

Jeff Bezos raised $1M from 22 people to get Amazon started - thinkling
http://thenextweb.com/media/2012/11/29/in-the-early-days-amazon-founder-jeff-bezos-attended-60-investor-meetings-to-raise-1m-from-22-people/

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hythloday
If like me the phrase "regret minimization framework" catches your eye, he
goes into it here:

[http://bijansabet.com/post/147533511/jeff-bezos-regret-
minim...](http://bijansabet.com/post/147533511/jeff-bezos-regret-minimization-
framework)

previous HN discussion:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1717824>

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rexreed
I had to click into the article to understand the title of this post. Somehow
the sentence structure of the post title didn't seem to make sense to me.

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pbreit
Was the use of "ask" as a noun the problem?

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sixothree
I needed 3 googles to understand the etymology. But seriously, why is ask
being nounified where other verbs are not. I think it has something to do with
the culture, but I cannot place my finger on it.

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SatvikBeri
In the business world, ask has been used as a noun at least since 1985 ("I
understand it's a big ask...")[1]

[http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001331.h...](http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001331.html)

~~~
podperson
Goes back at least as far as 1781:

[http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4246/can-or-
shoul...](http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4246/can-or-should-ask-
ever-be-used-as-a-noun)

Nouning verbs (like verbing nouns) is very common in English, to the extent
it's often unclear which came first.

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mvc
I like the bit about how nobody in the book business was interested. Puts
their current whining into perspective.

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leelin
Wasn't Jeff Bezos a fairly senior and well-respected quant at D. E. Shaw just
before founding Amazon? I would guess he would have had a fairly easy time
raising money purely for capital purposes. Maybe he was strategically trying
to get non-tech people in the book industry to invest and that was the root of
the difficulty?

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mdonahoe
He was perhaps deliberately keeping each individual investment small so that
no one investor would have a large controlling interest.

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ry0ohki
Getting an investor in 1 out of every 3 meetings doesn't seem so terrible

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hkmurakami
The ratio is probably a bit worse than this, since I expect that some of the
meetings were with groups of investors.

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monochromatic
"Ask" is a verb, not a noun.

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debacle
Actually, in investing and finance, "ask" is both a verb and a noun.

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pbreit
In all of business (and probably elsewhere, too), "ask" is frequently used as
a noun.

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haberman
I wonder how much each one of those original $50,000 investments is worth now.

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adventured
I think it's safe to guess that Bezos didn't give up much more than 10% to get
started for that. From what I recall his family also holds shares and
invested, whether they were part of that group I don't know.

Bezos now owns roughly 20% (Forbes and Bloomberg peg his wealth around $20b to
$25b usually depending on Amazon's market cap at the time), and he hasn't been
an active buyer or seller for the most part over the years (he has sold a very
small portion). So if Bezos retained 80% to 90% at the time of this deal, and
assuming his shares weren't specially protected (and I'm not aware they
were)....

If that group held 10%: each $50k is worth $125 million If that group held
20%: each $50k is worth $250 million

That's assuming no sales occurred over time of course. That's a decent
ballpark either way, and even if you skew the numbers either direction it's a
massive return.

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netcan
Amazon is an interesting story with an interesting trajectory. I remember
being explained about it as a teenager. The overfunded 90s dotcom that made
it.

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podperson
It seems to me that Amazon is the last of the 90s dotcoms. It's barely viable,
so it just keeps going, but there's a huge premium on its share price that
seems to presume that one day it will get a monopoly on online sales and
suddenly be able to generate huge profits. As if this wouldn't (a) immediately
result in massive cannibalization by new entrants or failing that (b) anti-
trust enforcement.

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wmf
They may lose money on Kindles, Kindle books, and Prime, but don't forget the
cloud.

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podperson
Yes, thanks to their vast operating profits from the cloud they have a P/E of
~3000.

Let's be generous and assume Amazon could push a button and run the rest of
its business at break even, and that its revenues from the cloud are pure
profit -- its P/E would only be somewhere between 50-70.

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wmf
It depends whether you assume that virtually all servers will go to the cloud
and Amazon will have monopoly market share in the cloud.

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podperson
I think a business strategy that assumes "someday in the future we'll be a
monopoly and charge rents" isn't a good one.

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jsemrau
Thank you for posting this. I am currently at half that but step by step
progressing further.

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bbaker
Even a hit rate of half that is pretty solid. 30% close rate on pitches is
ridiculously high. Keep rocking.

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hntldr_com
Original title is a bit clearer: "Jeff Bezos attended 60 investor meetings to
raise $1m from 22 people, just to get Amazon started"

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jlgreco
It seems like the moderators have been putting in some overtime lately with
the headline rewriting. I appreciate the effort, most of the time the rewrite
is better, but it does make it harder to visually scan the site for
interesting articles (considering it is not rare for many articles about the
same topic to be on the front page at once).

