Topics Covered

• Community spotlight: Nowdue, a super fast invoicing platform for teams on Slack. Invoice like it's the future! This looks very cool. 
• Jet's deep origins in Founder & CEO Marc Lore's first two companies, The Pit and Quidsi (aka, diapers.com) 
• Lore's chance run-in with Jeff Bezos at a school picnic in Seattle in the early 2000's
• Amazon's dramatic acquisition of Quidsi in 2010, including Bezos' admonition to Amazon corp dev to keep Quidsi from being bought by Walmart under any circumstances (covered well in The Everything Store)
• Lore's less-than-favorable opinion of Amazon's culture
• Lore's vision of Jet as an ‚Äòonline Costco' that can directly with Amazon on price by selling goods to a "huge middle-class of people" at effectively zero margin, and make profit on membership fees
• Jet's huge, pre-launch fundraising rounds, and subsequent massively promoted public launch in July 2015
• Jet's pivot in October 2015 to drop the membership model (their only profit engine), and subsequent massive growth (but also accompanying massive losses) 
• 'Admitting defeat" to Amazon in July 2016? Immediately followed by the blockbuster $3B+ Walmart acquisition announcement
• Is e-commerce really a winner-take-all business and will Amazon just take over the world? Featuring liberal citations (again) of Ben Thompson's Aggregation Theory and the importance of customer experience. 
• Is there any path for Walmart & Jet to compete effectively with Amazon? Is Marc Lore Walmart's only hope?
• Fantastic interview with Tim Cook discussing (among other things) the massive amount of growth still left in the internet

Follow-ups

• Lucasfilm: Star Wars Rouge One trailer drops! Featuring a strong female protagonist!

Hot Takes

New section! Thank you @cteitzel on Slack for the idea.

• Verizon/AOL acquires Yahoo!
• Lyft reportedly turns down acquisition offer from GM
• Microsoft acquires Beam
• Randstad acquires Monster.com

Carve Outs

• Ben: Michael Mauboussin's Talk at Google and Reflections on the Ten Attributes of Great Investors after thirty years of honing his craft
• David: Strava, the fantastic social fitness-tracking app