Amazon.com

Hey, Acquired listeners. In the time between when we recorded this episode and now when we're releasing it, longtime 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.

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 Coie and the telecommunications firms, Western Wireless and McCaw Cellular, that really make up a large part of the infrastructure we all use for our phones today. We also were lucky enough to, uh, 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.

Yeah. Tom was the longest serving Amazon board member other than Jeff himself. I believe twenty-three years, was the lead independent director and had a huge impact on the company, and of course, on us.

We'll all remember Tom. He gave back in so many wonderful ways, and this episode is dedicated to you, Tom Alberg. Thank you.

Who got the truth? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Who got the truth now? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Sit me down, say it straight, another story on the way. Who got the truth?

Welcome to season eleven, episode two of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert, and I am the co-founder and managing director of Seattle-based Pioneer Square Labs, and our venture fund, PSL Ventures.

And I'm David Rosenthal, and I am an angel investor based in San Francisco.

And we are your hosts. Our story today is probably the single most interesting business of the past thirty 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-

Ah, so great

... our episode with Alfred Lin on Zappos, and of course, by referencing Bezos's famous two thousand and nine speech about outsourcing anything that does not make your beer taste better over, and over, and over again. [chuckles]

And over! [chuckles]

But we decided that no self-respecting technology business historians like ourselves could skip over this incredible, tumultuous, death-defying, and, and ultimately, very, very successful story. Today, we'll be tackling Amazon.com, the website that sells books and now everything else on the World Wide 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.

Woo-hoo.

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 dot-com bust headlined, "Amazon.bomb," I can tell you from staring at my mountain of notes that, uh, there are some details in here that I certainly didn't know, and you may not have known either.