Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Eventually, Amazon, Jeff, Joy, and everybody, convinced Rick to make the jump. Right before the IPO in early 1997, he joins. Jeff knows they're going to win at this point. Brad writes in The Everything Store, "Bezos had predicted that Barnes and Noble would have trouble seriously competing online, and in the end, he was right. The Riggios were reluctant to lose money on a relatively small part of their business, and didn't want to put their most resourceful employees behind an effort that would siphon sales away from the more profitable stores. On top of that, their company's distribution operation was well entrenched and geared towards servicing physical stores by sending out large shipments of books to a certain number of locations. The shift from that to mailing small orders to individual customers was long, painful, and full of customer service errors. For Amazon, that was just daily business." There we go. Rick, he alone joining is huge. He also airlifts about a dozen executives out of Walmart to come join him. When he finally does officially accept the offer, Walmart's like, you're dead to us. He gets escorted out of his office by security and the whole thing, which in retrospect was a mistake by Walmart, because that just makes everybody more curious inside Walmart. Like, dang, Rick, he could have been CEO at this place and he just went to go and be head of IT at this company. I better go find out what they're doing, I want to follow Rick. At this point, Amazon is well underway from transforming a culture of misfits and geeks who want to be able to ship rare books online to MBA city. This is where they're getting experienced executives. They're really turning on the recruiting engine from top business schools and Walmart. There are two different ways to look at Amazon. I think on this show, we focus a lot on the business side of it, where there's an unbelievable cash flow dynamic that we'll talk about, there's the whole get the investors you asked for, there's the constant reinvesting in growth. But up to this point, when you listen to these interviews with Shel Kaphan, or reading all the stories on Greg Linden's blog who was an early engineer, or all the interviews Glenn Fleishman has given, it really is about adapting technologies that were not really ready yet being the first and biggest and being with misfits on the Internet. There was a big exiting of the 1994–1997 crowd in 1998 and 1999 as Dalzel, his people, and all the MBAs come in to say, okay, it's working and it's not just about this quest for odd books. Yup. I actually would put Dalzel on the Walmart crew. I think there are three key categories of people that were necessary for Amazon to succeed. There were the technologists—Shel in the early days and the freaks and geeks—but then that evolved into a world class technology organization over time. There were the MBAs that we're going to talk about in a minute. The Andy Jassys, the Jason Kilars, the Harrison Millers, the Jeff Blackburns. And then there were the Walmart people, the Rick Dalzel. Jeff, he didn't come from Walmart, but he's very much cut from that cloth, the back-end retail logistics distribution people. And you really need a world class, all three of those to make this work. On the distribution and supply chain front, more than a dozen Walmart executives come over to Amazon. In late 1998, Walmart sues Amazon for trying to steal trade secrets. The case settles with no damages, but there was damage. It happened. That DNA came right out of Walmart and right into Amazon. To be fair, like we said, it's a different thing than the Walmart supply chain that they're building. It's the Amazon supply chain.…

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