Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Oh, that'll be fun to talk about. Clearly, it's both. I think we should grade Amazon from founding until just before the financial crisis. Okay. It's interesting. If the company were to have ended in 2007, I think they were doing about a billion dollars a year of operating income. This is why it's very interesting to be grading on a timeframe with a company that's thinking in a much longer timeframe. If they're generating a billion-ish dollars of operating income, and I think their market cap at that point was something like $30 billion, if you're a shareholder, they haven't really realized those future cash flows yet. The pedantic way to look at it would be like, well, if the music stopped there, that would have been pretty bad. But, of course, it didn't. Of course, AWS would still come. Their market cap would absolutely explode. They've turned on the ability, especially with AWS, get very profitable in the future. That's probably the wrong way to look at it. What if the company shut down? It's more about, how do they execute to set themselves up for ultimately realizing all that value for shareholders? Humans are such funny creatures. The hedonic adaptation is crazy. If you go back in time to 2007, what did you say their market cap was? $30 billion?…

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