Author: Brad Stone
In the end, we are our choices.
Bezos is a micromanager with a limitless spring of new ideas, and he reacts harshly to efforts that don’t meet his rigorous standards.
Bezos wields his laugh like a weapon.
narrative fallacy?’
‘When a company comes up with an idea, it’s a messy process. There’s no aha moment,’
‘He went to school on everybody,’
He was very methodical about everything in his life.’
‘I knew when I was eighty that I would never, for example, think about why I walked away from my 1994 Wall Street bonus right in the middle of the year at the worst possible time. That kind of thing just isn’t something you worry about when you’re eighty years
And if the potential employees made the mistake of talking about wanting a harmonious balance between work and home life, Bezos rejected them.
and finally a letter informing him that the vehicle had been sold at auction for seven hundred dollars.
‘You were stuck in amber. But inside that amber was frenetic activity that no one else could see.’
Always Amazon.com, never Amazon
every company in retail stands on the shoulders of the giants that came before it.
Bezos did not tell other employees or his directors, particularly since Scott Cook, the founder of Intuit, was on both the Amazon and eBay boards.
An amiable former Apple exec and the chief executive of Intuit in the mid-1990s,
Silicon Valley legend, a former Columbia University football coach named Bill Campbell.
They were naturally worried that the goose who laid the golden egg might be about to crack the egg in half.
Amazon was mentioned in some seven hundred stories about the new Harry Potter novel in June and July that year.
Amazon announced a new initiative called Marketplace. The effort started with used
Amazon announced a new initiative called Marketplace. The effort started with used books.
‘Man, that’s a good-looking woman!’ His friends would all sing out, ‘It’s a miracle!’ before everyone collapsed in stitches.
forever after, they would be known as fulfillment centers, or FCs.
‘Communication is a sign of dysfunction. It means people aren’t working together in a close, organic way. We should be trying to figure out a way for teams to communicate less with each other, not more.’
‘What we do is hard. This is not where people go to retire.’
had this unbelievable ability to be incredibly intelligent about things he had nothing to do with, and he was totally ruthless about communicating it.’
a group that included Vijay
Japanese consultants occasionally came to work with Amazon, and they were so unimpressed and derogatory that Amazon employees gave them a nickname: the insultants.
Bezos also helped to pioneer the modern crowd-sourcing movement with a service called Mechanical Turk and laid the groundwork for Amazon Web Services –
Bezos had decided to rent his spare computer capacity during the quieter periods.
‘You go back in time a hundred years, if you wanted to have electricity, you had to build your own little electric power plant, and a lot of factories did this.
‘You go back in time a hundred years, if you wanted to have electricity, you had to build your own little electric power plant, and a lot of factories did this. As soon as the electric power grid came online, they dumped their electric power generator, and they started buying power off the grid. It just makes more sense. And that’s what is starting to happen with infrastructure computing.’14
Bezos believed that high margins justified rivals’ investments in research and development and attracted more competition, while low margins attracted customers and were more defensible.
Finally, after years of setbacks and internal rancor, Amazon was unquestionably a technology company, what Bezos had always imagined it to be.
Prime members bought more products across more categories, which in turn convinced sellers to let Amazon stock their merchandise and ship their orders from its fulfillment centers, since that meant their products qualified for Prime two-day shipping.
‘The second thing is that he is not tethered by conventional thinking. What is amazing to me is that he is bound only by the laws of physics.
In fact, finding the toll-free number on the Amazon website can be something of a scavenger hunt.
Hsieh saw that the acquisition could offer a sizable payout for employees at a moment when many desperately needed it.
Yet Hsieh, Lin, and Moritz had fought back fiercely, dueling Amazon to what might best be considered a draw.
It was one of Jobs’s last public performances and a spellbinding swan song from an iconic entrepreneur
‘willingness to be misunderstood,’
‘One of those great paradoxes is that it’s usually the missionaries who end up making more money anyway.’
Amazon was on track to lose $100 million over three months in the diapers category alone.
So the Quidsi executives stuck with Amazon, largely out of fear.
‘I’ve just always considered it a game and we are figuring out how to best play it,’