David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…No. In that chapter, it's not just Google Express, it's Instacart and their success of fundraising rounds. Sometimes it's a story in the Wall Street Journal, the Times, or Bloomberg that catches their eye and there's a competitive response. Yes, certainly Instacart, the fact that this was a former employee had hit them hard, and they tried to copy it. I talk about what Prime now was at the beginning. One element of it, which they called [...], was an effort to basically do the same thing as Instacart. Kind of syndicate offline physical retailers and use their shelves as fulfillment centers and deliver those with contractors to people's homes. What they found when they tried to emulate Instacart is that no grocery store was going to work with Amazon. That would be madness. Particularly since in a very Amazon-like way, they also had this AmazonFresh experiment happening in Seattle, and by that point probably San Francisco and LA, that seemed like this big mortal threat to the grocery stores. Little did they know, Amazon Fresh at the time was kind of a disaster and wasn't really being expanded. But Instacart has the benefit of being a technology platform for other grocery stores. Whereas Amazon was kind of doing both, a little bit of 3P and 1P. They even went to Whole Foods back in 2015 and got told no, which was interesting and precipitated a little bit of the relationship down the line. There was a fun little moment that just reminded me of in the book. I think you either wrote implied that John Mackey at Whole Foods reached out to Bezos either through Bloomberg or after having seen something in Bloomberg. Right. The companies had been circling each other. Activist investors were kind of pummeling Whole Foods Market. My colleague at Bloomberg, Spencer Soper, wrote an article that suggested that Amazon had considered buying Whole Foods in the past, which they had. That was a precipitating event to Mackey saying maybe we should pick up the phone and call these guys, maybe Amazon's our way out. Then I've got the name of whoever this was in the book, and I'm not going to be able to remember it, but somebody who was advising Mackey had been active in Democratic politics and called Jay Carney, and that precipitated the deal.…

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