Lamar Smith

If you want to hear the latest rumors and real customer needs, then you need all your leaders to be out talking to real customers. You can predict how innovative a company will be by watching how close they are to their customers. …

He said tha…mazon’s hockey stick growth curve, and we all gaped at him, wondering what the hell he was smoking. He told us calmly that all we sold were books, music and video, and all of them were being digitized and would die soon. Right then and there he predicted the Kindle and iTunes and Amazon Instant Video, none of which emerged until years later. He said that if we didn’t get into hardlines and other businesses, we’d be dead in a few years. He told us we had to be able to sell and ship anything, a live elephant if need be. So we solved that.

…ents and business logic are growing more complicated by the week. And I mean literally by the week. But Grab makes smart tech choices — e.g. AWS, the Go language, Kotlin for Android. And they don’t have Not Invented Here syndrome, so they don’t waste time reinventing wheels. I have every confidence that we’ll win this.