Brad Stone: prediction

Transcript context

…I was kind of curious because there's the time between The Everything Store and Amazon Unbound. Amazon started acquiring way more companies than they previously had. This was in a period where the company was much bigger too. In some ways, the acquisitions look smaller on paper. In hindsight, even Whole Foods, if you think about it in terms of the market cap now feels pretty insignificant. What has changed internally at Amazon for how they think about acquiring companies? What kind of made the cut for you in terms of what was worth talking about from an acquisition point of view? I do tell the Kiva story in one of the chapters on operations. To me it was a Dave Clark call. It was the epitome of Amazon in terms of trying to automate systems and take humans out of the equation. It was a little bit of a ruthless move in that they negotiated the thing over many years and tried to suppress its growth, then bought it, then made a promise to the Kiva founders that they could sell it externally, and then reneged on that promise. It allowed the super scaling, the fulfillment centers, and made them incredibly more efficient. Then it also furnished Dave Clark with some leadership credentials that allowed him to continue to grow inside the organization. I think you're right, Josh. I did take a little bit of a light pass on Twitch. Definitely, on Ring, I did not do much. Part of it was just streamlining the story and trying to shoehorn everything into a narrative without too many digressions and also while keeping Jeff Bezos at the center of the action, that was the main narrative challenge of the book. Amazon might acquire MGM in the next couple of days. I always thought that Amazon's ability to acquire companies was going to get severely curtailed because of all this antitrust scrutiny. We'll see what happens, but it seems like that's an asset that they'll easily be able to buy and then increase their output of movies in their catalog. You're describing one of the challenges I had of figuring out what to include, what not to include, how to keep things moving in this book that covers the entire arc of Amazon history and all these characters that populate it. Brad, to wrap, where can listeners buy the book?…

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