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Published · transcript-backed

Speaker unverified: belief

31 Dec 2016 Acquired The Amazon IPO with original Amazon Board Member Tom Alberg

“People were going public and being worth $30 billion and really didn’t have much. It didn’t quite happen that way with Amazon because even though there was interest – And I think one of Jeff’s motivations, I think the idea that we could raise money at hopefully good valuations and then use that money to grow further was attractive, he also felt that because it was kind of a small, relatively unknown retail company that it would help the brand to get better known.”

— Speaker unverified

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Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
Speaker unverified
Attribution
Not verified from this transcript
Claim type
belief
Recorded
31 Dec 2016
Publisher
Acquired

Transcript context

…And movies. So at the end of ’96, just on $16 million in revenue, Amazon hires Joy Covey as CFO who plays a central role in The Everything Store. The company makes the decision and the board makes the decision that they wanted to prepare for an IPO and go public in 1997 which – So at this point, we are two years into the life of Amazon as a company, one year into it being a publicly available website. You’ve talked a little bit about the financial markets being open. But how did those discussions – I mean, the board was you, John Doerr, and Jeff. Did Jeff come to you and say, “Hey, I think we’re ready to go public?” Well, I think pretty quickly investment bankers were even calling. Once something starts to get hot, whether there’s substance in these companies or not, there’s sort of this investment banker. And that was particularly true in the ’95 to 2000 era. People were going public and being worth $30 billion and really didn’t have much. It didn’t quite happen that way with Amazon because even though there was interest – And I think one of Jeff’s motivations, I think the idea that we could raise money at hopefully good valuations and then use that money to grow further was attractive, he also felt that because it was kind of a small, relatively unknown retail company that it would help the brand to get better known. I think that’s true on some consumer-oriented companies. It actually can be true even on enterprise startups. We have one, Impinj that went public this year. They were not widely known among CEOs. The CIO knew them but once you get public, you start to get picked up more on the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times – certainly happened to Amazon after it went public. What was the preparation process like? In particular, I’m curious, so the lead-left bank on the Amazon IPO was Deutsche Bank. Not Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley. We covered the Facebook IPO a few episodes ago and talked about the jockeying between the two of those firms for the Facebook IPO. These are the gold-plated Wall Street firms that everyone wants one of them to be their lead book runner for the IPO. But Amazon went with Deutsche bank and in particular, the lead banker, Frank Quattrone, and the lead analyst, Bill Gurley who obviously is now a partner at Benchmark. How did that relationship come together?…

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