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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Jeff Bezos
Read between
December 25, 2021 - January 2, 2022
Smart people are a dime a dozen and often don’t amount to much. What counts is being creative and imaginative.
be curious, passionately curious.
A second key trait is to love and to connect the arts and sciences.
Another characteristic of truly innovative and creative people is that they have a reality-distortion field,
they retained a childlike sense of wonder.
“It seemed to me that he had this incredible capability to create a vision that he could get a large number of people to share,”
“regret minimization framework.” He would imagine what he would feel when he turned eighty and thought back to the decision.
“You know the business plan won’t survive its first encounters with reality,”
by 2019 Amazon stock would be at $2,000 a share, and the company would have $233 billion in revenues and 647,000 employees worldwide.
“I’m always trying to figure out one thing first and foremost: Is that person a missionary or a mercenary?” Bezos says. “The mercenaries are trying to flip their stock. The missionaries love their product or their service and love their customers and are trying to build a great service.
Focus on the long term. “It’s All About the Long Term,”
Focus relentlessly and passionately on the customer.
“We make money when we help customers make purchase decisions.”
Avoid PowerPoint and slide presentations.
4. Focus on the big decisions.
5. Hire the right people.
“We know our success will be largely affected by our ability to attract and retain a motivated employee base, each of whom must think like, and therefore must actually be, an owner.”
When forced to choose between optimizing the appearance of our GAAP accounting and maximizing the present value of future cash flows, we’ll take the cash flows.
we choose to prioritize growth because we believe that scale is central to achieving the potential of our business model.
brand image follows reality and not the other way around.
Price performance of processing power is doubling about every eighteen months (Moore’s Law), price performance of disk space is doubling about every twelve months, and price performance of bandwidth is doubling about every nine months.
We too will use technology to reduce costs, but the bigger effect will be using technology to drive adoption and revenue.
Growth spreads fixed costs across more sales, reducing cost per unit, which makes possible more price reductions.
Our consumer franchise is our most valuable asset, and we will nourish it with innovation and hard work.
The customer experience we create is by far the most important driver of our business.
Cash flow statements often don’t receive as much attention as they deserve. Discerning investors don’t stop with the income statement.
managing both working capital and capital expenditures. We work to increase operating profit by focusing on improving all aspects of the customer experience to grow sales and by maintaining a lean cost structure.
Our judgment is that relentlessly returning efficiency improvements and scale economies to customers in the form of lower prices creates a virtuous cycle that leads over the long term to a much larger dollar amount of free cash flow, and thereby to a much more valuable Amazon.com.
Long-term orientation interacts well with customer obsession.
Working backward from customer needs often demands that we acquire new competencies and exercise new muscles, never mind how uncomfortable and awkward-feeling those first steps might be.
we have strong conviction that customers value low prices, vast selection, and fast, convenient delivery and that these needs will remain stable over time. It is difficult for us to imagine that ten years from now, customers will want higher prices, less selection, or slower delivery.
we believe that focusing our energy on the controllable inputs to our business is the most effective way to maximize financial outputs over time.
360 of the 452 goals will have a direct impact on customer experience. The word revenue is used eight times and free cash flow is used only four times. In the 452 goals, the terms net income, gross profit or margin, and operating profit are not used once. Taken as a whole, the set of goals is indicative of our fundamental approach. Start with customers and work backward. Listen to customers, but don’t just listen to customers—also invent on their behalf.
customer obsession rather than competitor obsession, eagerness to invent and pioneer, willingness to fail, the patience to think long-term, and the taking of professional pride in operational excellence.
corporate cultures: for better or for worse, they are enduring, stable, hard to change.
obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of Day 1 vitality.
A common example is process as proxy. Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing.
Day 2 companies make high-quality decisions, but they make high-quality decisions slowly. To keep the energy and dynamism of Day 1, you have to somehow make high-quality, high-velocity decisions.
people are drawn to high standards—they help with recruiting and retention.
As a company grows, everything needs to scale, including the size of your failed experiments. If the size of your failures isn’t growing, you’re not going to be inventing at a size that can actually move the needle.
Cleverness is a gift; kindness is a choice.
the stock is not the company, and the company is not the stock,
You want people to stay for the mission. You don’t want mercenaries at your company. You want missionaries.
How do you hire great people and keep them from leaving? By giving them, first of all, a great mission—something that has real purpose, that has meaning.
The most important factor for nimbleness is decision-making speed. The second-most important factor is being willing to be experimental.
And the other thing about competition is that you do not want to play on a level playing field. This is why you need innovation, especially in domains like space and cyber.
Infrastructure lets entrepreneurs do amazing things.
Globally, Amazon operates ninety-one solar and wind projects that have the capacity to generate over 2,900 MW and deliver more than
