I attended the pinnacle of the New York conference circuit, the DealBook Summit, this week. I am usually a gadfly at conferences, hovering in hallways and chatting to randos. At DealBook, I was glued to my seat and hardly even looking at my phone: Serena Williams, Jerome Powell, Sam Altman, Ken Griffin… and Jeff Bezos, among others.
Here are my five quick takeaways from the event.
I hadn’t seen Jeff Bezos speak in person since 1997. That year, we bumped into each other at Boston’s Logan Airport and he gave me a ride into town. He’s built some interesting things since then.
In his discussion with Andrew Ross Sorkin, one thing made me take pause. He joked that rich lists should be ordered not by the amount of money a person had made for themselves but by the amount they had made for others. For the case of Bezos, this would be more than $2 trillion for Amazon shareholders alone. He owns roughly 10% of Amazon, which was enough, in his words, to keep him incentivised. Remember, Amazon was losing money for over a decade and was considered a turkey—or worse—by many analysts.
Ranking entrepreneurial endeavours less by what the entrepreneurs have accumulated and more by what they have enabled is a lovely way of looking at things. Perhaps something for inveterate list-makers at media firms to think about.
I had a great discussion with IBM’s CEO, Arvind Krishna and Vanguard’s chief economist, Joe Davis, at a breakfast at the summit. We’re all quite bullish about the growth of AI in 2025 believing adoption in the enterprise will increase substantially. When I challenged Joe and Arvind about whether their projections for 2025 were more likely to be lower or higher than reality, both agreed that it was more likely that AI use will grow faster than they thought. It’s a familiar refrain I’m hearing from other conversations.
