Henry Blodget, CEO of Insider Inc., told CNBC on Wednesday that Jeff Bezos gave invaluable advice when the Amazon founder invested in his upstart media company.
Bezos, who will step down as Amazon’s CEO later this year, led a $ 5 million round of investment in Blodget’s company in 2013. The company was about six years old at the time and was known as Business Insider. In an interview on “Squawk Box”, Blodget recalled a discussion he had with Bezos about how to divide his time between management and editorial.
“I was writing 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 things like that or should I stay CEO Because the company has grown so big that I really have to do one thing or the other, ” said Blodget.
Bezos responded by saying he really only had one request as an investor, Blodget said. He said, ‘I beg you to remain CEO.’ ”On Wednesday, Blodget, a former Wall Street analyst, also described pressing Bezos on the reason. “[Bezos] said, ‘Because you don’t even realize it, but every day you make dozens of small course corrections. You are all inventing a new model of journalism. You have an instinct to know where that is going. ”
According to Blodget, Bezos added, “ When you bring in someone else with experience, you want to give them a lot of room to make their own decisions. They will take place in a long time and things will change. ‘He said,’ I’m investing because I want you to make those course corrections. ‘ ”
Insider Inc. was sold to German publisher Axel Springer in a deal worth nearly $ 450 million in 2015. Blodget remains CEO, but dropped the role of editor in 2017.
Blodget recalled the conversation a day after Amazon announced that Bezos will switch from CEO to executive chairman later this year. Andy Jassy will take over from Bezos, who founded the e-commerce titan more than 25 years ago and turned it into a global colossus worth nearly $ 2 trillion. Jassy, a longtime Bezos lieutenant, is currently running Amazon’s highly profitable cloud computing business.
The Insider boss said he has confidence in Jassy and thinks Amazon will “be in top shape for a while,” adding that it will likely take three to five years for outsiders to determine if the CEO change is “a major problem. will be. “
“With companies of this size, they’re super tankers. They have tremendous momentum,” said Blodget. “You can change different people at the top and you won’t see the outside impact for a long time, because the company will continue to do what it was raised for.”
Before his tenure as media CEO, Blodget put an eye on Amazon as a closely watched Wall Street internet analyst during the dotcom boom. In December 1998, while working for brokerage firm CIBC Oppenheimer, he posted a remarkable price hike on Amazon, and shares rose 19% in the following session.
Blodget went to work for Merrill Lynch, but his research came under scrutiny. Following an investigation into what the Securities and Exchange Commission called “the undue influence of investment banking interests on research analysts at brokerage firms,” regulators permanently banned him from the securities industry in 2003. As part of a multi-million dollar settlement at the time, the SEC has not denied or admitted the allegations.