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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Brad Stone
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September 23 - October 29, 2021
The confluence of those three initiatives—in the fulfillment centers, and with AWS and the Kindle—vaulted Amazon back into the graces of Wall Street. In 2008, Amazon surpassed eBay in market capitalization and was beginning to be mentioned in the same breath as Google, Apple, and a new Silicon Valley upstart, Facebook.
He was a ravenous reader, leading senior executives in discussion of books like Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma, and he had an utter aversion to doing anything conventionally. Employees were instructed to model his fourteen leadership principles, such as customer obsession, high bar for talent, and frugality, and they were trained to consider them daily when making decisions about things like new hires, promotions, and even trivial changes to products.
In the spring of 2011, Amazon was valued at $80 billion. Buoyed by the rise of his stock holdings, the forty-seven-year-old Bezos was the thirtieth richest person in the world, with an $18.1 billion net worth.
“The biggest needle movers will be things that customers don’t know to ask for,” he would write years later in a letter to shareholders. “We must invent on their behalf. We have to tap into our own inner imagination about what’s possible.”
“If I have to choose between agreement and conflict, I’ll take conflict every time,” Bezos often said. “It always yields a better result.”
“stubborn on vision, flexible on details,”
We all know that if you swing for the fences, you’re going to strike out a lot, but you’re also going to hit some home runs. The difference between baseball and business, however, is that baseball has a truncated outcome distribution. When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs. This long-tailed distribution of returns is why it’s important to be bold.
The death knell for any enterprise is to glorify the past, no matter how good it was—especially for an institution like The Washington Post.”
Baron said that Bezos “didn’t try to reinvent the paper; he tried to capture what made it special.” But Bezos did try to reinvent the systems behind the paper, with a flood of Amazon-style rituals. The Pancake Group, which occasionally expanded to include finance and audience development execs, spoke to Bezos every other week on Wednesdays at 1 p.m. EST for an hour. Bezos asked Post managers to “bring me new things”; he wanted to see everything, including changes in pricing and how to expand the paper’s audience and revenue, in the form of six-page Amazon-style narratives, subject to Bezos’s
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He also exposed them to a steady stream of Jeffisms: about one-way and two-way doors; how double the experimentation equals twice the innovation; how “data overrules hierarchy” and there are “multiple paths to yes”—an Amazonian notion that an employee with a new idea who gets a negative reaction from one manager should be free to shop it to another, lest a promising concept get smothered in infancy.
Do you trust storytellers, or do you trust data; the ingenuity of artists or the wisdom of the crowd?
Considering what his grandfather had been through a generation before during the infamous witch hunt for Communist sympathizers, Price saw bitter historical parallels.
“Averages are bad measures. I want to see actuals, highs, lows and why—not an average. An average is just lazy.”
Jeff always said that when you focus on the business inputs, then the outputs such as revenue and income will take care of themselves.”
Conscious Capitalism,
“Many people think our main competition is Bing or Yahoo,” he said. “Really, our biggest search competitor is Amazon. People don’t think of Amazon as search, but if you are looking for something to buy, you are more often than not looking for it on Amazon.”
They used an old internal Microsoft term to describe it: “cookie licking,” or the act of claiming to do something before you actually do it, in order to capture notoriety and prevent others from following.
anecdotal evidence.
The average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Seattle increased by 67 percent between the years of 2013 and 2017, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. Traffic on the I-5 freeway into the city, and over the bridges to West Seattle and to the eastern suburbs, crawled to a standstill during rush hour. With restrictive land use regulations and neighborhood opposition limiting the construction of new housing, low-income families were displaced and homelessness on Seattle streets became sickeningly ubiquitous.
Capital goes where it is welcome and stays where it is well treated.”
And on the other side of the world, there was Mohammed bin Salman—the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, who was embittered at Bezos for the Washington Post’s coverage of the murder of dissident Jamal Khashoggi, and who some cybersecurity experts would come to believe had hacked Bezos’s cell phone.
“It’s better to assume trust and find out that you are wrong than to always assume people are trying to screw you over,”
His personal wealth was larger than the gross domestic product of Hungary; larger than even the market capitalization of General Motors.
The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America,
later published a trove of these documents, which revealed Amazon execs strategizing back in 2009 to run the company’s diapers business at a loss to combat the company that operated Diapers.com, and to buy the internet doorbell company Ring in 2018—not for its technology, but to gain a dominant position in the market.
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