Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, go for it. I've got two I want to share. Save me room for two. I will. Here's the thing we really didn't talk about, but it is very important to understand about Amazon. They were ludicrously, ludicrously private. They never broke AWS out as a segment. They basically had to. They have always kept everything in this gigantic amalgamation of the fewer numbers we can report, the better. In their S-1, they never said anything about any cohorts, cost to acquire customer, or lifetime value of an Amazon customer. No one in the outside world know 10-Ks, know S-1. Nothing has ever said anything about that information. Jeff just believes his famous Bezos charts where he's announcing this cool thing for Alexa and he's like, this was the best year ever. You just see an unlabeled axis that's like, oh, it's upper and to the righter. That has served them really well. They're able to do a lot of maneuvering versus competitors, with their suppliers, with third-party sellers, by just never really disclosing any key information. Yup, the same story with advertising as with AWS. At a certain point, they're going to have to break out advertising. It's a $30–$40 billion run rate business at this point. But for a long time, nobody really knew or understood what was happening inside Amazon with that.…

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