Jeff Bezos: evaluation

Transcript context

…It’s a grand project of humanity. Yes, it’s one of humanity’s grand challenges, and especially as you look at going to the moon and going to Mars and building giant O’Neill colonies and unlocking all the things. I won’t live long enough to see the fruits of this, but the fruits of this come from building a road to space, getting the infrastructure. I’ll give you an analogy. When I started Amazon, I didn’t have to develop a payment system. It already existed. It was called the credit card. I didn’t have to develop a transportation system to deliver the packages. It already existed. It was called the Postal Service and Royal Mail and Deutsche Post and so on. So all this heavy lifting infrastructure was already in place and I could stand on its shoulders. And that’s why, when you look at the internet … And by the way, another giant piece of infrastructure that was around in the early, I’m taking you back to 1994, people were using dial-up modems and it was piggybacking on top of the long distance phone network. That’s how the internet … That’s how people were accessing servers and so on. And again, if that hadn’t existed, it would’ve been hundreds of billions of CapEx to put that out there. No startup company could have done that. And so the problem you see, if you look at the dynamism in the internet space over the last 20 years, it’s because you see two kids in a dorm room could start an internet company that could be successful and do amazing things because they didn’t have to build heavy infrastructure. It was already there. And that’s what I want to do. I take my Amazon winnings and use that to build heavy infrastructure so that the next generation, the generation that’s my children and their children, those generations can then use that heavy infrastructure, then there’ll be space entrepreneurs who start in their dorm room. That will be a marker of success when you can have a really valuable space company started in a dorm room, then we know that we’ve built enough infrastructure so that ingenuity and imagination can really be unleashed. I find that very exciting. They will, of course, as kids do, take all of this hard infrastructure ability for granted.…

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