Acquired27 Mai 2021

Special: Amazon Unbound (with Brad Stone)

Brad Stone joins us to discuss the making of the modern Amazon, and how it's morphed from the "flywheel company" of The Everything Store into a set of interlocking and self-reinforcing businesses that extended both wider and deeper into the global economy than anyone ever imagined. (except perhaps Jeff Bezos) Is Amazon the Standard Oil of our time, or maybe something much, much bigger? Tune in as we dive in!

Sponsors:

Sentry: https://bit.ly/acquiredsentry
WorkOS: https://bit.ly/workos25
Anthropic: https://bit.ly/acquiredclaude25
Statsig: https://bit.ly/acquiredstatsig26

More Acquired!

Get email updates with hints on next episode and follow-ups from recent episodes
Join the Slack
Subscribe to ACQ2
Merch Store!

Topics covered:

When and why Brad decided The Everything Store needed a sequel
The process of writing the book and access he got at Amazon, including S-Team executives like Dave Clark
The evolution of Amazon's core strategy from the flywheel into a set of "interlocking and self-reinforcing businesses", and how Brad landed on that as the key theme for the book
Amazon's culture and the evolution from "Jeff-bots", and its embodiment in S-team members and company leaders beyond
Amazon's investments in Video and why Bezos was ahead of the pack in realizing its strategic importance (including the rumored as-of-recording MGM deal)
Amazon's secretive "Campfire" event and why Amazon does it despite its very un-Amazon price tag
Brad's take on the future of three major Amazon business lines: Video, International and Marketplace / 3rd Party Sellers
Amazon and Bezos's intense focus on competitors, despite the "theater" of their mantra to only focus on customers
The Bezos "lapses of judgment" in 2018-19 and what it was like reporting on all the craziness around it
Tracking down the "voice of Alexa" Nina Rolle, and Bezos's relationship with Elon!

Links:

Amazon Unbound (on Amazon, natch): https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Unbound-Invention-Global-Empire/dp/1982132612/

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(214)

Trader Joe’s

Trader Joe's breaks every rule of modern retail. They don't do e-commerce. They don't do delivery. No sales, coupons, or loyalty programs. They only stock 4,000 SKUs versus 50,000+ at normal supermark...

27 Okt 20253h 26min

Google Part III: The AI Company

Google faces the greatest innovator's dilemma in history. They invented the Transformer — the breakthrough technology powering every modern AI system from ChatGPT to Claude (and, of course, Gemini). T...

6 Okt 20254h 4min

Acquired Live at Radio City Music Hall (Presented by J.P. Morgan)

It’s finally here! Today we are releasing Acquired’s first “concert film” — the full video recording of our Radio City live show from this summer with Jamie Dimon, Andrew Ross Sorkin, New York Times C...

1 Okt 20251min

Google Part II: Alphabet

In its first six years from 1998 to 2004, Google built one of the greatest products of all time (and certainly the greatest business of all time) with Search. Then in its next six years from 2005 to 2...

26 Aug 20254h 10min

The Jamie Dimon Interview

We sit down with Jamie Dimon for a live conversation at Radio City Music Hall, covering the incredible journey from his 1998 firing at Citgroup (where he was widely expected to become CEO) to building...

16 Jul 20251h 8min

Google Part I: Origins of Search

We tell the story of the single greatest business ever created: Google search. From its origins as a Stanford research project called BackRub, Google became the front door to the internet. Today it’s ...

30 Jun 20253h 37min

The Steve Ballmer Interview

We sit down with Steve Ballmer, the legendary former Microsoft CEO and owner of the LA Clippers, for an epic conversation covering his 34 years at Microsoft. Steve listened to our Microsoft episodes a...

2 Jun 20252h 56min

Epic Systems (MyChart)

What if we told you that the most important company in US healthcare was run from a farm in rural Wisconsin? And that farm contained the world’s largest subterranean auditorium, as well as Disneyland—...

21 Apr 20253h 54min