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Comment by lnsru | Hacker News Reader

Wrong comparison. Peloton is manufacturer of fitness gadgets with limited market size. While Amazon is a marketplace gathering fees from sellers with virtually unlimited market size. Everything with hardware is close to death with one leg in the coffin. One mismanagement in supply chain and you are gone. Look at the poor car manufacturers right now. Maybe there is exception - one phone manufacturer that is managing supply chain very well.

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> While Amazon is

Not a wrong comparison at all. His point is that Amazon was a place that sold books. They took risks and grew into a marketplace for selling everything. One mismanagement of their AWS development or platformization and things could be very different.

Peloton is a manufacturer of fitness gadgets AND a content provider of fitness classes. What they could grow into if they take risks is an open and interesting discussion.

Starting with books with an intention to go into all e-commerce seems like a good plan to expand into a large domain from a hard problems side, then he could do it again with AWS. By that point size alone was advantage.

Manufacturing a fitness product with streamed classes seemed to be tackling the hardest part of what domain? Sure they could try random things now, but where are they ahead of a media, robotics, car or e-commerce firm? Investors are quoted as thinking he doesn't know what he is doing so probably he shouldn't have built up staff with no new market to enter with an advantage.

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