Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…It might have been in the chapter on Prime Video. It just seemed for a long time even employees and some board members and investors on Amazon didn't understand Bezos’ infatuation with Hollywood and his investment in video, and almost saw it as a personal weakness, midlife crisis, a digression, or a diversion. But as with all these things, so often, Bezos is just simply ahead of the pack in thinking about it. It was this idea that Prime was a two-day shipping club and then it was a one-day shipping club. But the reality is that fulfillment centers are outside every major American city and shipping really ceases to be a differentiating factor. Prime would have to be something more, would have to be a content club. The way in which Prime Video feeds in the Prime and reinforces the retail business, and Prime Videos (in some ways) a consumer application of AWS because it's streaming and sitting on Amazon servers. The same with Alexa, it being a consumer application of AWS. That's how Jeff conceived it with that first email to executives at a $20 computer whose brains are in the cloud controllable by voice. It also goes back to one quote from The Everything Store where he said to Tim O’Reilly, we don't have any big advantages so we have to weave a rope with smaller advantages. That's the way Bezos thinks and the way he's encouraging his executives to think. What are you doing for the cloud business? What are you doing for Alexa? Getting everyone to go and exploit the assets and the advantages Amazon has. You've got this set of really opaque and hidden connections between all these businesses that are at the center of how Amazon operates. While they'll probably really resist mightily any effort or suggestion that they should break up. Actually, I want to put a pin in antitrust for one second and ask this question sort of in a different way, which was when I heard you were writing this book I made the comment to David that The Everything Store is a pretty clean narrative. It's one idea, it’s ecommerce starting with books becoming everything. It's The Everything Store and it's the story of this maniacal guy who's going to pull that off. For this one, I was like, oh my God, Amazon has done so many random things and many of them have become very big businesses. They're not a conglomerate like Berkshire Hathaway because the S-team is much more than capital allocators. They're not just sending money to the head office. His businesses really do—as you would later coin—interlock. I just think it's so fascinating that they occupied this middle ground between a classic conglomerate and what you would think of that sort of a normal business should just go into near adjacencies. Where it's like, well, let’s expand and address a very similar market. Whereas Amazon is taking the strategy of we are going to go after completely different markets and find ways to link them together with the same customer. It's just a super unique structure. They do both, right? For every satellite project Kuiper where they're going to get into internet access if they can ever launch the satellites, there's the physical retail initiative, the Amazon grocery stores that will also function as ecommerce distribution centers, and Pick and Pack in addition to using their AI strength. Use the Go Store technology to do cashierless checkout. There is some sort of far-field business expansion at the same time as they do kind of leach out into adjacent markets.…

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