Sean's 2020: Walmart Buys FedEx, Slack Sells, AWS Set Free

Each month, “Ammirati on Innovation” episodes will look at ways
that the disruptive-startup mentality is spreading beyond young
entrepreneurs to big established corporations. Serial
entrepreneur, venture capitalist and Carnegie Mellon B-school
professor Sean Ammirati, who sits at the intersection of these
high-change dynamics, provides insight.


Episode 9


In this episode, Sean and I discuss Slack. He says Slack has
basically been slashed in half – $42 a share vs. $22 a share. Its
market cap is $12 billion. Sean says what would these statistics
be worth inside Oracle, Salesforce, Microsoft, or Google. He says
that with some of the assets Microsoft has, LinkedIn plus Slack
would be a very good combination. Sean says LinkedIn bought
Lynda, a corporate education company, for $1.5 billion, but so
far it’s been an accretive acquisition.


He speculates Walmart has the potential to buy one or two very
large companies – including FedEx, which he says would be a good
acquisition – and maybe Shopify too. He says we’ll see a further
investment in Walmart Labs, including new business models.


He then turns to Amazon and AWS. He says he just can’t wrap his
head around why Amazon won’t spin out AWS this year. He says he’s
seen all the denials from the management team – but it just
doesn’t make sense that they don’t want to do this. Sean says how
does Walmart feel about cutting checks to AWS? I say that AWS
will finish the calendar year with about $38 billion in revenue –
placing them among the top seven tech companies.


Sean says he’s not an economist, but his conclusion is that often
companies are wrong. They often deliver with confidence and that
confidence often turns out to be incorrect. The market almost
certainly needs to correct in 2020.


Sean’s podcast is Agile Giants, and it’s on all the major
platforms.


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