Amazon.com

**David Rosenthal** (0:00)
Hey, Acquired listeners. In the time between when we recorded this episode and now when we're releasing it, long time Amazon board member and Madrona Venture Group founder, Tom Alberg, sadly passed away. And we wanted to, instead of our usual funny cold opener here, take a moment and dedicate this episode to Tom.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:22)
Tom had such a huge impact on David and my careers. Tom also had such a huge impact on Seattle and really the whole technology ecosystem, helping to build the law firm Perkins-Cooey and the telecommunications firms Western Wireless and McCall Cellular that really make up a large part of the infrastructure we all use for our phones today. We also were lucky enough to have Tom on Acquired and it was really wonderful getting to spend the time in person with him, gosh, four or five years ago now, David.

**David Rosenthal** (0:52)
Yeah, Tom was the longest serving Amazon board member other than Jeff himself. I believe 23 years was the lead independent director and had a huge impact on the company and of course on us.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:05)
Well, I'll remember Tom, he gave back in so many wonderful ways and this episode is dedicated to you, Tom Alberg. Thank you. Welcome to season 11 episode 2 of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert and I'm the co-founder and managing director of Seattle based pioneer Square Labs and our venture fund PSL Ventures.

**David Rosenthal** (1:45)
And I'm David Rosenthal and I'm an angel investor based in San Francisco.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:49)
And we are your hosts. Our story today is probably the single most interesting business of the past 30 years. For the longest time, David and I resisted doing an Amazon episode because it almost felt like a trope or that we needed to do something maybe more unexpected. We've tackled bits and pieces like our interview with former board member Tom Alberg in the Amazon IPO episode, our episode with Alfred Lin on Zappos, and of course by referencing Bezos' famous 2009 speech about outsourcing anything that does not make your beer taste better over and over and over again.

**David Rosenthal** (2:27)
And over.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:29)
But we decided that no self-respecting technology business historians like ourselves could skip over this incredible, tumultuous, death-defying, and ultimately very, very successful story. Today, we'll be tackling amazon.com, the website that sells books and now everything else on the worldwide web. As you know, Amazon is also one of the rare companies that built a completely separate and dominant business in Amazon Web Services. And we'll save that for our next episode. This story is for longtime students of Amazon and newcomers alike. So while you may be familiar with Jeff's flywheel diagram, or the famed door desks, or the Barron's article from the.com bust, headlined Amazon.bomb, I can tell you from staring at my mountain of notes that there are some details in here that I certainly didn't know and you may not have known either.

**David Rosenthal** (3:24)
Oh, it's just such a good story, too. Yeah, I'm so glad we did Walmart first. We almost didn't because it just perfectly sets the stage. For Amazon.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:36)
Oh, yeah, yeah. The big thing that we're doing today is we're going to try and answer the question, how did Amazon succeed to such an incredible degree that it has, where so many of their dot cobs siblings burst into flames? So first, we have some big, big news here at Acquired World HQ. After seven years of beating back requests, we are finally launching a merch store. We've been holding on to this bit for a while because we can think of no better episode to launch our internet storefront than here on the Amazon episode. So we're partnering with what I think is the single highest quality merchandise platform on the internet, Cotton Bureau. They make really nice stuff that I have tons of in my closet. We are launching with men's and women's t-shirts, sweatshirts, tanks, and even onesies. If you, like David, have a little one at home, and if you decide to be first in this first wave of people to support the fashionable Acquired merch, you should tweet at us at AcquiredFM, and we will retweet some of our favorites. So the link is in the show notes, or you can go to acquired.fm slash store. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (4:47)
So Crusoe, as listeners know by now, is a clean compute cloud provider, specifically built for AI workloads. NVIDIA is one of their major partners, and literally Crusoe's data centers are nothing but racks and racks of A100s and H100s. And because Crusoe's cloud is purpose-built for AI and run on wasted, stranded, or clean energy, they can provide significantly better performance per dollar than traditional cloud providers.