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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Brad Stone
Read between
November 9 - November 11, 2020
Chapter 1: The House of Quants
Chapter 2: The Book of Bezos
Chapter 3: Feve...
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Chapter 4: Mi...
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Chapter 5: Rocket Boy
Chapter 7: A Technology Company, Not a Retailer
Chapter 8: Fiona
Chapter 9: Liftoff!
Chapter 10: Expedient Convictions
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Chapter 11: The Kingdom of the Q...
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In Taleb’s book—which, incidentally, all Amazon senior executives had to read—the author stated that the way to avoid the narrative fallacy was to favor experimentation and clinical knowledge over storytelling and memory.
Morgan Stanley finally pried Shaw loose from academia in 1986, adding him to a famed group working on statistical arbitrage software for the new wave of automated trading. But Shaw had an urge to set off on his own. He left Morgan Stanley in 1988, and with a $28 million seed investment from investor Donald Sussman, he set up shop over a Communist bookstore in Manhattan’s West Village.
Shaw recruited not financiers but scientists and mathematicians—big brains with unusual backgrounds, lofty academic credentials, and more than a touch of social cluelessness.
Bezos was twenty-nine at the time, five foot eight inches tall, already balding and with the pasty, rumpled appearance of a committed workaholic.
He had spent seven years on Wall Street and impressed seemingly everyone he encountered with his keen intellect and boundless determination.
remembers him as a capable and upbeat employee who worked tirelessly and at different times managed the firm’s operations in London and Tokyo.
“He was not concerned about what other people were thinking,”
“When you gave him a good solid intellectual issue, he would just chew o...
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Their fledgling venture, aimed at sending a customized newsletter to people over their fax machines, collapsed when Merrill Lynch withdrew the promised funding.
Minor remembers that Bezos had closely studied several wealthy businessmen and that he particularly admired a man named Frank Meeks, a Virginia entrepreneur who had made a fortune owning Domino’s Pizza franchises.
looking at things in new ways can enhance one’s understanding.
“I don’t think there was anybody Jeff knew that he didn’t walk away from with whatever lessons he could.”
Bezos would later say he found a kind of workplace soul mate in David Shaw—“one of the few people I know who has a fully developed left brain and a fully developed right brain.”
He was disciplined and precise, constantly recording ideas in a notebook he carried with him, as if they might float out of his mind if he didn’t jot them down.
He quickly abandoned old notions and embraced new ones when better options presented themselves. He already exhibited the same boyish excitement and conversation-stopping laugh that the world would later come to know.
Bezos thought analytically about everything, including ...
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“the most introspective guy I ever met. He was very methodical about everything in his life.”
“My office was next door to his, and all day long I listened to that fabulous laugh,”
The least introverted person on the team was Jeff Bezos.
Bezos was “incredibly charismatic and persuasive about the third-market project. It was easy to see then he was a great leader.”
So in 1994, when the opportunity of the Internet began to reveal itself to the few people watching closely, Shaw felt that his company was uniquely positioned to exploit it. And the person he anointed to spearhead the effort was Jeff Bezos.
Shaw and Bezos would meet for a few hours each week to brainstorm ideas for this coming technological wave, and then Bezos would take those ideas and investigate their feasibility.
Intrigued by Shaw’s conviction about the inevitable importance of the Internet, Bezos started researching its growth.
Bezos interpolated from this that Web activity overall had gone up that year by a factor of roughly 2,300—a 230,000 percent increase. “Things just don’t grow that fast,” Bezos later said. “It’s highly unusual, and that started me thinking, What kind of business plan might make sense in the context of that growth?”
(Bezos also liked to say in speeches during Amazon’s early years that it was the Web’s “2,300 percent” annual growth rate that jolted him out of complacency. Which makes for an interesting historical footnote: Amazon began with a math error.)
Bezos concluded that a true everything store would be impractical—at l...
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He made a list of twenty possible product categories, including computer software, office supplies, apparel, and music. The category that eventually jumped out at him as the best option was books. They were pure commodities; a copy of a book in one store was identical to the s...
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If he couldn’t build a true everything store right away, he could capture its essence—unlimited selection—in at least one important product category.
“With that huge diversity of products you could build a store online that simply could not exist in any other way,” Bezos said. “You could build a true superstore with exhaustive selection, and customers value selection.”
If Bezos wanted to be a true owner and entrepreneur, with significant equity in his creation and the potential to achieve the same kind of financial rewards that businessmen like pizza magnate Frank Meeks did, he had to leave his lucrative and comfortable home on Wall Street.
looking back on life’s important junctures was on Bezos’s mind when he came up with what he calls “the regret-minimization framework” to decide the next step to take at this juncture in his career.
“When you are in the thick of things, you can get confused by small stuff,” Bezos said a few years later. “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 old.
At the same time, I knew that I might sincerely regret not having participated in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a revolutionizing event. When I thought about it that...
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“What do you mean, you are going to sell books over the Internet?”
Jackie Bezos suggested to her son that he run his new company at night or on the weekends. “No, things are changing fast,” Bezos told her. “I need to move quickly.”
He was thirty-one, she was twenty-four, and together they were writing an entrepreneurial origin story that would be imprinted on the collective imagination of millions of Internet users and hopeful startup founders.
The site was primitive, mostly text and somewhat unimpressive. Holden bought a few books through the site and offered some feedback.
Top-notch communication skills are essential.
So later that summer, after renting a three-bedroom ranch house in the East Seattle suburb of Bellevue, Bezos and MacKenzie started brainstorming.
Bezos also briefly considered Aard.com, from a Dutch word, as a way to stake a claim at the top of most listings of websites, which at the time were arranged alphabetically.
