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The Founder's Notes

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The template only earns its keep if you actually put two cases next to each other.

This is the reason every teardown answers the same questions in the same order. Put a luxury house beside a console platform and the differences stop being vibes — one is refusing sales to protect a price, the other is selling below cost to collect a toll, and both are defending a moat.

Consumer · NYSE: NKE

Nike

Designs and markets athletic footwear and apparel, manufactures almost none of it, and sells the meaning of the product rather than the product.

Technology · NASDAQ: AMZN

Amazon

Runs a near-breakeven retail operation at enormous scale, and earns essentially all of its profit from renting out the two things that operation forced it to build — computing capacity and shelf placement.

The thesis in one line

Nike never sold shoes. It sold the version of you that finishes the race.
The store is not the business. The store is the customer acquisition cost for the businesses.

Verdict

Watch it
Own it

Moat

Wide

Brand · Distribution · Scale economics

Wide

Scale economics · Network effects · Process power · Switching costs

Porter's five forces

Competitive rivalry
Threat of new entrants
Threat of substitutes
Buyer power
Supplier power
Competitive rivalry
Threat of new entrants
Threat of substitutes
Buyer power
Supplier power

Headline figures

Revenue
$46.3B
Gross margin
42.7%
Factories owned
0
Founding loan
$50
Net sales
$638B
AWS share of operating income
~58%
Retail operating margin
~5.4%
Third-party share of units
~60%

Unit economics

One pair of flagship running shoes

The factory takes 23 cents of the retail dollar. Everything above that is paid for by belief, and belief is what Nike actually manufactures.

One $50 third-party item sold through Amazon

Amazon captures roughly 38% of the sale price and carries none of the inventory risk. The seller took the risk, paid for the warehouse, and then paid again to be found in a search of Amazon's own catalogue.

What would change her mind

If North America wholesale revenue grows year over year with gross margin expanding at the same time, the turnaround is real and the price stops mattering. If instead margin recovers only because revenue keeps shrinking, the moat is narrower than I think.
If AWS revenue growth falls below 15% for two consecutive quarters while segment operating margin also declines, the cloud business is being commoditised rather than merely contested, and the capex is being spent defending share rather than buying growth. That combination — decelerating growth and compressing margin at the same time — breaks the thesis outright. A single weak quarter on either measure alone does not.

1 mechanism in common

own the customer