David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…We did two kind of events relating to that financing and so forth. One, we had the famous meeting with Barnes & Noble back in pre-IPO where the Riggio brothers came to Seattle and wanted to do some kind of a joint deal with Amazon. They weren’t actually offering to acquire but they said, “Well, you can build our website and your own, and we can both have websites or we can do it jointly. We can jointly own it.” Jeff I think rightly decided he didn’t want to do that. Then they filed a lawsuit three days before the IPO because we were using the phrase “the world’s biggest bookstore.” So there are lessons in all of that for anybody who wanted to go public that your competitors sometimes do try to take it. But really, neither they nor anyone else really made a run at us and partly because I think a lot of traditional companies always thought we were overvalued. So it was actually a benefit. Now, why nobody tried it when we were $5 in 2001, that’s when they should have tried. I’m not sure they would have succeeded but people, you know, everybody becomes pessimistic at the same time, everybody become optimistic at the same time. It’s interesting that Amazon obviously, it would be a shocker if anybody would buy Amazon today. I seriously doubt that’s even possible. But Amazon as an acquirer, it feels like has kind of internalized those lessons and I think about the Zappos acquisition during the 2008 recession, 2008-2009. Or the Quidsi acquisition, both of which are written about extensively in the everything store. It almost feels like Jeff and the company taking that lesson to heart, that when there are good businesses targeting large markets and for whatever reason are out of favor or in the midst of a recession, that’s the time to go shopping. You don’t always have the luxury but it will be nice if you could.…

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