We were hoping to build a small profitable company; and of course, what we've done is build a large, unprofitable company.
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On the Internet, companies are scale businesses, characterized by high fixed costs and relatively low variable costs. You can be two sizes: You can be big, or you can be small. It's very hard to be medium. A lot of medium-sized companies had the financing rug pulled out from under them before they could get big.
If you fast-forward through the years, there was a period of time when there was too much debate inside the company about the significance of e-commerce, there were leaders who believed it would never be any bigger than the catalog business, there were leaders that believed it would never be profitable.
Friends congratulate me after a quarterly-earnings announcement and say, 'Good job, great quarter '... And I'll say, 'Thank you, but that quarter was baked three years ago. I'm working on a quarter that'll happen in 2021 right now.'
If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet,they can each tell 6,000 friends.
It's hard to remember for you guys, but for me it's like yesterday I was driving the packages to the post office myself, and hoping one day we could afford a forklift.
Focus on cost improvement makes it possible for us to afford lower prices, which drives growth. Growth spreads fixed costs across more sales, reducing cost per unit, which makes possible more price reductions. Customers like this, and it's good for shareholders. Please expect us to repeat this loop.
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