David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Yes. The other thing to point out about them identifying books is there's this seminal Wall Street Journal piece about the company in 1996 that drives a lot of traffic. It's like the Yahoo event on steroids. They have this really interesting stat, which is in 1995, the web attracted more than 100,000 retailers, which I would not have guessed that happened until Shopify. Apparently, that happened in 1995. With some spending more than a million dollars each on eye-popping sites, yet worldwide retail sales on the web amounted to just $324 million last year, which averages out to slightly more than 3000 in sales per retailer. Amazon nailed a category and an operational model, where they were able to be the one dominant ecommerce site. This predates pets.com, this predates cosmo.com, eBay. They were almost the earliest. They were of the first wave and just nailed it on a bunch of vectors. There's this great quote from Jane Slade, "There were no grown ups that could help us." Every time they would bring in a vendor for customer service software, database software, or anything, the implementation reps will just look at all the numbers and be like, what? Our software actually can't help you. They had to build a lot of this stuff in-house because they were basically the only successful, big retailer of this scale using the Internet. Like we learned on the Walmart episode. If the infrastructure off the shelf for what you need to do to make your beer doesn't exist and you want to make your beer taste better, you have to build your own infrastructure. For sure.…

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