Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Right, in the long run. That is the way that every business is measured. The keywords here are maximizing the present value of future cash flows, which necessitates building a brand around your stock, which I think Elon is the king of today. When you're talking about the present value of future cash flows, since future cash flows are unknown, you do have to build religion around your company today if your goal is to really get investors on board with your long, long, long term vision. Amazon got thrown in with all these other dot-com companies when you read that Barron's article, Amazon.bomb. A lot of those companies, cosmo.com, for no shipping, you could order a pack of gum to be delivered to your house and it would arrive in an hour. You're like, clearly, they're losing money on this, and I'm not necessarily a loyal subscriber to this. Amazon always was gross margin profitable. They always had solid unit economics, but they would choose to super aggressively reinvest in something. As we were preparing for this episode among the number of people we pinned in addition to Brad Stone and some of the other folks that we were chatting with were early, early Amazon or around the company, we reached out to a friend of the show, Michael Mauboussin, to see if he had any materials from this time. He's had more than a spidey sense that he would have strong opinions about Amazon at this time. Our episode with Michael, I think it's the seventh most listened to Acquired episode of all time.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.