Amazon: Can You Feel It

too bad ana kournikova is not available now :slight_smile:

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Manch,

Thought you said they are not divorce :clown_face:
When the man is rich, is a matter of time, he would get rid of the yellow face lady. Ask your wifeđŸ˜¶ what she thinks about you becoming rich, she would be very worried

They knew each other at least 15 years ago. Has Bezos with her for a long time?

I was just kidding


Having said that
 he did think she will be a good ambassador for sports bra
 so maybe he knew her more intimately than he admits
 :slight_smile: (again kidding)

Amazon is pretty evil
 :imp:

This year’s shareholder letter. Theme of the year: wandering.

Some juicy bits:

And it’s a high bar too because our first-party business has grown dramatically over that period, from $1.6 billion in 1999 to $117 billion this past year. The compound annual growth rate for our first-party business in that time period is 25%. But in that same time, third-party sales have grown from $0.1 billion to $160 billion – a compound annual growth rate of 52%. To provide an external benchmark, eBay’s gross merchandise sales in that period have grown at a compound rate of 20%, from $2.8 billion to $95 billion.

eBay sucks. We all know that.

Bezos spent two paragraphs going into pretty fine details of AWS’s database offerings. ORCL and MDB: watch out.

Within AWS, that same pattern has recurred many times. For example, we invented DynamoDB, a highly scalable, low latency key-value database now used by thousands of AWS customers. And on the listening- carefully-to-customers side, we heard loudly that companies felt constrained by their commercial database options and had been unhappy with their database providers for decades – these offerings are expensive, proprietary, have high-lock-in and punitive licensing terms. We spent several years building our own database engine, Amazon Aurora, a fully-managed MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible service with the same or better durability and availability as the commercial engines, but at one-tenth of the cost. We were not surprised when this worked.

But we’re also optimistic about specialized databases for specialized workloads. Over the past 20 to 30 years, companies ran most of their workloads using relational databases. The broad familiarity with relational databases among developers made this technology the go-to even when it wasn’t ideal. Though sub-optimal, the data set sizes were often small enough and the acceptable query latencies long enough that you could make it work. But today, many applications are storing very large amounts of data – terabytes and petabytes. And the requirements for apps have changed. Modern applications are driving the need for low latencies, real-time processing, and the ability to process millions of requests per second. It’s not just key-value stores like DynamoDB, but also in-memory databases like Amazon ElastiCache, time series databases like Amazon Timestream, and ledger solutions like Amazon Quantum Ledger Database – the right tool for the right job saves money and gets your product to market faster.

I like his idea of scaling up failures:

As a company grows, everything needs to scale, including the size of your failed experiments. If the size of your failures isn’t growing, you’re not going to be inventing at a size that can actually move the needle. Amazon will be experimenting at the right scale for a company of our size if we occasionally have multibillion-dollar failures. Of course, we won’t undertake such experiments cavalierly. We will work hard to make them good bets, but not all good bets will ultimately pay out. This kind of large-scale risk taking is part of the service we as a large company can provide to our customers and to society. The good news for shareowners is that a single big winning bet can more than cover the cost of many losers.

Finally Bezos is trolling Walmart and Target :smile:

Today I challenge our top retail competitors (you know who you are!) to match our employee benefits and our $15 minimum wage. Do it! Better yet, go to $16 and throw the gauntlet back at us. It’s a kind of competition that will benefit everyone.

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Good one.

How Amazon’s $97 million Eero acquisition screwed employees and minted millionaires

According to confidential documents viewed by Mashable, Amazon acquired Eero for $97 million. Eero executives brought home multi-million dollar bonuses and eight-figure salary increases. Everyone else, however, didn’t fare quite so well. Investors took major hits, and the Amazon acquisition rendered Eero stock worthless: $0.03 per share, down from a common stock high of $3.54 in July 2017. It typically would have cost around $3 for employees to exercise their stock, meaning they would actually lose money if they tried to cash out.

Former and current Eero employees who chose not to exercise those options are now empty-handed. And those who did exercise options, investing their financial faith in the company, have lost money.

Meanwhile, the Eero execs who stay to help Amazon wage its war for smart home domination will take home around $30 million.

What a fake news headline. Without the acquisition, the company would have gone under and everyone would be jobless. It was so bad because of the $40M debt. Blame the management of the company for blowing through VC money, racking up debt, and not delivering.

The real lesson is:

“ Hardware startups require a lot of cash, and technological progress can render a product obsolete before it has a chance to take off. Nearly all (97 percent) of the 400 hardware startups tracked in a 2017 report from CB Insights either died or became “zombies,” companies that survive for awhile with VC money, but eventually fizzle out.”

Amazon’s warehouse-worker tracking system can automatically fire people without a human supervisor’s involvement

Humans working under supervision of machines.

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Managers have long had the ability to see employee performance in real-time. You can see what process path an associate is in and how many units per hour they are processing.

Why Amazon is Gobbling Up Failed Malls

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UPS is getting into the fulfillment business dominated by Amazon’s FBA.

That’s the cash cow. The profitability is much higher than retail units, since FBA fees are on a cost plus model. The downside is amazon loses pricing control and can’t provide match competitors.

There’s a startup called Deliverr which is going after FBA too.

It also shows how badly eBay lacked vision and dropped the ball.

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Don’t know about Deliverr, only know a small Chicago startup called ShipBob in the same space.

Fulfillment is hugely capital intensive, and UPS and FedEx already have the muscles and cost advantage. I don’t think they have the technical chops though. UPS’ website is still a joke, not to mention the automation Amazon has invested in its fulfillment centers. UPS should have started 5 years ago.

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Competition is good for consumers.

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One thing that’s certain, Amazon is encroaching on the core businesses of FedEx and UPS while it doesn’t quite seem like Amazon is in any danger of the opposite coming true.

Actually that’s not true. UPS is trying to get into the fulfillment business but it’s a decade late. Now all they can do is watch themselves being killed slowly.

UPS has been in the fulfillment side for enterprise to enterprise for a while. I am guessing the push into B2C is new

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