The Navigator
Judgement in the fog, money, risk and the call others cannot make.
Brad Stone earns The Navigator through a decade of methodical charting across Amazon's sprawling and deliberately opaque empire, terrain he describes as having very few people with any kind of a bird's eye view. Where others register only corporate complexity, Stone plots coordinates, tracing Bezos's long-game patience on AWS and mapping the interplay of ambition and secrecy.
“Right, and the owner starts blogging about it. And right, they handled that pretty poorly. I mean, it's funny the similarities with Uber, but the first thing that they did perhaps persuaded by their legal counsel is to try to evade accountability. And the internet community just wasn't going to let them get away with it.”
“And yeah, Andreessen Horowitz, not only did they not see the extent of the Uber opportunity back then, and few people did, but I think they also, you know, they misjudged Travis and he didn't fit. He didn't look like a Mark Zuckerberger or Larry Page. He's pugilistic.”
“Yeah, identified that. Look, I mean, people have been predicting Lis's death, you know, from the very beginning. And I think it goes back to what we were saying before about certain services, as long as they're good enough. You can't outspend someone or into oblivion.”
“You're probably right. There might be things on the margin in terms of the permits for the drones or something where he can kind of make Jeff's life miserable if he decides.”
Masters in Business: “Brad Stone on Big Tech Companies (Podcast)”
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