[908B64B197]

I agree with your rule, but I would add something extra:

Only build if you have the talent to do so. Early on Amazon managed to attract serious tech talent to the company. That enabled them to build. If a company can't do that then it's better to buy no matter what.

[cratermoon]

> Only build if you have the talent to do so

I would certainly hope that if the function is part of what differentiates the company competitively that they'd hire the talent. If they're trying to be the best "X" company and nobody who works there is any good at "X", they should fail. The dot-com era is littered with the graves of companies who thought that just having an idea was enough.

[908B64B197]

And yet it's surprising how a lot of companies simply won't match offers or try to play games with CoL. Or worst, consider engineering a cost center when it's central to the business.

[tomnipotent]

> nobody who works there is any good at "X", they should fail.

Except almost every software startup in the last three decades was started by folks that were not experts in the domain they eventually became successful in.

[johnjj257]

Citations needed

[dpacmittal]

Did online shop software even exist when Amazon started?

[mattacular]

I was going to say "yes!" but then I looked it up that Amazon actually launched before Ebay as a business. I don't remember actually using Amazon personally until the 2000s but they've been around since 1994, almost a year before Ebay. I'm struggling to think of any earlier online retailers who would have been building ecommerce software.

[howlin]

Especially in the early days, the main competitors to online retail were catalogue services. I would think they have most business and logistics problems in common, minus running a web site.

[EdwardMSmith]

The Internet Shopping Network launched before Amazon, but I doubt they wouldn't probably have considered licensing any of their platform.