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he never takes the office elevator, always the stairs).
“We are genuinely customer-centric, we are genuinely long-term oriented and we genuinely like to invent.
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 was very methodical about everything in his life.”
“It’s easier to invent the future than to predict it.”
Bezos tapped Lovejoy to assist with recruiting and told him to go hire the smartest people he knew—just like David Shaw, Bezos wanted all of his employees to be high-IQ brainiacs.
within the first month of their launch they had sold books to people in all fifty states and in forty-five countries.
Bezos felt that hiring only the best and brightest was key to Amazon’s success.
“Every time we hire someone, he or she should raise the bar for the next hire, so that the overall talent pool is always improving,”
And if the potential employees made the mistake of talking about wanting a harmonious balance between work and home life, Bezos rejected them.
“You can work long, you can work hard, you can work smart, but at Amazon you can’t choose two out of three.”
Get Big Fast.
It was go really big or go home,”
Jeff Bezos become one of the original investors in Google,
Instead of Get Big Fast, the company adopted a new operating mantra: Get Our House in Order. The watchwords were discipline, efficiency, and eliminating waste.
Bezos was obsessed with the customer experience,
He’s now a life coach living in Barcelona, Spain.
“There are two kinds of retailers: there are those folks who work to figure how to charge more, and there are companies that work to figure how to charge less, and we are going to be the second,
When people wrote or said positive things about Amazon, he wanted employees to remember the Barron’s article and remain scared.
All new hires had to directly improve the outcome of the company.
“If you don’t know anything about the business, launch it through the Marketplace, bring retailers in, watch what they do and what they sell, understand it, and then get into it.”
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.
“When given the choice of obsessing over competitors or obsessing over customers, we always obsess over customers,”
“We pay attention to what our competitors do but it’s not where we put our energy.”
Borders, like Circuit City, couldn’t cut costs fast enough because it was locked into fifteen- or twenty-year leases on its stores. At the time of its bankruptcy filing, half its stores were still highly profitable, according to its CEO, but the company couldn’t raise money to buy out the leases on its bad locations.
“We can build a one-hundred-billion-dollar company without sending out a single fucking e-mail.”
The metrics meetings culminate with the weekly business review every Wednesday, one of the most important rituals at Amazon,
“If you look at why Amazon is so different than almost any other company that started early on the Internet, it’s because Jeff approached it from the very beginning with that long-term vision,” Hillis continues. “It was a multidecade project.
The family can hire drivers; they can buy limousines and private airplanes. Yet they still own a modest Honda,
there’s Blue Origin, where he typically spends each Wednesday,
Bezos’s long-term goal is to sell everything, everywhere.
Do we create something that is good, or just that seems good and might get us acquired or funded?
Amazon’s culture has been engineered to cater obsessively to its customers.
Suppliers who view Amazon as a bully are perfectly free to sell their wares elsewhere. Employees who feel marginalized or mistreated can leave at any time,
