You see the rise and fall of Sears and others. It's just a reminder that this can happen to us too.
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When you look at what was happening with e-commerce and how big that was going to become, there's the big wave of India, there's the big wave of e-commerce, and then there's the question of, "Is this the brand to invest in?". We developed this confidence in that team, and so far we've been proven to be right about that.
We grew this business with the store operators and the merchants making all the decisions, I got to be one of the merchants and it was a lot of fun. But to put the customer in charge, you have to start with design.
We've actually set the tech priorities driven off what we want to build for customers and what they're asking us to solve, and that's how it's going to be, and that is a cultural tension even today because we actually want some of both, we want ownership.
One of the technology leaders, a few years ago, was visiting with me here and we were writing on the whiteboard and they stopped and turned around and looked at me and said, "Oh my God, you're going to win." And I said, "Yeah, but why?". "Now, tell me how".
So, what I think, sometimes a pure tech company can underestimate is the importance of culture, the importance of a purpose.
I think scale matters, and being an Aggregator creates lots of opportunity, but scale also has a lot of disadvantages and it's an imperfect concept.
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