Kosmix Blog

By: Venky

Last week, Anand and I decided to play hookey and jet down to Carlsbad, California, for The Wall Street Journal’s premier tech conference: AllThingsD. This is was my first D Conference and I was very impressed by the quality of the attendees and the speakers. The format was Kara Swisher or Walt Mossberg interviewing celebrity CEOs.

The celebrity CEOs interviews we saw: Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Michael Dell, Barry Diller (IAC), Jeff Bewkes (TimeWarner), Jerry Yang (Yahoo), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), and Rupert Murdoch (News Corp)..

Here are some interesting lines that I recall from the conference:

"You are a public company, you get a 60% premium, you spend 3 months trying to find an alternative, you don't. What do you do? You say yes", both Diller and Murdoch.

"Is Google Voldemort?” – Walt Mossberg to Jerry Yang, since both Jerry and Steve Ballmer kept referring to Google as the “Market Leader”, similar to the “One who must not be named” in Harry Potter.

"Driving a 2 ton vehicle to get your 2 pound package from the store is the worst logistics system invented" -- Jeff Bezos. Walt Mossberg had the perfect comeback -- "doesn't sound like a 60 ton UPS truck delivering that 2 pound package is much better". Of course Jeff came back with the USPS stops at every house.

"We have built a core infrastructure in SEO and SEM, so we can take a new effort, and spin it up very quickly" -- Barry Diller, trying to articulate what connects all those disparate IAC properties.

"We look at any financial option, whether it be IPO, investment, acquisition, and see if it will get us to our vision quicker. It's interesting, if and only if it does. The IPO, investment, acquisition is not interesting in its own right" -- Mark Zuckerberg, the youngest CEO with the clearest answer.

"We didn’t buy Alaska to save two elk” – Rupert Murdoch.

I also chatted on the sidelines with Jeff Bezos, Don Graham (Chairman of the Washington Post), Steve Case (Revolution Health), Adam Lashinsky (Fortune magazine), Jessica V (Wall Street Journal reporter covering Google, Yahoo!), Matt Marshall (Venturebeat), Om Malik (Gigaom) and more...

All in all, a great week in sunny southern California!