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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Jeff Bezos
Read between
March 9 - March 21, 2023
Whenever Steve Jobs launched a new product such as the iPod or iPhone, his presentation ended with street signs that showed an intersection of Liberal Arts Street and Technology Street.
Bezos read dozens of science fiction novels each summer at a local library, and he now hosts an annual retreat for writers and moviemakers.
“Things that Disney invented, like Disneyland, the theme parks, they were such big visions that no single individual could ever pull them off, unlike a lot of the things that Edison worked on.
Every time a seismic shift takes place in our economy, there are people who feel the vibrations long before the rest of us do, vibrations so strong they demand action—action that can seem rash, even stupid.
“Mr. Bezos, can you even spell ‘profit’?” Brokaw asked, highlighting the fact that Amazon was hemorrhaging money as it grew. “Sure,” Bezos replied, “P-R-O-P-H-E-T.”
“The only reason I’m interested in space is because [NASA] inspired me when I was five years old. How many government agencies can you think of that inspire five-year-olds?
want my grandchildren’s grandchildren to be using way more energy per capita than I am,”
“As a senior executive, what do you really get paid to do?” he asks. “You get paid to make a small number of high-quality decisions.
shivam bansal liked this
hiring: Will you admire this person? Will this person raise the average level of effectiveness of the group he or she is entering? Along what dimension might this person be a superstar?
I constantly remind our employees to be afraid, to wake up every morning terrified. Not of our competition, but of our customers.
Jobs was saying: do not be afraid
no other company has ever grown 90 percent in three months on a sales base of over $1 billion.
“I have one hundred shares of Amazon.com. What do I own?” I was surprised I hadn’t heard it before, at least not so simply put. What do you own?
“In the short term, the stock market is a voting machine; in the long term, it’s a weighing machine.” Clearly there was a lot of voting going on in the boom year of ’99—and much less weighing.
2021-21 tech valuation
Online selling (relative to traditional retailing) is a scale business characterized by high fixed costs and relatively low variable costs. This makes it difficult to be a medium-sized e-commerce company.
LONG-TERM THINKING IS both a requirement and an outcome of true ownership.
Similarly, many investors are effectively short-term tenants, turning their portfolios so quickly they are really just renting the stocks that they temporarily “own.”
a company can actually impair shareholder value in certain circumstances by growing earnings. This happens when the capital investments required for growth exceed the present value of the cash flow derived from those investments.
In the book great example with tables
Efficiently managing share count means more cash flow per share and more long-term value for owners.
“The Structure of ‘Unstructured’ Decision Processes” is a fascinating 1976 paper by Henry Mintzberg,
The culture demands that these new businesses be high potential and that they be innovative and differentiated, but it does not demand that they be large on the day that they are born.
missionaries build better products.
We’ve received thousands of feedback emails from customers about Kindle, and—remarkably—26 percent of them contain the word “love.”
Everywhere we look (and we all look), we find what experienced Japanese manufacturers would call muda, or waste.
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.
I will awaken you by pointing out that, in my opinion, these techniques are not idly pursued—they lead directly to free cash flow.
I am emphasizing the self-service nature of these platforms because it’s important for a reason I think is somewhat nonobvious: even well-meaning gatekeepers slow innovation.
“We noticed that you experienced poor video playback while watching the following rental on Amazon Video On Demand: Casablanca. We’re sorry for the inconvenience and have issued you a refund for the following amount: $2.99.
Doing it proactively is more expensive for us, but it also surprises, delights, and earns trust.
Bringing joy to air travelers, the FAA approved the use of electronic devices during takeoff and landing. Our public policy team, with the help of many allies, worked patiently for four years on this,
Pay to Quit is pretty simple. Once a year, we offer to pay our associates to quit. The first year the offer is made, it’s for $2,000. Then it goes up $1,000 a year until it reaches $5,000. The headline on the offer is “Please Don’t Take This Offer.”
Though I can’t prove it, I also believe an urban headquarters will help keep Amazon vibrant, attract the right talent, and be great for the health and well-being of our employees and the city of Seattle.
Failure comes part and parcel with invention. It’s not optional.
Maintaining a firm grasp of the obvious is more difficult than one would think it should be.
Similar to the way I think about Amazon retail, for all practical purposes, I believe AWS is market-size unconstrained.
You can write down your corporate culture, but when you do so, you’re discovering it, uncovering it—not creating it.
Outsized returns often come from betting against conventional wisdom, and conventional wisdom is usually right.
If you’ve made a suboptimal Type 2 decision, you don’t have to live with the consequences for that long. You can reopen the door and go back through. Type 2 decisions can and should be made quickly by high judgment individuals or small groups.
these benefits are egalitarian—they’re the same for our fulfillment center and customer service employees as they are for our most senior executives.
customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great.
The process is not the thing.
most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70 percent of the information you wish you had.
High standards are contagious.
Unrealistic beliefs on scope—often hidden and undiscussed—kill high standards.
by tradition at Amazon, authors’ names never appear on the memos—the memo is from the whole team.)
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.
detailed analysis has found that shopping online consistently generates less carbon than driving to a store, since a single delivery van trip can take approximately one hundred roundtrip car journeys off the road on average.
We want other big employers to join us by raising their own minimum pay rates, and we continue to lobby for a $15 federal minimum wage.
Theodor Seuss Geisel: “When something bad happens you have three choices. You can either let it define you, let it destroy you, or you can let it strengthen you.”
In most occupations, if you’re in the ninetieth percentile or above, you’re going to contribute. In theoretical physics, you’ve got to be, like, one of the top fifty people in the world, or you’re really just not helping out much.
Cleverness is a gift; kindness is a choice.
