Henry Blodget, CEO of Insider Inc., told CNBC on Wednesday that Jeff Bezos offered valuable advice when the founder of Amazon invested in his start-up media company.
Bezos, who resigned as Amazon CEO later this year, led a $ 5 million investment round in Blodget’s company in 2013. It was about six years old at the time and was known as Business Insider. In an interview on ‘Squawk Box’, Blodget recalls a discussion he had with Bezos about how to allocate his time between management and editorial staff.
“I wrote all the time. I was an editor, and one of the things I asked him right after he invested was, ‘Listen, should I keep writing and doing TV and stuff like that or should I stay CEO? “Because the company has grown big enough that I really need to do something,” Blodget said.
Bezos responded by saying he actually only had one request as an investor, Blodget said. “He said, ‘I’m going to beg you to stay CEO. ” On Wednesday, Blodget, a former Wall Street analyst, also described the urgent Bezos over the reason. “[Bezos] said: ‘Because you do not even realize it, but every day you make dozens of small course corrections. You are all inventing a new model for journalism. You have an instinct where it’s going. ”
According to Blodget, Bezos added: ” ‘If you take someone else who is experienced, you will want to give them plenty of room to make their own decisions. It will happen over a long period of time and things will change. “He said, ‘I’m investing because I want you to make the course corrections.’
Insider Inc. was sold to German publisher Axel Springer in a deal worth nearly $ 450 million in 2015. Blodget remains CEO, but resigned in 2017 as editor-in-chief.
Blodget recalls the conversation one day after Amazon announced that Bezos would move from CEO to CEO later this year. Andy Jassy will take the reins of Bezos, who founded the e-commerce titan more than 25 years ago and turned it into a global cattle worth nearly $ 2 trillion. Jassy, a longtime lieutenant of Bezos, currently leads Amazon’s highly profitable cloud computing industry.
The Insider boss said he had confidence in Jassy and that he believed Amazon would be in good shape for a while, and it would probably take three to five years before outsiders could determine whether the change of CEO would take place. is a big problem. “
“With companies of this size, these are super tankers. They have tremendous momentum,” Blodget said. “You can change different people at the top and you will not see the impact from the outside for a long time because the company will continue to do what it is capable of.”
Prior to his tenure as media chief, Blodget treated Amazon as a closely watched Wall Street Internet analyst during the dot-com boom. In December 1998, while working for the brokerage firm CIBC Oppenheimer, he issued a significant price increase on Amazon and the stock rose 19% in the next session.
Blodget went to work at Merrill Lynch, but his research was scrutinized. After an investigation into what the Securities and Exchange Commission called ‘unnecessary influence of investment banking interests on research analysts at brokerage firms’, regulators permanently banned him from the security industry in 2003. As part of a then-million-dollar settlement, Blodget did not deny or acknowledge the SEC’s allegations.