are From Mars and Women Are From Venus, the self-help book, and I remember it was to a customer in Cave Creek, Arizona, and that was, and it was done at that then pre…”

“But it cost us 208 dollars to make that little device, and we tried to sell it for 215 dollars.”

“I think it's something on the order of 50.5 to 51% purposeful good calls and brave moments, and times when you just didn't give up, the rest of it is definitely luck, because otherwise, how could I have made so many stupid, boneheaded decisions along the way t…”

“Book publishing is a, is, is people who love books, meaning that they're willing to get paid less, or they have the wherewithal to not get paid a lot, and you know, and they go into a world, and usually, they stand for the status quo and they usually resist, y…”

“The stock price, you know, which was once 29 dollars or something, it went down to four cents at the end of 2000.”

“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”

“I was 43 years old, and I took an 85% year-over-year pay cut to start Audible.”

“If anyone said they were building a platform, Microsoft would make it their business to destroy your company.”

“And we got a patent together on a downloadable system Of, for media that would be captured by a solid state device, and I remember it was 14,000 dollars that I put on my credit card.”

“Robin Williams had come in and bought, like, 500,000 shares of common stock before it went public.”

“We also figured out how to make an audiobook for about a 10th of the cost. That the, just using technology, you know so we just started making a lot of audiobooks”

“We walked away with almost forty million dollars. We had 5700 customers.”

“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.”