David Rosenthal: commitment

Transcript context

…Wild. We're going to talk about a completely different type of business today than we talked about last time. Sort of. There are a lot of similarities and a lot more than you would guess when looking at an online retailer that started as an online bookstore and a cloud computing pioneer. Speaking of ecommerce, we have huge news. You can finally, finally buy Acquired merch on the Internet. That is available acquired.fm/store or click the link in the show notes. You can grab your favorite tee, crewneck, hoodie, tank, or even a onesie, since I know a lot of you out there are like David and have little ones at home. After you finish this episode, comment, discuss it with David and I and 13,000 other smart members of the Acquired community at acquired.fm/slack. If you're dying for more required in the meantime, go check out the LP Show by searching Acquired LP in any podcast player. The next episode is with David's partner in crime at Kindergarten Ventures, Nat Manning, talking about his company Kettle and how the business of reinsurance works. That, of course, is already live if you are a paying LP, which you can become acquired.fm/lp. Without further ado, David, take us in. Listeners, as always, the show is not investment advice. David and I may certainly have investments in the companies we discuss. The show is for informational and entertainment purposes only. We left off the amazon.com episode in 2007 with the Sony PlayStation-like coda of the Kindle story. The new chapter, one might say that it seemed at the time to the outside world that Amazon was opening as a true technology company with Kindle. I believe the quote from Eric Schmidt in The Everything Store was, "The book guys finally got technology." Of course, as we talked about, Jeff Bezos always got technology. This was not a shift. In particular, this was not anything new because of everything we are going to talk about on this whole separate episode today. To do that, we need to rewind back, as I said above, to the end of 2001, early 2002, the immediate post dot-com bubble popping crash era. Bezos and Amazon, as hard as it is now to remember, he was like an embattled CEO at this point. It just gotten rid of COO Joe Galli, the board has brought in coach Campbell, Amazon's fighting for its life against both eBay and Wall Street. Is it insane to think that the board was in the place with Jeff Bezos thinking, we really need some adult supervision to be a scale CEO and help this guy out? Freaking Jeff Bezos. Obviously, that did not pan out. Bezos came valiantly riding back in and ran the business for another 20 years.…

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