Crypto Bezos - by Packy McCormick - Not Boring by Packy McCormick

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Hi friends 👋,

Happy Monday!

I haven’t written about a specific company or protocol for the past few weeks, since I wrote about Solana on August 23rd. I’ll get back to analyzing specific companies, protocols, and projects soon, but for now, it feels like we’re in the middle of one of those big, once-in-a-generation shifts, and I’m trying to make sense of it all in real-time. It’s a two-step dance: understand what’s happening as best I can, and then figure out how to translate it such that it makes the most sense to the most people.

One way to do that is to simply analyze and explain what’s going on in the present. I’ve tried to do that with Status Monkeys, Nifty Corporates, Story Time, Infinity Revenues, Infinity Possibilities, The Great Online Game, Own the Internet, The DAO of DAOs, and The Value Chain of the Open Metaverse. Another is to guess at where it’s all heading, like I did in Power to the Person, The Cooperation Economy, The Interface Phase, and Compounding Crazy.

The third way is just to look back. While history isn’t a perfect guide to the future, it’s it’s helpful to remind ourselves that what once seemed laughably futuristic is now normal.

Let’s get to it.

C’mon, Packy. You’re better than this. Writing a blog post about what web3 founders and investors can learn from Jeff Bezos? Jeff Bezos!? Google “Jeff Bezos Business Lessons” and you’ll get 2.8 million results. This has been done before!

I know I know, but last week, I got sucked into the old Jeff Bezos interview rabbit hole on YouTube. Two things struck me:

Those two observations bounced around in my brain and blobbed into a question:

What kind of company would Jeff Bezos start if he were 30 years old today?

Bezos founded Amazon.com when he was 30 years old, back in 1994. Today, it’s the fifth most valuable company in the world, with a $1.75 trillion market cap. Bezos himself is the richest person in the world and the only one out of the 7.9 billion of us with a net worth over $200 billion. He recently flew to space on his own company’s spaceship. He’s done well, and everyone knows it.

The incredible part of the Amazon story to me, though, is how and why it started.

Other companies have since built better business models than Amazon. Google and Facebook are money-printing machines, which Ben Thompson calls Super Aggregators:

Amazon has to buy and hold physical inventory, build warehouses, create a global logistics network… in other words, they deal with atoms. Google and Facebook just deal in bits. But for this exercise, intent matters.

Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Mark Zuckerberg didn’t set out to build internet behemoths. Google started as a research project, BackRub, that Page and Brin began as Stanford PhD students. Zuck launched Facebook from his Harvard dorm to rate girls.

Bezos, on the other hand, set out with the intention to build a giant business by leveraging the internet’s unique capabilities, and was careful to highlight that Amazon was not an internet business. It was a customer business. Amazon could only exist because of the internet, but being on the internet wasn’t the value proposition. Bezos knew that the internet was a tool he could use to give customers the things that actually mattered to them: better selection, lower prices, convenience, and a superior customer experience.

If 30-year-old Jeff Bezos were leaving the hedge fund world to start a business today, chances are, he’d be launching something in web3. It’s growing insanely fast and has the potential to shake everything up enough to create massive, category-defining companies.

I’ve been fully crypto-pilled, and I recognize that my brain is in “have hammer, look for nails” mode, but when I watched the four Bezos interviews, both what Bezos said and the way that his interviewers viewed him and Amazon, I couldn’t help but draw comparisons with everything going on in web3 today.

This is why I can still look myself in the mirror after writing a “Lessons from Jeff Bezos” post: there’s a lot of Bezos lore that applies to companies at any point in time, but the stuff we’re covering today only applies in the “critical category creation time.” With web3, we’re living through one of those rare times when whole segments will be reshaped and new ones will be created from whole cloth.

Plus, as much fun as the speculative side of crypto is, what really excites me is the new types of businesses and projects that crypto makes possible when you look beyond the hype. I don’t think Bezos would just start a web3 company to start a web3 company. Crypto would be a means, not an end. He’d start something that took advantage of web3’s unique capabilities to better serve customers. He’d likely care a lot more about certain aspects of web3 than most people, and a lot less about other aspects than most people. He would be unafraid to incorporate non-crypto tech, and even atoms, where useful.

The question is, then, what kind of company would he start to take advantage of web3’s unique characteristics to better serve customers and “build a lasting important company born of” web3?

The question assumes two things: 1) no one has built a Bezos-esque web3 company to date, and 2) it’s possible to build such a company. The former may be a bad assumption because such a vision may be hiding inside of an unassuming wedge, and the latter may be untrue if web3 is indeed a “stack with ‘fat’ protocols and ‘thin’ applications.”

Either way, it’s a fun and useful thought exercise and an illuminating trip down memory lane, so we’ll try to answer the question by watching four early Bezos interviews and exploring:

I’m not as smart as Jeff Bezos, though, so I don’t have the answer. I’ll set the stage and give some guesses, but I’d love to hear what you think as well. Get involved by replying to this tweet:

First, let’s set the stage. Is web3 the kind of tectonic shift that would attract a young Jeff Bezos?

The mainstream reaction to Web3 in 2021 feels an awful lot like the reaction to Amazon felt in 1999. That’s hard to really grok until you teleport yourself back to that time.

In hindsight, a company like Amazon seems inevitable. Amazon is Amazon. But even five years into its life, when it was worth $30 billion, the media dismissed it as almost a joke, an overhyped and overvalued futuristic oddity thingamajigger. Its dominance was not a foregone conclusion, or even likely, to anyone outside of Seattle. The way the press talked about Amazon then is the way it talks about crypto now.

Watch this 1999 interview Bezos did with 60 Minutes:

Knowing what we know about Amazon now, the interview is cringeworthy. Take, for example, the part in which Bob Simon opines on why Bezos had an unsuccessful dating life in college via voiceover:

One could imagine 60 Minutes’ 17.1 million viewers laughing along with Simon at that rich nerd.

This segment, Nerd of the Amazon, was filmed at an in-between time, when Amazon was already a large, public company, but long before its numbers had caught up to its valuation. As Simon said, “It lost $125 million last year. The company says it’s investing for the future. Skeptics say, it would have to sell every book being sold in the world today to justify its stock price.”

It’s a well-preserved snapshot of the kind of period that Bezos called a “critical category formation time.” In 1999, the internet was up for grabs, and “electronic commerce,” which we just call ecommerce when we call it anything different at all, was a nascent and underdeveloped category. Skeptics rightly pointed out that Amazon’s valuation was crazy based on the reality at the time, but they missed the fact that Amazon would both expand the market and that Amazon itself would do more than just sell books.

Twenty-two years later, Amazon still doesn’t sell every book in the world, but it sells a whole lot more than books, including Amazon Web Services, the main driver of its profits and growth. The company is now worth 60x what it was when the piece was shot in 1999.

Watching that video, the similarities between the general public’s views towards Amazon then and towards crypto today struck me over the head. A good video editor could keep the same quotes, replace a few words, and put out a believable 60 Minutes piece on crypto today. A few quotes that were particularly reminiscent of the current dialogue:

See what I mean?

Now, I admit that there’s survivorship bias here. I could probably go back and find 60 Minutes features on companies that seemed crazy and ended up failing. Amazon’s ultimate success doesn’t necessarily mean that crypto, or any particular web3 company, will succeed. But the similarity in the tone towards Amazon then and the tone towards crypto today is eerie: this is big, and we don’t understand why it’s so big, so let’s cover it, laugh it off, and move on.

I believe we’re in a “critical category formation time” today, too.

Just as Amazon hired away execs from Walmart, Borders, and other major retailers, new people are jumping into web3 daily today.

Elena Burger’s excellent Is This Public? is literally about a smart young person leaving a hedge fund to get into crypto, like Bezos left a hedge fund to get into the internet in 1994. I just backed Optilistic, which is training senior web developers to become blockchain engineers and is flooded with applications. Station is “onboarding and empowering the next billion contributors.”

Crypto projects and protocols are attracting hundreds of millions of investment dollars at multi-billion dollar valuations, and in most cases, they’re trading more on promise than numbers. It’s easy to compare Ethereum’s market cap to Bank of America’s or JP Morgan’s in chuckling disbelief.

Amazon even partnered with Sotheby’s in June 1999 to make people more comfortable with an entirely new behavior -- buying things online.

Sound familiar?

Source: Reuters

The tide is shifting once again, and the similarities are uncanny. I think that young Jeff Bezos would build a crypto company today. How would he approach it?

Before anyone knew who he was, a young, balding man sat down for an interview on Web and Internet Pioneers with Richard Wiggins.

The video is one of the best things on the internet, a must-watch for anyone interested in technology, entrepreneurship, or strategy. If you get nothing else out of this piece, just watch the video:

I’ve written about this interview before, in May 2020’s Two Ways to Predict the Future, when I wrote about Worldbuilders, entrepreneurs who:

Bezos is maybe the greatest modern example of a Worldbuilder, along with Elon Musk (it’s no surprise that they’re the two richest people in the world).

Source: Forbes

The interview is chock full of clues as to how Bezos would evaluate what to build today.

Since I first watched the video a few years ago, what stuck with me is that Bezos didn’t have a particular nerdy passion for the internet, or a desire to revolutionize the way books were sold. In the modern startup parlance, he was more “mercenary” than “missionary.”

In 1994, while he was working at the quantitative hedge fund D.E. Shaw, Jeff Bezos read that internet usage was growing 2,300% per year, and he wanted to get involved. He made a list of twenty products he might be able to sell online, researched them all, and settled on books as the “first best product” for a simple reason: “there are more items in the book category than there are in any other category by far.”

From a market size perspective, books were not the obvious choice.Book store sales in 1994 were $10.1 billion, compared to $273.4 billion in food store sales. Books were so non-obvious that Louis Borders, the guy who started bookselling giant Borders, decided to start Webvan instead of trying to sell books online.

Bezos realized, though, that the internet wasn’t ready for everything yet, and had disadvantages compared to offline retail, so he decided that whatever he built needed to be something that could only exist online. He told Wiggins:

Bezos was comfortable using the more traditional method in his own business wherever necessary to provide the best customer experience. This 1999 interview highlights that Bezos wasn’t trying to build an internet company, but to take advantage of what the internet offered to provide a superior experience to customers.

Again, the whole thing is worth a watch, and is particularly funny for Bezos’ insistence on bringing the conversation back to the customer (captured hilariously by the YouTube comments):

Source: YouTube

But the crescendo comes when the interviewer pushes Bezos on whether or not, given its real estate footprint, inventory, and employees, Amazon is a pure-play internet company.

To Bezos, the internet was a means to achieve a great customer experience, not an end in and of itself.

Source: CNBC on YouTube

So what can we pick up? How would he look at what to build today?

The internet gave Amazon early superpowers that it used to build a juggernaut:

Bezos was able to do what he did because he understood what the internet did well, and what it didn’t. Crypto Bezos would need to start from the understanding of what web3 does well.

The internet that captured young Jeff Bezos' attention in 1994 wasn’t like the internet we use every day:

Web3 today is more advanced in many respects than the internet was in 1994, but it still checks a lot of the same boxes: slow transactions, early penetration, mainly for nerds, and very little casual shopping. What would most enchant a new young Jeff Bezos, sitting at his desk at 2021 DE Shaw, would undoubtedly be web3’s growth.

Sources: Dune, DeFiPulse, DeFi Llama, Business Insider

Over the past year:

These are rough proxies for the overall growth of the web3 ecosystem. Conservatively, web3 is growing faster today than the internet was in 1994, and it’s still equally early when measured by the number of users.

Last week, I wrote that new interfaces were one way web3 was going to go mainstream and “cross the chasm,” just as Netscape grew internet usage. In the app-infrastructure-interface cycle, interfaces play an underappreciated role. Apps’ role is appreciated -- Amazon undoubtedly made more people comfortable shopping online -- and a crypto version of Jeff Bezos will be a necessary ingredient to web3’s mass adoption.

So attracted by eye-watering growth, Crypto Bezos would look into web3 and understand what it uniquely enables for customers that couldn’t be done without it. Remember, if you can build with the old technology, build with the old technology. What would crypto let Crypto Bezos do for his customers?

The first thing he would notice is that crypto shortens the horizon on Original Bezos’ observation that, “in the long-term, there is never any misalignment between customer interest and shareholder interest.” In crypto, the customers can also be the owners from the earliest days. He might raise money directly from customers instead of (or in addition to) outside investors, or let customers become owners just by being customers. Better alignment, built in.

The next thing Crypto Bezos would notice is that web3 lets companies bootstrap early demand without spending a ton of money on marketing. Incentivized customer / owners will spread the word to other customer owners. Might that let him lower prices, or even pay customers to use the product? If Amazon benefited most from scale, Crypto Bezos’ new thing would likely benefit most from network effects.

Crypto Bezos might also recall that Original Bezos said that attention is the scarce resource of the late 20th century, realize that it remains so today, and start playing around with what a world looks like in which he could actually reward customers for their attention directly. He might also realize that, unlike in Amazon’s marketplace, in web3, creators are not commodities, and incentivize them to capture attention for his product and contribute their work to increase selection.

Original Bezos ran Amazon in a decentralized fashion, pushing budgets and decision-making power out to teams. Crypto Bezos might use tokens and on-chain cash flows to further decentralize decision making at the corporate level.

Crypto Bezos would certainly appreciate that web3 makes digital objects ownable. If Amazon changed the cost structure by shifting from expensive retail to cheaper warehouses, NFTs would give Bezos the opportunity to lower costs even more dramatically by selling ownable, provably unique and scarce digital items. Infinite shelf space for Original Bezos meant listing physical books and tracking them down IRL; infinite shelf space for Crypto Bezos might mean unique digital items literally approaching infinity and not limited by physical space or logistics.

He would also have a field day with tokenomics, tinkering and tweaking to build a system that creates the best outcome for both the customer and for Crypto Amazon.

Equally interesting is what Crypto Bezos would ignore, and how he would mix and match old tools and new. Original Bezos wasn’t afraid to build buildings, hire people, and hold inventory, and didn’t care whether investors thought Amazon was a pure-play internet company.

Crypto Bezos would be clear-eyed about what web3 does well today, what it will do well eventually, and what it will never do well, and then design a product around that understanding. He’d throw out dogma in favor of whatever would bring hundreds of millions of normal people into his product. He might tell investors, or token holders, “web3, shmeb3” and stay resolute in the face of their confusion…. or he might realize that token value is important in different ways than share price, and use the tools at his disposal to prop up its market cap.

Ultimately, Crypto Bezos would approach crypto clear-eyed and pragmatically and use the tools at his disposal to build products that could not be built otherwise and that are better for regular customers. So what would he build?

There are a lot of crypto projects that are built as crypto projects, for crypto people. Many of them have made, and will continue to make, a shitload of money. Many will continue to be built. Many will make astronomical sums of money, just like Google and Facebook do today. FTX and Alameda founder Sam Bankman-Fried might be the Crypto Zuckerberg, a tech genius with a nose for money and a willingness to do whatever it takes (within the boundaries of the law) to make it. SBF builds crypto products.

Crypto Bezos, on the other hand, would build products, from Day One, that are better for the regular customer than anything they have access to today. He’d pick a small wedge -- something for which crypto is most uniquely well-suited -- and patiently expand outward over time, as the underlying tech makes crypto better at more and more things.

The first category that comes to mind would be NFTs, which are the easiest comp to Original Amazon. Original Bezos sold physical products online, Crypto Bezos might sell digital ones. There’s no other way to sell portable, ownable digital items besides crypto; NFTs check that major box. Maybe the answer is simple: Crypto Bezos would launch the Metaverse Everything Store.

I think that’s too on the nose, though. Certainly, Crypto Bezos would incorporate NFTs where practical, but I think he’d be more drawn to an area in which crypto is uniquely well-suited to make the biggest difference in the everyday customer’s life: personal finance.

Crypto Bezos could find ways to abstract away all of the complexity beneath the surface to build a wallet or finance app that makes people more money, automatically gives them ownership in the companies and protocols behind the things they buy, rewards them for their attention, and closes the wealth gap. Instead of one-click purchase, Crypto Bezos might offer 0-click yield maximization/risk minimization. (There’s actually one company I’m really excited about here but I can’t talk about it yet. Soon.)

The wallet or app would be a direct wedge from which Crypto Bezos could expand into any number of categories, bringing a large base of newly-onboarded customers along. In a decade or two, Crypto Bezos’ empire might be as sprawling as Original Bezos’ is today, selling the crypto equivalent of everything from books to cloud services to Prime Video, direct or via marketplace.

The thing is though, I have no idea what Crypto Bezos will build. No one writing about the internet in 1994 predicted what Amazon would become. Even five years in, the media all but dismissed it as a nerdy fad run by a nerdy lad. Books were a non-obvious choice. The fun thing about innovation is that it’s impossible to predict because the next big idea is going to come from the unique experiences and insights of one of the 7.9 billion people on earth.

Web3 Bezos might be building in crypto already, might be a really smart person at a hedge fund, web2 company, or outside of tech, or might even be a community of people building and collaborating together, aided by web3’s unique coordination capabilities. Chances are, many of the 76,625 of you will have better ideas on the subject than I do. Share them here:

The Crypto Bezos might be one of you -- smart and curious enough about web3 to read thousands of words on it every week, each bringing your own skills and experiences. The biggest lesson from Bezos might be that when you’re in a critical category creation time, it’s worth taking the time to analyze the new things that you can build and the new superpowers you can give customers. And it’s worth diving in.

There’s a fifth video that we haven’t discussed yet. I have to admit, I didn’t watch the whole thing. I just watched the intro. Its attitude towards Amazon seems reflective of the prevailing sentiment towards the company today, and it too is best captured in a question:

“The question for the democracy is: are we OK with one company essentially winning capitalism?”

Hearing that question fresh, without having watched the old Bezos interviews, wouldn’t raise any red flags. We’re used to Amazon’s dominance. But the juxtaposition across twenty-two years is stark. The same company that Bob Simon openly laughed at now stands accused of having “won capitalism.”

It wasn’t obvious at the time to most people that the internet would create enormous winners over the long-term, or that Amazon would be one of those winners. But it was clear to Jeff Bezos. In the internet shminternet interview, he said:

That’s where we are right now. It’s very easy to predict that there are going to be lots of successful companies born of web3 that are going to have very large market caps and so on. It’s also very hard to predict who those companies are going to be.

The best part is that if you’re reading this, maybe you’ll be one of the people to build one. Maybe you’ve been Crypto Bezos all along.

Thanks to Dan and Puja for editing!Heroes.

This Thursday, September 23rd, I’m hosting a session with Thrive’s Gaurav Ahuja and Stytch on the founders’ journey going from 0 to 1. Stytch is an API-first company backed by Benchmark, Index, and Thrive. Its founders, Reed McGinley-Stempel and Julianna Lamb, will share tips on hiring early engineers, building a product strategy, landing your first customers, and fundraising. The event is free - join us!

Yesterday, I discovered Wanderers, a space-themed NFT collection that resonated with me more than any I’ve seen. The current NFTs are animated, colorful, and play spacey music on loop. I bought three, my biggest NFT purchase to date.

My Wanderers; check them out on OpenSea to see animation and hear sound

Holders have access to future drops — planets and avatars — and there’s a whole story developing around the Wanderers. The Discord is one of the more fun and welcoming I’ve found. If you’ve been wanting to dip your toes into NFTs and read sci-fi, this seems like a fun place to start. Check out the collection on OpenSea.

How did you like this week’s Not Boring? Your feedback helps me make this great.

Thanks for reading, and see you on Thursday,

Packy