Acquired - Acquired Episode 39- Whole Foods Market

0:00Yep. Yep. Completely agreed. Podcasting is the new groceries. Yeah. Well, good thing we're here on the scene. Welcome back to episode 39 of Acquired, the podcast about technology, acquisitions and IPOs. I'm Ben Gilbert. David Rosenfall. And we are your hosts. Today, we are coming in hot with the just announced Amazon acquisition of Whole Foods for 13.7 billion dollars all in cash. Are we ever? We are not planning on doing an episode today, but David and I woke up saw the news and absolutely could not resist. We live for this. So here we are. We do. This 4 p.m. PST on Friday, June 16th. The day the acquisition was announced this morning. And hot takes flying all over the internet. David and I do not purport to have any of the answers, but we do have hot takes of our own.

1:04So in true acquired fashion, we will probably be wildly speculative. We have no idea what they're going to do with this acquisition. And we certainly cannot give it a grade that we feel very confident about, but it's going to be real fun to talk about. Before we dive in though, important, important announcement. So Ben's birthday is coming up this week. And if you want to get him in present like me, you should leave acquired a review on Apple Podcast. See what we did there. No, seriously. David gets some of my birthday present too, apparently. I'll read your review then. But seriously, we have some acquired is growing a lot and we have some amazing guests coming on this summer. And that's possible because of the growth and the way to keep the growth going is through Apple Podcast reviews. So if you haven't, please leave one. We really, really appreciate it. And

2:00Thanks for being a listener. We do. And now I get to skip my section where I normally ask for Apple podcast reviews. My present to you is giving you a break from this. Perfect. Perfect. Well, listeners do know that we have a Slack. We're 750 strong now and it was blowing up today. So if you're a new listener to the show and you want to talk about any awesome news that is dropping on the day that it drops in technology, join us acquired.fm. You can join the Slack and be part of the discussion. All right, listeners.

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4:54for the show today. We are of course going to do history and facts as always, but it's going to be a little different than usual. One, because we didn't have the time to do the in-depth research that we usually do into whole foods, so it'll be a somewhat truncated history and facts on whole foods, but we'll still tell some fun stories. But we don't think that we can actually give kind of the full analysis and treatment of this deal in what it means without looking at a couple other companies too. So we're also going to talk about web van, keep systems, and of course Instacart, which will be a big topic of conversation today and already is in the media given what happened and Whole Foods being an investor in Instacart. But so to start off Whole Foods was started in 1978 in Austin, Texas by a young man named John Mackie.

5:48and his then-girlfriend, Renee Lawson Hardy. And it was originally not called Whole Foods. It was a natural foods store, you know, mostly for hippies, which they were in the late 70s in Austin. And they called it Safer Way, as which was an intentional dig at Safe Way. I have not heard that. That is awesome. It was great. John was on a podcast recently.

6:13I think it was NPR is how I built this. And it said that they called it then. They were sort of hoping that Safeway would sue them because then it would be like free publicity. But they were so small and insignificant that Safeway didn't even notice. I think I'd heard in the past that this Whole Foods is this Texas owned company and this is shocking. Like growing up, you know, we got one in Ohio.

6:34I remember thinking, oh, this is probably some San Francisco. Where are they eating like this? And where would there be a hippie commune that would inspire this and keep Austin weird, but shocking that it was in Texas to me? Well, as we all know, Austin and his stereotypes about it are not always true, but Austin is definitely hippie mecca and wasn't the 70s even more so. But so Mackie basically goes on, he's still the CEO of Whole Foods many years later, will continue to be under Amazon.

7:04Um, it was announced but he's basically like the Steve Jobs of grocery stores. So he dropped out of UT to start the company and he talks about kind of when he was at UT, he sort of had this very jobs like experience, you know, like jobs had a read in Portland when he was there for a semester.

7:23You know, Mackie kind of didn't like the structure of college and having to have a major and so he just decided he was gonna bum around and take whatever class is interested in and he ended up. He's like exactly the Steve Jobs. Exactly the Steve Jobs experience and he ended up through kind of that route getting involved with a vegetarian co-op on campus. That's where he met Renee and started getting into food and natural foods and whole foods and the two of them had this idea that they should.

7:52start their own store so they borrowed $10,000 and then they raised another $35,000 from investors and they start safer way and they put it in an old building and the store was on the first floor and then they had a restaurant on the second floor and then they lived on the third floor. Oh, that is awesome. Yeah, super cool. So they do it for a couple of years and it starts really working and they get lots of business and people really love what they're doing.

8:21But of course, because Austin's a hippie town, there are other natural foods markets in town. And there's one called the Clarksville Natural Grocery. And that was run by two guys, Mark Skiles and Craig Weller. And Mackie, the whole food CEO, kind of admired what they were doing. And he approaches them about merging and becoming a bigger store combined together. So they do.

8:46And then they had to rename the business, and they renamed it Whole Foods Market, and thus Whole Foods is born. Yeah. It's funny. We've done other ones that have origin stories in these small mergers too. Like you look at Iljeornale and Starbucks, kind of a similar thing. Very, very similar carries. Mackeys basically, the Howard Sultz and Steve Jobs combined of the grocery business.

9:10So they do the merger and then a couple years later they start expanding first elsewhere in Texas and then they go to New Orleans and they buy a company there called the Whole Food Company and then basically they kind of learn that growing through acquisition there are lots of you know local natural food stores throughout the country especially in kind of more liberal hippie areas It is so true. It is like shockingly true. I did like a weird little anecdote but I was doing this bike trip up the coast of California last summer and we'd get into these little towns that had like it became the running joke of the trip. Like the little towns that had like three or four buildings and it seems like there wasn't much going on there but have like an incredible natural market.

9:52And it is amazing like when you get into these, you know, if those were any bigger, you could totally see the whole food just gobbling that up and it being, you know, right under their brand. Yep. And that's really how they grew by acquiring a lot of those little stores and little chains and then slowly over time, turning them into whole foods and into, you know, the big, big box store that whole foods is today. But kind of as they do that, they're over the decades, you know, the sort of, they catch the wave of, you know, whole natural foods, organic foods, they really help start the organic food wave and publicize it among not just hippies, but kind of everybody and especially young people in the American population. So they keep growing and by the mid-2000s, they're above a $10 billion market cap, one of the largest grocery chains in America. Then the recession happens in 2008 and the financial crash and the stock craters then, but then it kind of goes right back up and

10:50Growth continues by 2014. Whole Foods has become the 30th largest retailer period in the US. Wow. But then over the last couple years, unfortunately, for them, growth kind of stopped. So as of today, when Amazon acquired them, for the last seven quarters straight, they've had declining sales of declining same-store sales. And the stock has fallen precipitously. Huh.

11:17declining same store sales like it seems like I mean this is like the urban Seattle bubble I'm in but it sure seems like the health food movement is in more full swing than it's ever been yeah people are woke David this is uh this was really odd to me too I just don't know enough about the grocery industry to know what was happening but the little I was able you know to read and then this makes sense is that it was actually kind of mostly growing competition from other stores that are going to be a trader Joe's or plenty of other even regular grocery stores now are offering plenty of natural and organic. Yeah. Often cheaper than Whole Foods. I mean the knock on Whole Foods is it's expensive. And you totally see that here. Like I've been shocked with Kroger owned QFC here in Seattle is a you know last couple of years really stepped up their game to the point where.

12:03I can get enough, you know, really healthy stuff there, where I'd actually, you know, I can totally see why the same source sales would be declining for Whole Foods. Yeah. So the stock's been under a lot of pressure for the last couple of years. And actually there's an activist hedge fund, Janna Partners, that I believe pushed for, I believe ended up getting board seats and has been kind of, you know, really pushing the company to, you know, take a corporate action, meaning sell itself. This is totally interesting. So last.

12:32fall. Amazon was, at least this was a, I think it was a Bloomberg story, that it was reported that Amazon was considering buying whole foods, but then Janice stepped in as an activist investor and that calmed down for a little while. And, you know, there's been other talks recently, we'll get into the Albertsons stuff. The Albertsons was considering it take over a bit more recently. But on this Janice Partners thing, Janice requires, I think it was 8.3% of Whole Foods last fall. And then is it able to flip it for the premium that they got to Amazon today? And Amazon was interested before Janice stepped in. So I'd love to know that story of how did Janice manage to make that happen when Amazon knew the price was only going to go up when that happened.

13:17Well, nothing drives acquisition interests like other acquisition interests and viable alternative paths too. So we don't know now but I'm sure lots of stories will come out in the coming months. But yes, as you as you mentioned back in April, it was rumored that Albert Sins was looking at buying the company. And then today the big announcement that Amazon finally would acquire the company for 13.7 billion.

13:41in cash. So $42 a share, which is 27% premium to wear the stock closed yesterday. And on a sort of price to earnings, you know, multiple ratio of 31 versus kind of 14 and a half, which is where the average grocery store was trading these days, which I assume that's kind of how grocery chains trade.

14:04but like disclaimer, we don't know much about the industry. Well, David, this is fascinating. So I just had this conversation with a coworker and I was doing some of the research for the show. The annual sales last year for Whole Foods was 15.6 billion. And I was like, wait a minute. So the market cap of this grocery store is actually less than a single year of revenue, which to us in the tech business, like you get a two, three, four, 10 X multiple on revenue.

14:33And if you look at the grocery store business, apparently not the case. And I think actually retail all up. I heard another stat and when I was talking to someone who's kind of in the know about this, that boutique retail, actually the general valuation for that is around a quarter of your annual sale. So it really, it's a totally different ballgame than we're used to covering. And that just comes down to margins, right? I mean, the margins in retail generally are tiny. I mean, Amazon trades, I believe trades at a much lower revenue multiple than other.

15:01tech companies because it is a retail business and has lower margins and grocery is like razor razor thin margins makes Amazon look like a software business. Yeah. And then well the other interesting things you mentioned that 29% or I'm sorry 27% premium listeners David and I were chatting with a friend who's kind of in the know before the show today and mentioned that Whole Foods had been aggressively pursuing a sale six months ago after Janet Partners came in and you know their main intention was to slim operations or streamline operations, which I don't really know how much you can do in the time frame from when they took that position until now. So I can't really speak to if that actually happened. But they were aggressively looking for a seller for the last six months. And it's fascinating to see 27% premium over where they're trading in the public markets. It's in the range of what you would expect from these things, but it's certainly on the high end. And it's really interesting and certainly implies that there was a tremendous amount of competitive pressure.

16:00that even when they were looking to sell so hard, they still had enough leverage to get that sort of a premium. Yeah. Well, and it speaks to what Amazon can do with business that nobody else can. So let's put a pin in that for a minute. We'll come back to Whole Foods, of course. But we want to talk about these three other companies quickly. So that are pretty key to the story. So the first is the infamous Webvan. So the bruntofall.com jokes back in the day. This company was founded in 96 by Lewis Borders who is the same Lewis Borders who was co-founder and CEO of the Borders Bookstore. No way. Same. I never knew that. All of the intersections across this whole story between you know with Amazon at the center and books and retail and like it's all the same people and it's really key and I think this is something that

16:52hasn't been talked about yet, you know, in the few hours since the deal was announced in the press, but like to really understand what's going on here, you have to understand this background. So borders started Lewis Board. It was a separate company from Borders, the bookstore, but he started WebVan in 96 and immediately, you know, he was a superstar raised capital raised about $10 million. He invested a third of it and benchmarking Sequoia, you've invested the other third.

17:21in 97. Sequoia later put in another 50 million. Softbank put in another 160 million, quickly after that. Goldman Sachs put in another 50 million. This is all very quickly in kind of 97, 98. And what the company was doing was delivering groceries to people's homes. Web van, grocery van. And so they started in the Bay Area. But then they even before they'd really proved that it was working in the Bay Area because they never proved it really worked anywhere. They immediately started investing all this capital to roll out across the country. I mean, this were the go-go.com days that we talked about in the Amazon IPO episode. So Amazon was, of course, watching this with great interest. So the company ended up going public at the end of 1999. So just a couple years after being founded, they raised another $375 million in their IPO.

18:18and their market cap at IPO was close to $5 billion. So, and at this point, the company had done a grand total of just under $400,000 in sales. Oh, my God. I mean, this is why this is the cautionary tale about the.com bubble. And pretty quickly, I mean, the musical chairs stopped playing and the company just imploded. So, shortly a little over a year after that in the middle of 2001, they filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy.

18:46laid off all 2000 employees that they had at that point. And they lost all the money. So basically the whole nearly billion dollars that they raised, they just burned all of it. And so this was sort of the initial view that the world had on technology and internet approach to grocery delivery was that You know, you don't want to be web band like look what they look what they did. Yeah, I mean, that's like the very long extended and very painful visualization of that the hype cycle curve where it's, you know, the value isn't there yet, but the hype is really high. It comes completely crashing down and then has to slowly build back up to what it once was and may never even reach the hype that it previously hit. Yeah, but what's super interesting about it is how much of that DNA from web band

19:33kind of has still to this day held on to the dream of grocery delivery. And sort of there's been this perception in the world that grocery delivery doesn't work, that web they improved it. But really what web they improved is like how not to run a startup, not necessarily anything about the market. And so there was a company that actually came directly out of web van called Kiva Systems. And Kiva was founded in 2003, I believe.

20:02Wait, Kiva came out of what, this is incredible. This web is ridiculous. So, Kiva Systems, which Amazon ends up acquiring in 2012, was founded by a guy named Mick Mounds. And Mick had been, he had been at Webvan, and he was in charge of logistics in the fulfillment centers that Webvan had all around the country.

20:24You know, Webband knew that the margins on what they were doing were terrible. They were losing tons of money on every order, which is why they, as they grew, they went belly up so quickly. And his job had been to try and turn it around, and he didn't have enough time. But he kind of stayed obsessed with this idea about how could you make a fulfillment center?

20:42you know, more efficient and be able to eat out better margins out of a fulfillment center. It's like Amazon's whole promise. This is basically the entirety of, you know, Amazon's retail operations today is just solving that problem. So Mick founded Kevon with Kevon. He saw an opportunity to use robotics to not just replace human labor and actually what Kevon systems do is they don't necessarily replace human labor, but they make human labor much more efficient. They're robots that take palettes and racks that are in fulfillment centers and rather than them just being in the same place and having the employees walk around to pick the items from them they actually the robots move the racks themselves to the employees and the employees stay stationary and it's been a major improvement in innovation in distribution and fulfillment center systems so much so

21:32And actually, listeners should know, despite what we're saying, this is a very different Kiva than the Kiva.org that is sort of micro lending. Not micro lending, different Kiva. So in 2012, Amazon acquired the company for just under $800 million and started, Kiva had been, had head customers like Staples and actually, both Zappos and diapers.com were.

21:55Kiva customers which was probably why let's make the web exactly why Amazon started to realize after they acquired those companies the power of Kiva systems in fulfillment centers Amazon buys the company and then completely shuts down all other third party customers and brings all the tech in house and as since kind of remade I believe at this point probably the majority if not all of their US fulfillment centers into Kiva run fulfillment centers Yeah, I'm not sure. I know someone recently that went and did some work in one of the film and centers that wasn't Kiva enabled. Yeah, it may not be. I believe the goal is to convert every FC into a Kiva center, but they may not be fully done yet because it requires a huge amount of CapEx and time to make these conversions. So this has become a big, big part of Amazon and you kind of directly came out of the ashes of webbing separately.

22:50Amazon acquired the acquired the domain name for a web band. So if you go to webband.com today, it won't resolve. But Amazon actually owns it. Oh, wow. And they've been, you know, as the world knows. And we've been talking about on this show for a long time. Amazon's been thinking about groceries, you know, they didn't just wake up this morning and say, gosh, we should buy whole foods. Why did they not point that at Amazon fresh? Yeah, it's bizarre. You would think it would just redirect.

23:18They must have been waiting for the Whole Foods acquisition, and now it'll be the name of the Instacart. Yeah, totally. Oh, man, what a that would be just amazing. So in back in 2007, even before they acquired Kiva Systems, Amazon started thinking about groceries and launched Amazon fresh in Seattle. So if you know, like us many listeners in the show, you have lived in Seattle for the last few years.

23:48You see Amazon fresh bags on doorsteps all over the city. It is fresh only here. So for many years, actually for six years, it was only in Seattle and sort of the the lesson that they took in and many not just the Kiva founders, but many former web band employees actually work at Amazon now and are part of Amazon fresh. And the sort of key lesson that they took from web band after spending.

24:10many years analyzing it both on the Amazon side and folks having lived through it is that the problem with Webvan wasn't that the business didn't work. It was that they grew way too quickly and because the margins are so small growing a new market is incredibly costly because you need density and scale to be able to leverage your fixed costs enough and the distribution costs enough to be able to actually turn to profit and so if you grow too quickly You'll really quickly flip the boat upside down, which is what, which is what Webband did. Makes sense. So for six years, Amazon Fresh was just in Seattle. Then in 2013, they launched in LA. And then at the end of 2013, they launched in San Francisco. The next year, they went to New York and San Diego and Philadelphia. And basically, the rollout has been accelerating ever since. So they're in most major US cities at this point. They're international. They're in London.

25:04They're in Berlin. They're in Tokyo and has really been accelerating as they've started to perfect the business at the same time. It's funny, but but Instacard I think is actually more pervasive in the US. Yes. Like I know they're like Instacard just launched in Columbus. I know and you know, that's they're getting into a lot more markets than these sort of major top 10, 20 markets. Well, yeah, foreshadowing. The next company being Instacard, but just to wrap up on fresh, you know, they've also been Amazon has been doing a ton of innovation as we've talked about you know around grocery with the Amazon go the pilot that they're launching with cashier list stores in Seattle and pick up they actually have a location in Seattle now where you can order your as a consumer you can order groceries online drive your car to a center and then have the groceries put in your car so they're doing lots of innovative things around kind of around fresh and around groceries in general even before whole foods so

26:00separately kind of the third track here is of course Instacart and Instacart was founded in 2012 by a guy named Approva Mata and Approva had been an engineer at Amazon and in particular an engineer focused on fulfillment centers and he was in Seattle and actually left Seattle moved down to the Bay Area a couple years before and started working on a bunch of startup ideas and we wanted to start a company and eventually came back around to this idea of grocery delivery, but he took a very different approach because he knew from the get-go he talked about this on, I think he was actually also on the NPR, how I built this, he talks about, he kind of, he also has a really great talk at startup school one year about how the whole thing got started. But he knew that Amazon was going to be his main competitor and he had to take a different approach. And so when Instacard, as most listeners know, has done, has said, you know, screw this whole logistics thing, like that's really hard. And actually,

26:58grocery stores are pretty good at it in terms of keeping the produce fresh and things frozen that need to be frozen and refrigerated and managing the inventory. Why don't we just build a thin layer on top of it that's just the delivery layer to give the consumers the product experience they want of grocery delivery, but just have people come directly to grocery stores, shoppers. So basically paying that retail premium and then just solving the last mile problem instead of trying to You know, sort of eliminate that middle man and do a fully agreed system, you know, like what band tried to do back in the day and that Amazon's been building now for, you know, 10 plus years. As Jeff Bezos would say, I couldn't have built Amazon without all the infrastructure already in place, the, you know, UPS, the internet laid by the telephone wires, all these things. So now we can build Amazon on top of it. It's sort of that same approach, but with, you know, a different market at a different time.

27:52Yep, and so a poor of a he started the company in 2012 and pretty quickly it started growing really fast and They did why combinator right after he started the company and then pretty quickly Sequoia invested after that I believe led the series a they've gone on in the last five years to race almost $700 million so approaching webband levels of investment and What's interesting about that it turns it you know, it's so funny how it's all the same people all over again Mike Moritz from Sequoia led the investment and is on the board and he had led the web band investment back in the day. Whoa, I didn't know that. Yep. Huh. So Instacards sitting here today having raised all this money at a $3.3 billion valuation on their latest round. One of their investors, their biggest grocery store partner, that they have an exclusive relationship with, and as part of that, the company invested in Instacard.

28:46is Whole Foods. And so everybody woke up this morning and the whole world changed in this space. Yeah, I mean, it's heavily, heavily promoted in the stores at Whole Foods. I think if you buy a certain amount, then you just get it at store cost instead of, I think this is right, instead of paying the Instacart markup for it. It's like much more heavily integrated than any of their other grocery stores. And, you know, as we'll sort of get to Whole Foods is a super premium brand. Yep.

29:14Yep, just speaking from personal experience, having used Amazon Fresh and Instacard and many of the other delivery services. We would use Instacard often just solely for Whole Foods to get the premium products from Whole Foods. I mean, that was the most compelling aspect of it for us. Yep, I love Instacard. I mean, I've been a user for a really long time. And since it launched in Seattle and it's awesome. But you sort of have to wonder at this point, they knew Amazon was going to be their competitor at the very outset and you know today the news comes out and if you would have asked me a week ago what's you know how does Instacart compete against Amazon or you know the impending Amazon then I would have said probably that the Whole Foods partnership was their their greatest leverage point and I'm super curious now like do these partnerships like

30:11much like music streaming, like if Spotify were to get acquired then all of their rights negotiation that they did with the record labels would need to be renegotiated. Those all, you know, dissolve upon a liquidity event. I'm curious if the same sort of thing happens here, or if Instacart can still hold Whole Foods to their, you know, the contractual agreements that they agreed to. Yeah.

30:36I don't think we know yet the early indications seem to be that the deal that Instacart and Whole Foods had I believe it's looking like was a four-year deal that they were one or two years into and that it does have to be honored but again this is you know these are private agreements we don't know so we will it will be very very interesting to see and even if it does have to be honored you know you can bet that as soon as that deal expires you know Amazon is not going to renew it right Right, yeah. Tenuous position to be in. I'd be very curious to sit down with some Instacart folks and try and figure out what they think the mode is right now and what do you do from here? Because maybe the move is not to double down and strive for world domination, but to try and figure out how to play in Amazon's world. Well, it's interesting. We're getting into analysis now, but I think we have to give all the players involved in this situation.

31:31But Porva has argued quite compellingly, I think, you know, certainly with investors that he knows that Amazon is going to be his main competitor, but that the way you have to compete with Amazon is to compete on a different dimension and do things they can't do. And his argument is that has always been that by just being the thin delivery layer and being able to partner with any grocery store or other retailer for delivery and all of those other folks, you know, are scared of Amazon too and sort of need Instacard as a partner that He'll be able to provide, they'll be able to provide a better experience because Amazon itself will have a limited selection only what they carry. Oh, please, please. I'm just going to tell Amazon starts. Let me give you a, let me give you a playbook. Amazon becomes, they sell books on the internet.

32:20And they are the retailer of these books and you buy from them. They would never be considered themselves into a marketplace with them. I mean, they're a retailer. Right. Right. Gosh, how could you ever imagine third party grocery store sellers coming on to Amazon's distribution and customer. Yeah. Well, then there's also the fact that you know, grocery is it's a very different business than books or any other type of retail. True. Very true.

32:47If you look at what is differentiation in grocery stores, and this is actually probably a big reason why Whole Foods was struggling in recent years. You need a lot in a grocery store, but you need a set number of stuff. And if you have the stuff that people want, which is the same, you go to a safe way around the country, or you go to a public's in the South, or a crogr's elsewhere, they're the same stuff. So as long as you have that stuff, and you have the You know, high-end natural stuff that Whole Foods has, you know. Which again, is differentiation. The only reason, at least, I mean, Jenny used Instacart. You know, if you have that stuff, do you need anything else? Is selection that important anymore? Right. It seems like selection in, like, all the random stuff on Amazon from a retail perspective is much more long-tailed distributed than it is in a grocery store. Like in a grocery store, it seems more concentrated towards the head of the curve. Which granted is a lot of skews, but it's a pretty standard set. Yep. Yep.

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35:33Spend some time talking to people today and look around for opinions and before we get to acquisition category I just want to like talk about a few things to come out of this story So one of them is that just yesterday John Mackie was talking about how there's an activist investor called Janet Partners which holds 8% of his $11 billion then $11 billion grocery chain and he says we need to get better and we're doing that But these guys just want to sell us because they think they can make 40 or 50% in a short period of time They're greedy and I'm not gonna say this because we have a clean reputation, but you know, they're greedy guys and they're putting a bunch of propaganda out there trying to destroy my reputation the reputation of Whole Foods because it's in their own self interest to do so. That was yesterday. That was yesterday. Wow. I mean, you can't argue that John didn't do this. The deal was done. Yeah, there's no way that like, oh, it actually we did do the deal and like he, you know, he is. So how does he really feel?

36:31Roll right and it's fascinating because what he doesn't really say there the good news is he can still be an effective CEO inside of Amazon because he doesn't you know throw Amazon out of the bus but like you know Definitely wanted to continue being an independent entity there and these guys did get a huge pop Janet partners since the time they bought Oh, that they did yep another you know, let's let's spend a little bit of time and cover some basically hot takes on what this could represent. And then once we kind of cover all that, then I think acquisition category, I'll start to come together and make sense. But right now I would imagine they're not going to immediately transform these whole foods into Amazon goes, but like holy crap, what if they know internally that Amazon go is like such a fantastic experience. And rather than like slow rolling it out and allowing competitors to start coming in and then

37:19potentially whole foods to go up and value as they start doing similar things or go up and value for Amazon as people start seeing the obvious, you know, synergies. What if it's just like, uh, we should own this now so that we can go big fast with this Amazon go concept. Yeah, which is, you know, on the one hand, and goes been delayed the public launch, supposedly because of, you know, trouble getting it to work public facing link. But, you know, at this point, I think the point that I was trying to make, that we were trying to make in telling the full story and all these other companies, WebVan, Kiva, InstaCart. Amazon didn't just wake up yesterday and they're today and decided to do this. They've been thinking about this category for over 10 years at this point. So if they're going to do this, you can be sure they have a very clear plan. Yep. Okay. So they're really the only ones who can do this. There's a $400 million break up fee on this. So if InstaCart gets another bid or pulls out, it's on the way. Hopefully it's mean.

38:12I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, So unless Apple or Google steps in, like Kroger only has $400 million, Dan Primack was raising this point on Twitter. Amazon is really the only one who could win this deal. And so that's sort of an interesting thing to consider. Yeah, totally. Nobody in the grocery world would have the capital to do this. Nope. Nope. Another good one, Geekwire was reporting that a really interesting thing here is that it's really a training ground for AI retail research.

39:08Amazon has all these incredible machine learning, artificial intelligence, PhDs, and Whole Foods has probably zero. Maybe some small amount of data science, but you start to marry the amount of data coming in from Whole Foods and having Amazon have the ability to deploy that all over the ecosystem, not only to make Whole Foods better, but to use that in other parts of the business, it sure seems to contribute to the flywheel. Yep, absolutely.

39:32Another good one, I was reading freight waves, a friend who's in the trucking industry, working on a startup there, sent this over, and they were talking about how the thing that's really interesting about this deal is it could dramatically reduce their transportation costs because if they're using whole foods in the back as urban warehouses for things that they want to start putting around to unlock.

39:53You know imagine Amazon Prime now launching everywhere there's a Whole Foods because they can keep things in Whole Foods in a non-customer-facing way or maybe they can actually just deliver things directly out of the Whole Foods retail area. It really opens up the potential of reduced freight costs because you just have so many more nodes on the network. Yep, absolutely. So then another one that I was another thing I was thinking about is Whole Foods has, let's see, 456 stores in the US and Canada.

40:20Now, that's zero international, so Amazon has a global footprint. Will we see them start to make international grocery moves? Well, they're already fresh as already in London and Berlin and Tokyo. Right, right. You got to imagine yes. Will they need M&A? Like, whatever they're doing at Whole Foods, will it make sense to buy a big international chain as well? Which, as we talked about, is how Whole Foods grew through acquisition. Yep, absolutely.

40:48And then lastly, this one might be a little bit more out there, but who knows? Amazon has reportedly been working on some prescription and pharmacy efforts and CNBC reported that if Amazon wants to sell prescription drugs, Whole Foods could provide the real estate on top of not just prescription drugs, but incredibly high value real estate with high net worth clientele all over the place.

41:12It's a premium customer set at premium real estate and they can do all sorts of things with that including launch a pharmacy brand. I feel like we should we should call this a new new section on the show called just like pure speculation. Yeah. I know. Then David widely speculate including a whole bunch of things they read on the internet. If it's on the internet, it must be true. That's the mantra of Aquarius. Yep. So all right with that.

41:42Should we come back to Earth? Let's do it. Yeah, what do you think? Well, I think I have to say two here. And the two are business line with caveat that Amazon already had this business line. This is just a massive, accelerant and reshaping of that business line. And then the other one is asset, you know, as you were alluding to in the wild speculation section of the show. You know, this is now instantly, you know, 450 plus new, you know, in last mile distribution centers in cities that are extremely proximate to the majority of Amazon's customer base, which is, you know, people middle to high income, people mostly younger demographics that live in cities. So this is an incredible real estate asset that they just acquired.

42:34David, it is like you are literally reading out of my text. I had those two boldly. Like, new listeners to the show, we have people, technology, product, business, line, asset, or other. And those are my two as well. Yeah. And what's interesting, I mean, I don't think either of those is, you know, even in the couple hours since the acquisition, you know, I don't think there's any great depth of insight in either of those. Well, I'm looking forward to talking about tech themes. But before we do that, should we hop to what would have happened otherwise?

43:03and we should talk about Whole Foods and Amazon, but in particular, I want to talk here about what's the future for Instacart? Yeah. Okay, wait, pausing on Instacart real quick. What would have happened otherwise? So when we're thinking about what we were talking about earlier, with Amazon marketplace and they have fulfillment by Amazon for customers who are merchants who are on the marketplace, it's interesting to think about first they had to be their own retailer and then they could open up the marketplace.

43:31You know, in this case, it seems to me like first they're going to be their own sort of grocer, which let's not forget. I don't think we've said this on the show yet. Grocery is an $800 billion market. Like grocery is the market, and it's like a massive. If you look at all of retail, not just e-commerce, but all of US retail, grocery is about 15% of that. So it is enormous. I mean, it is as big as Amazon's entire business. It is as big as all bigger than all of e-commerce combined right now. Well, I mean, it's basic human stuff, right? Like, look at Maslow's hierarchy. Like, we need food. We need food each other. And actually, if you look at household spend in order, it's taxes, house, car, food. You're feeling purely at retail. The first two of those don't apply. House taxes and it's car and food, right? And like, think about it. Think about Uber and Lyft. And, you know, and, well,

44:29I'm going to pause here. I'm going to save this for tech themes. Continue. Yeah. Okay. So massive, unbelievable ridiculous market people need to eat. And it's interesting that to me, Amazon is going the direct route with being the place where you buy the food when they buy owning whole foods and not opening it up as a marketplace.

44:51direction they could have gone is to go to every physical grocery store at scale and say you can reach customers online using our platform the way that Instacart did. And it's interesting that they sort of went the other direction with it and really bought their way into possibly unfolding it in the same way that they unfolded from their normal retail retail. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I don't know. Like if they didn't buy whole foods, like would they have bought a different grocery store? I mean, If you look at Albertsons bought Safeway for $9 billion a couple of years ago, and so that I suppose Albertsons could have bought Whole Foods. I know they were considering it. Amazon maybe could have bought Albertsons. At the end of the day, I think Whole Foods was the best one to buy because it has the best selection and the most premium customer segment and the most premium real estate. And it actually had to the extent any large-chain data that it actually had differentiation.

45:46I mean, I don't think it was lost on Amazon that, you know, I seriously doubt Jenny and I were the only folks that used Instacart to get Whole Foods. And I really doubt that that was lost on Amazon. Yeah, I think you're right. So to me, Amazon gets a heck of a lot more leverage out of buying Whole Foods than Albertsons would get out of buying Whole Foods. And so from a value creation perspective, I guess it creates more value for the world for Amazon tone. So let's talk quickly about Instacart. I mean, what? Yeah.

46:16What do we think is the future for them here? They have a very large valuation. The product is great. I completely agree with you, Ben. We love it, but we love it to get all foods. This is big for them. What's the path for it? I have some thoughts, but I'll go first. On the surface, this is a bad day. It's a very, very bad day for Instagram.

46:44On the other hand, though, I don't think all is lost for them by any means. They have, I think, the only model that makes sense to, that is capable of scaling quickly in anything less than a decade-long time frame in this space, which is let the stores that are in the companies that are good at logistics, do logistics, and we'll do the last mile. Right.

47:13Zero inventory risk. When we talked about the web then boat flipping upside down, it was that they had plowed so much money into inventory and their fulfillment centers. And then when they were losing money on every order and demand, a title wave of demand came in. It didn't fail because people didn't want the product. It failed because the capital demands got too great on the business. That's how they lost all of the $800 million they were pissed.

47:41Instacart doesn't have that problem. More demand is more, you know, gross margin for them. So that's good. And I think with this acquisition, you know, what this is certainly going to do in the medium term is it is going to drive everybody from, you know, in the grocery pharmacy, you know, any local retail space, you know, if they weren't afraid of Amazon already, they're going to be driven into the arms of Instacart.

48:07You know, I think probably starting with Trader Joe's, right? Like, if Instacart can land Trader Joe's, to my mind, they're sort of the last bastion of differentiation in this space. And they're sure as heck not going anywhere near Amazon after the Whole Foods acquisition. So I don't think all is lost. Then the other thing for Instacart is of course, you know, the other player in the commerce space, which is Walmart, you know, which has been very inquisitive acquired jet.

48:33Just also acquired bonobos today in a story that was vastly overshadowed by Whole Foods, acquired mod cloth, plenty of others. They are gonna be very interested in this space too. And Wal-Mart's in food. I mean, they have the superstores. They're effectively just...

48:52huge grocery stores attached to Walmart. Now the problem is been, as you mentioned, Walmart only has six and a half billion dollars of cash on their balance sheet and Instacart's sitting in a $3.3 billion valuation. So, you know, Walmart's not going to spend all their cash on this deal if they buy Instagram. Right. So returns are limited there. Yeah. Ooh, that's interesting. If you're a poor, do you take Walmart stock? Yeah. Well, you better think hard about that.

49:21I believe that was all cash, right? I don't actually remember. I think it was. I think it was, you know, with heavy, heavy earnings. Heavy earnings, right, but all cash. So, you know, Mark, Laurie didn't have to make that bet. Yep. Hey, I mean, look, you can go ahead to head with Amazon. Like, Instacart might actually just deliver like a way better consumer experience. I mean, maybe, I don't know.

49:48Keep going. Yeah, I mean, one thing, here's another thing. There's a logic that if we go down when you start thinking that way, but the go right, right? Well, I'll pay a little bit excited. I hit it when you did too. The kind of what I hit on is price, right? Like the thing is Instacard is more expensive thing going the grocery store. And if Amazon it is now all foods can make it cheaper. Like you just can't compete, right? And this is how Amazon one retail. And Maybe there's a play for Amazon to aggregate, or I'm sorry, Instacart to aggregate the long tail of all these sort of independent grocery stores and smart grocery stores and everything that is not Whole Foods, but you have to imagine at some point Amazon will open up a marketplace for this. But the thing is, so with grocery delivery, Amazon fresh is much more on like this sort of, I've actually never done it, but I think on this sort of weekly cadence or bi-weekly cadence, right?

50:48And whereas Instacart's much more on demand. Yeah, I think that's right. You can do on demand from Amazon too, I believe, but they try and funnel you to a weekly cadence. Yeah. And so this thing for Instacart, the ability to aggregate third party sellers on a platform in an aggregated way where you can, I can go to Amazon and order from three different third party sellers. And since they're all fulfillment by Amazon, they sort of get to my house at the same time. It's all through the same system.

51:18Instacart uses a on-demand system. You really can't actually order from multiple grocery stores because the logistics of that sending a shopper in the next two hours to both grocery stores is prohibitively expensive and time-consuming. They're actually isn't really a play to aggregate the long tail, to go to multiple stores.

51:38But maybe there's a play to aggregate the long tail where in every local market, you have all the smaller stores on there that Amazon doesn't have with Whole Foods. I don't know. Yep. I mean, yep. But you're competing with the everything store and aggregation theory, as we've talked about. Well, we'll see. I don't think I certainly don't think, you know, Monday, starting Monday or today that Instacard is doomed. Actually, there certainly are plenty of ramifications from this deal that are positives for them. But it does just speak to, in the world we live in right now, Amazon is the new Microsoft from the 1990s. Yeah, dude, that's okay. I'm glad you're going there because that's my first tech team. I think it will. I think probably one of yours too.

52:36in one sense they're the new Microsoft and in other sense the big five right now Facebook Amazon Microsoft Google Facebook are way more powerful just way more powerful because of machine learning because of of the data assets that they have then Microsoft of that era because I really do think that like there is this like well we can out execute you know this company right now because they don't know how to do consumer they don't know how to with with these companies like It's just a matter of time like I really thought like wow Amazon fresh isn't as good as an experience for a long time as Instacart but like at some point Amazon just has so much cash and these companies have so much cash they just go in and they buy yep this huge asset and they get this incredible data asset out of it and they learn how to optimize every single experience for every single customer based on exactly their wants and needs and I think that

53:32Also with the availability of cloud computing, you start in your two pizza team inside Amazon and it's small and you work on a thing and then suddenly if it's working and you find product market fit, you get the power of Amazon's cloud behind it. I really do think that the big companies now have ability to enter markets that they just compete with everyone and they're fierce. When I think it highlights the importance of, you know, if you're gonna do the crazy thing and attack one of these guys head on, well, hey, you can't attack head on, but attack them on their turf. The angle you enter at has to be completely orthogonal to the angle that they're approaching the market. And I think Instagram, you know, you listen to a porva and again, it's very articulate and made

54:30makes a good case for why Instacart can do things and offer things that Amazon couldn't and probably still can't. But I don't know that the angle, it was a little too acute. As we've been talking about it, it's not so totally different that enables a completely different customer experience. And that's...

54:52It's I think you're right like the power that the big five Big four big five however you want to categorize it have right now Are you know make the power that Microsoft had in the 90s, you know look point? I agree and to pile on that point one more time the market really doesn't believe that Amazon can that anyone can compete with Amazon once Amazon decides to enter a market. Like, that's the Amazon is by far the scariest of those five horsemen right now, because here's how the market responded today when this deal happened. Target's down 9%, Walmart's down 5%, Costco's 6%, Sprouts 11% and Kroger 13. Wow. Like Amazon's signals they're going to enter a market and just. Which is really true. I mean, like, they should not be news to

55:45anyone like Amazon is single for 10 years that they're coming for groceries so David the irrationality of the market will never will never cease to be a topic of the show. Yeah, but actually that is a good point that I think we should is worth a moment that as scary as Amazon is they can't start from zero.

56:06and destroy you. It really, I don't think this would have happened without the 10 years from Webvan to Kiva to Frash and then to observing Instacart. Everybody knew this was coming. I don't think if you're Airbnb and you have another amazing marketplace, But you're nowhere near Amazon. I don't think Amazon can launch Amazon stays tomorrow. So there is some solace there. There's plenty of places. Especially in those marketplaces of building up a big supply and a big man. Yep. Absolutely. They do not happen overnight regardless of who you are. But I think it also highlights something else that if I were...

57:01happened to believe necessarily the bear case on Amazon right now. But nobody seems to be making it. So I'll take a stab. Here's my bear case on Amazon. As they grow and everything you were just saying and enter so many new markets, there is going to be this incredible, incredible human capital management problem there. And I think Jeff Bezos is amazing. He's one of the best management leaders of ever to be able to grow Amazon as it is in such a decentralized fashion. But at some point, even in as efficient an organization as Amazon, there's communication costs within the organization are going to get higher and higher. So there is probably a natural human limit to how much they can scale in terms of businesses.

57:58Yeah, I mean, that's always been the case against big companies in the case against conglomerates for a long time. The question is has Amazon really found the formula to make that? Well, I think they've done better than just about a real history. Right. But what is the upper limit of their current? Right. And you know, you could certainly argue that in.

58:19you know, today's world and tech. We've talked about this. I think we're in tech themes now on the show about how technology has levered right in like the two pizza teams in Amazon, like a two pizza team started, you know, prime now and Amazon go and Amazon fresh and all these things. Right. So one thing that we shouldn't lose though, like we're going to find this two piece of teams. The Amazon fresh team is around, I'm sorry, the Amazon go team with one location that is only open internally to Amazon employees is like a thousand people.

58:50And those are a thousand people with individual personalities and politics and you know wants needs and desires So again, I'm not you know, I don't want to compete head on against Amazon But but if you were to articulate a bear case to me, that's the that's the best one right now. Yeah, all right listeners Now is a great time to thank our longtime friend of the show, ServiceNow. If you are running a large enterprise, AI agents are likely spread across every team, and deploying them is no longer the hard part. Yeah. The hard part is knowing what permissions they have, what employees are using them for, or what decisions AI is making. AI security for an enterprise at scale is not a small concern. Like the risks are real.

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1:00:48So if you're trying to turn AI ambition into real business outcomes and make it work safely, securely at scale, go check out servicenow.com slash acquired and tell them that Ben and David sent you. Another interesting, it's not as much a tech theme, but an Amazon theme is, Amazon's never done an acquisition on this order of magnitude before. Like all of their, their, their M&A strategy sort of changed from buying, buying these sort of.

1:01:13properties that they can integrate into their system to audible and Zappos and things like that to buying like technologies that were even cheaper and then they sort of stay on this like buying lesser expensive technologies for a while or maybe more expensive in the sort of Kiva or elemental technologies or things like that but really like they haven't been acquiring these sort of I guess in the media world to be like properties or like you know like retailers and so it's really interesting to come out swinging so hard like they're really putting a stake in the ground that this is a huge business for us and there's this great chart on Axios and I'll just read it from the bottom up of deals above $500 million. See of Quidzie in 2010, Kiva in 2012, Sappos in 2009 and those were like 500, 700, 900 million Twitch for 970 million and 14 then the

1:02:08You have Whole Foods at $13.7 billion and the next step down from Whole Foods is kind of the between Twitch and Whole Foods is an office building that they bought in in 2012 from Volcan for $1.16 billion. So so literally this is our league union is the next. Yes, yes, they bought an office building. Yeah, for a you know, one order of magnitude less than this deal and that was a bigger than that.

1:02:38That's not about you, right? Well, anything else you wanted to say on that? No, that's it. Perfect lead in to the tech team that I really want to talk about here, which is the power of big markets and the lead in that I was, the connection I was making is that, you know, the real estate market is enormous. If you're going to pay more for an office building than you would for Twitch. But taking a step back here, I think a lot of people and certainly the press and the public, you know, kind of look at this whole situation that we've discussed in all these companies and say, man, Silicon Valley is crazy. Venture capitalists are nuts. These people are so stupid. How could you put so much money into Webvan, you know, into...

1:03:29who knows what hopefully Instacart has a bright future ahead, but maybe that goes to zero too. Maybe Amazon just killed it. How could you do that? How could you be so irresponsible? And I think the answer is that when you're talking about a market as large as grocery, literally a trillion dollar market, 15% of US retail, you have to think about it in terms of What if I'm right? And this is how Amazon and Jeff Bezos thinks about things, right? It's like the power of attacking a large market. It's going to be very hard by necessity because there's going to be a ton of competition. And your odds of success are certainly not 100%. But if you get it right, I mean, if Amazon gets this right.

1:04:15It's literally gonna double the size of Amazon. And think about how big Amazon is already. And people thought AWS was a big business now. And these are the kind of bets that lead to, I used the word bet. I don't like the word bet because it's not a bet. It's about the hard work that you do over a decade-long period that Amazon has done to get here. And they have another decade ahead to continue to realize it. But if you can be successful in that, you know, that's how you build Amazon scale businesses. Yeah, I love that. I love that. And in venture, it's not about all the ones you lose. It's only about the ones you lose. Well, right. I mean, you know, 800, close to a billion dollars lost on web ban, right? But already, you know, if you're, if you take those learnings and you had bought, you know, Amazon shares or, you know, or even Instacart shares, right? Like you would be getting a nice return on that.

1:05:16Yep, you want to grade it? One other one I wanted to do real quick. I mean, I don't know that there's too much more insight to add, but I don't think we can, oh, I don't think we've talked about it yet, and we can't have an episode on Amazon without talking about the flywheel. And because I mean, that is really, that is the other, you know, besides making big bets. You know, that is the other core element to Bezos and Amazon's philosophy. And if you think you're about kind of, especially you know, Alexa, right? And, and, and echoes and like where do echoes live? Like they live in the kitchen, you know? And, and, and that how that business has grown with an Amazon. And then attaching a grocery business to that and, you know, Alexa, bring me some milk, you know? You can start to see the flywheel spinning. And that's how you, you can create this just, you know, uncermountable competitive advantage in a space. Yep. Absolutely.

1:06:12All right, should we go back to wild speculation and grade this thing? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't know. It's a... Okay, so they've spent, what was it? $13.7 billion, right? Yep. And you know, I mean, what?

1:06:37What's the what's what's the return to get I mean, that's what yeah, so here's an interesting what else could they have done with that that could have possibly Let's let's see if we can do like an expected value calculation So you you pour that into something else and we can think of what that something else could be and then I guess like Try and figure out the real efficient possible success America Right, right like there aren't that many more like bigger markets than this And especially Amazon's already playing in transportation. Well, there's three. There's government and taxes. There's US real estate and there's transportation. Those are the only markets that are bigger than this. Wow. It's funny. Amazon doesn't, I mean, other than the buildings they own, they don't really play in real estate. They so far aren't really playing in transportation other than logistics, like certainly no consumer transportation.

1:07:33Do we want to make any calls on this show? I know this isn't creating it, but we should like make a long bet or something that in five years are they competing with waymo uber lift or an Airbnb and real estate. Yeah. Yeah. There is so much that Amazon's not competing in yet. Yeah. I mean, what you're talking about is no longer a big five in tech, but a big one. Yeah. I don't know.

1:08:03I have a hard time seeing that happen. Well, you know, if we're, if we're greeting this acquisition and we're being that speculative, I just didn't think it was that much further. Yeah. Well, um, well, I mean, I think right now I, I, I'm going to give it, uh, an A minus, which is in line, I kind of, you know, this feels weird to say given the, difference in magnitude between the two of them, but I'm thinking about our last episode in sound jam. And in some ways this feels like a sound jam to me. Like Amazon was going to do this anyway. Clearly, you know, they've been doing it for a decade. This is an acceleration to their plans. And hopefully for them, it works out like sound jam worked out for Apple.

1:08:55But I can't give it more than an A-, even if it does work out beautifully because I don't think it's a fundamental transportation or a transformation. It's not like a, this isn't like an Instagram that's going to come in and just completely take the whole organization in a direction that it wasn't going. It was already going this way. Right. Yeah. The only interesting caveat on that is it could actually be their biggest business in five years. Yep.

1:09:25But for me, if our A is a next or an Instagram, a business, and a team that just completely transforms a company, this is not transformative. That's a great point. Well, it certainly won't.

1:09:47Yeah, and if it fails like well, then there was a lot of money to spend on this so Right, right. It's really just the opportunity cost of that cash. Yeah, so assuming if if they succeed I give it a name minus maximum grade Hmm maximum really really I mean what if they what if they start commanding six of the eight hundred billion dollars in this market Oh, but I think they could do that anyway. They didn't need to buy Whole Foods to do that Okay, all right It might sound good to me. All right, there we go. Follow up some hot tips. Follow up some hot tips. Follow up some hot tips. Follow up some hot tips. Follow up some hot tips. Follow up some hot tips. Follow up some hot tips. Follow up some hot tips. Follow up some hot tips. Follow up some hot tips. Follow up some hot tips. Follow up some hot tips.

1:10:45buy a bunch of these sort of smaller e-commerce companies that people love and figure out, you know, can they just own a portfolio of these things? They may not sell them in Walmart or something like that, but, you know, if the goal is to go around and buy a bunch of these like Casper and, you know, Hairies and sort of internet and now and Warby Parker, those sorts of businesses, does it make sense for Walmart to own a big portfolio of those? I don't know, but I don't think this wasn't a huge outcome for Benobos. No, I mean, not given how long the company was around and how much money there is, but nice exit. Honestly, what it feels like, and I think this is a Ben Thompson tweet earlier, but these being announced on the same day is

1:11:43but just like the contrast, it really showed how stark the contrast is where like Walmart's kinda playing checkers and Amazon's content. Oh yeah, I love this is how I'm gonna throw in one more tech theme that actually I've been thinking about a lot lately and I think is a very powerful one. Is that Amazon is playing offense, Walmart is playing defense.

1:12:04You don't win by playing prevent defense. Yeah. And especially as a startup, not the one where it's the opposite of a startup, but like when you're a startup, like you have nothing to defend. You can't play. You can only play offense. That's the only way to win. Right. Are you insinuating that Amazon may be playing like a day one company? I hadn't thought of that. So insightful. I know. All right. Carvouts. Let's do it.

1:12:32So mine is a friend of the show Brian McCullough from the internet history podcast which if you're listening to this show you would love that show Tweeted this this link out the other day. I had to just go watch the whole thing because it was like just It only seems you can't take your eyes away from it is Mark Zuckerberg in 2005 coming back to Harvard to give a guest lecture in CS 50. Oh, man. I haven't watched yet. I need to It is unreal. First of all, it's super insightful from a technology perspective to understand how Facebook succeeded in a way that a lot of other precursors of social networking sites failed. So it's interesting to learn about Facebook's early architecture from a tech perspective. But then on top of that, it is just so stark to see Mark Zuckerberg speaking the way that he spoke in 2005, juxtaposed against the way that we all

1:13:27hear him today. And, you know, Mark without PR training and Mark without a team of writers and, you know, Mark without a perfect diet and hitting the gym all the time. And he's, he's, you know, he's just insanely off the cuff and almost a little like, broie, like there's a little streak of that in there. Yeah. Well, two things. One, wire hog. Yeah. Facebook was here just a side away for him to launch like a Napster competitor. And then to the Sequoia Pajama pitch. Oh my god. Yeah. Yep. Yep. And in this pitch, he probably earned this lecture. He's like, we have two hours. I'll probably talk for like 15 minutes because I don't know what you guys want me to talk about. And then like probably 15 or 20 times.

1:14:16I know right over the course of the two hours, he says, yeah, I don't know if this is interesting to you guys at all. I know if this is relevant. I don't know what you want me to say. I don't know. I don't know if this is relevant. You just keep saying that over and over and over again. You're like, wow, this guy. It's so different. Look at him today. What matters is potential, not the current state of things.

1:14:42potential and network and flywheels and big markets and playing offense not events All of the things All right, my podcast is the episode this week of exponent the Ben Thompson and James always great podcast that I'm sure many you guys listen to and and show it if you don't already on podcasts. We've talked about this on this show. We did the episode a while back on Midroll and Stitcher. But it really feels like with Apple announcing that they're going to bring a whole bunch of changes and improvements to the platform of podcasting. Like now might be the time. I mean, we've argued on this show where podcasting is obviously near and dear to our hearts.

1:15:31And we are, you know, in the startup and venture world, but that it's just too soon, the market's too small. You can't build big businesses here. But I wonder if now's the time that things are changing. It's a great time to be in podcasting, David. It is. Which is also why it's a great time to tell your friends about acquired. That is, now it's great. It leads exactly into our show clothes. All right, listeners. Now is a great time to talk about one of our favorite companies, Statsig. Yes, there is a reason why the best product teams rely on Statsig, whether they are iterating on their core product features or shipping AI-powered experiences at scale. Yep. In the crazy speed of today's AI world, shipping fast is just table stakes now. It's basically trivial to build and deploy your app constantly. The real advantage is how quickly you learn

1:16:27what changes actually created value for customers, and how fast you can use that signal to guide what you shipped next. This is where Statsig comes in. It brings experimentation, feature flags, and product analytics into one unified system so teams can ship safely, test rigorously, and directly link what they changed to how users actually behaved. So if you want to make learning your competitive advantage, whether you're building new AI experiences, or just evolving your existing core product, go to Statsig.com slash acquired to get started. So listeners, happy Friday night. You probably will listen to this in another time, but David, enjoy your weekend. YouTube in listeners, if you haven't subscribed and you want to hear more, you can subscribe from your favorite podcast client. And if you feel so inclined, we would love, love, love a review on Apple podcasts. So with that, go shop at Whole Foods. Go shop at Whole Foods. To more wild speculation in the future.

1:17:26Yes, all right. Thanks everyone. Thank you