29 Quotes by Julie Wainwright

Whenever people think of the dot-com collapse, they think of a handful of companies that epitomized the era, and Pets.com... is always up there, right?

I said the only way I would join Pets.com was if I could get Amazon to invest, and I did. I knew that anything that could be sourced externally, Amazon could do better and cheaper than anyone else except Walmart. It was really obvious to me.

Why are people so obsessed with Pets.com? We shut it down and returned money to shareholders. Besides, there were plenty of other dot-com failures around then.

You have to have a unique product that Amazon just can't source. It's all about the product. Why is it important? Why is it different? Amazon are not merchants. They are technology platform guys.

Something like Pinterest would scare the hell out of me. With $5 billion valuation - regardless how sound those numbers are - wouldn't be one that I would start, given what I would consider the risk of failure.

When I turned 50, I truly felt I was too old to work in Silicon Valley. No one said anything to my face, but when you can be the mother of some of the people you're interviewing with, that says it all.

Here is what the world looked like in 2000... there were no plug and play solutions for ecommerce/warehouse management and customer service that could scale... which means that we had to employ 40+ engineers. Cloud computing did not exist, which means that we had to have a server farm and several IT people to insure that the site did not go down.

When I started in e-commerce, there was not a lot of clutter because there were not a lot of companies. Nowadays, you have to have a pretty serious moat around your business to compete with Amazon, Wal-Mart, and even Alibaba online.

Investors do not like losing money. They do not like companies that fail. They do not like entrepreneurs that fail. There is not a culture of celebrating failure in Silicon Valley or anyplace else. That is a myth. Recognize this, and if you start another business, get it to a successful point before approaching outside investors again.