From idea to employing 1.3 million people and serving hundreds of millions of customers and businesses in a generation is phenomenal.
It is, therefore, epic to see Amazon’s founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, transition to executive chairman of the online retailer after 27 years.
As to how, he puts it down to one core thing. “Invention is the root of our success.
“We have done crazy things together, and then made them normal. We pioneered customer reviews, 1-Click, personalized recommendations, Prime’s insanely-fast shipping, Just Walk Out shopping, the Climate Pledge, Kindle, Alexa, marketplace, infrastructure cloud computing, Career Choice, and much more.”
To pick just one of these inventions, cloud computing. It is now a $1 trillion market, albeit a challenging one for competitors, such as Alphabet, which posted a loss of more than $1bn on its cloud division last quarter.
But opening cloud computing up to startups has been a core part of the explosion in innovation and productivity we are starting to see.
Take Moderna Therapeutics. Bringing new drugs to market can take a decade and cost in excess of $1bn and vaccines can take far longer. Moderna started using the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud so it could work on developing messenger RNA as effectively biologic software to tell patients’ bodies how to produce drugs themselves.
As Marcello Damiani, chief digital officer at Moderna, told AWS back in 2017: “Given our company’s small size and ambitious goals, AWS is critical to our digitization strategy.”
By mid-December, Moderna had been approved by the US government as the country’s second covid-19 vaccine. A month or so later and more than 22 million Americans have been vaccinated using Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech’s vaccines with more approved.
The same examples are true in all other sectors, and we are delighted Amazon and AWS share their corporate venturing and entrepreneurial leadership as part of GCV sector councils.
Today also marks the inaugural discussion for GCV’s new Global Health Council chaired by Bill Taranto and Dave Stevenson from Merck Global Health Innovation and Rob Coppedge from Echo Health Ventures.
Merck last month had its latest win with the agreed sale of Preventice to co-investor Boston Scientific, while Coppedge formed the Echo Innovation Alliance to bring Arkansas Blue Cross Blue Shield’s USAble Corporation subsidiary into its investment orbit.
As an evergreen unit, the alliance acts as the internal corporate venturing unit for healthcare systems and so complements the Blue Venture Funds run by John Banta where the 30 or so Blue Cross Blue Shield corporations in the different US states commit to limited liability partnerships.
For Echo, a measure of success comes from the collaborations between portfolio companies and its parents, Cambria Health and Mosiac Health Solutions, an investment firm managed by health insurer Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina Foundation, as well as the financial returns from its three initial public offerings.
And just as Moderna has started vaccinating the world to improve people’s lives, so impact investing and the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals are affecting healthcare CVCs.
Coppedge said before the council: “There is no question inequities have been brought to light by the past year. This is an opportunity for our portfolio companies but more can be done together for underserved communities.
“Private sector with a tight partnership with federal and state governments can do much. And it also requires CVCs to think about their own diversity, equity and inclusion and how they hire and train their teams.”
GCV is proud to be a service for those making the world a better place.
