Gurley cites DP Review, a one-person digital camera review site acquired by Amazon for forty to seventy million dollars.
“I love this story of DP Review, which is a website for digital camera reviews.”
Gurley discovered Amazon was running same-day delivery experiments through Uber drivers by talking to them as a shareholder.
“And I always talk to them. I always talk to the drivers because I'm a shareholder and I always talk to the drivers.”
Gurley contrasts Bezos respectfully addressing shareholders in his S-1 against later founders' antagonistic approach.
“So if you reread his S-one where he writes a letter, it's titled To Our Share Owners, and he talks a lot about them.”
Gurley says AI companies have bigger burn rates than Amazon or any company in venture capital history.
“Oh, more than Amazon ever lost. And so the the burn rates are bigger than they've ever been in the history of venture capital. And eventually, they're gonna wanna bring those in.”
Gurley says Mechanical Turk network effects level out because aggregating more commodity workers does not improve quality.
“If you had 100,000, it doesn't really change the quality of the work that much.”
Gurley learned from Bill Miller that network effects justify Amazon growing at unreasonable rates for extended periods.
“value just means that the asset is underpriced relative to what you think it will be worth in the future.”
Gurley discovered Amazon was running same-day delivery experiments on top of Uber using burner phones and driver cars.
“And I'm like, what happens at 02:30? He goes, I have to meet at the Amazon warehouse at 02:30.”
Gurley says most companies over $20-30M in revenue wouldn't run Amazon's experimental hack approach due to accounting concerns.
“I know for a fact that most of the companies I've worked with that have gotten over 20 or 30,000,000 in revenue would not run that experiment because someone would say, oh, we won't know how to do the accounting. We can't like, that's too much of a hack, like, whatever.”
Gurley says Amazon ran same-day delivery experiment using Uber while most companies over $30M wouldn't.
“I know for a fact that most of the companies I've worked with that have gotten over 20 or 30,000,000 in revenue would not run that experiment”
Gurley quotes Bezos saying internal experiments get killed only when the last person with good judgment gives up.
“They ask him, when does a internal experiment get killed? And he said, when the last person with good judgment gives up.”