Create a Product for a Quick Acquisition
Acquiring the Proof of Concept
Amazon Go launched the most novel way of shopping to date. Amazon has prided itself on human less workforce. Now they are bringing that theme to the brick-and-mortar experience.
If you've ever seen a picture of an Amazon warehouse you know it is staffed with thousand of robots that insure that you'll get your products within a two day window, if you're a Prime member. Amazon understood that building robots is a lot cheaper than paying for health insurance and salaries of people that are not infinitely strong and can't work 24 hours a day seven days a week, because of regulations.
Amazon Go Enables people to walk into a store, grab a basket full of products, and walk out without having to interact with a cashier. The whole checkout process has become more seamless. Like a real life “1-click” checkout. Amazon is using the latest technologies including Bluetooth beacons, shelf cameras, artificial intelligence and weight sensors to understand what you put into your basket and exactly how much to charge you. This is clearly going to be rolled out to any brick-and-mortar that Amazon operates and has or will acquire. So all of those Amazon stores and Whole Foods stores will no longer need humans at their checkout lanes. This is helpful as this will ultimately reduce all theft, but also will reduce this human interaction that you might have of small talk with the checkout person.
Bodega, a company which allows any place to become the local corner store, has been building very interesting technology which is similar.
As you'll see from the video, Bodega is building out Computer Vision which is allowing it to identify the person that is choosing the product, which products they are in fact choosing, and ultimately billing the person as soon as they shut the doors.
Bodega is creating the proof of concept for the white label version of Amazon Go. They will be sold to the highest bidder just like Jet was, as the technology is patented and is ultimately the future of competing in an Amazon ruled world. It is uncertain whether or not the founders of Bodega thought of this idea on their own or knew that Amazon was working on something similar. If it’s the latter, then they knew that they could have a pretty easy exit by creating a white label version of similar technology, making the move quite brilliant.
Ando
Ando just announced that it is going to be acquired by Uber. What Ando did brilliantly, just like it did in the past life when it was called Maple, was that it proved out that there was no need to have a brick-and-mortar store front in order to offer food deliveries for people.
Seamless’ partners were all businesses which had storefronts which you can walk into and order or pick up from. This assumption that food businesses had to be run this way was incomplete. Ando showed that you could have a lot of cost savings by creating a limited menu and have a delivery only restaurant where the food would be fully cooked in a fulfillment center. Uber saw this as a very smart and novel concept and since they had a bit of insight on the kinds of volume that they were doing because Ando was using Uber Rush to handle their deliveries. It was a no-brainer for Uber to start vertically integrating in the food delivery space by acquire a meal creator.
The roadmap is here: build the next inevitable step, don't be associated with any large companies, and make it almost frictionless to be sold off. Don't worry about your vertical integration as your acquirer is buying you to fill out that piece.
