Brad Stone: belief

Transcript context

…The third business line I want your opinion on is, not the OG OG, but pretty close—the first kind of pillar of the story of Amazon is the Marketplace. I'd always assumed that this is an unassailable, unbelievable business. Even putting AWS aside, which on its own, should be a FAANG company. US Marketplace, also on its own, should be a FAANG Company. You paint kind of a dark picture of what's going on with the Marketplace right now. What’s your take? Tell us more. They made a series of very logical choices over the years which unlocked a tremendous amount of opportunity and growth. In fact, one of the big questions I had going into the book was how does the retail growth of a 20-year-old company start to re-accelerate? That seems to defy the laws of company gravity. The bigger you are, the slower you grow. What exactly happened there in 2015–2016 that GMV kind of took off? I remember looking into it and talking to former members of that team. Essentially, again back to the competition point, they are “inspired.” Their eyes opened by two companies. (1) Alibaba is expanding AliExpress with the idea that the sellers who have learned how to sell on Alibaba in China could now reach customers in the US and Europe. That was a seductive idea. I think it got the attention of Amazon executives. In fact, I think, except for maybe parts of Europe, that really hasn't worked out that well. In any event, that was sort of one inspiration. There was internal communication among Amazon executives that I cite in the book expressing fear that maybe Jack Ma would like to reduce fees to nothing in an effort to expand outside China. Which is normal in China ecommerce as we see on Acquired.…

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