David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah. And a little bit of story there that I think came out before, but Kleiner Perkins, John actually said, “Well, I love you but I’m so busy, I’m on all these other boards.” He was on the Netscape board I think at that time. “I really don’t have time. But here I’ve got a great partner here in the board.” Jeff sort of said, “Well, that’s too bad, it’s your thing. Talk to us.” And we said, “Well, why don’t you just tell them that Kleiner can only invest if John comes on the board?” So Jeff of course did, and John joined the board, which was good for Amazon and good for Kleiner and John, obviously. Yeah. I’m curious on that. So, in The Everything Store, he talks about how, I don’t know how much of this is causal but after that Kleiner invested and John joined the board, that Jeff kind of adopted as a mantra a “get big fast. ” How did that come together? In truth, Amazon did get very big very fast. Was that associated with investment? What drove that mindset change for John? I think part of it just came from the fact that we were growing fast. The original business plan back when he was raising the million dollars was he had kind of a moderate growth and a fast growth but nothing like what he was achieving. The plan actually said he would break even in year 2. And again, unfortunately that didn’t happen.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.