Ben Gilbert: commitment

Transcript context

…We didn't talk about the Fire Phone. The Fire Phone, A9 search engine, which was just wildly underfunded relative to Google search engine, Block View, which was the predecessor to what Google figured out with huge investment to make Street View, investing tens of millions of dollars and startups, like homegrocer.com and pets.com. Over, and over, and over again, there are these huge failures, and yet it's the most successful company of our time. There are so many other companies where, compare it to Elon Musk, for example. You look at SpaceX, it worked. Tesla, it worked. PayPal, it worked. Boring Company, we don't know yet, but it seems like it could work. Neuralink, jury's out. It's really early, but it's not a failure. He doesn't go start these things that are completely dead ends the way that Amazon did dozens, and dozens, and dozens of times. But Amazon is so damn good at learning. There's this great quote again in the 97 letter, which is, "We will make bold rather than timid investment decisions, where we see a sufficient probability of gaining market leadership advantages. Some of these investments will pay off, others will not, and we will have learned another valuable lesson in either case." My big takeaway is, if you're going to look at Amazon as a straight line, it was a philosophical straight line. It was a strategically squiggly line, but it was a tactically random set of dots that there was just a fact finding algorithm going to figure out. Man, I love that. That is such a good point, but that was the strategy. Jeff says it in the shareholder letters all along.…

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