Episode Details

Ben & David break down Jet.com’s meteoric rise, culminating in Walmart’s blockbuster $3B+ acquisition of the company just two years after its founding. Will we look back on this deal as an ‘Instagram-like’ bargain or a ‘Pets.com'-sized blunder? And most importantly, can *anyone* compete with Amazon going forward? We speculate wildly. 

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• Community spotlight: Nowdue, a super fast invoicing platform for teams on Slack. Invoice like it’s the future! This looks very cool. 
• Jet’s deep origins in Founder & CEO Marc Lore’s first two companies, The Pit and Quidsi (aka, diapers.com) 
• Lore’s  chance run-in with Jeff Bezos at a school picnic in Seattle in the early 2000’s
• Amazon's dramatic acquisition of Quidsi in 2010, including Bezos’ admonition to Amazon corp dev to keep Quidsi from being bought by Walmart under any circumstances (covered well in  The Everything Store)
• Lore’s  less-than-favorable opinion of Amazon's culture
•  Lore's vision of Jet as an ‘online Costco’ that can directly with Amazon on price by selling goods to a “huge middle-class of people" at effectively zero margin, and make profit on membership fees
• Jet’s  huge,  pre-launch  fundraising rounds, and subsequent  massively promoted public launch in July 2015
• Jet’s pivot in October 2015 to  drop the membership model (their only profit engine), and subsequent massive growth (but also accompanying massive losses) 
• 'Admitting defeat” to Amazon in July 2016? Immediately followed by the  blockbuster $3B+ Walmart acquisition announcement
• Is e-commerce really a winner-take-all business and will Amazon just take over the world? Featuring liberal citations (again) of Ben Thompson's