Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
26 transcript-backed records
01 / belief
“Then investing a billion dollars worth of his return from Amazon stock every year and turbocharging it. That kind of change of pace I think has yielded some dysfunctional outcomes.”
02 / belief
“Now you've got this massive advertising business. I think $6 billion in the last quarter.”
03 / belief
“In fact, I think, except for maybe parts of Europe, that really hasn't worked out that well.”
04 / uncertainty
“I don't know that I had a number, but I definitely had some sources saying that it was the biggest single investment in Amazon history.”
05 / belief
“I think what I originally was riffing on with that term was how he's so effortlessly alluded difficult questions back when he gave interviews.”
06 / belief
“I found that he had personally bought a Bell Helicopter and that Lauren Sanchez’s company had also registered a new Bell Helicopter at the same time.”
07 / commitment
“I will say that Bernie Thompson is one of those sellers who has mentioned in the investor letter, this guy that Steven Yang of Anker said I'm going to run you over.”
08 / belief
“I agree with that. Amazon is doing so much now in serving so many constituencies that the brand holder who wants no part of this frontier chaos, wants to sell directly, and have a relationship with their customers.”
09 / evaluation
“Although I think the international part of the income statement in the last quarter was profitable for one of the first times.”
10 / evaluation
“Their numbers are upside down because they're trying to acquire customers with billboards and conventional ads, and it's super expensive and ultimately unproductive.”
11 / evaluation
“I think I quote a Flipkart (maybe) board member investor in the book as saying, “If there was a mistake to make, we made it.”
12 / prediction
“I always thought that Amazon's ability to acquire companies was going to get severely curtailed because of all this antitrust scrutiny.”
13 / evaluation
“What's unfortunate is that the Saudi bots on Twitter have kind of taken what I wrote in that book to launch another wave of attacks against Bezos saying that he improperly accused them.”
14 / evaluation
“I wanted to stand on its own and be fresh in part because even though I was sort of kidding about that in the first book, Mackenzie mentioned that in her one-star review I think.”
15 / evaluation
“Hard to imagine what the missing pieces are in the Amazon quilt of businesses because they are sort of doing everything right now.”
16 / belief
“Not to say that Uber doesn’t have that because they have local offices and very smart general managers but I think there’s a reason that Uber hasn’t run the table yet.”
17 / belief
“I mean, Uber I think has to hope that we move into a different capital environment and all these companies like Lyft, but also like Juno, this New York startup that’s giving its drivers equity that all that stuff starts to look very unsustainable in an environment where companies have to go public and they have to show profit.”
18 / belief
“I think that’s right and I think that the big moment for this industry, so Kuaidi and Didi start to emerge by virtue of the investment of Tencent and Alibaba.”
19 / belief
“I think that there would be some regulatory or anti-trust scrutiny if Google was to play favorites in the way that Tencent and Alibaba did in China.”
20 / belief
“The founders started out wanting classy rides around San Francisco. So you kind of have to pick where you start and so Uber now is sort of focusing on the driver community and has a lot of work to do I think to quell some of the dissatisfaction particularly among full-time drivers and when we get into these cars and talk to our drivers, we know that dissatisfaction is there.”
21 / belief
“I think the other thing that happened and the reason why this was a smart deal probably for both companies is, it became very clear over the last two years that this market was about to undergo a major pivot into driverless car technology and so it really doesn’t make a lot of sense to go waging a war and spending a battle for a market that is going to be changing very quickly.”
22 / prediction
“One of the things that happens at this meeting is Cheng Wei stands up and on a whiteboard kind of charts Uber’s growth since 2010, then with another fever line charts Didi’s growth since 2012, and the lines intersect and he projects that Didi will be larger than Uber primarily because the market in China is so much larger.”
23 / evaluation
“I think when Kuaidi went and raised money from Alibaba, it was definitely a blow to the Didi guys because that’s their alma mater and Alibaba obviously the e-commerce giant in China.”
24 / evaluation
“Of course, it’s very fashionable to say you’re looking into it. It’s unclear to me now whether Didi has made the progress of, say, Uber which is testing cars now in Pittsburgh and a few other cities.”
25 / evaluation
“One of the things that happened was Uber when they launched, the integration was very poor in China because they were using Google Maps and we all know Google is pretty much blocked in China, so the integration was poor.”
26 / evaluation
“There’s a lot of maneuverings here behind the scenes. But I think that to their credit, the Didi executives and at this point, Jean Luo, an executive from Goldman Sachs, she’s either advising Didi at this time or has joined really as Cheng Wei’s partner.”