YouSaid · the spoken record

Dana Mattioli

lines on the record: 77
first: 2024-12-19
most recent: 2024-12-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Oh my gosh, when I first started out, calm was like not even that much of a thing, right? You know, WSJ.com was this like bastard stepchild, right? And that's what I was put on, actually. I think I wish I knew that you just have to be so resilient in this profession that if you're doing your job well, it means a lot of rejection, that you're going to cold call people and they're going to hang up on you and that's fine. Cold call the next one. You just get up again and get up again because so much of journalism is a numbers game.”
2024-12-19 · Masters in Business · Amazon's 'Everything War' with Dana Mattioli · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Journalism, it's, I mean, you have to hustle. I would say it's to get as many bylines as you can, even if it's not at one of the prestige newspapers at first. I fully believe the way I got hired at the journal was freelancing my college papers, my college articles to other places to get a byline and place in tiny newspapers that probably don't exist anymore. And you just have to be reporting around you all the time, making sources wherever you are, keeping a great Rolodex. So I think that's the most important thing you could do.”
2024-12-19 · Masters in Business · Amazon's 'Everything War' with Dana Mattioli · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, some of my favorites are the moonstone by Wilkie Collins. It's like one of the first Victorian detective mysteries. I love the Bronte's and Jane Austen. I know that's like pretty trite. I'm reading some just fun Halloween type of books right now. This book called Lucy Foley called The Midnight Feast that's been really fun. And I love Sally Rooney. I have her new book ready to read after this one.”
2024-12-19 · Masters in Business · Amazon's 'Everything War' with Dana Mattioli · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh gosh, I have so many of them. Joanne Lublin, who was this dynamo at the Wall Street Journal, Dana Simaluka, my former boss at the Wall Street Journal and M&A, Jamie Heller, who's now the CEO of Business Insider, Dennis Berman, who is amazing M&A reporter at the journal, and Drew Dowell, I would say, who he's now overseas for us.”
2024-12-19 · Masters in Business · Amazon's 'Everything War' with Dana Mattioli · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have a prime account because my husband watches football and they have Thursday night football. We don't really shop on it though.”
2024-12-19 · Masters in Business · Amazon's 'Everything War' with Dana Mattioli · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or reduce their own margin. And the FTC lawsuit says because Amazon's so big and they require those sellers to also have the lowest price on Amazon that they have to raise the price on target.com and Walmart.com and on and on and on and it's created higher prices for all of us.”
2024-12-19 · Masters in Business · Amazon's 'Everything War' with Dana Mattioli · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“FTC lawsuits a little bit different. She alleges that actually in this current forum, Amazon's become the monopoly. They don't have to do predatory pricing anymore. They could actually exert their power on their sellers. You know, a decade ago, the average seller on Amazon gave 19 cents on the dollar back to Amazon in fees. Today, that's 45 cents on the dollar.”
2024-12-19 · Masters in Business · Amazon's 'Everything War' with Dana Mattioli · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's where the Congress was alleging that if you can't own the world's biggest online platform and also compete on it, that it has to be one or the other.”
2024-12-19 · Masters in Business · Amazon's 'Everything War' with Dana Mattioli · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do and that's you know, advertising has become so core to being successful as a seller on Amazon.com because there's millions of other sellers that flywheel that if you don't buy advertising, you're not showing up in search. And what did Amazon do? Roku, which makes a competing device for them for streaming TV. All of a sudden they can't buy ads anymore. You know, this happened across the devices space.”
2024-12-19 · Masters in Business · Amazon's 'Everything War' with Dana Mattioli · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so she points to predatory pricing that Amazon was undercutting the market in those early days in order to steal share from rivals and put them out of business. She also says they're like a utility that this isn't a company that you might want to work with. You sort of have to work with them if you want to reach shoppers and that has power over the sellers on their website where they could jack up fees. It has power over lots of different competitors that feel like they're forced to work with their main rival in order to access markets and show them.”
2024-12-19 · Masters in Business · Amazon's 'Everything War' with Dana Mattioli · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And she starts to, with this other band of trust busters, start to reshape this moment in time about whether antitrust laws are failing Americans.”
2024-12-19 · Masters in Business · Amazon's 'Everything War' with Dana Mattioli · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, she was the law school student at Yale where actually Bork had been a professor and she writes this seminal law review article saying that the antitrust laws, the way that they're being interpreted partially because of Bork are failing customers and consumers in the US and that Amazon's the prime example of this, that Amazon is a monopoly and it's allowed to be monopoly because we're not enforcing our antitrust laws the way that they were first derived. And this might be the only time that a law review article goes viral. Millions of people read this thing including legislators, CEOs. It gets picked up by the New York Times, right? It becomes this like zeitgeist type of movement. It's the first time that people start equating this company with the smile on the box with potentially being a monopoly.”
2024-12-19 · Masters in Business · Amazon's 'Everything War' with Dana Mattioli · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know the big question is will this FTC suit have a chilling effect on the way Amazon behaves? I would say they have more competition these days. Timu and Sheehan are, you know, these low-cost Chinese marketplaces. But I don't see any changes to the way Amazon is operating. You know, Andy Jassy, there's a scoop in the book. He's telling his deputies around the same time that they have this historic lawsuit against them for being too big, that they should be so much bigger. He tells them we should be a $10 trillion company. Okay. So how do you get to $10 trillion when you're $2 trillion? It's competing the way you've been competing.”
2024-12-19 · Masters in Business · Amazon's 'Everything War' with Dana Mattioli · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know it's really fascinating. I don't know which administration they would want to win. They had a really painful four years under Trump where he was just berating them online every day, alleging that Jeff Bezos was using the Washington Post as a political tool to attack him. The Amazon Washington Post. Amazon Washington Post that should be a lobbyist according to him. So that was like super painful. But then the Biden administration came in where they had good connections and that was even more painful in some ways. Biden chooses Lena Khan to be the head of the FTC. She brings forward the lawsuit against Amazon for being a monopoly. So either way, it's not like a really great outcome for that company.”
2024-12-19 · Masters in Business · Amazon's 'Everything War' with Dana Mattioli · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The EU was way ahead of us on policing our own giants. Marguerite Vestaire was looking into Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Apple years ago and people thought she was crazy.”
2024-12-19 · Masters in Business · Amazon's 'Everything War' with Dana Mattioli · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While governments around the world, including our government, have said it is a monopoly. The Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit last year saying it's an illegal monopoly. And the lawsuit says it could be broken up. What about you?”
2024-12-19 · Masters in Business · Amazon's 'Everything War' with Dana Mattioli · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and that creates this pernicious cycle. The average white collar employee at Amazon lasts a year and a half. That's the culture. So most of them leave their stock options on the table. But if you want to get your full payout, you have to survive. You have to not be part of that bottom 6%. And that creates that pressure cooker of an environment that I talk about.”
2024-12-19 · Masters in Business · Amazon's 'Everything War' with Dana Mattioli · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is. It really is. I mean, I just think it speaks to like the pain and suffering they went through with this MA battle.”
2024-12-19 · Masters in Business · Amazon's 'Everything War' with Dana Mattioli · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Walmart buys it for a very significant sum. A couple of billion bucks. He now owns if you live in New York, there's a place called Wonder, this restaurant company. That's his. I actually really like Wonder. So he's doing that now. He's gone on to do really big things.”
2024-12-19 · Masters in Business · Amazon's 'Everything War' with Dana Mattioli · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. Walmart could back away from the deal scot free. So they were forced to sell to their main competitor who put them in this position. And this created generational wealth for those two men who didn't even go to a drink to celebrate because they were so upset.”
2024-12-19 · Masters in Business · Amazon's 'Everything War' with Dana Mattioli · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're going to give Right. And the people in that room knew that if Walmart had decided to acquire Quidzy and Amazon put them out of created this pricing war that they were selling diapers for either zero or like a dollar.”
2024-12-19 · Masters in Business · Amazon's 'Everything War' with Dana Mattioli · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“higher offer and it's not the company that destroyed them so they go in the hallway they discuss it and they say let's take this walmart offer they go back into the room with the amazon executives they say hey just want to let you know we got this offer it's better for our shareholders we're going to go in this direction and they're told by a senior amazon executive okay you go ahead and do that and we're going to cut the price of our diapers to zero”
2024-12-19 · Masters in Business · Amazon's 'Everything War' with Dana Mattioli · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They were so threatened by this little startup in New Jersey, okay Amazon eventually makes a buyout offer to this firm, but they don't want to do it because they're. Cuts price of diapers more, creates this loyalty program to incentivize moms to shop with Amazon, not Quidzy. And it becomes to the point where it's untenable for the Quidsi people, they start missing their internal numbers. They have to start considering a sale, unfortunately. They're really crestfallen about that. Amazon's one of the biggest players in the space. They even have to consider an offer from the person that did this to them, okay? So they're at this private dinner with Amazon executives discussing this offer. They don't want to sell to Amazon. And Mark Lori's BlackBerry at the time gets an email pop-up and it's an offer from Walmart and they're excited.”
2024-12-19 · Masters in Business · Amazon's 'Everything War' with Dana Mattioli · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Control the law decisions in the house. Yet the definition of predatory pricing, it's 2010 Jeff Bezos becomes laser focused on Quidzy, which is started by these two entrepreneurs that are like the first people in their families to even go to college, right? These are homegrown talent. Mark Lori and Vinnie Berrara, right? And he puts together a team to essentially spy on them and figure out how they do it. And Amazon starts to really cut the prices of their own diapers 30%. They cut the price of their diapers so much that they start losing $200 million a month just on diapers according to internal documents.”
2024-12-19 · Masters in Business · Amazon's 'Everything War' with Dana Mattioli · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would agree with you. And, you know, that's the one thing I wanted to depict in this book is the human toll of that. I mean, when I was reporting out that chapter you're just describing, the founders that would cry to me on the phone about what happened to their companies, how Amazon just decimated them. It was really hard reporting just as a journalist like internalize a lot of that. This company that didn't need to do these things to win chose to And it cost people their jobs, their livelihoods, their technologies, at what cost?”
2024-12-19 · Masters in Business · Amazon's 'Everything War' with Dana Mattioli · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The interesting thing is so many of my sources for this book are the people doing the bad things because once they take a step back from Amazon and they realize how this company push them to their breaking point that it made them do things that they would not have done at a company that was not so cutthroat, they feel bad”
2024-12-19 · Masters in Business · Amazon's 'Everything War' with Dana Mattioli · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh my god, this was galling to me. Deal geek who covered MA. I asked some of these founders I spoke to for the book to send me all the documents that Amazon gave them prior to these meetings and I read them very thoroughly and found something called a residuals clause buried in the legalese and it basically said that anything retained in the memories of Amazon executives at these meetings where proprietary stuff is being disclosed could be used by Amazon in their own business without any legal repercussion so it's a license to steal”
2024-12-19 · Masters in Business · Amazon's 'Everything War' with Dana Mattioli · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. That was Amazon was one of the pioneers of this voice technology and these voice assisted robots. And as such, they set up this VC arm called the Alexa Find. And what I learned was that a pattern played out. They'd have all of these CEOs and founders pitch them on getting money and seed investments for their companies. And under the auspices of either getting an investment or being bought by Amazon's M&A arm, they'd share all of their proprietary data. Things like, you know, their patents, their technologies, all this stuff that companies go to great lengths to keep secret because they think they're getting an investment. And time and time again, Amazon would take that information, bring the heads of different Amazon businesses to these meetings to learn from it, and then ghost them and introduce the same exact product from an Amazon brand months later.”
2024-12-19 · Masters in Business · Amazon's 'Everything War' with Dana Mattioli · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They have. I mean, the documents that I was given shows how they reverse engineer these best-selling products. And they have everything from the number of items sold to the cost to sell them, to the number of returns, to the margins. There's 25 different fields that the employees on the private label side of the company who have been told you probably shouldn't be doing this. There's policies in place at Amazon that are essentially not enforced. And because they're afraid of losing their jobs and not hitting their numbers, they've often resorted to looking over the fence and taking this type of data to reverse engineer best-selling hits because it makes them look good and it keeps their jobs. And Amazon even under oath told Congress that they were not doing this.”
2024-12-19 · Masters in Business · Amazon's 'Everything War' with Dana Mattioli · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, they have this uncomfortable situation of selling on marketplace, relying on it for their income. But then also seeing a lot of their products that they've gone to great lengths to use R&D to create showing up in very similar versions.”
2024-12-19 · Masters in Business · Amazon's 'Everything War' with Dana Mattioli · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And also a lot of their competitors, a lot of their fiercest competitors, Netflix, Apple, use AWS. The CIA uses AWS, right? So this is a really entrenched business product for them, and it's very sticky once you're on it, you don't really leave.”
2024-12-19 · Masters in Business · Amazon's 'Everything War' with Dana Mattioli · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so Andy Jassy, who's the CEO today, started at Amazon, like a little bit before the IPO. So he's been there from the early days. Amazon's retail business was expanding so rapidly and they had so much data and they needed so much computing power that they were continuously adding that to their own business. And they got good at it. Jeff and Andy and a few other people started figuring out like, hey, yeah, we're a retail company, but we're also good at this technology stuff. If we need this, other companies probably also need this as they explore expanding online. So they productized it. They created a company called Amazon Web Services. It was very iffy as to whether this would take off. They didn't dedicate a ton of resources to it at the beginning. Andy remembers sheepishly asking for like a few dozen employees to work on it with him and thought that was like a big deal. Standalone, if this were to be split off from Amazon, would be one of the biggest tech companies in the world on its own.”
2024-12-19 · Masters in Business · Amazon's 'Everything War' with Dana Mattioli · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, he trained his shareholders essentially to not expect anything. And he was very clear communicating that. But it also just gave them roadway to take all their money and say, you know, books were not the be-all end-all. We're going to use this as a test case. We're going to make some money. And then we're going to take all that money and put it into expanding our verticals. Let's open this up to toys. Let's open this up to electronics. It allowed them to build the everything store. And then it allowed them to put this money toward other areas of growth beyond retail and really create this M'son octopus.”
2024-12-19 · Masters in Business · Amazon's 'Everything War' with Dana Mattioli · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so Barnes Noble, in order to stay competitive, tries to buy Ingram, this book distributor that Amazon also used, and Amazon cried foul and said this should be an antitrust violation. And basically Amazon, even today, sometimes has this mentality that they are the David going up against Goliath, even though that has not been true for a very, very long time, including in that anecdote, Amazon by market value was way bigger than Barnes& Noble at that time. And Len Riggio, the CEO of Barnes& Noble at the time, calls them out on it. He says you're crying foul and pretending like this is going to hurt this little player, but you are the behemothier. You know, the regulators do turn it down.”
2024-12-19 · Masters in Business · Amazon's 'Everything War' with Dana Mattioli · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Toys R Us. And they had to outsource it, which meant Amazon kept their customer data. They paid Amazon a fee for shipping it. They paid Amazon a fee for listing it. They paid Amazon all these fees. And Amazon had all the upside.”
2024-12-19 · Masters in Business · Amazon's 'Everything War' with Dana Mattioli · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For a domain like that is around to be so careful with their money because it's a hard business, right? And so yeah, Target borders.”
2024-12-19 · Masters in Business · Amazon's 'Everything War' with Dana Mattioli · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, Jerry Storch, who was the CE of Toys R Us, first worked at Target on dot com, and he told me a story that he got yelled at by senior leaders for spending ten thousand dollars on buying the domain name Targetstores dot com amazing story.”
2024-12-19 · Masters in Business · Amazon's 'Everything War' with Dana Mattioli · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is nothing in between. Retail is a notoriously hard business. It could be low margin. And they have to manage to Wall Street quarter after quarter to quarter. And they couldn't, you know, the CEO told me, we couldn't miss one quarter of earnings, let alone years of them like Bezos did. I'd be out of a job. I would be fired. The company could go bankrupt. And that was exactly what was going on in every company that was trying to compete with them to the point where so many of them had outsourced their logistics to Amazon, which was their main competitor.”
2024-12-19 · Masters in Business · Amazon's 'Everything War' with Dana Mattioli · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A great point, low low tax rate. And that really destroyed his competitors because they couldn't catch up with him on online shopping. I spoke to a lot of these CEOs who went head-to-head with Amazon in the 1990s and 2000s. One of them was the CEO of Linens and things. And I said, you know, why were you all so late to online shopping? Did you not believe in it? And he said, Dana, we believed in it, but my boardroom, my board of directors laughed me out of the room when I asked for $100 million. To get our e commerce and logistics up and running because that would have tanked our earnings, that would have tanked our share price.”
2024-12-19 · Masters in Business · Amazon's 'Everything War' with Dana Mattioli · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Next 10 or 20 years. Exactly. And that just was not the norm back then. It is today, but that was definitely not the norm. And this just gave him a tremendous roadway to reinvest in his business and grow and steal share and cut on prices to get customers.”
2024-12-19 · Masters in Business · Amazon's 'Everything War' with Dana Mattioli · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, this was huge. There probably wouldn't be an Amazon today if Jeff did not convince Wall Street that we don't have to make profits. Right.”
2024-12-19 · Masters in Business · Amazon's 'Everything War' with Dana Mattioli · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, they have something like 6.5 billion dollars in subsidies on taxes from different jurisdictions around the U.S. It's pretty staggering.”
2024-12-19 · Masters in Business · Amazon's 'Everything War' with Dana Mattioli · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. They still haven't broken go. That's amazing. They have one building up for sure, but the whole plan has not come to fruition”
2024-12-19 · Masters in Business · Amazon's 'Everything War' with Dana Mattioli · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And New York was one of the rare cities to really call them out on that. Just think about the frenzy around hundreds of different cities lobbied and put in these very intensive applications for the pleasure of having these warehouse jobs and the second headquarters there. And that just shows how politicians really just want the jobs.”
2024-12-19 · Masters in Business · Amazon's 'Everything War' with Dana Mattioli · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Speaks to Chris Christen. He says, You guys are killing me. Why are you not making Amazon collect sales tax in New Jersey? You're putting toys R Us out of business. You're going to put Main Street out of business. And Chris Christie sort of yay as him. And then a year later they announced this big Amazon warehouse in Robinsville, New Jersey. They give Amazon all these tax credits for it, and Chris Christie gets to put out the press release that they're bringing hundreds of jobs to New Jersey. But Jerry's whole point was, okay, you're getting hundreds of jobs there. You're going to lose thousands of jobs just from my one company. So that's really short sighted. And that's what happened, you know, Toys R Us went out of business”
2024-12-19 · Masters in Business · Amazon's 'Everything War' with Dana Mattioli · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, part of what I found is that many of these legislators in the states were very short-sighted. They wanted to put out press releases that, oh, we got an Amazon warehouse with all of these temporary jobs. And there's this horrible scene in the book where Jerry Storch, who's the CEO of Toys R Us at the time, which is one of New Jersey's largest employers, okay?”
2024-12-19 · Masters in Business · Amazon's 'Everything War' with Dana Mattioli · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a really good question. I spoke to someone in Amazon's public policy office that worked on this, and he said, like, this was our secret sauce. And Amazon fought tooth and nail to preserve it, to not get rid of this advantage they had. And so they'd go to court, they would go before Congress and make their case. And some states did come knocking.”
2024-12-19 · Masters in Business · Amazon's 'Everything War' with Dana Mattioli · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Amazon for many states could sell that for five hundred dollars flat. Sears would have to charge eight percent sales tax in New York. So what would Sears? They would cut the price of their TV by eight percent in order to go head to head with Amazon, and they would just completely destroy their margins. And it created this race to the bottom on electronics prices because they had to try to compete but at a loss. And this happened in so many companies where they either couldn't compete and they lost the sale to Amazon or they cut their prices and they destroyed their margins and that's like a very easy way to go bankrupt.”
2024-12-19 · Masters in Business · Amazon's 'Everything War' with Dana Mattioli · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly, and up to 10% in some of these states. And that just had ripple effects because people, once the advent of online shopping came about, people became really price conscious. You know, people would do comparison shopping. And I spoke to, you know, one of the presidents of Sears who had to deal with this head on. And he said, you know, Amazon and him would be selling the same Sony television. Let's say it's $500 market the price.”
2024-12-19 · Masters in Business · Amazon's 'Everything War' with Dana Mattioli · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, this was simultaneously brilliant, but like horrifying for the rest of retail, he comes up with this idea that his warehouses don't count as physical locations for Amazon.”
2024-12-19 · Masters in Business · Amazon's 'Everything War' with Dana Mattioli · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source