More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“When I read that letter, I thought, we don’t make money when we sell things. We make money when we help customers make purchase decisions.”
“You can’t do a job like that on caffeine. You have to do it on carbs,”
Sounds familiar.
“But don’t be worried about our competitors because they’re never going to send us any money anyway. Let’s be worried about our customers and stay heads-down focused.”
Sam Walton’s autobiography, Sam Walton: Made in America.
Harrison Miller, Chris Payne, and their colleagues fanned out that night across Manhattan to various stores, splurging on random products and stuffing them in the trunks of taxicabs. Miller spent a thousand dollars alone at a Toys “R” Us in Herald Square.
customer obsession, frugality, bias for action, ownership, and high bar for talent.
Later Amazon would add a sixth value, innovation.
“Jeff didn’t believe in work-life balance,” says Kim Rachmeler. “He believed in work-life harmony. I guess the idea is you might be able to do everything all at once.”
“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.”
After the big push was over and the last box had shipped, typically on December 23, “you got to enjoy Christmas Day more than anybody else on the planet, because you had worked so hard to get there,”
“Bruce, turn them off.” “In twelve hours, they went from millions of pieces [from Amazon] a day to a couple a day,”
while working on the S3 project, he frequently had difficulty grasping just how big Bezos was thinking. “He had this vision of literally tens of thousands of cheap, two-hundred-dollar machines piling up in racks, exploding. And it had to be able to expand forever,” Atlas says. Bezos told him, “This has to scale to infinity with no planned downtime. Infinity!”
Bezos predicted they would be good over the long term but said that he didn’t want to repeat “Steve Jobs’s mistake” of pricing the iPhone in a way that was so fantastically profitable that the smartphone market became a magnet for competition.
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.
Google chairman Eric Schmidt said it was at least two years before he noticed that the founders of seemingly every startup he visited told him they were building their systems atop Amazon’s servers.
“It is not written anywhere that books shall forever be printed on dead trees,”
Frugality We try not to spend money on things that don’t matter to customers. Frugality breeds resourcefulness, self-sufficiency and invention. There are no extra points for headcount, budget size or fixed expense.
Any process can be improved. Defects that are invisible to the knowledgeable may be obvious to newcomers. The simplest solutions are the best.
Creation: Life and How to Make It, by Steve Grand (2001). A video-game designer argues that intelligent systems can be created from the bottom up if one devises a set of primitive building blocks. The book was influential in the creation of Amazon Web Services, or AWS, the service that popularized the notion of the cloud.
