Acquired / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
71 published records
01 / recommendation
“I've read Made in America, I'm building out this advantage, it's going to be my moat, I'm going to delight customers, this is the way.”
02 / belief
“Certainly, Tom was very happy with their Amazon investment at that point in time. I think we have to give it an A.”
03 / uncertainty
“I was thinking of myself over dinner. Man, I don't know if we're doing a good job with this episode.”
04 / belief
“You couldn't IPO, so if you weren't already out like Amazon was, there's basically no chance that you were going to. I think Google finally IPO'd in 2004.”
05 / belief
“I think there are three key categories of people that were necessary for Amazon to succeed.”
06 / belief
“I believe Amazon's inventory turns per year are something like 16 or something insanely high.”
07 / uncertainty
“Joe, under this impression, probably from talking to Bill Campbell—we don't know for sure, and probably from talking to other board members—I think I'm supposed to do CEO-type stuff.”
08 / belief
“By this point in time, I think he had finally figured out that shoot, I might actually have to take delivery of some of these books, and shipping them back out to customers in midtown Manhattan is not a great place for that.”
09 / belief
“The keywords here are maximizing the present value of future cash flows, which necessitates building a brand around your stock, which I think Elon is the king of today.”
10 / belief
“Tom was the longest-serving Amazon board member other than Jeff himself, I believe 23 years.”
11 / belief
“If by some miracle at some point, we get to interview Jeff, I think that's the biggest question I want to ask him.”
12 / belief
“Now, there's no difference in our age. I think I'm four years, five years older than you.”
13 / belief
“We could buy you and you could be our internet thing or we could crush you. I think that's how the dinner went.”
14 / uncertainty
“At a minimum, he held to the IPO, 1%+ of Google. They probably held longer than that, I don't know.”
15 / belief
“I don't feel, based on everything we've discussed in this episode, qualified to assess Amazon retail as it is today. I think we should scope it to the time period.”
16 / belief
“Most Americans read one book a year. I think that's the mode of number of books per year per person.”
17 / commitment
“There's this great quote again in the 97 letter, which is, "We will make bold rather than timid investment decisions, where we see a sufficient probability of gaining market leadership advantages.”
18 / prediction
“Not only is it shocking that Amazon is doing hardware, because that is not a thing that they've ever done before, and that's not what we expect out of them, and there are only a few big successful companies that make consumer computing hardware, that sort of thing, but it really was the introduction of E Ink as a viable technology.”
19 / belief
“Rather than beating myself up over that mid episode here, I was like, I think that's actually the point.”
20 / belief
“Like we learned on the Walmart episode. If the infrastructure off the shelf for what you need to do to make your beer doesn't exist and you want to make your beer taste better, you have to build your own infrastructure.”
21 / uncertainty
“I don't know if that's technically true, but one reasonable way to think about it is you could load any web page, but there weren't a whole lot of forums you could type things into to send information back to those companies or those servers.”
22 / belief
“You get 90 minutes in and you're like, this is a really good interview. I think that happens a lot on the Lex Friedman podcast.”
23 / observation
“A lot of people are laughing all the way to the bank on the other side of that bet.”
24 / belief
“I think his realization is, okay, if eBay has grown really fast and there's a way to get something rarer, cheaper, or something, we have to be in business doing that, too.”
25 / belief
“I think the thing that did happen while MacKenzie is driving and Jeff is working on the drive out is Jeff's on the phone with a lawyer.”
26 / belief
“If they're generating a billion-ish dollars of operating income, and I think their market cap at that point was something like $30 billion, if you're a shareholder, they haven't really realized those future cash flows yet.”
27 / belief
“Going back to this credit card game, Ponzi, or Peter to pay Paul, this mental model of borrowing against something in the future like paying your suppliers in order to do interesting things with the dollars today, I think giving that a little bit more thought since I threw it out, I think the reason why it all worked out is that the Internet ultimately provided a ton of consumer value on an ongoing basis, even when the bubble burst.”
28 / belief
“I always thought those things were like, if I really think back in rites of passage for someone growing up, and I don't think I realized at the time, these are becoming things exactly at the pace that I'm growing up.”
29 / belief
“I think I looked into this when we were working on the Walmart episode, something like 5%–7% gross margin business.”
30 / belief
“Shaw, I think, was actually before Microsoft in realizing, okay, the Internet is going to be huge in a handful of years, but the thing that led to the dot-com mania was people realizing all at once that oh my God, the tidal wave is coming.”
31 / belief
“I think the stat is that as Jeff looked at two different research reports and basically approximated the middle, what he was analyzing was basically the amount of traffic.”
32 / belief
“Four, I think. Yeah. I was probably just a little bit ahead. I was aware of stuff going on with stocks related to tech companies.”
33 / belief
“I think his model for this was Jim Simons who, in 1982, started Renaissance Technologies (RenTech).”
34 / belief
“I was a little disappointed at the end. I think I felt like I lost steam. I can totally forgive it.”
35 / belief
“Len, the lead of the two of them, I think the older brother, technically did go to NYU.”
36 / observation
“Amazing. I feel like there's a lesson there, and the lesson is investing Google.”
37 / belief
“You didn't go knock on the door. I think that's fine. They just need one more thing which is capital.”
38 / belief
“We sorted this a little bit not intentionally with podcasting, I think, in Acquired.”
39 / belief
“I think everything in our time that we've thought of as that is mobile, cloud, Web3, VR, it's all still just the Internet.”
40 / uncertainty
“In 2001, they lay-off 1300 people. This is almost like, Amazon had been so dominant for so long today that it's hard to even think about the fact that I don't know how close to death they were.”
41 / belief
“I think the suit is like, well, you don't have a store, you can't go select the books.”
42 / belief
“When he was (I think) in college, he had used the Internet when it was fully just command-prompt based and there was no GUI.”
43 / evaluation
“Jeff just believes his famous Bezos charts where he's announcing this cool thing for Alexa and he's like, this was the best year ever.”
44 / commitment
“You can find it in any podcast player. With that, listeners, we will see you next time.”
45 / belief
“We're not going to get into Blue Origin on this episode, but I think the last time we would have talked about Jeff's space routes would have been, I think, on the Virgin Galactic episode.”
46 / evaluation
“A paperback copy of book X is a paperback copy of book X. It doesn't matter where you bought it and how you bought it.”
47 / belief
“Jeff and MacKenzie would get married. I think technically, MacKenzie was the first Amazon employee.”
48 / uncertainty
“Amazon's got highly valued liquid stock, all this cash, blah-blah-blah. If that had gone otherwise, I don't know about PayPal.”
49 / belief
“Jeff was so persuasive that John made time. I think he's probably glad that he made time to join the board.”
50 / commitment
“One out of every 10 things that I buy in that way from a merchant that is not Amazon, I will have some headache with.”
51 / belief
“I think we should grade Amazon from founding until just before the financial crisis.”
52 / belief
“I believe the original intention was Jeff and MacKenzie were going to move out to Santa Cruz and were going to build Amazon in Silicon Valley.”
53 / belief
“We skipped over this in history and facts, but I think let's talk about it a little bit here.”
54 / belief
“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.”
55 / uncertainty
“I don't know technically in terms of literally, was she the first person to become a W-2 employee, but certainly, she was already doing work, particularly in accounting, working with legal, and setting up the operations of the business before Jeff hired Shel Kaphan who was the first engineer, the first full-time hire other than he and MacKenzie.”
56 / belief
“How did you phrase it? I think you texted me, the surface area of this company is just immense.”
57 / commitment
“Shaw. I will compensate you appropriately. It will be worth your time. But I also understand the entrepreneurial impulse.”
58 / commitment
“Very senior executive, so he had some capital to invest a few years later which we will get into.”
59 / belief
“I think Jeff's main job is the two of them would meet every week, they would brainstorm ideas, Jeff would then go off for the rest of the weekend to research the feasibility of the ideas, work on them with employees within D.”
60 / belief
“I think strictly speaking, that is not a true statement. They have been issuing debt, but I think that is not for financing the business.”
61 / uncertainty
“I don't know. Ram led this. My best guess is $10 million or maybe even lower post.”
62 / evaluation
“Any web platform of sufficient scale can layer on for free a second business of advertising, because they just have the traffic and they can put stuff in front of people, and they can prioritize it however they see fit.”
63 / evaluation
“The entire first year after the public launch, they spent zero marketing dollars. It was all word of mouth and inbound media inquiries, because what they were doing was so novel and so useful to the mass market consumer.”
64 / recommendation
“Jeff, because of this, because he's read Made in America, he knows that he can be Barnes & Noble, but the way to do it is through distribution by building native distribution logistics supply chain for ecommerce not for physical stores.”
65 / recommendation
“In fact, in job postings, I think Bezos put things like experience with websites would be a bonus but not required.”
66 / evaluation
“There were a few little wobbles and detours in places, but really I don't know any other company that has created such a juggernaut that is so consistent with the original ideas of the founder.”
67 / preference
“Oh man, Amazon was not only my idea dinner pick at The Arena show but has been my favorite company, stock, and number one position in my portfolio for more than 10 years now, I think.”
68 / preference
“Great, both sci-fi work and fantasy work, both of which I really enjoy. I read her, I think, probably best known sci-fi novel.”
69 / evaluation
“What happens after this meeting with Megan Pierre (I think) really illustrates just how special Jeff and Amazon as a company are, because he makes a mental and emotional leap that I don't know many people could have made.”
70 / recommendation
“If you decide to be first in this first wave of people to sport the fashionable Acquired merch, you should tweet at us @acquiredfm, and we will retweet some of our favorites.”
71 / evaluation
“I think people have probably seen this video or screenshots of this video. It's worth watching the whole few minutes because it's unbelievably prescient.”