The Everything Store Quotes

“Single at the time, he started taking ballroom-dance classes, calculating that it would increase his exposure to what he called n+ women. He later famously admitted to thinking about how to increase his “women flow,”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“When you are in the thick of things, you can get confused by small stuff,”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Chris Brown, a software-development manager at the time.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Amazon tried to combat employee delinquency by using a point system to track how workers performed their jobs. Arriving late cost an employee half a point; failing to show up altogether was three points. Even calling in sick cost a point. An employee who collected six such demerits was let go.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Most execs, particularly first-time CEOs who get good at one thing, can only dance what they know how to dance.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“customer and revenue growth, the degree to which our customers continue to purchase from us on a repeat basis, and the strength of our brand.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“The stronger our market leadership, the more powerful our economic model. Market leadership can translate directly to higher revenue, higher profitability, greater capital velocity, and correspondingly stronger returns on invested capital.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“maximizing the Internet’s ability to provide a superior selection of products as compared to those available at traditional retail stores.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Bezos said. “When I read that letter, I thought, we don’t make money when we sell things. We make money when we help customers make”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“We are genuinely customer-centric, we are genuinely long-term oriented and we genuinely like to invent. Most companies are not those things. They are focused on the competitor, rather than the customer.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“While other dot-coms merged or perished, Amazon survived through a combination of conviction, improvisation, and luck.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“willingness to try a lot of things and make many mistakes.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“The notion that he can accomplish a huge amount with a larger time frame, if he is steady about it, is fundamentally his philosophy.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“When Kessel asked Bezos what his deadline was on developing the company’s first piece of hardware, an electronic reading device, Bezos told him, “You are basically already late.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“But through it all, Bezos never showed anxiety or appeared to worry about the wild swings in public sentiment. “We were all running around the halls with our hair on fire thinking, What are we going to do?” says Mark Britto, a senior vice president. But not Jeff. “I have never seen anyone so calm in the eye of a storm. Ice water runs through his veins,” Britto says.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“While employees embraced Amazon’s newly articulated values, many resisted the breakneck pace of the work. As Amazon’s growth accelerated, Bezos drove employees even harder, calling meetings over the weekends, starting an executive book club that gathered on Saturday mornings, and often repeating his quote about working smart, hard, and long. As a result, the company was not friendly toward families, and some executives left when they wanted to have children. “Jeff didn’t believe in work-life balance,”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“mirrors”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Smith worked so tirelessly over one span of eight months that he forgot about his light blue Peugeot station wagon that he’d parked near his apartment in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. The fate of the car would later be revealed in the piles of mail that stacked up inside his front door. When he finally opened the mail in that pile, Smith found, in succession, several parking tickets, a notice that the car had been towed, a few warnings from the towing company, and finally a letter informing him that the vehicle had been sold at auction for seven hundred dollars.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“copyright © 2014 Hachette Book Group, Inc. All rights reserved.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“really a hedge fund but a versatile technology laboratory full of innovators and talented engineers who could apply computer science to a variety of different problems.5 Investing was only the first”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“been finished. A month after the launch, Alan Atlas recalled, it crashed for nine hours, and hardly anyone in the outside world”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Amazon executives were going to have to substitute artifice and improvisation for truly comprehensive selection.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“He was looking for versatile managers—he called them “athletes”—who could move fast and get big things done.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Thus did Jeff Bezos become one of the original investors in Google, his company’s future rival,”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“copy of Sam Walton’s autobiography, Sam Walton: Made in America.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“In customers’ minds, the Amazon brand meant books only.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“In August 1997, Dalzell started his new job as Amazon’s chief information officer and became a key member of the J Team.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“saw D. E. Shaw as a highly secretive hedge fund, the firm viewed”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon