A Quote by Julie Wainwright

Amazon has reported a loss of nearly $900M in 1999... because, guess what, ecommerce is a business of scale. And, the Internet bubble had burst... which meant that no one was getting funded.
I had been in the technology business for so long, I had seen the PC-bubble come and burst, I had seen the local area and wide area networking-bubble come and burst, it was no shock that the internet-bubble was going to burst.
That's our mirror. Every dip, every crash, every bubble that's burst, a testament to our brilliant stupidity. This one gave us the railroads. This one the Internet. This one the slave trade. And if we hope to do anything about saving the environment, or getting to other worlds, we'll need a bubble for that too. Everything I've ever done in my life worth anything has been done in a bubble: in a state of extreme hope and trust and stupidity.
You can go back to tulip bulbs in Holland 400 years ago. The human beings going through combinations of fear and greed and all of that sort of thing, their behavior can lead to bubbles. And it may have had and Internet bubble at one time, you've had a farm bubble, farmland bubble in the Midwest which resulted in all kinds of tragedy in the early '80s.
It was 1999, and we were building a way for college kids to create online profiles for the purpose of sharing... with employers. Oops. I vividly remember the moment I realized my company was going to fail. My co-founder and I were at our wits' end. By 2001, the dot-com bubble had burst, and we had spent all our money.
Great businesses can be built on scale. I think Amazon has built a phenomenal commerce business largely on scale. Their network effect isn't obvious to me, but boy, have they used scale effectively.
People on welfare are getting a price cut to join Amazon Prime, which means you're paying for that. So the food stamp recipients will now get Amazon Prime for $5.99 a month. Free shipping, unlimited streaming of movies and TV shows, which means that these people have to have internet accessibility.
Here is what the world looked like in 2000... there were no plug and play solutions for ecommerce/warehouse management and customer service that could scale... which means that we had to employ 40+ engineers. Cloud computing did not exist, which means that we had to have a server farm and several IT people to insure that the site did not go down.
We had a booming stock market in 1929 and then went into the world's greatest depression. We have a booming stock market in 1999. Will the bubble somehow burst, and then we enter depression? Well, some things are not different.
I always had a sense that I would fall in love with Tokyo. In retrospect I guess it's not that surprising. I was of the generation that had grown up in the '80s when Japan was ascendant (born aloft by a bubble whose burst crippled its economy for decades), and I'd fed on a steady diet of anime and samurai films.
I live in a bubble. I don't read the blogs, or go on the internet, and I really just don't know what people are saying because, well I guess I'm afraid to.
I've been managing Internet businesses since 1999. That's 12 years of being in the tornado, and it's pretty exhausting. I'll be looking at the next challenge, but in terms of operating an Internet business, I've scratched that itch very well.
When I got fired, I had a feeling of loss because Viacom had been a passionate long-term relationship. But I got my balance back. I guess it's like getting jilted by a girlfriend, a serious girlfriend. You move on.
When I got fired, I had a feeling of loss because Viacom had been a passionate long-term relationship. But I got my balance back. I guess its like getting jilted by a girlfriend, a serious girlfriend. You move on.
The Internet rewards scale; by trading higher up-front costs for lower marginal cost, market leaders can invest in better technology and service. As a result, there is nothing online that is both great in quality and small in scale. Amazon wasn't originally a better bookstore than the small shops we mourn, but it is now.
That's the miracle of Amazon! It's like Internet dating. In the early days, you could get slimed as an author on Amazon by someone bearing a grudge, or jealous, or whatever. And because there were so few reviews posted, this stank.
Virtually every real breakthrough in technology had a bubble which burst, left a lot of people broke who'd invested in it, but also left the infrastructure for this next golden age, effectively.
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