People turns out love the Amazon dot com episode. That was so awesome. It makes me a little nervous for this one. Oh

Massively by far and away our biggest episode ever. Is this how George Lucas felt when he was doing Empire Strikes Back?

You did not just compare as the George Lucas did you?

I swear we're humble. All right, let's do this

Now

Is it you? Is it you? Is it you sitting down? Say it straight another story on the way

Welcome to season 11 episode three of acquired the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them

I've been Gilbert and I am the co-founder and managing director of Seattle based pioneer square labs and our venture fund PSL ventures

And I'm David Rosenball and I am an angel investor based

In San Francisco cold San Francisco here in August and

We are your hosts

All right, David. Let's say you run a lemonade stand

You sell me the highest quality lemonade you can for the lowest price one dollar a cup

And when you add up all your costs the variable ones like the lemons and the fixed ones like the table that you rented

It costs about 98 and a half cents to give me that lemonade and you're happy your turn to profit

I'm sure but man you are going to have to sell a lot of lemonade

So you're telling me I'm Amazon.com in the fourth quarter of 2001

Which is actually where we're going to start our story perhaps

But you discover something interesting by making all this lemonade you get really good at the stuff

It takes to run a lemonade business the perfect cups and ice and lemons everything and it turns out all that stuff that you just got good at

You can sell to other businesses and guess what you realize further that when you sell your services to other companies

When you charge them a dollar it only costs you 70 cents to make it

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