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Comment by theolivenbaum | Hacker News Reader

From what I see, it's exactly the opposite. It's more like we hired all these people because we're growing so fast, so please give us money

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That doesn't sound like a powerful negotiating position, though; it sounds like desperation. Why would you do that intentionally?

If the top line is also growing fast, and you have a good story on the unit-economic, part of the narrative is that you can eventually reduce costs and increase margin. It is hard from the outside to distinguish between Amazon style "we are investing all our profits back into R&D so we can take over the world" and "We are bloating our team to grow at all costs and don't know what levers to pull"

> It is hard from the outside to distinguish between Amazon style "we are investing all our profits back into R&D so we can take over the world" and "We are bloating our team to grow at all costs and don't know what levers to pull"

Considering Amazon was building physical warehouses, buying land, literally delivering to people, executing deployment of AWS which Netflix was famously using, all while being a publicly listed company with audited public financials I think Amazon’s style is easy to distinguish from the outside.

It really doesn't sound easy to me to tell this from the outside. What if the R&D investments are all garbage? It is hard to scale an engineering org effectively, it can take off and start building some microservice fortress that never yields any business value if it has the wrong leadership.

Because they were publicly listed with public financials, you know they were not losing money:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/profit...

You also know from using Amazon that they were near flawlessly executing 2 day shipping across the US with prices competitive with Walmart and other successful retailers.

They also had a pricing advantage against incumbents due to not having to collect sales tax in all states until 2016.

It’s mostly the verifiably not losing money part though so you knew they weren’t overextending, and they were delivering what people wanted.

There are third party appraisals for the value of physical things, and even quite a bit of software stuff nowdays.

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