Daily insights for city builders, delivered every morning at 6 AM ET. I’m Brandon Donnelly — a Toronto-based real estate developer and founder of Globizen. I’ve been writing here since 2013.
This is an excellent talk by NYU professor Scott Galloway about Amazon, online grocery, and many other aspects of the retail landscape. The bits about Amazon’s scale and reach are fascinating. There is about 30 minutes of him speaking quickly and then another 15 minutes of Q&A. If you can’t see it below, click here.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HyiY_m_YxI&w=560&h=315]
So Amazon is buying Ring (they make video doorbells, among other things) for north of $1 billion. Supposedly, it is the second largest acquisition that Amazon has ever made – the first was Whole Foods.
If you consider that Amazon is also looking to enter the delivery business, it should be obvious that they want to control everything related to the home delivery process.
For one, it likely enhances Amazon Key and helps with the “porch pirate” problem. Apparently Amazon has had to restrict same-day delivery from some high crime neighborhoods because of this exact problem.
And there’s already speculation about what this could mean for grocery deliveries. Amazon needs to find a frictionless way to get your food orders into your refrigerator.
There are also many possible tie-ins to Alexa/Echo. It’s probably safe to assume that Jeff Bezos sees a lot more than just a doorbell with a camera in it.
Who better to talk about on Black Friday than Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. Supposedly he’s now worth $100 billion.
I just finished watching this short 60 Minutes clip about Amazon from 1999. If you can’t see it below, click here.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjjUOemW-_Q?rel=0&w=560&h=315]
Amazon was founded in 1994, so this was 5 years in. Already the company had gone public and had a market cap of somewhere around $30 billion.
Now, keep in mind that this was right in the middle of the dot com bubble, but already Bezos was a billionaire on paper.
What is clear from the above clip is just how obsessed Bezos was and is on the long game (”I don’t go in for carpe diem”) and on his customers. Here he is worth quite a bit, but driving around in a Honda Accord.
Bob Simons, the interviewer, pokes fun at him a few times for his reluctance to spend money. But Bezos says that it’s all about spending money on things that matter to customers and not spending money on the things that don’t.
That’s customer obsession.
P.S. The title of this post will make sense once you watch the video.
