Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News. This is Master's in
Speaker 1: Business with Barry rid Holts on Bloomberg Radio.
Speaker 2: This week on the podcast, I have another extra special guest.
Speaker 2: Dana Mannioli is the Amazon reporter for The Wall Street Journal.
Speaker 2: In addition to covering Amazon, she is an award winning
Speaker 2: reporter who has deep roots in both M and A
Speaker 2: and retail. Her new book is really quite fascinating, The
Speaker 2: Everything Wore, Amazon's ruthless quest to own the world and
Speaker 2: remake corporate power, just came out a few months ago.
Speaker 2: I thought this was a really interesting book. I read
Speaker 2: a lot of stuff for interviews, and this is a
Speaker 2: book that I would have just plowed through regardless. It
Speaker 2: was really fascinating. And you know a lot of the
Speaker 2: things you spect about on Amazon, you think about, you know,
Speaker 2: how they flex their corporate muscles. You have like a
Speaker 2: loose idea, Hey, they really seem to be the eight
Speaker 2: hundred pound gorilla. I had no idea. You know, as
Speaker 2: I'm reading the book, I'm just genuinely shocked, and by
Speaker 2: the way, it's deeply investigating. In research, she did hundreds
Speaker 2: of interviews with former employees and executives and partners and
Speaker 2: like just everybody who was affiliated with this and these
Speaker 2: are not nice people. These are ethically compromised executives who
Speaker 2: are just hell bent on increasing profits by any means necessary.
Speaker 2: And she paints a not very pretty picture of the company,
Speaker 2: It's culture, its tactics.
Speaker 1: Like I thought I.
Speaker 2: Knew Amazon, and it turns out I really didn't know Amazon.
Speaker 2: Fascinating book and I'm really fascinating conversation that I think
Speaker 2: you'll enjoy. With no further to do. My discussion with
Speaker 2: the Wall Street Journals. Dana Maddioli, Welcome to Bloomberg.
Speaker 1: Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2: So we've been trying to get the schedule for quite
Speaker 2: some time. We've been ships in the night, and I'm
Speaker 2: glad we finally did this. Before we get into the book,
Speaker 2: I just have to go over your background, which is
Speaker 2: really fascinating. You started the journal in two thousand and six.
Speaker 2: Tell us a little bit about how you got there.
Speaker 1: Oh, I'd say I snuck through the back door. I
Speaker 1: started a week after graduating from college, Amazing as a
Speaker 1: journal as a major in an English major. I had
Speaker 1: some freelance clips while I was in college. I would
Speaker 1: go and take my articles that I wrote for class
Speaker 1: and sell them to the local newspapers in Washington, DC.
Speaker 1: Sometimes just give them away to get a byline. And
Speaker 1: that's sort of how I got hired at the Journal
Speaker 1: and just really learned as a grunt at that point
Speaker 1: and rose up the ranks.
Speaker 2: It's kind of fascinating that you're the Amazon reporter now
Speaker 2: because you began covering retail companies like j C. Pennies.
Speaker 2: I don't know if it call Kodak retail. They had
Speaker 2: a tail arm. Tell us a little bit about some
Speaker 2: of the companies you covered and some of the front
Speaker 2: page scoops you got.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So for a while I was the retail reporter
Speaker 1: at the Wall Street Journal. I loved that job. I
Speaker 1: basically covered thirty different publicly traded retailers, from Gap to
Speaker 1: Macy's to Nordstrom and got to know a lot of
Speaker 1: those CEOs very well, people like Mickey Drexler over at
Speaker 1: shake Crew right like legends. And that was a really
Speaker 1: good education for me actually in writing this book, because
Speaker 1: I saw firsthand through their lens of how they had
Speaker 1: to react to a young Jeff Bezos and how that
Speaker 1: was decimating their businesses.
Speaker 2: Right. You started six at that point, Amazon is what
Speaker 2: a decade old just about Yeah, and had already begun
Speaker 2: to damage traditional retailers. You go from retail to doing
Speaker 2: large M and A deals. You covered the Pfizer Alergen
Speaker 2: deal and a bunch of other M and A tell
Speaker 2: us how you went from retail to mergers and eye acquisitions.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there was a stop before that. Actually, I covered Quodak,
Speaker 1: like you said, that was my first corporate gig, and
Speaker 1: then retail, and then I was the M and A
Speaker 1: reporter with another reporter named Dana Simluca who's a good
Speaker 1: friend of mine, and our whole job was to break
Speaker 1: what companies were buying other companies, and it was a
Speaker 1: really exciting job. You'd get these giant tips one hundred
Speaker 1: billion dollar deals and you put the headlines down. You'd
Speaker 1: see the stock prices just go through the roof, right.
Speaker 1: It was like this kind of adrenaline rush of a beat.
Speaker 1: So I did that for six years, which is a
Speaker 1: very long time to cover that beat because it's fairly
Speaker 1: all on. You know, you work every Sunday because deals
Speaker 1: get announced on Monday. But also a through line on
Speaker 1: that beat was the beginning of that beat. When I
Speaker 1: started in twenty thirteen, the retail companies, the consumer companies
Speaker 1: were worried about Amazon. By the time I left that
Speaker 1: beat in twenty nineteen, every single corporate boardroom I spoke
Speaker 1: to every CEO, every banker, in industrials, healthcare, every industry
Speaker 1: was worried about Amazon.
Speaker 2: Huh. And just to wrap up the M and A,
Speaker 2: you win another Lobe award in twenty sixteen covering the
Speaker 2: Dow DuPont merger. That was a giant merger. Tell us
Speaker 2: a little bit about that story.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that was you know that this was a time
Speaker 1: when there were a lot of there's a lot of
Speaker 1: industrial m and A, A lot of these corporate giants
Speaker 1: that you know, had been esteemed companies were hitting a
Speaker 1: rough patch and we started to see a lot of
Speaker 1: deals in the chemicals space and the industrial space. I
Speaker 1: broke that with my colleagues Danis and Luca and Dave Banoit,
Speaker 1: and that was one of the biggest years for em
Speaker 1: Anda that I was on the beat.
Speaker 2: So retail m and A, how do you end up
Speaker 2: not just back in their online retail space with Amazon,
Speaker 2: but making that your sole beat? How did you become
Speaker 2: Amazon only as a reporter?
Speaker 1: So after six years on the M and A beat,
Speaker 1: you know, writing probably hundreds of articles. It's very competitive,
Speaker 1: beat Bloomberg pretty fiercely. It was time for me to
Speaker 1: take a step back from that type of reporting. You
Speaker 1: get fairly burn.
Speaker 2: It's a grind, it is.
Speaker 1: It's a grind, you know. I was reporting stories out
Speaker 1: from my friend's weddings, from christenings, from family birthday parties,
Speaker 1: ever off. So I wanted to take a step back
Speaker 1: and do a bigger, like investigatory beat. And the only
Speaker 1: thing that really excited me at the time was Amazon.
Speaker 1: I'd seen them be this major player on the retail beat,
Speaker 1: on the M and A beat, I saw stupid M
Speaker 1: and A happening because of Amazon. I remember I broke
Speaker 1: this deal when CVS was buying Etna. This is a
Speaker 1: bet the farm sort of eminem deal. Sixty nine billion
Speaker 1: dollars were the CVS, this pharmacy was buying an insurance company.
Speaker 1: And I learned that the CEO of CVS was terrified
Speaker 1: of Amazon. Every board meeting he had with his board,
Speaker 1: they had Amazon proofing plans put in place. And I
Speaker 1: started seeing that in other boardrooms too, that these dumb
Speaker 1: deals were happening because people were trying to Amazon proof
Speaker 1: their businesses, and I started to think about how how
Speaker 1: little people knew about how Amazon always seemed to win,
Speaker 1: how they seemed to have their finger on the scale
Speaker 1: in a lot of ways. So I pitched this investigatory
Speaker 1: Amazon beat to my bosses at the Wall Street Journal,
Speaker 1: and they were into it. They said, if you think
Speaker 1: you could get inside this black box, the do it?
Speaker 2: What ye was that?
Speaker 1: That was twenty nineteen, all right.
Speaker 2: So by then I'm trying to remember how big Amazon
Speaker 2: had become. I mean, they obviously blew up after the pandemic,
Speaker 2: but I want to say Scott Galloway's book The Four
Speaker 2: had already come out, Brad Stone's book The Everything Store.
Speaker 2: I don't know if that had come out yet.
Speaker 1: That did that came out? I want to say maybe
Speaker 1: twenty fifteen, And.
Speaker 2: Both of those books sold very well and drew a
Speaker 2: lot of attention Amazon. It doesn't sound like it was
Speaker 2: a tough argument to get the editors of woll Street
Speaker 2: General to say, Hey, these guys are a behemoth. We
Speaker 2: need a dedicated person covering justice one company.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And they were excited that I've raised my hand.
Speaker 1: I had, you know, a history of being very scoopy
Speaker 1: getting inside companies.
Speaker 2: Again war winning, right, and and you.
Speaker 1: Know Amazon's such a big company. You know, they're two
Speaker 1: trillion dollars today, and they're kind of like a giant.
Speaker 1: They're not kind of they're giant conglomerate. They're like fifteen
Speaker 1: different publicly traded companies in one company. Yeah, so I
Speaker 1: had I wanted to do this in a way that
Speaker 1: I my spots. If you just cover Amazon news day
Speaker 1: and day out, you could just write wire stories all day. Right,
Speaker 1: there's a million stories about them. I wanted to be
Speaker 1: deliberate and investigate them.
Speaker 2: So let's talk a little bit about that delibered investigation.
Speaker 2: The book covers Amazon's quest to own the world and
Speaker 2: remake corporate power. What does that mean?
Speaker 1: Well, Amazon, you know they started as this against all odds,
Speaker 1: grudge startup, right, But what we've seen in more recent
Speaker 1: years is that they've become the number one or two
Speaker 1: player by size in about eight different industries. You know,
Speaker 1: from retail, which we are already know forty percent of
Speaker 1: everything bought online in the US is Amazon to cloud computing,
Speaker 1: where they are the biggest cloud computing in the world
Speaker 1: exactly in the US. They deliver more parcels than UPS
Speaker 1: or FedEx. And it goes on and on and on.
Speaker 2: Say that again, they deliver more parcels than UPS or FedEx.
Speaker 1: Yes, they are the number one parcels.
Speaker 2: That's astonishing.
Speaker 1: And guess what it's they're only their own product. They're
Speaker 1: not delivery it really for other people. That's just Amazon goods.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: They've taken over industry after industry, and that's forced bankruptcies,
Speaker 1: it's forced lack of innovation. And beyond that, you know,
Speaker 1: my book gets into how they have this pattern of lying, cheating,
Speaker 1: copying their way to the top, and using their leverage
Speaker 1: in all these different industries to crush competition.
Speaker 2: So we're going to get into the details of that
Speaker 2: for sure. I just want to go through the eight
Speaker 2: areas where they're number one or two. So online retail, cloud, computing,
Speaker 2: package delivery. What are the other four or five where
Speaker 2: they're dominant?
Speaker 1: Yeah, voice assistant devices.
Speaker 2: Yeah, nobody comes close to that.
Speaker 1: Right. In online advertising, the number three actually a whole
Speaker 1: charged which.
Speaker 2: By the way, the online advertising is has become so
Speaker 2: ubiquitous throughout the site. So it's Google, Facebook, Amazon, exactly amazing.
Speaker 2: Give us the other two or three ebook ebooks, and
Speaker 2: that's before we get to other gadgets. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 2: the Kindle. Just Barnes and Nobles still make the Nook
Speaker 2: or is it do?
Speaker 1: And it's it's kind of a paltry experience. And I'll
Speaker 1: tell you ninety percent of my ebooks for this book
Speaker 1: have been sold in Amazon, which just tells you, right,
Speaker 1: how much of a dominant.
Speaker 2: I'll tell you something fascinating that when you Google search
Speaker 2: your book, the first link that comes up is Amazon.
Speaker 2: And that's true on so much stuff. I mean on Google,
Speaker 2: I don't mean on the Amazon site. Yeah, but on
Speaker 2: eight verticals, most of which they are either number one
Speaker 2: or number two.
Speaker 1: And they're keeping you know, they're going to keep growing.
Speaker 1: They they're getting into space with this project Kuiper.
Speaker 2: They are, now that's separate from Bezos's Blue Origins company.
Speaker 2: You're talking about a wholy different pursuit coming from Amazon
Speaker 2: proper within their own company, and what do they want
Speaker 2: to do in space.
Speaker 1: They're going to go head to head with Elon Musks
Speaker 1: Starlink with this these satellites, these orbital satellites, and that
Speaker 1: should launch in the next year. So they're ever growing
Speaker 1: and they have a lot of bandwidth to do that
Speaker 1: in ways that other publicly traded companies really don't.
Speaker 2: Why on earth does Amazon want to be in the
Speaker 2: satellite business out of curiosity? Is this related at all
Speaker 2: to Blue Origins and what Bezos is doing with that?
Speaker 1: Well, it's a question for Bezos, I would say. You know, Starlink,
Speaker 1: which is Elon Musk's venture, is considered one of his
Speaker 1: crown jewels. Okay, so there's like definitely an appeal there.
Speaker 1: The way that Elon has its structured it does fit
Speaker 1: into his space exploration company SpaceX. So some people pose
Speaker 1: it that this should this be part of Blue Origin
Speaker 1: rather than Amazon. Sure, but as of right now it
Speaker 1: is part of Amazon is.
Speaker 2: I guess the thinking must be, Hey, if we have
Speaker 2: more people with access to the Internet, we're shopping more
Speaker 2: people will shop online and we'll capture forty percent of
Speaker 2: it or whatever.
Speaker 1: They're right, they'll boost those two hundred million pribes ribers
Speaker 1: could grow exponentially.
Speaker 2: Right. How do you define Amazon Prime as a vertical?
Speaker 2: Is it just part of their delivery process? It comes
Speaker 2: with a lot of other things. Where do you put
Speaker 2: Amazon Prime into this?
Speaker 1: I mean, it's one of the biggest membership programs there
Speaker 1: is at any company.
Speaker 2: It's amazing, right, pay for the privilege.
Speaker 1: To shop with this company.
Speaker 2: Well, you theoretically pay for two day delivery, although if
Speaker 2: you've been an Amazon user for any length of time,
Speaker 2: that turns out to be bs because they do everything
Speaker 2: they can to dissuade you from next day or two
Speaker 2: day or same day delivery. Hey, ship on Wednesdays with
Speaker 2: even fewer boxes, create less ecological waste. Ship next Thursday.
Speaker 2: Here's a ninety nine percent digital coupon. Ooh, that's great.
Speaker 2: I rent ahead of Beatle. I'll save ninety nine cents.
Speaker 2: But obviously it works because the more they can spread
Speaker 2: out their shipping. My experience has been the shipping timeliness
Speaker 2: has decreased dramatically.
Speaker 1: I hear that from a lot of shopping right.
Speaker 2: I mean, So, I've been an Amazon member since I
Speaker 2: got a gift certificate from my college roommate. I want
Speaker 2: to say it was ninety eight, ninety eight, So this
Speaker 2: is early member and I out of college long before that.
Speaker 2: But but early member, like I used to just search
Speaker 2: and click whatever came up first, and it was always
Speaker 2: the right thing. I ordered lithium batteries with a like
Speaker 2: for a keyfob on your car. It's a very specific
Speaker 2: model number, wouldn't that exact model number come up first?
Speaker 2: So I was, and I went back and I redid
Speaker 2: it and figured out, oh, that's a sponsored link that
Speaker 2: has nothing to do with what I requested other than
Speaker 2: it's roughly a lithium ion battery. So I went to
Speaker 2: return it, and every now and then Amazon will say, yeah,
Speaker 2: I don't bother, just just keep it right and we'll
Speaker 2: credit you because it's more expensive to send it back
Speaker 2: then the product is worth. So the search has been terrible,
Speaker 2: The pages are just festooned with advertising. The whole experience
Speaker 2: is much worse. And then there's the other two issues.
Speaker 2: The prices are no longer the lowest, and the interesting
Speaker 2: thing about the pandemic is when they were frequently out
Speaker 2: of things, it sent you searching. So I think everybody
Speaker 2: has a Target account, a Walmart account, which may not
Speaker 2: have been true in twenty nineteen pre pandemic. So the
Speaker 2: whole experience is much less delightful than it was. I
Speaker 2: kind of think since Bezos left, the people who are
Speaker 2: there are just focused on how do we max out
Speaker 2: profitability and the hell with the user experience, which wasn't
Speaker 2: what it felt like under Bezos or am I wildly
Speaker 2: overstating that.
Speaker 1: Well, there's a large part of my book gets into
Speaker 1: this toxic culture at Amazon. Uh huh, where employees are
Speaker 1: in this hunger games like scenario where they're competing with
Speaker 1: their other employees to keep their jobs.
Speaker 2: Talking about the six percent, Yeah, they get cut at
Speaker 2: the end of the year, ranking that whole like everything
Speaker 2: they said they weren't doing.
Speaker 1: The Actually time, I have all the documents.
Speaker 2: GE used to cut the bottom ten percent six percent?
Speaker 2: And then where did the force ranking come from?
Speaker 1: Jeff like that Intel did this right, That's what he
Speaker 1: said to his leadership team, like, let's do this because
Speaker 1: we have to get rid of the bottom performers. But
Speaker 1: that has unintended consequences. It means that everyone at Amazon,
Speaker 1: on the white collar side, is driven to work in
Speaker 1: a way that just benefits their numbers, benefits their bottom lines,
Speaker 1: even if it's not good for you as the customer,
Speaker 1: even if it means it's unsafe for the customer, as
Speaker 1: long as it's expanding selection and increasing profits. That often
Speaker 1: is the name of the game.
Speaker 2: Unsafe for the customer. How is it on?
Speaker 1: Yes, So I have anecdotes in the book where there
Speaker 1: are well meaning people on the Child's Marketplace team that
Speaker 1: are that where there's they're selling clothes for children, right,
Speaker 1: and there's a mandate from Bezos to expand selection and
Speaker 1: get more sellers into Amazon dot Com because the more
Speaker 1: sellers you have, the more sales you get, the more
Speaker 1: sales sellers come on exactly, And they make changes to
Speaker 1: the sign up process for sellers to on board to
Speaker 1: Amazon dot Com. They want to make it easy as
Speaker 1: possible sign up and you could be selling within a day, okay, right,
Speaker 1: so not really betting these sellers.
Speaker 2: So in other words, Chinese junk with that's not fireproof,
Speaker 2: that's not exactly.
Speaker 1: So then the Chinese junk comes in within a day
Speaker 1: and some of these parents on the team are horrified.
Speaker 1: There are children's pajamas that smell.
Speaker 2: Like gas, aldehyde and gas.
Speaker 1: There are hoodies that have strings around the acuatch are
Speaker 1: a strangulation hazard that are banned from being sold in
Speaker 1: the US because if it's strangled tall there there are
Speaker 1: all these.
Speaker 2: Listen, if kids have to die in order for our
Speaker 2: profit margin to expand, that's just a little collateral damage.
Speaker 2: Who can complain as long as our profits are gone.
Speaker 2: I mean, you know it's a tough world. That tough enough.
Speaker 1: So they flagged this to the Actually they take upon
Speaker 1: themselves to add some of the friction back into the process.
Speaker 1: Design it okay, and their boss yells at them, it's
Speaker 1: just take that off, and they said, well, we're trying
Speaker 1: to protect the consumer. We ostensibly we are a customer
Speaker 1: obsessed organization, which is what they say, right, And he said, well,
Speaker 1: if that's what you know Bezos wants, there's other people
Speaker 1: that will handle that. So they reluctantly do that, and
Speaker 1: all the goods fled back in right. And ironically, their
Speaker 1: boss who told them not to do that, is now
Speaker 1: the VP of Customer Safety and Trust. But my book
Speaker 1: found other examples. Amazon was selling carbon monoxide detectors that
Speaker 1: don't detect carbon monoxide.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, that's extra if you want it to
Speaker 2: actually work. Yeah, that's a different that's that's carbon monoxide prime.
Speaker 2: You know, you can't just order early, you know. In
Speaker 2: the two thousands and twenty tens, it felt like the
Speaker 2: reason people were terrified of Amazon is huge selection, fairly
Speaker 2: high quality product, and the prices were almost always the cheapest.
Speaker 2: I don't find any of those things now. The selection
Speaker 2: is sort of a it's paradoxically, there's so much garbage
Speaker 2: on it, like when this when they first started marketplace,
Speaker 2: my immediate reaction was, Hey, if I wanted products from
Speaker 2: a garage sale, I know where eBay is. I can
Speaker 2: click over there. Why are you making this worse? But
Speaker 2: I guess you know it's worked out.
Speaker 1: From Well, there's a reason for that. You know, Amazon
Speaker 1: has been sued for being an illegal monopoly.
Speaker 2: Uh huh.
Speaker 1: And the idea here is that, you know, when when
Speaker 1: a company is building monopoly, they have to have the
Speaker 1: best experience because they have to steal market share from
Speaker 1: their competitors. So when Amazon was coming up, when you
Speaker 1: like the experience, it was fast shipping, the quality was
Speaker 1: much better, The prices were low because they were using
Speaker 1: predatory pricing to undercut their rivals, to steal market share,
Speaker 1: get people to sign up for prime, and put companies
Speaker 1: out of business. You know, Lens, the last time you
Speaker 1: saw a circuit city.
Speaker 2: Right, circuit city.
Speaker 1: It goes on. And I spoke to all those CEOs
Speaker 1: for this book, and they lived at first hand. Amazon
Speaker 1: is undercutting them on price to steal their customers and
Speaker 1: put them out of business. What happens to monopoly once
Speaker 1: they become a monopoly is that there's less competition. Where
Speaker 1: are you going to go? So they could raise prices,
Speaker 1: they could flood the feed with advertisements that are annoying
Speaker 1: to you. They could do all these things to make
Speaker 1: it a lesser experience. But have you canceled your Prime account? Probably?
Speaker 2: I haven't canceled my Prime account, but I will tell
Speaker 2: you that I have dramatically reduced the products I buy
Speaker 2: on Amazon, and very often in the old days it's like,
Speaker 2: oh it's on Amazon. Remember one click buying. There is
Speaker 2: no more one click buying because when you see something,
Speaker 2: especially if it's something you're not familiar with the price,
Speaker 2: you have to quickly Google Walmart, Target, and Google shopping
Speaker 2: to see because every now and then a third party
Speaker 2: seller will have a product that's double or you know,
Speaker 2: fifty percent more than what it should be. I just
Speaker 2: bought something from Target the other day that was twenty
Speaker 2: two dollars. It was thirty four dollars on Amazon, and
Speaker 2: it wasn't being sold by Amazon, but it was by
Speaker 2: a marketplace.
Speaker 1: That's why also part of this building. The monopoly situation
Speaker 1: is that Amazon's third party sellers. Sixty percent of what's
Speaker 1: sold on Amazon is these third party sellers. They are
Speaker 1: so reliant on Amazon because forty percent of everything's sold
Speaker 1: online is there. They have to be there, and it's
Speaker 1: this weird love hate relationship.
Speaker 2: We're going to go into the details on some of
Speaker 2: the really dubious things that they did just across the board.
Speaker 2: We'll talk about. I mean, the book is kind of horrifying,
Speaker 2: as I don't know if that was your intention, but
Speaker 2: as you're walking working through it, it's like, oh, this
Speaker 2: company has some ethical compromises and some just culture that
Speaker 2: seems to be really toxic, not just for the customers,
Speaker 2: but the employees as well and the partners. It seems
Speaker 2: across the board it's when it all costs, and you
Speaker 2: don't often stop and think what that means, but it
Speaker 2: means a lot of really bad things. According to your.
Speaker 1: Book, it does.
Speaker 2: Let's talk a little bit about how Amazon's culture got
Speaker 2: to where it is today, going back to its origin story.
Speaker 2: Bezos works at Hedge Funds, Qunshop d Shaw, and he
Speaker 2: is given the task, along with three other employees, of
Speaker 2: investigating this new fangled Internet thingy and what the possible
Speaker 2: areas for growth and disruption might come out of it.
Speaker 2: Three or four different analysts were given different sections. Bezos's
Speaker 2: was tasked with looking into the impact of the Internet
Speaker 2: on retail, directly by David Shaw. Tell us a little
Speaker 2: bit about that project. How long on d Shaw's dime
Speaker 2: was Bezos researching the Internet months?
Speaker 1: And he liked what he saw. At the time, the
Speaker 1: idea that this would take off was really far fetched.
Speaker 1: Nine four ninety three and three percent of Americans had
Speaker 1: ever been on the World Wide Web. So think of it,
Speaker 1: and you know, and and David Shaw was the nerdy
Speaker 1: programmer type of person who could see the potential for it.
Speaker 1: So he thinks, let's have my you know, my star
Speaker 1: associates and vps look into the commercial uses for the Internet.
Speaker 1: One looks into banking, and Jeff looks into retail. And
Speaker 1: the idea is, if they think it's worth worthwhile, that
Speaker 1: d Shaw will open up these verticals and they do
Speaker 1: it with the other areas that the people that research
Speaker 1: the other areas for for David start businesses for him
Speaker 1: that make money.
Speaker 2: Why didn't David Shaw invest in Bezos and Amazon when
Speaker 2: when he left for Seattle.
Speaker 1: Well, so, then Bezos likes what he sees all on
Speaker 1: d Shaw's dime. He does his research report, sees that
Speaker 1: there's likes for this, thinks that books could be the
Speaker 1: first area of selling online. And he goes on this
Speaker 1: walk with David the in Central Park and says, Hey,
Speaker 1: I think I'm going to quit and start an online
Speaker 1: book shop. And David said, you know, I think that's
Speaker 1: you already have a really good job. I think that's
Speaker 1: a good idea for someone else. And by the way,
Speaker 1: you know, that was my idea. We might go head
Speaker 1: to head with you and compete with you on this.
Speaker 1: And Bezos basically says I'll take the risk and moves
Speaker 1: out to Seattle.
Speaker 2: Kind of surprised that Shaw went that way instead of saying,
Speaker 2: you know, sort of let us seed you us, let
Speaker 2: us participate in this, like it was a little adversarial
Speaker 2: as opposed to cooperative.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And actually Bezos had a really hard time fundraising
Speaker 1: this idea because it was so wild. You know, it
Speaker 1: took him a really long time to get his first
Speaker 1: million dollars. Most of his investments trickled in in fifty
Speaker 1: thousand dollars.
Speaker 2: Increments literally friends and family. Oh, yeah, big time until eventually, right,
Speaker 2: who was the first VC to put money into.
Speaker 1: Believe it was Kleiner. They're on the board and oh
Speaker 1: that's right.
Speaker 2: John Door was on the board for forever. That's ocky,
Speaker 2: so really kind of interesting that he missed it. But
Speaker 2: the whole thing, just the way I learned about it,
Speaker 2: it's kind of shady.
Speaker 1: Isn't I mean it's copycat mentality that continues to this date. Amazon.
Speaker 1: Oh that's a good idea. Be a shame if someone
Speaker 1: took it.
Speaker 2: So Amazon is not only Custer obsessed, as Bezos once said,
Speaker 2: but it's also competitor obsessed. Where does that come from?
Speaker 2: And how does it manifest itself?
Speaker 1: Oh, they're the most competitor obsessed company I've ever covered,
Speaker 1: and I've covered companies for eighteen years. Part of it
Speaker 1: is the culture, because they have to be performing at
Speaker 1: all times to justify their existence, to not get cut.
Speaker 1: It's this pressure cooker of an environment that people that
Speaker 1: I've spoken to that might have worked at other companies
Speaker 1: wouldn't be tempted to do illegal things on ethical things,
Speaker 1: anti competitive things are sort of forced to their breaking
Speaker 1: point at Amazon, and I could give you an example
Speaker 1: if you like. There's a scene in the book that
Speaker 1: has resonated with a lot of people where Amazon, at
Speaker 1: Jeff's behest wanted to create like a Trader Joe's like
Speaker 1: product line of food. He liked that Trader Joe's was
Speaker 1: quirky and cool. So the team at Amazon writes the
Speaker 1: sixth pager that's how they come up with ideas, and
Speaker 1: it says, we want to copy the top two hundred
Speaker 1: best selling items at Trader Joe's. And they get the
Speaker 1: green light for management to do that. But Trader Joe's
Speaker 1: is a really secretive company. They don't do online shopping.
Speaker 1: It's hard to figure out what the best sellers are.
Speaker 2: Literally walk through the store, and they have to walk.
Speaker 1: Through the store and people love to do it. It's
Speaker 1: like a really delightful experience, right. So the head of
Speaker 1: the team goes about hiring the senior executive from Trader Joe's.
Speaker 1: She doesn't really know what her job's going to be,
Speaker 1: moves out to Seattle, and her first week in Seattle,
Speaker 1: stumbles across this really secretive room conference room. It has
Speaker 1: paper over the doors and the walls, brown paper. Suit
Speaker 1: can't see inside, and she goes inside and it's filled
Speaker 1: with Trader Joe's boxes of foods, and she has this
Speaker 1: light bulb moment like, oh, crap, I've been hired to
Speaker 1: replicate my former employer. From there, her boss starts hounding her, saying,
Speaker 1: give me any documents you retained from your time at
Speaker 1: Trader Joe's, which is.
Speaker 2: Clearly like and the collect correct answer is I have
Speaker 2: no documents that they made me turn everything in as
Speaker 2: per my prior employment agreement.
Speaker 1: Or if I do, I cannot give them over to
Speaker 1: because that's actually illegal. Okay, So she says no. The
Speaker 1: boss keeps hounding her, hounding her, and it becomes this
Speaker 1: really tense experience. Then she emails him the top selling
Speaker 1: items from Trader Joe's from one whole week in the US,
Speaker 1: ranked by products that were sold, and they start to
Speaker 1: disseminate that within the team. They have their blueprint to
Speaker 1: copy the top two hundred items at Trader Joe's. And
Speaker 1: then he doesn't stop there. He says, no, send me
Speaker 1: all the margins, really, and she says, no, I'm not
Speaker 1: doing that, and he screams at her in the middle
Speaker 1: of the Seattle office starts crying and someone reports to
Speaker 1: HR because it was just like such a clear violation,
Speaker 1: and Amazon actually fired those people because it went up
Speaker 1: to HR. But that sort of scenario plays out at
Speaker 1: Amazon every single team.
Speaker 2: I want to stay with the idea of some of
Speaker 2: the earlier advantages that Amazon had and how it resulted
Speaker 2: in their growth. We'll get to diapers dot com, We'll
Speaker 2: get to some of the other headlers. Let's talk about
Speaker 2: the state tax advantage, So talk about arbitrage. Bezos specifically
Speaker 2: picks Washington state because there's so few shoppers in the
Speaker 2: state that by locating there and shipping to the rest
Speaker 2: of the country, he doesn't believe he has to collect
Speaker 2: state sales tax because of an old Supreme Court case.
Speaker 2: Maybe it even involved a catalog. It wasn't Sears.
Speaker 1: Was it was a catalog, It wasn't Seiers.
Speaker 2: That said, hey, you only collect interstate commerce is not taxable.
Speaker 2: Therefore you don't have to collect it its own unless
Speaker 2: you have a nexus to that state. So immediately they're
Speaker 2: at a six seven eight percent advantage over everybody else
Speaker 2: in most states. Tell us how they push the envelope
Speaker 2: with state sales tax.
Speaker 1: This is simultaneously brilliant but horrifying for the rest of retail.
Speaker 1: He comes up with this idea that his warehouses don't
Speaker 1: count as physical locations for Amazon.
Speaker 2: Which is kind of bizarre because of course it is right.
Speaker 2: I mean, if you locate a warehouse in New York,
Speaker 2: you now have in nexus with New York.
Speaker 1: But they tried to carve that out as a separate entity.
Speaker 1: And up until twenty seventeen, Amazon was not collecting sales tax.
Speaker 2: In something, so they had a twenty year head start.
Speaker 1: Exactly, and up to ten percent in some of these states.
Speaker 1: And that just had ripple effects because people once the
Speaker 1: advent of online shopping came about, people became really price conscious,
Speaker 1: you know, people would do comparison shopping. And I spoke
Speaker 1: to you one of the presidents of Sears who had
Speaker 1: to deal with this head on, and he said, you know,
Speaker 1: Amazon and him would be selling the same Sony television.
Speaker 1: Let's say it's five hundred dollars market the price. Amazon
Speaker 1: for many states could sell that for five hundred dollars flat.
Speaker 1: Sears would have to charge eight percent sales tax in
Speaker 1: New York. So what would Sears do? They would cut
Speaker 1: the price of their TV by eight percent in order
Speaker 1: to go head to head with Amazon, and they would
Speaker 1: just completely destroy their margins. And it created this race
Speaker 1: to the bottom on electronics prices because they had to
Speaker 1: try to compete but at a loss. And this happened
Speaker 1: in so many companies where they either couldn't compete and
Speaker 1: they lost the sale to Amazon, or they cut their
Speaker 1: prices and they destroyed their margins. And that's like a
Speaker 1: very easy way to go bankruptcy.
Speaker 2: So with the benefit of hindsight, you look at they
Speaker 2: have this advantage for twenty years, which is a long time.
Speaker 2: I'm kind of shocked that states didn't stand up and say,
Speaker 2: not only are we losing jobs in our states, but
Speaker 2: we're losing tens of millions or hundreds of million in
Speaker 2: tax revenue. Why did the various states tolerate this for
Speaker 2: as long as they did.
Speaker 1: That's a really good question. I spoke to someone in
Speaker 1: Amazon's public policy office that worked on this, and he said, like,
Speaker 1: this was our secret sauce, and Amazon fought tooth and
Speaker 1: nail to preserve it, to not get rid of this
Speaker 1: advantage they had, and so they know they'd go to court,
Speaker 1: they would go for Congress and make their case and
Speaker 1: some states did come knocking.
Speaker 2: Wherever there is a state income tax, there's usually a
Speaker 2: state sales tax potend. Right, So if you open a
Speaker 2: warehouse there and the state is losing a lot of revenue,
Speaker 2: why wouldn't they just sue Amazon and say, hey, we
Speaker 2: figured out you sold this money goods in our state
Speaker 2: and uo of sales tax here because you have an.
Speaker 1: Ex Well, what part of what I found is that
Speaker 1: many of these legislators in the states were very short sighted.
Speaker 1: They wanted to put up press releases that oh, we
Speaker 1: got an Amazon warehouse at all of these temporary jobs.
Speaker 1: And there's this horrible scene in the book where Jerry Storch,
Speaker 1: who's the CEO of Toys r US at the time,
Speaker 1: which is one of New Jersey's.
Speaker 2: Largest employee r speaks to Chris Christie.
Speaker 1: He speaks to Chris Christie. He says, you guys are
Speaker 1: killing me. Why are you not making Amazon collect sales
Speaker 1: tax in New Jersey. You're putting Toys r Us out
Speaker 1: of business. You're gonna put Main Street on business. And
Speaker 1: Chris Christie sort of the aaas him. And then a
Speaker 1: year later they announced this big Amazon warehouse in Robbinsville,
Speaker 1: New Jersey. They give Amazon all these tax credits for it.
Speaker 1: Christy gets to put out the press release that they're
Speaker 1: bringing hundreds of jobs to New Jersey. But Jerry's whole
Speaker 1: point was, Okay, you're getting hundreds of jobs there, You're
Speaker 1: gonna lose thousands of jobs just from my one company, right,
Speaker 1: So that's really short sighted. And that's what happened out
Speaker 1: you know, toys or restaponant of business.
Speaker 2: It's amazing how effective they were manipulating so many self
Speaker 2: interested politicians who were so short sighted. But we saw
Speaker 2: that time and time again. It was fascinating that the
Speaker 2: Amazon two HQ was slated for New York, and a
Speaker 2: lot of people in New York said, this is a
Speaker 2: money losing deal. This isn't a wealthy company. Why do
Speaker 2: we have to give them tax breaks? They have to
Speaker 2: compete with everybody else, and they said, screw you.
Speaker 1: Going to New York was one of the rare cities
Speaker 1: to really call them out on that. Just think about
Speaker 1: the frenzy around hundreds of different cities lobbied and put
Speaker 1: in these very intensive applications for the pleasure of having
Speaker 1: these warehouse jobs and the second headquarters there, and that
Speaker 1: just shows how politicians really just want the jobs.
Speaker 2: Right, That's right, And so it was kind of interesting
Speaker 2: that when you ran the numbers as people in New
Speaker 2: York did, it wasn't a good deal and they ended
Speaker 2: up sort of splitting it. It's kind of part in Virginia.
Speaker 2: And where where did the rest of the Amazon headquarters
Speaker 2: end up going.
Speaker 1: Oh, it's in Virginia. But they haven't broken ground on
Speaker 1: a lot of it really.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so that was years ago. I mean, after all
Speaker 2: those crazy contests and RFPs and submissions, they got like
Speaker 2: two hundred cities applying for this, they still haven't broken gup.
Speaker 2: That's amazing.
Speaker 1: They have one building up for sure, but the whole
Speaker 1: plan has not come to fruition.
Speaker 2: Ironically, if you take the Long Island Expressway out past Jericho,
Speaker 2: sayas It, you'll see this immense warehouse that they built
Speaker 2: that used to just be like an empty parking lot.
Speaker 2: I don't know what was there if for years it
Speaker 2: was rumored that something was coming, and what a perfect
Speaker 2: location right off the highway. Why do you need to
Speaker 2: give you know, that gives them access to forty million
Speaker 2: people or fifty million people on the aisle, and why
Speaker 2: would you have to give them a tax break for that.
Speaker 2: That's where the customers are. Shouldn't their business model be
Speaker 2: able to accommodate building warehouse?
Speaker 1: I mean they have something like six point five billion
Speaker 1: dollars in subsidies on taxes from different jurisdisdictions around the US.
Speaker 1: It's pretty staggering.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's really amazing. The other thing that was so
Speaker 2: disruptive was how Amazon changed how Wall Street itself viewed retailers,
Speaker 2: both in terms of profit versus growth and startups versus
Speaker 2: established retailers. Talk a little bit about the impact Amazon
Speaker 2: had on how Wall Street thought about other companies.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is huge. There probably wouldn't be an Amazon
Speaker 1: today if Jeff did not convince Wall Street that we
Speaker 1: don't have to make profits.
Speaker 2: Right His initial shareholder letter was, hey, don't expect profits
Speaker 2: for the next ten or twenty years exactly.
Speaker 1: And that just was not the norm back then. It
Speaker 1: is today, but that was definitely not the norm. This
Speaker 1: just gave him a tremendous roadway to reinvest in his
Speaker 1: business and grow and steal share and cut on prices
Speaker 1: to get customers and.
Speaker 2: Not pay federal taxes because if you're not profitable, no
Speaker 2: tax it's a.
Speaker 1: Great point tax rate, and that really destroyed his competitors
Speaker 1: because they couldn't catch up with him on online shopping.
Speaker 1: I spoke to a lot of these CEOs who went
Speaker 1: head to head with Amazon in the nineteen nineties and
Speaker 1: two thousands. One of them was the CEO of Linens
Speaker 1: and Things, and I said, you know, why were you
Speaker 1: all so late to online shopping? Did you not believe
Speaker 1: in it? And he said, Dana, we believed in it.
Speaker 1: But my boardroom, my board of directors, laughed me out
Speaker 1: of the room when I asked for one hundred million
Speaker 1: dollars to get our e commerce and logistics up and running,
Speaker 1: because that would have tanked our earnings, that would have
Speaker 1: tanked our share price.
Speaker 2: There's a little bit of short termism there because and
Speaker 2: again we have the benefit of hindsight, but he obviously
Speaker 2: saw what was coming. Why can't you stay to the board? Look,
Speaker 2: here's the trade off. Either we spend one hundred million
Speaker 2: dollars now and be able to compete with them, or
Speaker 2: we and and lose some stock price for a couple
Speaker 2: of quarters or years, or we're dead. Those are your choices.
Speaker 2: You want, you want a little bit of a pullback
Speaker 2: now or you just want to go bankrupt.
Speaker 1: Retail's a notoriously hard business. It could be a low
Speaker 1: margin and they have to manage to Wall Street quarter
Speaker 1: after quarter, quarter to quarter, and they couldn't. You know,
Speaker 1: the CEO told me, we couldn't miss one quarter of earnings,
Speaker 1: let alone years of them like Bezos did. I'd be
Speaker 1: out of a job. I would be fired. The company
Speaker 1: could go bankrupt. And that was exactly what was going
Speaker 1: on in every company that was trying to compete with them,
Speaker 1: to the point where so many of them had to
Speaker 1: outsource their logistics to Amazon, which is their main competitor.
Speaker 2: Go through the list Toys, r US, Linens and things Target.
Speaker 2: Why on earth would Target, which is a giant company,
Speaker 2: outsource its e commerce to Amazon.
Speaker 1: Well, Jerry Storch, who was the see of Toys r US,
Speaker 1: first Target on dot com, and he told me a
Speaker 1: story that he got yelled at by senior leaders for
Speaker 1: spending ten thousand dollars on buying the domain name Target
Speaker 1: stores dot com.
Speaker 2: That's an amazing story in the book, which is like
Speaker 2: ten thousand dollars for a domat like that is around.
Speaker 1: It to be so careful with their money because it's
Speaker 1: a hard business, right, and so yeah, Target Borders Toys
Speaker 1: r US and they they had to outsource it, which
Speaker 1: meant Amazon kept their customer data. They paid Amazon a
Speaker 1: fee for shipping it, they paid Amazon a fee for
Speaker 1: listing it. They paid Amazon all these fees, and Amazon
Speaker 1: had all the upside and.
Speaker 2: They figured out, you write in the book, they figured
Speaker 2: out that if they were losing sixty five seventy million
Speaker 2: dollars a year on their site, hey we could charge
Speaker 2: them fifty million and it's a cost saving for them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they just can The lowshold just astonishing.
Speaker 2: So let's stay with books for a minute. I'm fascinated
Speaker 2: that Barnes and Noble tries to respond very aggressively to Amazon,
Speaker 2: and they figure, we're going to take over wholesaleer Ingram
Speaker 2: in order to get a little more bulk, be able
Speaker 2: to stands Amazon, which at that point had become a
Speaker 2: substantial market share of the book selling world. And Amazon
Speaker 2: gets the takeover stopped on anti trust grounds. How ironic?
Speaker 2: Explain what happened there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so Barnes and Noble, in order to stay competitive,
Speaker 1: tries to buy Ingram, this book distributor that Amazon also used,
Speaker 1: and Amazon cried foul and said the should be an
Speaker 1: antitrust violation. And basically, Amazon even today sometimes has this
Speaker 1: mentality that they are the David going up against Goliath,
Speaker 1: even though that has not been true for a very
Speaker 1: very long time, including in that anecdote, Amazon by market
Speaker 1: value was way bigger than Barnes and Noble at that time.
Speaker 1: And Len Reggio, the CEO of Barnes and Noble at
Speaker 1: the time, calls them out on it. He says, you're
Speaker 1: crying fall and pretending like this is going to hurt
Speaker 1: this little player, but you are the behemoth here. You
Speaker 1: know that the regulators do turn it down.
Speaker 2: So we were talking earlier about Amazon's lack of profitability
Speaker 2: for the first couple of years. It's kind of interesting
Speaker 2: how Bezos's initial share hold your letter, I want to
Speaker 2: say ninety six something like that, seventy seven, the same
Speaker 2: year as the IPO warrant investors not to expect profits
Speaker 2: for years to come. We're going to spend a billion
Speaker 2: dollars building out our website. Not only did this not
Speaker 2: have a negative impact, Wall Street applauded the profitless growth.
Speaker 2: Tell us a little bit about what an advantage and
Speaker 2: how prescient that shareholder letter from Bezos was.
Speaker 1: I mean, he trained his shareholders essentially to not expect anything,
Speaker 1: and he was very clear communicating that. But it also
Speaker 1: just gave them roadway to take all their money and say,
Speaker 1: you know, books are not the bi all end all.
Speaker 1: We're going to use this as a test case. We're
Speaker 1: going to make some money, and then we're going to
Speaker 1: take all that money and put it into expanding our verticals.
Speaker 1: Let's open this up to toys, Let's open this up
Speaker 1: to electronics. It allowed them to build the Everything store,
Speaker 1: and then it allowed them to put this money toward
Speaker 1: other areas of growth beyond retail and really create this
Speaker 1: Amazon octopus.
Speaker 2: To say the very least, let's talk about Amazon Web Services.
Speaker 2: I love the part of the book where you describe
Speaker 2: how this became a thing every time they would stand
Speaker 2: up a new vertical or open a new division, and
Speaker 2: people forget what it was like in the nineties and
Speaker 2: early two thousands before there was an AWS. You ought
Speaker 2: to go out and buy a couple of hundred servers
Speaker 2: and a lot of software engineers to put this together
Speaker 2: and to manage it. And then you had to build
Speaker 2: like you were reinventing the wheel every time there was
Speaker 2: a new startup. Tell us about how Andy Jassey kind
Speaker 2: of looked at this and said, hey, why don't we
Speaker 2: just do this once and scale it for ourselves and
Speaker 2: maybe someone else will want to buy the access from us.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So Andy Jasse, who's the CEO today, started at
Speaker 1: Amazon a few like a little bit before the IPO,
Speaker 1: so he's been there from the early days. Amazon's retail
Speaker 1: business was expanding so rapidly, and they had so much
Speaker 1: data and they needed so much computing power that they
Speaker 1: were continuously adding that to their own business, and they
Speaker 1: got good at it. Jeff and and and a few
Speaker 1: other people started figuring out like, hey, yeah, we're a
Speaker 1: retail company, but we're also good at this technology stuff.
Speaker 1: If we need this, other companies probably also need this
Speaker 1: as they explore expanding online. So they productized it. They
Speaker 1: created a company called Amazon Web Services. It was very
Speaker 1: iffy as to whether this would take off. They didn't
Speaker 1: dedicate a ton of resources to it at the beginning.
Speaker 1: Andy remembers sheepishly asking for like a few dozen employees
Speaker 1: to work on it with him and thought that was
Speaker 1: like a big deal standalone. If this were to be
Speaker 1: split off from Amazon, would be one of the biggest
Speaker 1: tech companies in the world on its.
Speaker 2: Own right, and one of the biggest sources of profits
Speaker 2: for Amazon.
Speaker 1: As well, an enormous source of profits.
Speaker 2: So they start out with storage, they start out, they
Speaker 2: had computes, They had a number of different services that
Speaker 2: just allow anybody, you don't have to go buy a
Speaker 2: bunch of servers, and that really led to an enormous
Speaker 2: adoption cycle by a lot of tech startups, a lot
Speaker 2: of small companies that hey, you don't need one hundred
Speaker 2: million dollars worth of junkets, two guys on a laptop,
Speaker 2: you can launch a business exactly.
Speaker 1: And also a lot of their competitors, a lot of
Speaker 1: their fiercest competitors, Netflix, Apple use as the CIA uses aws, right,
Speaker 1: So this is a really entrenched business product for them,
Speaker 1: and it's very sticky. Once you're on it, you don't
Speaker 1: really leave.
Speaker 2: So it's kind of interesting what happens in other areas
Speaker 2: of Amazon, where there's supposed to be a Chinese wall
Speaker 2: between you as a customer of their corporate services and
Speaker 2: the rest of their business. But you described time and
Speaker 2: time again in the book how that Chinese wall really
Speaker 2: doesn't exist. Anybody has access to everything throughout the company.
Speaker 2: Let's talk a little bit about marketplace, all right. So
Speaker 2: originally Amazon, Chase, Deebay launched an auction site. It actually failed,
Speaker 2: and the pivot was to marketplace. Hey, let's bring in
Speaker 2: third party sellers of stuff rather than auctions, just selling
Speaker 2: it at standard prices. That's now more than half of
Speaker 2: the business.
Speaker 1: It's more than sixty percent of their real Wow.
Speaker 2: That's amazing. So that becomes wildly successful. But all of
Speaker 2: these small businesses that sell in marketplace, they haven't been
Speaker 2: very happy with how marketplace works. Tell us what's going on.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they have this uncomfortable situation of selling on marketplace,
Speaker 1: relying on it for their income, but then also seeing
Speaker 1: a lot of their products that they've gone to great
Speaker 1: lengths to use RND to create showing up in very
Speaker 1: similar versions on Amazon's private label side of the business
Speaker 1: called Amazon Basics or Amazon Essentials. And for years they've
Speaker 1: alleged that Amazon stole my idea, and Amazon has always
Speaker 1: very vocally refuted that notion. They say, you know this
Speaker 1: is there's firewalls. We would never copy our own sellers,
Speaker 1: and they've they've disputed that, and I was able to
Speaker 1: get documentation and find the receipts that they've been doing
Speaker 1: this for a very long time.
Speaker 2: So let's put a little flesh on that. So Amazon
Speaker 2: is both the platform to these third party sellers as
Speaker 2: well as a original competitor, not merely selling other people's
Speaker 2: products but creating their own. Anything that's a hot seller
Speaker 2: on Amazon, they are aware of through their own data,
Speaker 2: and they look at it. They look at the margin,
Speaker 2: and they figure out how cheaply can we make this
Speaker 2: and how much do we want to go after this.
Speaker 2: They've been pretty aggressive about that, haven't they They have.
Speaker 1: I mean, the documents that I was given shows how
Speaker 1: they reverse engineer these best selling products, and they have
Speaker 1: everything from the number of items sold to the cost
Speaker 1: to sell them, to the number of returns to the margins.
Speaker 1: There's twenty five different fields that the employees on the
Speaker 1: private label side of the company who have been told
Speaker 1: you probably shouldn't be doing this. There's policies in place
Speaker 1: at Amazon that are essentially not enforced, and because they're
Speaker 1: afraid of losing their jobs and not hitting their numbers,
Speaker 1: they've often resorted to looking over the fence and taking
Speaker 1: this type of data to reverse engineer best selling hits
Speaker 1: because it makes them look good and it keeps their jobs.
Speaker 1: And Amazon, even under oath, told Congress that they were
Speaker 1: not doing this.
Speaker 2: Really, yes, under oath, and yet it's pretty obvious they've
Speaker 2: been doing that and doing it for a long time.
Speaker 2: Let's talk a little bit about Alexa and how they
Speaker 2: sent up a venture funds that was very different than
Speaker 2: the typical venture funds. Tell us a little bit about
Speaker 2: what's going on with Voice and Alexa inside of Amazon.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Amazon was one of the pioneers of this voice
Speaker 1: technology and you know these voice assisted robots, and as such,
Speaker 1: they set up this vcarm called the Alexa Fund. And
Speaker 1: what I learned was that a pattern played out. They'd
Speaker 1: have all of these CEOs and founders pitch them on
Speaker 1: getting money and seed investments for their companies, and under
Speaker 1: the auspices of either getting an investment or being bought
Speaker 1: by Amazon's M and A arm, they'd share all of
Speaker 1: their proprietary data things like, you know, their patents, their technologies,
Speaker 1: all the stuff that companies go to great lengths to
Speaker 1: keep secret because they think they're getting an investment. And
Speaker 1: time and time again, Amazon would take that information, bring
Speaker 1: the heads of different Amazon businesses to these meetings to
Speaker 1: learn from it, and then ghost them and introduce the
Speaker 1: same exact product from an Amazon brand.
Speaker 2: Later you talk about the firewalls and the vcs, and
Speaker 2: one entrepreneur is in a meeting with a bunch of people, Hey,
Speaker 2: who are those guys? I know you are? And who
Speaker 2: are who are these guys? And it turns out they're
Speaker 2: the product heads that are going to be making the competing,
Speaker 2: competing product. It's really the the I like the VC
Speaker 2: quote Amazon is a wolf in wolf's clothing, Like there's
Speaker 2: a very really not even a big attempt to hide it.
Speaker 2: A different part of the book describes an entrepreneur where
Speaker 2: there are people in the room with their arms closed,
Speaker 2: looking bored and like not usual venture capital behavior if
Speaker 2: you're really interested in this technology. They eventually figure out
Speaker 2: this is just a Yeah, that was fishing is too kind?
Speaker 2: You call it specifically VC espionage. Talk a little bit
Speaker 2: about how misleading even the NDA's were. The non disclosure.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, this was galling to me as a
Speaker 1: deal geek who covered M and A. I asked some
Speaker 1: of these founders I spoke to for the book to
Speaker 1: send me all the documents that Amazon gave them prior
Speaker 1: to these meetings, and I read them very thoroughly and
Speaker 1: found something called a residual's clause buried in the legal ease,
Speaker 1: and it basically said that anything retained in the memories
Speaker 1: of Amazon executives at these meetings where proprietary stuff is
Speaker 1: being disclosed could be used by Amazon in their own
Speaker 1: business without any legal repercussion. So it's a license to steal.
Speaker 2: So essentially, and I keep coming back to this from
Speaker 2: the original d Shaw issue the culture at Amazon. They
Speaker 2: hired senior lawyers from some of the best firms. It
Speaker 2: seems like ethics is completely irrelevant. It seems like this
Speaker 2: is a group of rogue capitalists who are just rapacious
Speaker 2: in their greed regardless of ethics and business standards. They're
Speaker 2: just opera reading in a gray zone of legality, but
Speaker 2: in a very black and white zone of ethics. These
Speaker 2: are bad people doing bad things.
Speaker 1: The interesting thing is so many of my sources for
Speaker 1: this book are the people doing the bad things, because
Speaker 1: once they take a step back from Amazon and they
Speaker 1: realized how this company pushed them to their breaking point,
Speaker 1: that it made them do things that they would not
Speaker 1: have done at a company that was not so cutthroat.
Speaker 2: They feel bad, Well they should. They have a guilty
Speaker 2: conscious because they did really bad things for the money.
Speaker 2: They could feel bad about it after the fact. But
Speaker 2: let's be blunts. They had big stock options and reasonable
Speaker 2: pay packages. And if you're coming over from a top
Speaker 2: twenty law firm where you're giving up a seven figure job,
Speaker 2: you're doing it because you have the chance to make
Speaker 2: ten figures in your stock options. So I feel bad
Speaker 2: that they feel bad. Not really, they did bad things
Speaker 2: because they were in for the money and they realized
Speaker 2: the trade off wasn't worth it. Sell your soul for
Speaker 2: a few bucks, you still made to deal with the devil.
Speaker 1: I would agree with you. And you know, that's the
Speaker 1: one thing I wanted to depict in this book is
Speaker 1: the human toll of that. I mean, when I was
Speaker 1: reporting out that chapter, you're just describing the founders that
Speaker 1: would cry to me on the phone about what happened
Speaker 1: to their companies, how Amazon just decimated them. It was
Speaker 1: really hard reporting, just as a journalist to like internalize
Speaker 1: a lot of that. This company that didn't need to
Speaker 1: do these things to win chose to rit and it
Speaker 1: cost people their jobs, their livelihoods, their technologies at what costs.
Speaker 2: Let's talk a little bit about diapers dot com and
Speaker 2: what was the parent company, Quizzy Quizzy Quizzy, So this
Speaker 2: is kind of interesting. Amazon can't figure out how to
Speaker 2: ship diapers quickly, right, And moms are a giant demographic
Speaker 2: in retail. I think the book says they make eighty
Speaker 2: four percent of the consumer spending the controls in the household. Like, there,
Speaker 2: you win the moms, you win retail. And these guys
Speaker 2: have figured out how to have diapers arrived next day, like,
Speaker 2: they figured out how to reach moms. And Amazon decides
Speaker 2: to go out after them, and they start predatory pricing,
Speaker 2: selling diapers twenty percent below cost, which one would think
Speaker 2: is illegal, isn't that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's the definition of predatory pricing. It's twenty ten.
Speaker 1: Jeff Bezos becomes laser focused on Quidzy, which is started
Speaker 1: by these two entrepreneurs that are like the first people
Speaker 1: in their in their families to even go to college, right,
Speaker 1: these are homegrown talent, Mark Lori and Vinie Berra, Right.
Speaker 1: And he puts together a team to essentially spy on
Speaker 1: them and figure out how they do it, and Amazon
Speaker 1: starts to really cut the prices of their own diapers
Speaker 1: thirty percent. They cut the price of their diapers so
Speaker 1: much that they start losing two hundred million dollars a
Speaker 1: month just on diapers. According to internal documents.
Speaker 2: That's two point two billion a year on diapers.
Speaker 1: Along because they were so threatened by this little startup
Speaker 1: in New Jersey. Okay, and Amazon eventually makes a buyout
Speaker 1: offer to this firm, but they don't want to do
Speaker 1: it because they're doing so well they think they could
Speaker 1: ipo one day, so they turn them down. So then
Speaker 1: Amazon ratchets up the heat, cuts price of diapers more,
Speaker 1: creates this loyalty program to incentivize moms to shop with
Speaker 1: Amazon not Quidzy, and it becomes to the point where
Speaker 1: it's untenable for the quizy people. They start missing their
Speaker 1: internal numbers. They have to start considering a sale. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: they're really crestfallen about that Amazon's one of the biggest
Speaker 1: players in the space. They even have to consider an
Speaker 1: offer from the person that did this to them. Okay,
Speaker 1: So they're at this private dinner with Amazon executives discussing
Speaker 1: this offer. They don't want to sell to Amazon. And
Speaker 1: Mark Lori's BlackBerry at the time gets an email pop
Speaker 1: up and it's an offer from Walmart, and they're excited
Speaker 1: to for.
Speaker 2: Like one hundred million dollars more than the five and
Speaker 2: change exactly five point fifty Amazon head offers it's a.
Speaker 1: Higher offer and it's not the company that's destroyed them.
Speaker 1: So they go in the hallway, they discuss it, and
Speaker 1: they say, let's take this Walmart offer. They go back
Speaker 1: into the room with the Amazon executives. They say, hey,
Speaker 1: just want to let you know we got this offer.
Speaker 1: It's better for a shareholders. We're going to go in
Speaker 1: this direction. And they're told by a senior Amazon executive, Okay,
Speaker 1: you go ahead and do that, and we'll go to
Speaker 1: cut the price of our diapers to zero.
Speaker 2: That seems legal, right, We're going to give our diapers
Speaker 2: a way to put you out of business and prevent
Speaker 2: you from selling to our competitor Walmart.
Speaker 1: Right. And the people in that room knew that if
Speaker 1: Walmart had decided to acquire Quidzy and Amazon put them
Speaker 1: out of you know, created this pricing war that they
Speaker 1: were selling diapers for either zero or.
Speaker 2: Like a dollar material change exactly. In fact, elements that
Speaker 2: would lead to the deal falling apart.
Speaker 1: Walmart could back away from the deal scot free, so
Speaker 1: they were forced to sell to their main competitor who
Speaker 1: put them in this position. And this created, you know,
Speaker 1: generational wealth for those two men who didn't even go
Speaker 1: to for a drink to celebrate because they were so upset.
Speaker 2: Now, what what did they end up doing in the
Speaker 2: future post that that purchase?
Speaker 1: Oh, they shut it down. They shut down quids They.
Speaker 2: Just took all the clients. They took the few years
Speaker 2: and then eventually was folded in. The two guys who
Speaker 2: created Quidcy. Did they do anything else in the field?
Speaker 1: Now, Mark Lori went on to start a company called
Speaker 1: jet dot.
Speaker 2: Com, he said, Which gets why.
Speaker 1: Walmt by it for a very significant sum, a couple
Speaker 1: of billion. Body now owns if you live in New York,
Speaker 1: there's a place called Wonder, this restaurant company that is
Speaker 1: I actually really like Wonder. So he's doing that now,
Speaker 1: So I mean this, He's gone on to do really
Speaker 1: big things.
Speaker 2: So the fascinating thing is, after being forced to sell
Speaker 2: the diapers dot Com company to Amazon, Jet dot Com
Speaker 2: became essentially the back end of all of Walmart online retailing.
Speaker 2: So I want to say he got a little bit
Speaker 2: of payback. Whether whether or not he, you know, put
Speaker 2: as much pain to Amazon as Amazon put to him
Speaker 2: is arguable. But it was pretty obvious, and you make
Speaker 2: it clear in the book he was imagine getting bought
Speaker 2: for five hundred and fifty million dollars and leaving dejected.
Speaker 2: I know, it's kind of amazing.
Speaker 1: It is, it really is. I mean, I just I
Speaker 1: think it speaks to like the pain and suffering they
Speaker 1: went through with this M and A battle.
Speaker 2: What are the things that kind of shocked me. You
Speaker 2: mentioned what a difficult a place to work Amazon is.
Speaker 2: They even backload their stock options. Your stock options are
Speaker 2: like if you work at Google or somewhere else, you
Speaker 2: get stock options and they'll vest in three years and
Speaker 2: you could start selling. At least that's what it used
Speaker 2: to be. I don't know what it is these days,
Speaker 2: but they backloaded. It's five fifteen. Year three is forty
Speaker 2: percent of your stock options. Year four is forty percent.
Speaker 2: You really have to stick it out, don't you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And that creates this pernicious cycle. The average white
Speaker 1: collar employee at Amazon lasts a year and a half.
Speaker 1: That's a major so most of them leave their stock
Speaker 1: options on the table. But if you want to get
Speaker 1: your full payout, you have to survive. You have to
Speaker 1: not be part of that bottom six percent. And that
Speaker 1: creates that pressure cooker of an environment that I talk about.
Speaker 2: So let's ask the question about the big question. Is
Speaker 2: Amazon a monopoly? Have they remade corporate power in their
Speaker 2: own image? And what sort of antitrust enforcement might we
Speaker 2: expect in the future.
Speaker 1: Well around the world, including our government, have said it
Speaker 1: is a monopoly. The Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit
Speaker 1: last year saying it's an illegal monopoly, and the lawsuit
Speaker 1: says it could be broken up.
Speaker 2: What about Europe, they've been pretty strict about Amazon as well.
Speaker 1: The ear was way ahead of us on policing our
Speaker 1: own giants. Marguerite Bestare was looking into Amazon, Facebook, Google,
Speaker 1: and Apple years ago and people thought she was crazy.
Speaker 2: Right, So we're recording this a week before the election.
Speaker 2: We don't know what the outcome is going to be,
Speaker 2: but it appears that no matter who wins, Amazon's going
Speaker 2: to stay in the FTC's crosshairs. Because Lena Kahan works
Speaker 2: for the Biden Harris administration, the assumption is if Harris wins,
Speaker 2: she continues, and Trump really dislikes Bezos because of his
Speaker 2: ownership with The Washington Post and has said Amazon should
Speaker 2: be broken up. What's it like inside the lobbying arm
Speaker 2: of Amazon heading into this election.
Speaker 1: It's really fascinating. I don't know which administration they would
Speaker 1: want to win. They you know, they had a really
Speaker 1: painful four years under Trump where he was just berating
Speaker 1: them online every day, alleging that Jeff Bezos was using
Speaker 1: the Washington Post as a political tool to.
Speaker 2: Attack him to the Amazon Washington Post.
Speaker 1: Amazon Washington Post, that should be a lobbyist, according to him.
Speaker 1: So that was like super painful. But then the Biden
Speaker 1: administration came in where they had good connections, and that
Speaker 1: was even more painful in some ways. You know, Biden
Speaker 1: chooses Lena Khan to be the head of the FTC.
Speaker 1: She brings forward the lawsuit against Amazon for being a monopoly.
Speaker 1: So either way, it's not like a really great outcome
Speaker 1: for that company.
Speaker 2: You know. The interesting thing about the anti trust enforcement
Speaker 2: against Microsoft in the nineties was just having that enforcement
Speaker 2: hanging over their head was enough to allow all these
Speaker 2: small companies to get out from under you know, every
Speaker 2: startup had to deal with the question every software startup, Hey,
Speaker 2: what's going to prevent Microsoft from just building these features
Speaker 2: to office or into Windows? And it was really challenging.
Speaker 2: The anti trust enforcements seem to have forced them to
Speaker 2: behave better and that, you know, that was the Cambrian
Speaker 2: explosion of dot COM's Might we see something similar with Amazon?
Speaker 2: Might online retail expand from the forty percent market share
Speaker 2: Amazon has elsewhere if this anti trustwork is enforced.
Speaker 1: You know, the big question is will this FTC suit
Speaker 1: have a chilling effect on the way Amazon behaves? I
Speaker 1: would say they have more competition these days, Timu and
Speaker 1: Shean are you know, these low cost Chinese marketplaces. But
Speaker 1: I don't see any changes to the way Amazon is operating.
Speaker 1: You know, Andy Jasse there's a scoop in the book.
Speaker 1: He's telling his deputies, you know, at around the same
Speaker 1: time that they have this historic lawsuit against them for
Speaker 1: being too big, that they should be so much bigger.
Speaker 1: He tells them, we should be a ten trillion dollar company. Okay,
Speaker 1: so how do you get to ten trillion dollars when
Speaker 1: you're two trillion dollars. It's competing the way you're you've
Speaker 1: been competing.
Speaker 2: Putting it, supersizing it. And since we're talking about antitrust enforcement,
Speaker 2: it's kind of fascinating that the entire we've had forty
Speaker 2: years of lacks anti trust enforcement, dating back to the
Speaker 2: Reagan administration and Judge Bork, who was one of the
Speaker 2: big advocates of moving away from historical anti trust enforcement.
Speaker 2: You describe in the book. Lena Khan is a twenty
Speaker 2: seven year old law student at Yale. She writes a
Speaker 2: law review paper on how much Amazon is monopoly? And
Speaker 2: when was the last time a law review paper when
Speaker 2: viral like this? This completely upended what was going on.
Speaker 2: Tell us a little bit about Lena Khan.
Speaker 1: Yeah, she was this law school student at Yale, where
Speaker 1: actually Bork had been a professor, and she writes this
Speaker 1: seminal law review article saying that the antitrust laws the
Speaker 1: way that they're being interpreted, partially because of Bork, are
Speaker 1: failingstomers and consumers in the US, and that Amazon's the
Speaker 1: prime example of this. That Amazon is a monopoly and
Speaker 1: it's allowed to be monopoly because we're not enforcing her
Speaker 1: anti trust laws the way that they were first derived.
Speaker 1: And this might be the only time that a law
Speaker 1: review article goes viral. Millions of people read this thing,
Speaker 1: including legislators, CEOs. It gets picked up by the New
Speaker 1: York Times, right, it becomes this like zeitgeist type of movement.
Speaker 1: It's the first time that people start equating this company
Speaker 1: with the smile on the box, with potentially being a monopoly.
Speaker 1: And she starts to with this other band of trustbusters
Speaker 1: start to reshape this moment in time about whether anti
Speaker 1: trust laws are failing Americans. She makes the.
Speaker 2: Point that the way Amazon has become a monopoly and
Speaker 2: abuses its platform power is very reminiscent of what we
Speaker 2: saw under standard Oil and Rockefeller tell us a little
Speaker 2: bit about some of the abusive uses of their power
Speaker 2: that manifest in their growth.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So, she points to predatory pricing that Amazon was
Speaker 1: undercutting the market in those early days in order to
Speaker 1: steal share from rivals and put them out of business.
Speaker 1: She also says they're like a utility, that this isn't
Speaker 1: a company that you might want to work with. You
Speaker 1: sort of have to work with them if you want
Speaker 1: to reach shoppers, and that has power over the sellers
Speaker 1: on their website, where they could you know, Jack up fees.
Speaker 1: It has power over lots of different competitors that feel
Speaker 1: like they're forced to work with their main rival in
Speaker 1: order to access markets.
Speaker 2: And share a lot of data a lot of their
Speaker 2: rather not as well as by advertising from them.
Speaker 1: Advertising is another area.
Speaker 2: In the book. You talk about how when Amazon enters
Speaker 2: into the marketplace with a competitive product, they shut off
Speaker 2: their competitors' ability to advertise that.
Speaker 1: Product they do, and that's you know, advertisings become so
Speaker 1: core to being successful as a seller on Amazon dot
Speaker 1: Com because there's millions of other sellers that flywheel that
Speaker 1: if you don't buy advertising, you're not showing up in search.
Speaker 1: And what did Amazon do Roku, which makes a competing
Speaker 1: device for them for streaming TV, all of a sudden
Speaker 1: they can't buy ads anymore. You know, this happened across
Speaker 1: the device's space.
Speaker 2: And so the anti trust law is, Hey, if you
Speaker 2: want to be a platform, you could be a platform.
Speaker 2: If you want to be a retailer, you could be
Speaker 2: a retailer, but you can't tie your platform advertising into
Speaker 2: reducing the competitiveness of your products versus other people.
Speaker 1: Well, that's where the Congress was alleging that if you
Speaker 1: can't own the world's biggest online platform and also compete
Speaker 1: on it, that it has to be one or the.
Speaker 2: Other spin out that separate business and.
Speaker 1: Do FTC lawsuits a little bit different. She alleges that actually,
Speaker 1: in this current form, Amazon's become the monopoly. They don't
Speaker 1: have to do predatory pricing anymore. They could actually exert
Speaker 1: their power on their sellers. You know, a decade ago,
Speaker 1: the average seller in Amazon gave nineteen cents on the
Speaker 1: dollar back to Amazon and fees. Today that's forty five
Speaker 1: cents on the dollar. That's unbelievable, and that means those
Speaker 1: sellers have had to raise the price of their goods
Speaker 1: to cover Amazon's margin.
Speaker 2: Or reduce their own margin or their own margin.
Speaker 1: And the FTC lawsuit says, because Amazon's so big and
Speaker 1: they require those sellers to also have the lowest price
Speaker 1: in Amazon, that they have to raise the price on
Speaker 1: Target dot Com and Walmart dot Com and on and
Speaker 1: on and on, and it's created higher prices for all
Speaker 1: of us.
Speaker 2: Huh, So are you an Amazon Prime member? Do you
Speaker 2: use Amazon?
Speaker 1: We have a Prime account because my husband watches football
Speaker 1: and they have Thursday Night Football. We don't really shop
Speaker 1: on it though.
Speaker 2: You don't very rarely. Huh, that's really interesting. All right,
Speaker 2: Let's jump to our favorite questions. We ask all of
Speaker 2: our guests starting with, so what are you streaming these days?
Speaker 2: What are you either listening to on Audible? What are
Speaker 2: you watching on Amazon Prime or Netflix or Apple Plus?
Speaker 2: What was keeping you entertained besides Thursday Night Football?
Speaker 1: I watch Nobody Wants This. That was very good, charming,
Speaker 1: really really good. I listened to my favorite murder. It's
Speaker 1: a true crime podcast. I'm a Murder, you know they
Speaker 1: call it.
Speaker 2: Tell us about your early mentors who helped shape your career.
Speaker 1: Oh gosh, I have so many of them. Joanne Lublin,
Speaker 1: who was this dynamo at the Wall Street Journal, Danis Simaluka,
Speaker 1: my former boss at the Wall Street Journal on M
Speaker 1: and A Jamie Heller who's now the CEO of Business Insider,
Speaker 1: Dennis Berman, who is an amazing m and a reporter
Speaker 1: at the Journal. And Drew Dowell, I would say, who
Speaker 1: he's now overseas for us.
Speaker 2: Let's talk about books. What are your favorites? What are
Speaker 2: you reading right now?
Speaker 1: So some of my favorites are The Moonstone by Wilkie
Speaker 1: Collins it's like one of the first Victorian detective mysteries.
Speaker 1: I love the Bronts and Jane Austin. I know that's
Speaker 1: like pretty trite. I'm reading some just fun Halloween type
Speaker 1: of books right now, this book called Lucy Fowley called
Speaker 1: The Midnight Feast. That's been really fun. And I love
Speaker 1: Sally Rooney. I have her new book ready to read
Speaker 1: after this one.
Speaker 2: All right, our final two questions. What sort of advice
Speaker 2: would you give to a recent college grad interested in
Speaker 2: a career in either journalism, m and a retail what's
Speaker 2: your advice journalism?
Speaker 1: It's I mean, you have to hustle. I would say
Speaker 1: it's to get as many bylines as you can, even
Speaker 1: if it's not at one of the prestige newspapers. At first,
Speaker 1: I fully believe the way I got hired at the
Speaker 1: was freelancing my college papers. My college you know, articles
Speaker 1: to other places to get a byline in places in
Speaker 1: tiny newspapers that probably don't exist anymore. And you just
Speaker 1: have to be reporting around you all the time, making
Speaker 1: sources wherever you are, keeping a great rolodex. So I
Speaker 1: think that's the most important thing you could do.
Speaker 2: And what do you know about the world of journalism today.
Speaker 2: You wish you knew twenty years or so ago when
Speaker 2: you were first starting out.
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh. When I first started out, dot com
Speaker 1: was like not even that much of a thing, right,
Speaker 1: you know. The WSJ dot Com was this like bastard
Speaker 1: step child, right, And that's that's what I was put on. Actually,
Speaker 1: I think I wish I knew that you just have
Speaker 1: to be so resilient in this profession that if you're
Speaker 1: doing your job well, it means a lot of rejection.
Speaker 1: That you're gonna cold call people and they're gonna hang
Speaker 1: up on you, and that's fine, cold call the next one.
Speaker 1: You just get up again and get up again, because
Speaker 1: so much of journalism is a numbers game.
Speaker 2: Really really interesting. Thank you, Dana for being so generous
Speaker 2: with your time. We have been speaking with Dana Mattioli.
Speaker 2: She covers Amazon for The Wall Street Journal and is
Speaker 2: the author of the book The Everything War, Amazon's ruthless
Speaker 2: quest to own the world and remake corporate power. If
Speaker 2: you enjoy this conversation, well be sure and check out
Speaker 2: any of the five hundred or so previous discussions we've
Speaker 2: had over the past ten years. You can find those
Speaker 2: at iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, Bloomberg, wherever you find your favorite podcast,
Speaker 2: and be sure and check out my new short forum
Speaker 2: podcast At the Money, Short conversations with experts about single
Speaker 2: topics that affect your money, earning it, spending it, and
Speaker 2: most importantly investing it At the Money, in the Master's
Speaker 2: and Business feed, or wherever you find your favorite podcast,
Speaker 2: I would be remiss if I do not thank the
Speaker 2: correct team that helps us put these conversations together each week.
Speaker 2: Sarah Livesey is my audio engineer. Jone Russo is my
Speaker 2: head of research. Anna Luke is my producer. Sage Bauman
Speaker 2: is the head of podcasts at Bloomberg. I'm Barry Bertolts.
Speaker 2: You've been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.