Amazon

“You can't just go by reported earnings. The true economic earnings of Amazon are significantly higher than reported earnings.”

“The amount of data that they can capture, and because all those companies have substantial resources, they can put a lot of resources against not only capturing, but analyzing data. It's an interesting flywheel, right?”

“Whereas on the, if you go to Amazon for deodorant, You search for Dioran. You search for Old Spice, or you search for Reichardt, which means the recollection of a specific brand name is much more important than the sort of recognition of a brand, if that makes…”

“Their sort of upheaval and downfall will come not from someone being in a garage alone. It will come from someone being in a garage who latches onto the next paradigm shift that makes it impossible for, you know, the powers that be to compete.”

“What Shopify allows People to do is like have, you know, for 29 dollars a month get something that gets them pretty close to having all the things that Jeff had to build for himself when he started Amazon, right?”

“There's so many dimensions to a company like Amazon or Disney, right, that there's no way any one person can understand it, and so what you want is you want cognitive diversity, and what that cognitive diversity means is people who have different, you know, li…”

“They think eBooks should be between two 99 and nine 99. And if you price it there, they'll give you a 70%. If you price it below two 99, Hey, you're welcome to do that. But they're going to pay you 35%, which is half. If you price it over nine 99, again, your …”

“The way the categories worked is the parent categories were inherited by the child categories, which sounds confusing, but the way it works is if you put your book in, you know, general books dash science fiction dash general dash dystopia. Then your book show…”

“But I don't think you want to find a flywheel at only 10 turns. If it's a great flywheel, So maybe we'll talk in a minute about the Amazon flywheel, because that's what stimulated me further thinking about Amazon. Would it be so bad to pick up a flywheel when …”

“And at Slack, we adopted a form of the Amazon memo.”

“Most of the big indexes are driven by the Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple, and those businesses don't seem very irrational to me. Those are some of the greatest businesses that man has ever created partially due to the internet interconnectedness of the world…”

“There's a difference between being complex and being complicated. And there's a difference between being simple and simplistic. You know, I would say Amazon is complex, but it's not complicated. It's a software company, right? They have certain things they sta…”

“We talked to Jeff Bezos about this at one point, and he asked us why we were starting a venture capital firm and not another company. And another startup and we asked him, well, if Amazon, you know, for some reason, Amazon got sold or whatever and you were a f…”

“The total GMV that Amazon would make in India would easily be done by a small European nation after being here for like maybe seven, eight years that they have spent over here because the people who can spend just do not exist.”

“And I actually think the answer is these are all tools and you should use all of them, right? Sometimes you should write like a six pager on something. Sometimes you should write a PowerPoint. Sometimes you should just have a list of bullets, right? And it dep…”

“I mean, there's no such thing as a big company, really. I think it's the main thing I deal with when Folks ask me about doing this at scale is like, there's no such thing as Apple or Amazon, right? Like that's not actually a real thing. There are groups of. 15…”

“When Amazon bought whole foods, that was a terrible moment for us at the time. We our blood competitor, who's known for annihilating everyone in their way buys our biggest partner who owns, who has responsible for 43% of our volume.”

“If you're Walmart trying to catch up with the distribution system of Amazon, I can't really use much of my current distribution system because it's made up for dealing with large volumes, selling large volume stores. And I have to come up with a distribution s…”

“At this point, I said that's only Amazon, Walmart, and Toyota are probably the only three companies I can imagine that are even closer to being able to do that.”

“Jeff Bezos has created eight hundred billion dollars of wealth for other people.”

“Amazon never needed that. They didn't create super voting shares where you could own a tiny economic interest.”

“A lot of the reason that people don't like reading, why people don't read as much as they should, or if they say, ah, I'm not a big reader. A lot of the reason is because they feel like morally that they need to finish every book that they start. And we realiz…”

“Amazon was able to step up and invest literally hundreds of millions of dollars in delivery in order to enable Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh to be able to deliver when the demand went from virtually zero to a huge percentage of your business.”

“I had my share of disagreements with Amazon. I fought with them many times, and ultimately that led to me to retire.”

“They came down just three days later, and six weeks after that first meeting, we had signed an agreement to get married, to merge”

“When we were going up there to talk about maybe Amazon buying Whole Foods you know, we were meeting at Jeff's Boathouse, which was next to his mansion on Lake Washington, and, but when we, they wouldn't tell us who the meeting place was until we landed, and th…”

“In my experience, they're very, they're not usually mission driven. They've gotten their MBA from Harvard or Wharton or Stanford. They're very intelligent. They work hard, but working at Whole Foods or Amazon, it's just a, it's just part of their career path. …”

“You're not allowed to call a meeting unless you've written a memo about what's going to be discussed at the meeting. And multiple people have to edit that memo before you could sit down and do it.”

“I believe it's at minimum of 80% of books, book purchases are through Amazon online.”

“Like, people don't understand the economics of self-publishing from a hardcover perspective. Sort of like audio and Kindle are great because the margins are good, but from a hardcover perspective, we were paying eight dollars U.S., seven dollars U.S., Approxim…”

“Other things that, you know, I'd say we try to avoid is things that are roadkill along the way of a company like OpenAI or Google or Amazon or Meta. So, small refinements into what the model doesn't do well today. That's just gonna be real cool along the way.”

“They didn't think this was a, this is a high margin business. They thought of it as like, ok, this will be a low margin business too, and we like low margin businesses.”

“The solution to pick back and ship in four hours was to solve a operations flow issue and not batch the operations, which I don't think anybody else figured out in e-commerce back then besides Amazon.”

“Between one and four and one and three filters purchased in the furnace filter category on Amazon is one of ours.”

“In my opinion that a lot of these big companies actually subsidize companies like three M maybe unknowingly to compete on price on, on online on some of these products because The economics of shipping them and putting them through their distribution networks …”

“We fulfill a hundred percent of our orders on Amazon.”

“I think anybody that kiss themselves and says, oh, you know, I'm too good to sell on Amazon or I want to ignore it is just incredibly naive.”

“I started a company called My Office Delivered, where we were effectively drop shipping office supplies, and in 2009 sold, you know, six and a half million dollars or so of office supplies, primarily on Amazon, and when I looked at the actual underlying data o…”

“Early on, I would spend some time thinking about that, and honestly, I realized, at least in our case, and maybe everybody's different, it's a fool's errand. I mean, it's like there's a reason why customers choose to buy on Amazon.”

“We had a big Prime deal that was running, and by some glitch of the system I got a call at three o'clock in the morning from someone at Amazon that our deal was not running, and they were looking at fixing it. I got up, started monitoring it, and by nine o'clo…”

“I think we have probably have too many people building models right now. There's already been some consolidation actually of companies being folded into Amazon and Microsoft and others. But I do think it will play out a bit like the cloud infrastructure busine…”

“So the internet was 80% startup value. It was Google, it was Amazon, you know, it was all these companies we now know and love. Meta, you know and then mobile, the mobile revolution was probably 80% incumbent value, or 90%, right? And so that was, mobile searc…”

“If you look at the biggest successes in the startup world over time, they were either solo founders or very unequal founders. So that, and there's counter examples to that, of course, but that was Amazon, right? Jeff Bezos was the only founder. Microsoft, it w…”

“So, I've never been part of such a customer-obsessed company, ok? PepsiCo was consumer-focused, but these are customer-obsessed companies, first.”

“Even Amazon has no braggers. Philips, the other company I said on the board of, the MedTech company from the Netherlands, not at all. Nobody brags. Everybody's talking about what can we do together to move the company forward.”

“There's about 26 teams that do an MBR, a monthly business review, and a six pager, and then that's just like, it doesn't, I think we cap it at six, but it's, the six isn't that important... So we have, I think, 25 or 26 teams that write those monthly, and then…”

“I mean, the Toyota production system, I think there's like two companies that have taken it really, really seriously and advanced it in the United States. One is Amazon, and one is Donaherr.”

“One of the things that they do that pisses off their merchants is they have this endless line of trucks at the warehouse they can't unload. They've pushed the bottleneck off into the unload piece. The loading docks and truckers and can't get appointments and s…”

“What Meta and Amazon want to do is to make LLM's commodity info that sold at cost. This is why Meta made it open source, because they want to make it commodity info that sold at cost, and they differentiate on top with Meta stuff, with Facebook, social, Instag…”

“If your Amazon and your main business Is subscriptions in prime and you offer content as kind of the thing in the front of the store to get people to come in. You're so far away. It's a different business model.”

“Those tech companies essentially have now taken over the old hegemony of quote, Hollywood, and now Netflix and Apple and Amazon.”

“We took the business from 10% sort of digital to 75%. Now we still did that through the channel, so through the sales consultants. We didn't go on Amazon or you sell direct, but we actually really focused on how do we utilize our competitive advantage, which w…”

“I went to the three star reviews on Amazon, one star review. Everybody hates it often for some stupid reason, like the book showed up and it was dirty on the dust jacket or whatever. Five-star review. Everybody loves it. But the three-star reviews or the four-…”

“In fact, I believe every C staff member at Amazon was at one point Jeff Bezos' tech assistant, And Andy Jassy was, and the CEO.”

“Why Amazon was, you know, they had a big burn rate, but then Uber took it to a new level but now it's had an, they've added a zero.”

“And the third thing Player almost always tends to be someone who says, great, I will help you both find something, trust the counterparty, and underwrite the risk on both transactions. Amazon. And usually, in the marketplace of, like, on the internet, the thir…”

“But I think a better way to deal with this problem is to not have the chain of command Like, to minimize the number of people who can say no, and only have people that you want and trust to do things.”