This Week in Startups - “Amazon Unbound” author Brad Stone on the mind of Bezos, the future of Amazon & more | E1282

Episode Date: September 14, 2021

Brad Stone, the author of "Amazon Unbound", joined to talk about Elon Musk (09:44), Amazon's workplace environment (23:25), the importance of Prime (27:17), which tech companies are most dangerous for society (51:13), & more!

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Shop for your next best look or book a virtual style consultation at Indochino.com. Right now you can get $50 off any purchase of $39 or more by using code Twist at checkout. Next up on the program is my friend Brad Stone. He is a senior executive editor for global technology. My God, that's a long title, Brad, at Bloomberg. Bloomberg News, I guess would be the correct way to say it. You also know him as the author of The Everything Store, Jeff Bezos and the age of Amazon 2013, the upstarts Uber, Airbnb and the battle for the new Silicon Valley 2017.

And he's back at the Amazon trough again reporting on... It's a good way to put it. Yeah, I mean, it's just it's the gift that keeps on giving Amazon Unbound, Jeff Bezos in, and the innovation of a global Empire 2021. Welcome back to the program. Brad, how you holding up? Thanks, Jason. I'm well.

You know, the pandemic was actually weirdly or perversely a good time to write a book because I would have been quarantining anyway. So, you know, it kind of worked out. You know, I just started writing my second book and I was in Italy and I stayed a week longer, went to the beach and, you know, the family went home. And I had the most productive week of my life. I'm curious for you as a writer, what is your process and how do you get the words to flow? How many words a day do you hit typically?

Take us through that. Let's go inside baseball. Sure, sure. You know, I kind of like to say that the only thing worse than writing a book and being on deadline and being in the midst of it is not being in the midst of it, right? It's like, I need the focus and the deadlines. and the, I, maybe like the sort of mental activity of having a project like that. And what I do, and when the story is great, as it is with Amazon, you know, in the last 10 years,

it's kind of, it's like a brain virus. I'm going to sleep thinking about it. I'm waking up. And, you know, my productive times in the morning, you know, I kind of feel like a good goal for me is like a thousand words a day. You know, it's just, it's, and that's my goal. I've usually got it outlined. I wake up early and that gives me like the whole day to kind of marinate on it, what I want to write the next day, how I'm going to approach the material.

And if you can do that and say disciplined, you know, then $100,000 or $120,000 word book is within reach. And, you know, I can my, you know, I've had my day job at Bloomberg and so and I've got kids and I was doing a bunch of other things. But that was the goal, a thousand words a day. And when you write it, can you multitask on other things during the day? Or I wonder if you're like me where if there's other things going on, I seem to have a hard time getting the words to flow. You'd have that distraction.

So if I go to another location and I'm out of my house, I'm out of my office, I'm turning my email off. And I'm just focusing for like four to six hour block of just trying to get the words to flow. And I typically when I do that, I can get that thousand to two thousand word a day then going. And like you're saying, I get that hint that when you're in that zone, it's almost like you can't write fast enough, right? The words can't come up fast enough. And you're like, oh, that's a chapter. That's a chapter. That's a section.

Oh. And you're just like, how do I get it out fast enough? And then there's other times when it's extremely frustrating, I would suspect. Yeah. Yeah. I can multitask, but on different kinds of things. So I probably couldn't multitask on another writing project. That would interfere.

But, you know, meetings, editing other people's stories, some of my other responsibilities of Bloomberg, that I find easy to do. But it's just like when I'm working on a book project, that's taking up the kind of writing part of my brain. And anything that would be too similar to that. I wouldn't want to embark on a magazine story when I'm, when I'm working on a book project. I think that would interfere. When you think about nonfiction writing and telling the stories of businesses and entrepreneurs, but what do you think the key is

in terms of writing the prose and story architecture? Do you have any insights in that now that you've done it a couple times? A company like Amazon poses a massive challenge. I mean, people want to understand, readers want to read these stories chronologically. That is the way the brain works. That is the best way to tell stories. There's a great, you know, there are many millennia of, you know, demonstration into that. And the problem, the challenge with Amazon is that everything's happening at once. And, you know, you not only have different business initiatives, but the, you know, the central story, which is the transformation of Jeff Bezos, almost before our eyes, from the geek who extolled the technical specs of the fire phone to the guy gallivanting around Hollywood,

retiring from Amazon and building a super yacht. So it really was an organizational challenge. How do I tell the story horizontally across the last 10 years, but also vertically, the Alexis story, the Amazon ghost story, the Indian China story, Hollywood, and then HQ2 antitrust in Bezos' own personal drama. And you know, you see how I did it in the book. I started 2010 with Bezos' company. coming up with the idea of Alexa, I end in 2020 and some of the increased antitrust scrutiny

in Amazon navigating the pandemic. And so the horizontal story is kind of teased throughout, but there are also chapters devoted to Alexa and Go and India and Hollywood. So you just have to do a little bit of both. Stephen Levy, who you know once told me this thing that for a long time I had up on my wall. It was this advice, he said, find the straight line. that's the thread that takes you from the beginning to the end of the story. So however many digressions, diversions, or chapter, subheadings you go into,

always keep the straight line in mind, you know, the beginning to the end. What do you think the straight line of, and I want to get into, let's just get into Jeff as a person. What is the straight line of Jeff Bezos? Well, I mean, it's, it's a guy who quit his job. A quick turn, right? I mean, yeah, I don't know how straight it is. There's many zags and zags, but, you know, roughly speaking, it's a guy who, you know, had a successful career on Wall Street in the early 90s who quit his job to bet big and

bet early on the internet. You know, and over the course of 25 years, many ups and downs being written off as almost the personification of dot-com hubris at one point, became the richest guy in the world, built a recognizable corporate franchise that's changed the world. And in the process changed himself, you know, and became a much different person and a very polarizing and controversial figure. So, you know, yeah, roughly speaking, it's an incredible journey. He looks different.

He sounds different. He, you know, some things have remained the same. But sometimes I look or I listen. I went to his rocket launch in Van Horn, Texas. And sometimes I don't recognize him. He's changed quite a bit. Before we get into the ad, let me just tell you straight up. LinkedIn.com slash twist, your first job posting free.

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And we're still hiring for three more positions using, you guessed it, LinkedIn jobs. So LinkedIn jobs will help you find the candidates that are worth interviewing faster. Every week, nearly 40 million job seekers visit LinkedIn. So post your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash twist. Terms and conditions apply because they've given you something for free. Let's get back to the program. So let me just put this out here because I want to get into Amazon the business. I think that's like the most fascinating part. But having known Jeff, not personally, but you know, been in the same room with him and

having mutual friends and this kind of thing, did he have a crazy midlife crisis? Is that what's going on the last five years when, you know, he got divorced? He starts dating. I mean, he essentially steals his friend's wife, I think, is the end of the end. only way to say it, right? And he pretty much goes out there unabashedly dating another guy's wife, and I don't want to make this salacious. But on top of that, then quits his job, starts flying helicopters. He looks like he's on performance-enhancing drugs or he's working out like eight times a day. I mean, he's just colossal. Like you've seen the memes. And, you know, the Hollywood thing seems to be on

track as a business. I don't think that was the midlife crisis, but certainly quitting and then saying, I'm going to go do what Elon does and make rocket ships was quite a turn of events. Was it not? It's remarkable. And Jason, you'll appreciate that I started working on this book in 2018. So I didn't anticipate any of this, that my tame little business book would take a left turn into you know, the National Enquirer, Dick Picks and a salacious Hollywood scandal. Like that, I did not anticipate that. But, you know, like I'll say a couple things. One, you know, first of all, we can't, I was very wary of assuming that we had all the facts, that we could know all the facts. People's private lives or the details of a marriage, you know, are somewhat

unknowable. They're very private people. I ultimately don't know the extent to which, you know, his first marriage was over before it became public knowledge. At the very least, he made, there was some questionable judgment in, as you say, being so open about the relationship at a time when public interest in him because he was the wealthiest person in the world and the CEO of Amazon was so high. Like, there was clearly an error in judgment. And then I tell the whole story about how he kind of, in some ways, weaponized his ownership of the Washington Post to attack the National Enquirer and did so very successfully.

You know, is it a midlife crisis? I mean, I think I, my, my, my sense is that, you know, as he got wealthier, as he became more of a member of elite society, he determined that he enjoyed it, you know, and he enjoyed the trappings of, of the of the, the super yacht, St. Barts lifestyle going to the conferences. And I know for a fact that McKenzie, now, you know, now, formerly McKenzie Bezos did not enjoy that lifestyle. She's very private, right? And so you can kind of see their stars moving in opposite directions. And she's obviously, you know, created quite a mystique for herself now as a philanthropist. But yeah, it seems to me that like, I don't know if it was a midlife crisis as much as it was him wanting to really continue living a life of public adventure, you know, or enjoying his wealth. The one thing, the one quick other thing I'd say is, you know, he had the space vision before Elon,

Blue Origin precedes SpaceX, but he executed it horribly. And I have a chapter on this in my book. And Elon runs SpaceX. Bezos has always administered to it from a distance and sewed all kind of dysfunction because of that. And so now we see him trying to catch up, putting himself at risk to take that flight, filing lawsuits against SpaceX. It's going to be interesting drama to watch.

Bezos doesn't like to come in second on anything. And with space, he's maybe third or four. at this point. Yeah, I mean, in fairness to E, he was into rockets in college too, but I think you're right. Maybe Blue Origin might have been cooperated first, right? It was all at that like 2000, 2001 time frame. And they and they would go to lunch and breakfast and I talked to Elon for the book and he was, he was telling Jeff he was pursuing the wrong rocket architecture and Jeff wouldn't listen. And then of course, you know, he made some mistakes. Yeah. It's super weird. I have to say, watching Jeff, who I think is just a tremendous entrepreneur be so insecure about this rocket

stuff. I don't know if you saw that they tweeted at Branson, that he didn't actually go to the right level of space by the definition that 60% of people consider. Did you see those crazy infographics? And then he criticizes Elon and then he's trying to like sue to catch up. What is going? Who's advising him? Or does he not have people around him who, tell him what a bad look it is because he looks, I mean, he's Jeff Bezos. I mean, we all respect him. He's done such amazing things in the world. And then to be like, you know, Richard Branson's an old guy. He went to space. You know, it's like, it could have all been like a jovial, fun space race of the summer. And then Bezos made it so petty and like, you didn't go high enough.

I went higher than you. It's just, it was kind of sad. When you saw it, did you think that's just sad? Yes. Obviously, it is. And he hasn't, he hasn't. He hasn't. He hasn't. He hasn't. hasn't done himself many favors. At the Van Horn press conference, you know, announcing the philanthropic gift to, you know, to two individuals as he's talking about the trip, wearing a cowboy hat with the spacesuit, the jubilation after, you know, a 10-minute ride. It all struck me as somewhat bizarre. You know, does he have people around him that might be counseling otherwise?

I mean, when you achieve the, well, you, Jason, You've seen this probably again and you achieve that level of success. And you know, you tend to probably think that you know best. So I don't know if he's, is he not listening to folks or is the company doing that? Yeah, I tend to think that it probably does come from him. Yeah. You cannot pick a fight as a corporation without the founder, CEO's approval to start a fight. Right.

You would be fired the next day. No PR marketing person is like, I've got an idea. Let's, you know, denigrate like Richard Branson's like life dream and in order to pump up Jeff. It's like, no, Jeff told him like, hey, we should make an infographic that does exactly this. Right. And he said at the press conference, he said, I'd like to thank employees and customers for paying for all this. It was absolutely cringing. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I mean, this is a good jumping off point because I'm curious, you know, we're old guys now. I'm 50. I don't know how old are you all brought. I think you're a couple years older than me. Jason, I'm the same damn age. We're both 50, both born in 19-7. I just turned 50. Okay, so then I'm older than I turned 50 on November 28th. So we're Gen Xers, right? And, you know, there's a generation of journals who are coming up who are very anti-capitalism, anti-you know, they've got concerns about wealth disparity. They've got concerns about unions and workers and workers' rights. I have to say when we look at what Amazon has contributed to society. It's hard for me to look at it and say, this has not been amazing and extraordinary for society.

The fact is, the best idea of the last 20 years or 30 years by the scorecard, the scorecard being, you know, consumers wanting to consume something and engage with it as a product, was the everything store, getting anything you want within originally,

I guess, two days, getting anything you wanted, then getting with the two days, and then one day, and now, who knows, maybe we'll get it into an hour. That idea was the greatest idea of the past 30 ideas voted on by consumers' dollars, right? I mean, we both agree on that. I can't think of any idea that consumers voted more for. And now, I don't know if you saw today, or maybe it was yesterday, the news broke, that they're going to cover people's bachelor's degrees. Right. They pay double minimum wage, the federal minimum wage. They didn't have to be you know, harangued into doing that. They just did it. They're fighting to get workers there. And you hear

Elizabeth Warren and AOC attacking, you know, and trying to protect the workers of Amazon. I don't hear the workers of Amazon complaining at all. And then you had that New York Times story where they said, oh, all these people had the worst possible traumatic PTSD experience at Amazon. But you know more Amazon workers and Amazon executives than anybody in terms of interviewing. I don't think there's a single person on the planet, outside of Amazon's HR department who has interviewed more executives. You know how fiercely loyal and how much they love Jeff and the company. So what is the, how do you look at it just as a chronicler of this, putting aside your hat at Bloomberg? Sure. As a chronicler, do you look at Amazon as good for society and good to its workers,

executives down to the people working in the factories? Right. I, you know, I would not have written two books and devoted a large portion of the last decade of my life in my 40s to crawling clueling this company if I just wanted to kick it in the knees, if I thought it was a nefarious presence in society. I'm an Amazon prime member. I'm an Alexa owner. I watch the movies and the TV shows. So, you know, I'm a customer.

At the same time, I think both things are true. It's an amazing company. but like a lot of tech companies, right? It's grown, it's created a platform and globalized and moved at a speed and left a trail of destruction and had to account and is accounting now for some of the mistakes it's made. I mean, what is the trail in destruction? Yeah. Right. It's, well, there's a number of different dimensions.

I mean, one, it's, you know, creating a globalized marketplace and reducing the friction, creating a self-service, for sellers around the world, reducing all friction to selling, and now spending billions of dollars to fight counterfeits and fraud and ensure that the items are safe. I have a chapter on that. There's, you know, to pick what... Just to unpack that for second. There's an unintended consequence of when you take all friction out of people selling, specifically the third party sellers where they let anybody sell on their platform, which is, I think

you would agree, like an incredible decision they made. and had to make because Alibaba and then a startup called Wish were doing that and it was a disruption and they had to move quickly and and yeah there were consequences to that. And the consequence is

hey somebody who's working at a factory who made this incredible startup's product might at night run the factory for somebody else make a knockoff version in Amazon let's be honest probably turned a blind eye to it for a while is that what you would discover? or added a lithium ion battery that exploded into flames when you plugged it in.

Okay. All sorts of examples. But that's one dimension. I think the labor thing, you know, you're right in that the preponderance of Amazon employees are not complaining vociferously. You know, they're happy to work there. They're having productive careers. They're having their education paid for.

But we can't ignore a vocal subset of employees. You know, some who get ill, who develop ergonomic disorders at work. pregnant employees who is well documented, have been sort of mistreated by a company that historically is so focused on meeting its promises to customers, getting efficient, building at rapid speed, now thousands of fulfillment centers around the world. You know, there is room for improvement and Amazon has acknowledged that and it's trying to get ahead of it, in part because it's a very competitive labor market. Hey, everybody. I thought I would have Christina Casiovo on this week in

startups to tell you about Vanta. Vanta, of course, has been sponsoring the pod and had a great reaction. And we're going to talk today just a little bit about what SOC2 compliance is and why it's so important for SaaS products. Welcome to the pod. Christina. Thank you so much for having me. How long does this typically take and what does it cost? Yeah. So in the, you know, prior world, if you didn't use software like Vanta, often companies would take about a year on the project to figure out what they needed to do, get everything in order, work with the auditor, get the auditor what they needed to get their report. And they probably spent $20,000 on the low end, kind of can go up to hundreds of thousands of dollars, depending on how large you are.

You figured out a way, Advanta, to do this quicker, better, and cheaper. So what is the secret and how can people use the product? Yeah, absolutely. So secret is sort of like a lot of things. You turn a lot of this into software. So you write a standardized set of checks that a company needs to do. You base them on good security principles. And then you just monitor and alert all that those things. So the company gets a dashboard. They always know where they are. They're not, you know, mucking around in spreadsheets.

And the auditor gets just really detailed data so they can be sure that what the company says they're doing is actually happening. All right. Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for coming on and telling the audience why you should get your sock to, when you should get it and how you should do it. And you've been very nice to our audience, giving them $1,000 off, which is a really significant and generous offer. Go to vanta.com slash twist. V-A-N-T-A-com slash twist

to get $1,000 off your stock too thanks, Christina. Appreciate it. Thank you so much. Explain to me the pregnant women issue. I never heard that. I'm confused. Is that executives?

Or is it people working in factories being pushed too hard when pregnant? That's right. Or trying to take leave in which I can't go too deep on this. I just saw something about it today. I think it might be the California state legislature looking to pass a law about that.

But, you know, this was never a company. And look, very decentralized, a lot of power in the local managers. It was never a company that was necessarily known for sensitivity to workers and their maladies or their personal needs on 10 to 12-hour shifts, including some mandatory overtime during peak hours. So, you know, I think both are true. I think it's a fascinating and important company that's made a positive contribution, particularly to customers. And, you know, a company that, like, clearly over the past 25 years has had a transactional relationship with a lot of its employees as it's seeking to maintain its growth and to keep unions obey.

And, you know, there is room for a critique. Yeah. I mean, the way I look at the critique is this is an intense work environment, putting aside the pregnant women issue, which to me is just like, well, that's bizarre. And what we'll just shelve that until we have the information on it, which would be unfordivable, if true, just horrific. But McDonald's has been fighting the raising of the minimum wage for decades. And they pay workers nine, ten, eleven bucks an hour. You're talking about getting paid 50% more here. We got 10 million open jobs in the country. We've had a, you know, a low unemployment and people fighting to get these folks into positions.

When you think about it, those people are opting into working there and not McDonald's. So I think one of the things we've lost in this hyperactive press, and you know, Bloomberg's slightly different because you're a business journalism place and you're kind of old school. But, you know, you see the Voxes of the world, the Huffington Posts of the world, you know, BuzzFeeds, these poor workers. But don't they have agency and they're picking that over working at Target, picking that over Starbucks and paying that over working at fast food places? I agree, but Amazon is the second largest employer in the country right now. And the rules that it establishes, you know, both on the downside with, you know, some of the goals that they've set, the kind of algorithmic way of managing workers. And then more recently, some of the perks that they've started to give to workers and, you know, some of the education reimbursement, the $15 an hour wage.

They're a leader. So it is important, right? I mean, other companies want to be like Amazon. They follow Amazon. You know, and there's some communities in which like local retail has been wiped out, right? And maybe the two big, the three choices are fast food, Walmart and Amazon. So, you know, I don't know. I don't want to over emphasize how much choice some workers have in this economy.

Yeah. I mean, with COVID, that puts a crazy. a crazy wildcard into it because there are people geographically who maybe don't have choice who are not writers, developers, designers who can work online. Let's go into the business of Amazon for a second. My understanding, because I talk to a lot of entrepreneurs, so you're getting to talk to executives, I talk to people who flee and become entrepreneurs. So I want to take some of the things I hear as an insider and then cross-referenced

with you as a reporter as an insider. And I think you have deeper knowledge and I do. My understanding from people who've worked at the company is that Amazon Prime is the north star of the company and that anything that happens is through the lens of the Amazon Prime customers and that club, as it were. When you and I joined Amazon Prime, I don't know how many years ago, 15 years ago, I think the initial price I paid was 40 bucks or 50 bucks. No, so $79 a year is a prime number.

Oh, okay, but there was a discount in the beginning, I remember, like maybe 20 bucks off when it first started. But now it's, I think, 20 bucks a month, 120, 150 bucks a year. 129. 1029 now. So they've raised the price. And if you just think about that for a moment, Amazon is such an amazing service and their product is so flawless and friction-free that people are willing to pay to shop there. And it seems like people have lost the script in terms of exactly what an amazing accomplishment that is.

What did people tell you about Amazon Prime being the locus of power inside the company? Yeah. And by the way, it's $119 a year. So clearly my- That's if you pay by year, right? That's right. Well, so I tell the story of Amazon Prime in the first book, The Everything Store. And then in this book, I talk about Prime Video and some of the other add-on Prime services.

You know, for Paisalus has been really good as the company grew about figuring out where he can add value. You know, what can he do at the end of every year to get people onto the same page, particularly when you've got a company that's half a million or a million people. And for a long time, the thing that he did was in every meeting, he would say, what are you doing for Prime? It's the glue that holds it all together. And, you know, the prime customer is their best customer. They'll spend two to three times as much as a non-prime member. And so it's like all roads, all products at the company are on ramps that lead to prime.

And it's been, you know, it's been an enormous competitive advantage for the company. Like you just look at prime video and Amazon Studios. I mean, that is a service that, you know, Netflix and Disney Plus and other. Their companies are charging significant monthly fees for, and Amazon makes it free for Prime members. It allows them to compete in a totally different way. While at the same time, with AWS, they go and they power Apple TV and Disney Plus and Netflix. So, you know, Amazon gets to win at a lot of different levels.

The Prime customer is their best customer, and they've understood that for many years. And everything they do is including Prime Day. I tell the story of Prime Day in the book. It was styled on Alibaba Singles Day, but the insight was, we're going to have this big day once a year during the fact. It started with the back to school period over the summer. But the metric of success is how many new prime members we get. Ah, see, that is the type of detail I'm talking about.

I was also, see, I didn't know that one, but that makes a ton of sense to me. These deals are so outrageous that if they lost 20 bucks on everybody who was a non-prime member who showed up that day, that means your acquisition costs for. a lifetime value of an Amazon Prime customer is so ridiculous. It's even better because they're not losing $20. The vendor is losing because they go around and they ask the brands to sponsor the deals. The deals are great. The brands get sales and they get prime members.

That is some like Tom Sawyer painting the fence, you know, giving your Apple, I'll let you paint the fence. Strategy. The other thing I heard, I don't know if you heard this one, was a poor. of the Whole Foods acquisition, which we know was a, that was, they danced around that for a little while. I think you had some insight information on that in the book as well. We'll get to that a second. But I was told that they wanted Whole Foods because they thought, you know what, we just break even on Whole Foods. And listen, they bought it for $13 or $14 billion. The stock went up $20 billion in the next like two weeks. So it was essentially a free acquisition if you look at their market gap increase, which isn't a perfect way to look at it, but an interesting one.

they just thought, well, we could sign up prime members at Whole Foods. We now have access to the most elite audience. And if a third of them were on prime and two thirds aren't or whatever it is, they did a calculation and said, if we just get whatever percentage of them to get onto Prime, we win. Did you hear that one as well? Right, right. I don't know that that was the exact calculation. I mean, so much of this is just fortuitous timing.

And they had kind of hit it, not a dead end, but they were certainly struggling with the fresh delivery service, Prime now, Instacart's racing ahead, Google Express, they viewed as a threat at that point. And then Whole Foods is being attacked by activist investors and John Mackey is looking for a white night. You know, interestingly enough, Amazon's growing now, not via new Whole Food stores, but by creating their own restaurant. Sorry, their own supermarket chain. Yeah.

The fresh markets with the Amazon Go cameras in the ceiling. So I don't, yeah, I mean, I think, I think like they, it's funny. because we have a local Whole Foods. They haven't done much there other than the integration of Prime as the loyalty program that Whole Foods really never had. Yeah. So let's talk about the stores. You got Amazon books. They've experimented with Amazon 4-Star. You got fresh, which I think does that live inside of Whole Foods? And then they have pop-up stores. It's different. It's different. And then you have Go, which we see in cities, and Amazon Go grocery, which I guess is a bodega or, you know, the fruit stand in New York.

They've retired that brand, but it's the Go Store. So tell me about their retail strategy. I'm curious. Yeah. Well, 90% of or maybe 85% of retail sales is still stubbornly physical. And, you know, Amazon wants to play there. And they've, in a very Amazon-like way, they've always determined that technology can be their lever, their way to do things a little bit differently. The Go store is probably the biggest investment that Amazon has.

ever made in anything. They've labored at it for 10 years. Out of frustration, they started the bookstores just to get something out there and then the four-star stores. But, you know, now we see the Go technology migrating into a couple of whole foods, but mostly the standalone Amazon fresh supermarkets. And I think in particular, you know, fresh food, groceries, drugstore items, you know, it's a significant part of all retail. People generally want it now and, you know, next day or two days isn't fast enough. So Amazon made it, you know, Jeff realized that they needed to be in physical retail. And so they're on a journey to kind of figure that out.

How can they go compete with the Kroger's and the Walmarts of the world or even the right aids or the Walgreens of the world? And it's going to be, it's going to look conventional, but there's going to be tech behind the scenes and they're going to do it in an Amazon like way. So I think this is interesting to dovetail you two books. Uber under Dara is working. They bought a store called, what did they buy? What was the company?

Not bodega. A corner store. They bought corner store. There was another startup called bodega. Corner shop was the Uber acquisition. There was another startup called bodega that did something similar. But they got canceled because they culturally appropriated the name bodega, which I thought was a little ridiculous. Right.

But bodega's concept was really good. They were putting into like lobbies of buildings, a self-serve kind of app. You use your app and like in your lobby, they would have whatever toiletries you need or whatever. And you open it up, and it's like the honor system, you take out whatever you want. But there's a camera in there. So if you took two shampoos, they would now. Putting that aside, you had Instacart tried to sell to DoorDash, I think. And then they tried to sell to Uber.

Founder got replaced or something. I don't have you covered that. And then Uber's had tremendous success in Uber Eats and selling various sundries and, you know, basically connecting other retailers like Instacart does to people, you know, the 100 million plus people. in America who have the Uber app or whatever it is now. So is that the next frontier one hour delivery, Lyft, Uber, DoorDash, etc.,

Instacart competing, and do they have a chance versus Amazon? Yeah, I mean, I think it's been the next frontier, yeah, for the last five years when, you know, when Instacart and Prime Now and all those stuff hit the scene. Do they have a chance? Yeah, I mean, I think like confederating, existing retail, you know, you don't have to build as much, right? The products, the deodorant I need, you know, sitting in, you know, two miles in every direction

from my house right now on the Walgreens and the Wright Aids and the Dwayne Reed's near me. So, you know, if you can bring those retailers together on an app, you don't have to do what Amazon has. And no one wants to work with Amazon. I mean, and I tell the story in the book. They went, they tried to replicate the Google Express or the Instacart experience. of working with conventional retailers and putting their inventory online.

But it's Amazon. Nobody wants to facilitate their own death. So Amazon has to build fulfillment centers that are now closer to or even inside cities. So that's taking a while, right? And that's why Amazon spends billions of dollars building new, spends billions of dollars building new fulfillment centers every year. So I think they do have a chance and they need to take advantage of it because Amazon is coming. Right? Amazon's getting closer to its customers every year.

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Walgreens, a $40 billion company. Uber's like an $80 to $100 billion company. Uber buys Walgreens or Moral Greens merges with Uber. Instant. Instant competitor. What do you think? Well, I mean, they're so constitutionally different, right? And this is something where Amazon bought whole foods.

And as I said, they've allowed John Mackey to run it in Austin. They haven't done much to it. And that probably comes from a hard one awareness over the years with Quincy and Zappos and all the companies they bought in the 90s. That kind of thing takes many years and creates a cultural mess. But it's interesting. I mean, the challenges, I guess, with Uber really with Instacart is that, Ultimately, a lot of these retailers want to control their own destiny. You know, and if you're a Walmart or a Walgreens and you have the resources to go hire

technologists and build your own app, do you ultimately want to deal with an Instacart? Yeah. And so. Well, that was the weird thing about Instacart because what is Instacart's special sauce, somebody who puts the things, you know, a shopper who puts them into a bag? Well, they already have those. And they don't even employ the shoppers, right? They don't employ the shoppers, right?

They're a tech layer. It's a, they're just a tech layer and a pretty easy one to replicate for Lyft, Uber, DoorDash, and Amazon for that matter. Or even if Walgreens or, you know, one of these other folks got their act together, they might actually be able to figure it out as well. How has Walmart actually been able to, I think, thrive in the age of Amazon? Yeah. And only recently, under the leadership of Doug McMillan, it feels like they have turned it around. I mean, I think one of the, I mean, there's this funny tendency these days to look at Walmart to some kind of underdog, right?

And yet, really, by sales, it still does eclipse Amazon. And it's the largest retailer in the world. And they've got tremendous resources. You know, and then they had what, you know, the real moat was in the grocery business, which Amazon is still on a journey to figure out. And so I think it was probably the smart but expensive move of hiring. Mark Lorry and buying Jet.com and bringing in some real indigenous internet people and, you know, figuring out how do we build a customer-friendly app and an experience and then focus on what they do best, which is going to be those softline goods. You know, personally, I'm not a Walmart customer and in part because I live in the Bay Area.

Do we even have one in the Bay Area? I don't think we do somewhere on Route 80. They would burn it down, right? It would basically, the crazy socialists and communists in the Bay Area would literally burn it down. It's bonkers. So what do you think about regulation now? We have Alina Khan coming in, and she obsessed over Amazon and wrote. She's already there.

She's already there, right? And she's in. And she spent, and she's young, right? I mean, she's early in her career. She wrote two seminal papers. I think they both were about Amazon. and how to think about them as a monopoly, how do you think Amazon will fare

and did Bezos leaving and putting a CEO in place while still having a lot of control, was that like a Larry Page, Sergey Brin moved to kind of be a puppet master and not have to go to all these, you know, get dragged to Washington to deal with all this nonsense? Well, hang on, Jason, do you think Larry and Sergey are playing puppet master?

I feel like they've really departed the scene. My understanding is that they put Sundar in charge. He does make the decisions, but ultimately, you know, they have a lot of voting say in all of this. And, you know, basically putting themselves up into the executive chair positions was a way to not get dragged to Washington. And creating the alphabet group was a way to also obscureify that. And so that is the deep insider track of like, how do we? Because, you know, Zuckerberg can't do that, right? If they want, Zuckerberg tried to send people to Washington or to, you know, the UK.

And they're like, yeah, no, you're the CEO, get your ass over here. Now who's going to show up when they want to put Amazon, you know, or Microsoft? The CEO has to go, period. And I do think, yeah, and I do think, you know, when Jeff is there, he's not just there as the CEO of Amazon. He sits there as the richest guy in the world. And that's a stigma. Right. And Andy presents a humbler, safer target. I think he'll represent the company well. I do, though, think it's that genuinely Jeff has moved on. Even to an extent that I didn't really understand early on, but sort of saw when I went to Van Horn, the way he talked about Blue Origin and its philanthropic initiatives and not Amazon, I feel like this is now Andy Jazzy's company. But to address your first question, you know, when a judge sent the FTC's case against Facebook back and said that it had to remake its argument about market definition, I saw that as the possible outcome in the case against Amazon.

That it's going to be very difficult for Lena Khan and her colleagues to make a case that this is a monopoly. because Amazon, you know, is a relatively, you know, big fish, but in the giant ocean of retail with significant competitors like Walmart and in enterprise computing competes against Microsoft and Google. Not insignificant competitors is what you're saying. So how do you say it's a monopoly if you've got Walmart that's bigger and you're up against Google, IBM, and Microsoft for Amazon Web Services? It makes no sense.

Right. Now, I do think that we're going to see. We're going to see cases and we're probably going to see Amazon retreating. And funny, the same way Apple has a little bit on the app store, on small things, the relationship that Amazon has with its sellers, most favorite nation pricing schemes, you know, retreats in behavior that maybe made sense in 2005 but does it in 2021. But in terms of the specter of, you know, the wand waving and existential end to the company known as Amazon, because they're found to be a monopoly and broken. up, you know, that Microsoft wasn't broken up, and it was a monopoly in the late 90s. So I see it as a, yeah, as a as a, as a very unlikely outcome for Amazon. See, this is the interesting part. You have the AOCs of the world, you know, Amazon's the worst thing. We have to stop them.

With that, I don't think actually understanding the law here, I'm not single out AOC, but just the sort of whole cohort there of young, anti-corporate, anti-large company, you know, politicians. And I'm not sure if Lena Khan actually falls into that and I haven't met her or talked to, have you? I have. What is she like? What is her, you know, driving force? Does she have a philosophy there, do you think? Yeah.

Yeah. And I think it's a valid one. And I think one thing is that she's listened. You know, she's listened to sellers on the Amazon marketplace. And she's listened to, you know, to publishing houses who have been negotiating with Amazon for 20 years. and there are legitimate grievances. Now, I'm not saying that these are monopolistic or anti-competitive practices, but I think a lot of good points were raised in the, you know, Citilini's House Committee that looked into

Amazon and other tech companies. You know, and it's a story we've seen before, you know, a company that scraps and fights for every inch of market power over the course of 10, 20 years and then becomes dominant but doesn't necessarily change its stripes. And I think we're actually seeing, yeah, we're seeing Amazon. start to reconcile, I think, some of that behavior. But they're not making it up. And I don't necessarily think it's like polemical. You know, Lena Khan has been doing this for a couple years and she's listened to the very valid complaints that are out there that Amazon, you know,

wields a big stick. I think you just nailed it. When you fight to get where you are, you are a samurai, you're a fighter, you're a warrior, you're a gladiator, whatever it is. And then all of a sudden you become king or queen. And now, You don't need to fight. But then you have sometimes these people who are wartime consularies, they're wartime CEOs, and they can't stop themselves. And you saw that with Google where they just couldn't stop scraping people's data with the one box.

So you and I are journalists, writers, and we have a web page, and we get paid when people visit the web page. And then Google's like, you know what? We're going to send you traffic. You know what? We're going to put an abstract dunder here. And, oh, no, we're going to make you a one box. Or we're going to put a question there, and you can hit the drop down,

and we'll pull the paragraph that you're actually looking for just to make it a little faster for you. And now you don't have to go to Bloomberg. We've experienced this from Google, yes? Absolutely. And it's infuriating when you're a Yelp or you're a journalist or a content producer that, and I told us to Sergey and I told this to the Google folks. I was like, you guys, you've already won, be Magnanimous. We're making crumbs over here as journalists and as websites that are making content. Why do you need to dominate us so much?

And, you know, Sergei's answer and other people's answer is always like, well, we're just trying to give the consumer an answer, which I understand. But be magnanimous in victory is something that the deranged machine that gets built when you start from zero, like you're saying, it's actually a really interesting way to look at it. Yeah, particularly when you're aware of the long history in Silicon Valley of being disrupted by startups. And you're constantly digging your moat because you know that dominance or hegemony today

doesn't mean anything tomorrow. It's interesting. We saw today at the time we're taping this news broke that Apple and Epic, Apple lost the epic lawsuit in an epic way. Well, I would argue the judge kind of split the Apple, so to speak. Okay, here we go. But you're right, the rules of the road, hopefully will change in the up store. So now there was a, Apple had a very, you know,

Apple is very friendly when they're throwing the elbow in your face. And the elbow in the face with the App Store was you couldn't link out to let people sign up at your website. So you're the New York Times. You're Rupert Murdoch took offense to this. And he had a big blowout with Steve Jobs over it when he wanted newspaper subscriptions. You know, you want to have the customer relationship. How do you not have the email of your customers?

And Apple wants to obscureify that by you doing payments through the app store. In fact, in the latest update, they let you say, don't give my email. You know, use a fake email. So they want to control that customer relationship. And they were just told by the judge, listen, you can't do that anymore. And you got to change this. And now that could be have a pretty serious hit. But it also, I think, takes them out of the crosshairs of antitrust because the legal system's working.

And this is going to empower, don't you think, other groups of startups to work together? it didn't work against Google like Yelp and a bunch of other people tried it with Google and search as I previously spent it didn't work but this just worked you know you had Epic and I guess Spotify and Netflix and other people were kind of joining this coalition

is this the future of you know throttling these big companies well look I mean Apple stock is down two or two and a half percent today it's not like it's a death knell no but it's a big number it's a big number but look I mean where I

it out is that hopefully this will be a better consumer experience because, you know, the number of times I had to respond to a parent saying, you know, why can't I buy my Kindle book, the Amazon app on my iPad won't let me, or why can't I sign up for Netflix? It's, you know, I'm here on my iOS app. And it's because of a business dispute because none of these media companies wanted to pay the 30% toll. So in this new future, you know, it's just going to simply be a better customer experience. You know, Netflix or Amazon or Spotify will own the relationship. They won't have any hesitancy like, you know, getting people to sign up on your iPhone or

iPad. And I think consumers will benefit. And I think Apple will be just fine. If you look at the big fan companies, which one do you think is the most sharp elbow dangerous towards society, Facebook, Apple, Google, Amazon? Like, that one that concerns you most that you think needs the most regulation has the most detrimental effect on society. Well, okay, I'm not going to, no, I'm not going to answer as a journalist. I'm going to answer as a parent.

Yes. Okay, perfect. I'm uncomfortable with TikTok. And I just, I have no visibility into what my kids are seeing. You know, they love it. Forget, I mean, forget about Facebook being dominant or Instagram. You know, my kids, my teenage girls live in a TikTok world. And I don't have, you know, I don't have, I'm not being a great parent there because I don't know what is being fed to them because of their choices by an algorithm that's been, you know, devised and is controlled by a Chinese company.

You know what? And there are some idiots out there who are going to say you're being xenophobic because they don't understand. understand that it's a communist country that considers themselves a rival and that they need to dominate America. How can you dominate America? If they had the data on all of our children and they're programming of all of our children in an app that over-sexualizes kids and exposes them to things that are bad for kids. Now, this sounds like a conspiracy theory. Oh, the Chinese government wouldn't do this. By the way, even if it was an American company, even if it's an American company, I would have the same concerns. And so, you know, it's, it's, uh, it's, uh,

It's the lesson that we've learned over and over in Silicon Valley. It's, you know, the dominance today doesn't mean anything tomorrow. And TikTok has almost come practically out of nowhere and is consuming my kids' lives. And sometimes I worry their childhoods because they spend a lot of time on it, particularly during the pandemic. The age range here? Yeah. Teenage three teenage girls. Yeah.

So I have three daughters, 11 and two five-year-olds. And they're not allowed on it yet, but I'm going to be having to deal with the issue you're dealing with, which is, I got to be the partner who says you can't be on it and then that empowers them to want to do it more and by the way I've looked at it it is gnarly the stuff on TikTok is gross I mean some portion of it is really by the way

it's also turned them into creators I mean they you know but I don't know and that I am asserting myself and they do keep that stuff private so there's some good to it but yeah a lot a lot of it does worry me yeah I mean we

yeah and let's there's a good pivot into China man, we were sitting here during the Clinton era, everybody's talking about, you know, and the Bush era, we're going to have these great relations with China. My lord, they're going to embrace commerce. They're going to become entrepreneurial and this is going to become a democracy and it's going to be beautiful and we're going to do business together, therefore we can't go to war. And in the last six months, it seems like, since COVID actually, seems like things, all gloves

are off. you know, they putting aside whatever happened with COVID, which looks really sketchy, whether you believe, you know, leave from a lag, but they didn't give us complete information. That's pretty obvious. And then now, Jack Ma disappears. They got three million Uyghurs in a concentration camp. They took over Hong Kong and rolled it. They've got people being reeducated.

And they're going to probably take over Taiwan maybe and they're delisting their companies, maybe, the education companies. I mean, what do you think of this? maelstrom of events in China. Yeah. Well, let's just say that Mark Zuckerberg's jog through smog-filled Tiananmen squares seems like it happened a long time ago. Back when tech companies thought they could charm their way into the Chinese market.

I mean, the most remarkable thing to me is China's war against its own tech companies. And it feels a little inexplicable because at one point, those were the national champions that represented China's business interest in Southeast Asia and India and elsewhere. And now they're curtailing them and saying that they can't expand and hurting their financial prospects in the West. And, you know, you have to conclude that the party, you know, looks at it as a threat to their control. And yeah, it's just remarkable.

And these stories, I always enjoyed going to China once a year and interviewing, you know, Jack or Pony Ma are telling these, Robin Lee from Baidu, talk to the guys at Xiaome, like, these great entrepreneurial stories that felt like Silicon Valley in the 90s. And you can't talk to them anymore. They won't talk to us right now. And they're muzzled and they're scared of saying the wrong thing. So it's a, you know, this is a developing story and it's going to be really interesting to see where that's out. What do you think happen with Jack Ma? What are journalists who you know, because you know people on the inside, you know, you have the back channels that maybe people are buzzing about but haven't made it into the actual articles yet.

What is the back channel buzz about what happened with Jack Ma? I mean, we know he criticized them. He disappeared and, you know, was crushed. He's painting oil paintings. I saw that Wall Street Journal story. That's right. Well, I was like, hmm. Yeah, that's right.

That was a good story. He had already taken a step back and Daniel Zhang had taken over the. the company. I think, you know, he, he was, he is so flamboyant and just like, you know, enjoyed, he was being on the, on the global business scene and talking. And I think right now, all these guys have, have, I don't necessarily think they're disappeared in any nefarious way, but they're staying quiet. They realize that you say the wrong thing and it has big business repercussions.

And so they're just kind of holding their fire and probably wait. waiting to see if they can swing their own government back in their favor. And if you had to take a guess, do you think that's going to happen? Where do you think that they're just going to nationalize all these giant companies? No, I actually think it will happen. And I'm guessing. And I've got colleagues that know this a lot better than I do. But like, it is in China's national interests to have strong tech companies, right?

And, you know, if they want to be a power player in these parts of the world where, you know, like Singapore or Southeast Asia or India, you have to take the gloves off and let these companies go and operate and build their businesses and invest in companies and be active. And so I just tend to think that like, yeah, these things seem to come. Again, I don't know what I'm talking about. I'm not a Chinese expert, but they seem to go in waves. And I feel like at some point the company has to recognize that these companies from DEDA to Alibaba and Tense, that it's in the country's interest to let them operate.

Feels to me like, I don't know if remember when MBS put all the princes in the Ritzkoulton or the St. Regis or something, it's like, yeah, let's talk about how things are going to work on a go-forward basis. And it was kind of like a grand renegotiation. And Jack Ma, I think people in the West knew a lot more about Jack Ma than Xi Jinping, right? And I think he's probably much more popular. And that can't sit well with somebody who's... got a hundred year plan and is the dictator for life or ruler for life, you know, to have somebody

more popular and wealthier and, you know, the West has embraced. I mean, that seems to be like the straight line. If we're going to go back to the straight line theory. What happens to, uh, I'll go ahead. I was going to say, I'm not going to comment on that one. You may not want to go back to China, but I might one day. It is, you know, that's one of the crazy issues. You think about us as Americans, you know, Darry, just, you know, GM for at the time the rockets, makes just a just very simple sign of support for the people of Hong Kong who just want to maintain some level of freedom that they had, you know, for the past couple of decades. And everybody in the NBA, you know, throws him under the bus. And for what, the 10% of incremental dollars they get from China? and then people in Hollywood,

who are the most highest virtue signaling folks, they're changing the ends of movies because they can't sell them in China. And literally China's picking the ending of movies. You can't, the reason they said there's so many terrorists as villains in movies now is because you can't have a Chinese person as a villain. I don't know if you remember, like,

that was like one of the core James Bond movies. there was a Chinese villain, you know, this type of villain, that type of villain. What are your thoughts on American companies not being, I mean, I don't want to score up your book deals turning into movies now, but I'm scorched earth, Brad. I don't care. I mean, just what do you think about how the West should embrace an authoritarian country with products? It's hard, right? Hollywood and the NBA. It's interesting.

I mean, I haven't thought a lot about it. Yeah, the NBA, obviously, NBA cultivated the Chinese market for so long. And so, you know, you could see like, well, it was interesting. I mean, it wasn't as much a cultural reaction as it was like a protective business reaction. And Hollywood, right? One of the measures of success right now is can the movie launch in China? And the new Marvel movie, Shang Chi, apparently is not. but the James Bond movie will.

And so, right, it's like these are business realities. But you're raising the question, well, what's the right thing to do? Or what's the culturally Western or American thing to do? But as you know, it's like these are big multinational companies who's, you know, and it's the almighty bottom line. And so I guess, you know, without passing judgment, I'll say it's sort of not surprising, right, that they're making business decisions and maybe self-censoring, a little bit. Yeah, and I'll, I will pass judgment. You're cowards. You can't get up there at the Oscars and make

all these speeches, you know, about this group that's being, you know, that's suffering in America, or the cops are terrible in America, or this group's terrible in America, or Black Lives Matter, or Amazon workers, and then they got three million Uyghurs in concentration camps. Sorry, you can't have it both ways. Hollywood or the NBA. If you're going to fight for injustice, you fight for injustice, wherever it sits. And if you let the chips fall where they may, and if you're a LeBron James and you're a billionaire and now you're only worth 900 million. Who cares? You know, and if they don't want our books in the future, who cares? Like, you know, my books in 11 languages, if it's going to be in 10, I don't care, you know, like, it's not worth it, you know, for me. What do you think

about this Elizabeth Holmes things as we wrap here? Got any thoughts on Elizabeth Holmes? I mean, it wasn't backed by Silicon Valley venture capitalists, but it certainly is a weird situation. I mean, it's a fascinating story. I am watching the court drama along with everyone else. I personally haven't covered it. Bloomberg's on a great job of covering it. You know, I don't know. I don't know.

I guess, you know, I am sort of curious, like, why the case has resonated so much, right? Like, what about her has drawn so much attention? Is there an element of wanting to, you know, I mean, it was a fraud. Of course, it was a fraud. But like, yes. Does it partly resonate because she was a powerful female CEO? Yeah. What will interest in the day?

Yeah. Yeah. And have people been really like sort of taken some weird pleasure in the extent of her downfall? I don't know. But, but look, I mean. I think it's an interesting insight. And there's a, there's a counter to that, which is also she's using that she was a, you know, had this Schengali now and that she was, you know, had Stockholm syndrome and that's why she lied

and committed this fraud for 20 years. Right. Right. It's, what a mess of like trying to, two, two guys trying to pass judgment on this situation. Yeah. Somewhere out there, there's a master manipulator, you know, John Carter said, like, don't underestimate her. Yeah, somewhere out there, there's a two minutes or so clip of Emily Chang and I on Bloomberg television interviewing her. And I just think that we never, we, we, we at Bloomberg in a business week, we never, we never got upside down and put her on the cover in the way that some other magazines did. But I remember, you know, sitting there interviewing her and, you know, I don't know that my spidey sense was tingling, but not quite understanding exactly where she was coming from at the time.

See, that's a very interesting observation because a lot of people I talk to who are investors, you know, journalism and investing is the same thing. I always tell people. That's why Maritz, myself, you know, other folks we know, made that jump, O Malik, et cetera. because you have partial information. Your only weapon, really, your only tool is asking questions and finding more people to ask questions to, listening to the answers and then trying to figure out the great mystery of what is thereinos.

And the journalist is just trying to convey what thereinose is to the audience. As an investor, you're just trying to convey to yourself, is this worth placing a bet on? But you're just trying to find the truth. And with horror, you just, couldn't understand what she was talking about or find the truth. And when you know this, when you're talking to a subject and they can't just explain it to you in plain English, you know, and there's a lot of questions. The red flags just built up with that company over

and over again. I had one investor, you know, prominent who laughed in her face because he asked to see the machine and she said, we can't show you the machine. He was like, you're asking us for a hundred million dollars. He literally, she said, yeah, well, you can invest, but we can't show to, and she's literally laughed in her face and left the room and told myself and a couple friends like, wow, that woman's a fraud before it came out. Like crazy. All right, listen, everybody, drop what you're doing, take a pause, go over to the app store, and I don't know if you're going to be able to buy the book. You may have to go to a web browser still if you're on an iOS device. Go to your local, go to your local bookstore and buy Amazon Unbound.

And while you're at it. Get the collection. Get the trilogy. Get the upstores. Get the everything store. As an entrepreneur, read these because there's so many lessons in them. We just scratch the service. Brad,

you've been great giving us an hour of time. I truly appreciate it. I'm going to let you go for your great weekend and policing TikTok and the other things we both have to deal with. Well, I hope we can go get some ramen or something. I'll talk to you soon, brother. That'd be great. And we'll see you next time on this weekend startups.

Bye-bye.