David Rosenthal: recommendation

Transcript context

…By the way, listeners, we weren't going to do the Walmart story. We actually were going to do this as the first episode of the season. We got into researching Amazon and realized how much Jeff respected and borrowed from the Walmart strategy. We're like, I guess we got to tell that story first. There are a couple moments coming up where he interacts with Walmart. He brings along his copy, his scrawled in notes, marked up, and dog-eared copy of Made in America, to show these people who we're going to talk about. They're like, no, Sam is my hero. I'm not just some geek. I understand what we're doing here. Jeff, because of this, because he's read Made in America, he knows that he can be Barnes & Noble, but the way to do it is through distribution by building native distribution logistics supply chain for ecommerce not for physical stores. It is different enough that just like Walmart could build native distribution for their network of Walmart Supercenters. That was very different than the Kmart coming out of Kresge distribution that they were piggybacking off of. Jeff's like, we can do the same thing here, but we have to do it. I know we need to do it, but I can't really do it, but I know some people who can. In early 1997, he and Joy, together—I think, according to Brad, it was very much a joint effort of both of them, probably John Doerr was involved too—start traveling to Bentonville on recruiting trips. Canvas and poach.…

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