Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
belief 13evaluation 8uncertainty 3
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
The useful parts, with receipts.
24 published records
“I think that often happens with technology where you realize that something is going to be very big but knowing the details that today, AWS would have come out of that, there was no way to predict that or think about that in those days.”
- Speaker
- Not verified from transcript
- Publisher
- Acquired
“One trend that I think we can observe from Amazon is actually doing corporate innovation well.”
- Publisher
- Acquired
“I don’t think we thought we were kind of falling in a Microsoft model although I think from the beginning, everybody in Amazon recognized that Microsoft had the potential in the cloud to be the most important competitor in that as they have become.”
- Speaker
- Not verified from transcript
- Publisher
- Acquired
“As someone who works on early-stage startups, a lot of the time there’s all this like really vague questions around, “Okay. We think we have an idea in this space and we’re learning as we’re going.”
- Publisher
- Acquired
“I think Jeff wasn’t reluctant on that either but it was really John in a lot of ways saying, “you’ve got to have a better, stronger team to go public.”
- Speaker
- Not verified from transcript
- Publisher
- Acquired
“Kind of one interesting point out of it, I think, is that there was some negotiation on price and both firms were eager, both were outstanding firms.”
- Speaker
- Not verified from transcript
- Publisher
- Acquired
“I think over a billion dollars. But you also left out, for example, that I learned the multiplication table since third grade and probably was class president in fifth grade.”
- Speaker
- Not verified from transcript
- Publisher
- Acquired
“A broader answer is I think Jeff always had the view and we had the view that big name companies aren’t always the best.”
- Speaker
- Not verified from transcript
- Publisher
- Acquired
“People were going public and being worth $30 billion and really didn’t have much. It didn’t quite happen that way with Amazon because even though there was interest – And I think one of Jeff’s motivations, I think the idea that we could raise money at hopefully good valuations and then use that money to grow further was attractive, he also felt that because it was kind of a small, relatively unknown retail company that it would help the brand to get better known.”
- Speaker
- Not verified from transcript
- Publisher
- Acquired
“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.”
- Speaker
- Not verified from transcript
- Publisher
- Acquired
“” Meaning that if you focus on two cents more profit per quarter, then you get investors who’d focus on that. It takes you a while I think to get the right kind of investors, but if you say long-term cash flow is how we measure the business, pretty soon you get investors who are willing to invest on that basis.”
- Speaker
- Not verified from transcript
- Publisher
- Acquired
“I was intrigued by it. But anyway, you never always say “no, I don’t know anything about it.”
- Speaker
- Not verified from transcript
- Publisher
- Acquired
“I think looking back it’s a little hard but I don’t think he stood out as the only great entrepreneur I ever met, but certainly in the top 20 or 10 percent.”
- Speaker
- Not verified from transcript
- Publisher
- Acquired
“” I suspect Jeff was thinking about that, but it was good I think in the beginning, just let’s get this one right.”
- Speaker
- Not verified from transcript
- Publisher
- Acquired
“When I think about Amazon, it’s just like the canonical colloquial example of how to build the world’s best flywheel business where so many things feed into so many other things and fuel the business.”
- Publisher
- Acquired
“Again, it’s somewhat personality and I think I was very fortunate that Jeff was in this for the long-term and so, even at moments when he could have gone out and sold the company, he wasn’t interested.”
- Publisher
- Acquired
“Incredible growth. But I think, to my mind, the most incredible thing that happens at the end of 1997 is Jeff publishes his first annual letter to shareholders.”
- Publisher
- Acquired
“One of the measures that we use for that with IPOs is what going public enabled that company to do that they would not otherwise have been able to do.”
- Publisher
- Acquired
“I seriously doubt that’s even possible. But Amazon as an acquirer, it feels like has kind of internalized those lessons and I think about the Zappos acquisition during the 2008 recession, 2008-2009.”
- Publisher
- Acquired
“I think for me the flipside of that coin that I think really shines through in reading about and reading this history of Amazon at that time is the long-term thinking that Jeff and the company and the board had.”
- Publisher
- Acquired
“I think after those years, did Jeff put a moratorium on M&A because they’ve acquired so many companies?”
- Publisher
- Acquired
“I think that one reason why we had so much trouble in that earlier section of what would have happened otherwise is it just doesn’t seem like there was a lot of choice.”
- Publisher
- Acquired
“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.”
- Publisher
- Acquired
“I’m curious in that and then that ended up being I believe the last money into the company through the internet bubble.”
- Publisher
- Acquired