“I met with these guys,” Mackey said, recalling how they presented a PowerPoint filled with what he characterized as inaccuracies, then refused to provide him a copy to review.
“They basically said, ‘Listen, Mackey, here’s what’s going to happen. First, first thing we’re going to do is take over your board. And once we do that, we’re going to fire you. And then we’re going to fire every one of your executives that doesn’t do exactly what we tell them to do. And then we’re going to just put you up for sale to the highest bidder, and there’s not an effing thing you can do about it,’” Mackey said. “And then they walked out of the room.”
Jana Partners didn’t immediately respond to Fortune‘s request for comment.
“We needed to lower our prices, but we needed time to do that,” Mackey said on the podcast. “We weren’t going to have time with Jana as investors.”
Then Mackey recalled waking up one morning with what felt like the answer: Amazon. He had met founder Jeff Bezos the previous year at a conference and found they shared interests in science fiction, fantasy, and scuba diving.
“Amazon was the best solution to a problem we had,” Mackey said in the interview. “We didn’t want to sell to Amazon. It’s just that Amazon was the best solution to a problem we had. And that problem was we had shareholder activists take a large stake in the company”.
You can watch the full interview with John Mackey and Jen Cohen below:
