Dan Rose - How Stunning Founders Operate

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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I hosted David on Invest Like the Best last summer and it's hard not to walk away insanely energized after listening to any episode with him. You can find a link to Founders and those episodes in the show notes of this conversation. You can also search all past transcripts on our website, joincolossus.com.
Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. Invest Like the Best is part of the Colossus family of podcasts and you can access all our podcasts including edited transcripts, show notes and other resources to keep learning at joincolossus.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:07)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO and founding partner of Positive Sum and the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Positive Sum or O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of Positive Sum or O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:41)
Dan is the chairman of Coatue Ventures and has one of the most interesting collections of experiences of anyone I've talked to. He spent 20 years at Amazon and Facebook in their early days, working closely with Jeff Bezos, Andy Jassy, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sheryl Sandberg. He's had a front row seat to the defining products and founders of our era, and his lessons from those experiences do not disappoint. Please enjoy this great discussion with Dan Rose.
Dan, we have a total embarrassment of riches of stuff to talk about, given you've just been at the center of so many interesting business stories in the last 25 years. I really didn't even know where to begin, but I have to pick a product, which is Amazon's Kindle, mostly because I've spent some large chunk of my life as a user of it.

**Dan Rose** (3:24)
Me too.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (3:25)
Most of my 20s, effectively my downtime was spent on Amazon's Kindle products in various different forms. So I'd love you to begin our conversation today by maybe just telling the story of that product within obviously a much bigger organization, with an eye towards the lessons that it started to teach you about building, launching, distributing great technology products.

**Dan Rose** (3:46)
Sure. And it's great to be here, Patrick. Thanks for having me. The Kindle was for me, actually, the big break in my career. I was at Amazon for four years. I had done a few different things. I started out in business development. I actually dropped out of business school after a summer internship at Amazon to stay on full time. Then I ended up moving over to the retail business and got to experience buying inventory and pricing it and running sales. That was the whole part of the business. Then Steve Kessel was asked by Jeff Bezos in 2004 to start up this new division. Steve at the time was running the entire media business at Amazon. He was running the books, music, and video business, which was the largest business by revenue. But even more importantly, the books business alone was the vast majority of Amazon's profits at the time.