Each month, “Ammirati on Innovation” episodes will look at ways that the disruptive-startup mentality is spreading beyond young entrepreneurs to big established corporations. Serial entrepreneur, venture capitalist and Carnegie Mellon B-school professor Sean Ammirati, who sits at the intersection of these high-change dynamics, provides insight.
Episode 9
In this episode, Sean and I go through his 2020 predictions. We start by discussing Slack. Sean says Slack has basically been slashed in half, now at $42 a share vs. $22 a share. Its market cap is $12 billion, compared with a high of $23 billion. At $12 billion, that’s a price that some of the big tech companies could pay—so Sean wonders what Slack’s user and revenue statistics might be worth inside Oracle, Salesforce, Microsoft, or Google.
Speaking of acquisitions, Sean speculates Walmart will go on the offensive in 2020. The company definitely has the potential to buy one or two very large companies, including FedEx, which Sean says would be a good acquisition, and maybe Shopify too. Sean also expects that in 2020, we’ll see a further investment in Walmart Labs, including new business models.
Sean and I also discuss Amazon and AWS. Sean says he can’t wrap his head around why Amazon won’t spin out AWS this year. Because, for example, how does competitor Walmart feel about cutting checks to Amazon, via AWS? From Sean’s perspective, in addition to making sense internally, the market would love the AWS spin-off.
Finally, Sean says he’s not an economist—but his conclusion is that the market almost certainly needs to correct in 2020. But given the prevalence of digital transformation, the impact on the software industry won’t be as bad as in previous economic downturns.
You can also stream the audio-only version of this episode:
Highlights
‘When you think about some of the assets @Microsoft has, what could LinkedIn plus Slack do, if you were to combine?’ #CloudWars Click To Tweet ‘I think @Walmart in 2020 is going to do what Disney did last year, which is move from playing defense to playing offense.’ #CloudWars Click To Tweet ‘#AWS is going to increasingly bump into a problem where large companies don’t like funding their competitors in other parts of the business.’ #CloudWars Click To Tweet
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Follow Sean on Twitter and LinkedIn for more valuable insights into innovation and entrepreneurship. He also has a podcast, called Agile Giants.
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Cloud Wars Live Digital All-Stars
Sean Ammirati is one of our regular Digital All-Stars. These experts appear in regular video podcasts. The conversations focus on the critical themes shaping (and re-shaping!) the business world in the digital age of 2019. Our intention is to provide regular chunks of timely ideas and insights about high-priority subjects from industry veterans with diverse backgrounds.
