The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google

by Scott Galloway

The ex is still pissed off. In April 2017 Bezos closed Quidsi and laid off many of its employees. Hey, if you leave me, your brother needs to move out of the basement. Maybe Quidsi should have been shut down. But my bet is this was Jeff saying to Marc, “and fuck you too.” We forget most of the world’s major organizations are run by humans, middle-aged humans, who have enormous egos that ensure they, on a regular basis, make an emotional/irrational decision. Jet uses algorithms to encourage you to increase the size of your basket by lowering the price based on cost of shipping and how profitable the bundle is. It started out with an annual membership fee of $50, similar to wholesale club Costco. It was the first company that had the balls to take on Amazon head-to-head and in its first year raised a quarter of a billion dollars. But there was a glitch: the firm and offering made no sense. Jet.com announced soon after launch that they were scrapping the membership model, as business was so strong without it. This is the PR equivalent of turning chicken shit into chicken salad. At the time of Walmart’s acquisition, Jet.com was spending $4 million/week on advertising and needed to get to $20 billion in annual sales—more revenue than Whole Foods or Nordstrom—to break even.85 As traditional consumer marketing wanes in importance at the hands of digital, and better products emerge that consumers can discover using new tools of diligence, entrepreneurs’ ability to spin lemons into...

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