Junk to Gold: From Salvage to the World’S Largest Online Auto Auction

I was at Amzn early '00s when we lost 95% of our market cap. Later at FB I negotiated a down-round in '09, and then in '12 our stock dropped 50% post-IPO. I was on the board of a public company that went bankrupt (Borders) and a start-up that went under (Hello). Some lessons:

"Move fast and break things" is outdated advice for startups. Software ate the world—and there's more competition than ever. Our startup learned the hard way to ignore this advice, and this is what happened:

Three senior executives recall meeting privately in a conference room that year to write a list of all of Bezos’s successes and failures on a whiteboard. The latter column included Auctions, zShops, the investments in other dot-coms, and most of Amazon’s acquisitions. It was far longer than the first column, which at that time appeared to be limite

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