Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

by Jeff Bezos

He asks and tries to answer hundreds of charmingly random questions: Why is the sky blue? What does the tongue of a woodpecker look like? Do a bird’s wings move faster when flapping up or when flapping down? How is the pattern of swirling water similar to that of curling hair? Is the muscle of the bottom lip connected to that of the top lip?

“Curiosity is more important than knowledge.”

Vitruvian Man, his drawing of a nude male standing in a circle and a square, a triumph of anatomy, math, beauty, and spirituality.

People who love all fields of knowledge are the ones who can best spot the patterns that exist across nature.

One final trait shared by all my subjects is that they retained a childlike sense of wonder.

Bezos read dozens of science fiction novels each summer at a local library, and he now hosts an annual retreat for writers and moviemakers.

brings together experts interested in machine learning, automation, robotics, and space.

a private space company with the long-term goal of moving heavy industry to space,

his maternal grandfather, Lawrence Gise,

helped develop the hydrogen bomb as an assistant director of the Atomic Energy Commission.

voracious reader

Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein became his favorites,

In 1974, when he was ten, his passion for Star Trek led him to computers. He discovered that he could play a space video game on the terminal in the computer room of his elementary school

“You literally dialed a regular phone and picked up the handset and put it in this little cradle.

His childhood business heroes were Thomas Edison and Walt Disney.

Bezos came to admire Disney more because of the audacity of his vision. “It seemed to me that he had this incredible capability to create a

Walt Disney really was able to get a big team of people working in a concerted direction.”

Bezos was a straight-A student,

I was never going to be a great theoretical physicist,” Bezos says. “I saw the writing on the wall, and I changed my major very quickly to electrical engineering and computer science.”

He ended up at a hedge fund run by David E. Shaw, which used computer algorithms to discover pricing disparities in the financial markets.

While working at the hedge fund in 1994, Bezos came across the statistic that the web had been growing by more than 2,300 percent each year.

opening a retail store online, sort of a Sears catalogue for the digital age.

he chose books—partly because he liked them and also because they were not perishable, were a commodity, and could be bought from two big wholesale distributors.

When he told David Shaw that he wanted to leave the hedge fund to pursue this idea, Shaw took him on a two-hour walk through Central Park. “You know what, Jeff, this is a really good idea. I think you’re onto a good idea here but this would be a better idea for somebody who didn’t already have a good job.”

Bezos then consulted his wife, MacKenzie, whom he had met at the hedge fund and married the year before. “You know you can count me in 100 percent, whatever you want to do,”

Bezos used a mental exercise that would become a famous part of his risk-calculation process. He called it a “regret minimization framework.” He would imagine what he would feel when ...

I knew that if I failed, I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. I knew that that would haunt me every day.”

“The initial start-up capital came primarily from my parents,

“I told them that I thought there was a 70 percent chance that they would lose their whole investment.… I thought I was giving myself triple the normal odds, because really, if you look at the odds of a start-up company succeeding at all, it’s only about 10 percent. Here I was, giving myself a 30 percent chance.”

They eventually put in more money, ended up owning 6 percent of the company,

Amazon.com went live on July 16, 1995.

“the long tail,” which means being able to offer items that are not everyday bestsellers and, thus, don’t command shelf space at most retailers.

CEO of Time Inc., the very wise Don Logan,

Jeffrey Preston Bezos

“As I watched the stock fall from 113 to 6, I was also watching all of our internal business metrics: number of customers, profit per unit,”

“Every single thing about the business was getting better and fast. It’s a fixed-cost business.

Bezos succeeded by keeping his eye on the long game, foregoing profits for growth,

Amazon engineer suggested that the company offer free shipping to its most loyal customers. Bezos put the two ideas together and asked his finance team to assess the costs and benefits. “The results were horrifying,” Bezos says with his laugh. But Bezos had a rule, which was to use his heart and his intuition as well as empirical data in making a big decision. “There has to be risk taking. You have to have instinct. All the good decisions have to be made that way,” he says.

He knew that creating Amazon Prime was what he calls a one-way door: it was a decision difficult to reverse. “We’ve made mistakes, doozies like the Fire Phone and many other things that just didn’t work out. I won’t list all of our failed experiments, but the big winners pay for thousands of failed experiments.”

Amazon Web Services. The initial ideas—which included a software layer known as Elastic Compute Cloud

“Traditionally, if you were a company and needed computation, you would build a data center, and you’d fill that data center with servers, and you’d have to upgrade the operating systems of those servers and keep everything running, and so on. None of that added any value to what the business was doing. It was kind of price-of-admission, undifferentiated heavy lifting.”

the flop of Amazon’s Fire Phone and the success of the Amazon Echo, the company’s smart speaker and home assistant device known as Alexa.

“The vision for Echo and Alexa was inspired by the Star Trek computer,”

Whole Foods Market grocery chain, which Amazon bought in 2017. Bezos says that his purchase of the company was partly due to his admiration for the outlook of its founder, John Mackey.

In 2000 he set up a company, very secretively, near Seattle called Blue Origin,

He called upon one of his favorite science fiction writers, Neal Stephenson, to be an advisor.

Eventually Bezos focused on reusable rockets. “How is the situation in the year 2000 different from 1960?” he asked. “The engines can be somewhat better, but they’re still chemical rocket engines. What’s different is computer sensors, cameras, software. Being able to land vertically is the kind of problem that can be addressed by those technologies that existed in 2000 that didn’t exist in 1960.”

Christian Davenport’s The Space Barons

Bezos biographer Brad Stone discovered the existence of Blue Origin, he emailed Bezos,

“This is the most important work I’m doing, and I have great conviction about that,” he says. Earth is finite, and energy usage has grown so much that it will soon, he thinks, strain the resources of our small planet. That will leave us with a choice: accept static growth for humanity or explore and expand to places beyond Earth. “I want my grandchildren’s grandchildren to be using way more energy per capita than I am,” he says. “And I would like to see us not have a population cap. I wish there were a trillion humans in the solar system; then there would be a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts.”