Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Let’s flip to the bull side. Actually, for me the topic here is still Amazon. Tobi has this really great quote in one of his interviews where he says, “If you assume Amazon is going to eat retail of everything that has a barcode on it,” basically you need to have a barcode to sell on Amazon, “the question then is what happens to anything that doesn’t have a barcode on it? Is Tesla going to sell on Amazon? Are upstart D2C brands going to sell on Amazon?” Maybe they will and actually you can now on Shopify. They have a plugin to Amazon. You can easily sell on Amazon from Shopify. But there’s a lot of stuff out there that isn’t going to sell on Amazon. The way that I think about it is timing that this company, the market for people selling things directly on the internet or, let’s expand and say, selling things directly both on and off the internet actually expanded dramatically in the years after their IPO. We’re in this era where people want to sell things in a bunch of different ways and subscription method, using a strong storytelling component, using a strong brand component, all these things at Amazon is not good at. It makes sense. I don’t mean not good at in a tactical way. It’s not “Oh darn. They just couldn’t hire people to figure the dang thing out.” It’s a structural problem. Yeah. Amazon.com subordinates the brands of the products.…

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