The Everything Store Quotes

“They have an absolute willingness to torch the landscape around them to emerge the winner.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“You have to start somewhere,' he said. 'You climb the top of the first tiny hill and from there you see the next hill.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“from his company. After the stock market crash in 2000, Amazon went through two rounds of layoffs. But Bezos didn’t want to stop recruiting altogether; he just wanted to be more efficient. So he framed the kind”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

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

“Bezos even wondered aloud whether Amazon could hire college students on every block in Manhattan and get them to store popular products in their apartments and deliver them on bicycles.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Mensagem postada na Usenet, 21 de agosto de 1994:   Start-up com bom capital busca programadores de C/C++/Unix muito talentosos para projeto pioneiro de comércio pela internet. É necessário ter experiência em projetar e desenvolver sistemas grandes e complexos (que possam ser atualizados) e ser capaz de fazer isso em um terço do tempo considerado possível. Exigimos bacharelado, mestrado ou Ph.D. em ciência da computação ou formação equivalente. Grande facilidade de comunicação é essencial. É desejável, mas não imprescindível, ter familiaridade com servidores de Web e HTML. Esperamos trabalhar com pessoas talentosas, motivadas, apaixonadas e interessantes que tenham disponibilidade para se mudar para Seattle (ajudaremos com os custos da mudança). Oferecemos uma participação significativa nas ações da empresa. Enviar currículo e carta de apresentação para Jeff Bezos. Endereço: Cadabra Inc. 10.704 N.E. 28th St., Bellevue, WA 98004 Oferecemos as mesmas oportunidades para todos.”
― Brad Stone, A loja de tudo: Jeff Bezos e a era da Amazon

“É mais fácil inventar o futuro do que prevê-lo.” — Alan Kay”
― Brad Stone, A loja de tudo: Jeff Bezos e a era da Amazon

“Quando uma empresa formula uma ideia, o processo é caótico. Não há um momento do tipo ‘ahá’”, disse Bezos.”
― Brad Stone, A loja de tudo: Jeff Bezos e a era da Amazon

“we don’t make money when we sell things. We make money when we help customers make purchase decisions.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Each group was required to propose its own “fitness function”—a linear equation that it could use to measure its own impact without ambiguity. For example, a two-pizza team in charge of sending advertising e-mails to customers might choose for its fitness function the rate at which these messages were opened multiplied by the average order size those e-mails generated. A group writing software code for the fulfillment centers might home in on decreasing the cost of shipping each type of product and reducing the time that elapsed between a customer’s making a purchase and the item leaving the FC in a truck. Bezos wanted to personally approve each equation and track the results over time. It would be his way of guiding a team’s evolution. Bezos was applying”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“have realized about myself that I’m very motivated by people counting on me,” he answered. “I like to be counted on.”14”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose,”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“point of view is worth 80 IQ points”—a”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“The electronics effort faced even greater challenges. To launch that category, David Risher tapped a Dartmouth alum named Chris Payne who had previously worked on Amazon’s DVD store. Like Miller, Payne had to plead with suppliers—in this case, Asian consumer-electronics companies like Sony, Toshiba, and Samsung. He quickly hit a wall. The Japanese electronics giants viewed Internet sellers like Amazon as sketchy discounters. They also had big-box stores like Best Buy and Circuit City whispering in their ears and asking them to take a pass on Amazon. There were middlemen distributors, like Ingram Electronics, but they offered a limited selection. Bezos deployed Doerr to talk to Howard Stringer at Sony America, but he got nowhere. So Payne had to turn to the secondary distributors—jobbers that exist in an unsanctioned, though not illegal, gray market. Randy Miller, a retail finance director who came to Amazon from Eddie Bauer, equates it to buying from the trunk of someone’s car in a dark alley. “It was not a sustainable inventory model, but if you are desperate to have particular products on your site or in your store, you do what you need to do,” he says. Buying through these murky middlemen got Payne and his fledgling electronics team part of the way toward stocking Amazon’s virtual shelves. But Bezos was unimpressed with the selection and grumpily compared it to shopping in a Russian supermarket during the years of Communist rule. It would take Amazon years to generate enough sales to sway the big Asian brands. For now, the electronics store was sparely furnished. Bezos had asked to see $100 million in electronics sales for the 1999 holiday season; Payne and his crew got about two-thirds of the way there. Amazon officially announced the new toy and electronics stores that summer, and in September, the company held a press event at the Sheraton in midtown Manhattan to promote the new categories. Someone had the idea that the tables in the conference room at the Sheraton should have piles of merchandise representing all the new categories, to reinforce the idea of broad selection. Bezos loved it, but when he walked into the room the night before the event, he threw a tantrum: he didn’t think the piles were large enough. “Do you want to hand this business to our competitors?” he barked into his cell phone at his underlings. “This is pathetic!” Harrison Miller, Chris Payne, and their colleagues fanned out that night across Manhattan to various stores, splurging on random products and stuffing them in the trunks of taxicabs. Miller spent a thousand dollars alone at a Toys “R” Us in Herald Square. Payne maxed out his personal credit card and had to call his wife in Seattle to tell her not to use the card for a few days. The piles of products were eventually large enough to satisfy Bezos, but the episode was an early warning. To satisfy customers and their own demanding boss during the upcoming holiday, 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

“Eric and Susan Benson didn't come to Amazon alone every day - they brought their dog Rufus, a Welsh corgi.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“While he was charming and capable of great humor in public, in private, Bezos could bite an employee’s head right off.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“He turned them into real-life versions of an M. C. Escher drawing, automating them to the rafters, with blinking lights on aisles and shelves to guide human workers to the right products, and conveyor belts that ran into and out of massive machines, called Crisplants, that took products from the conveyors and scanned and sorted them into customer orders to be packaged and shipped. These facilities, Wright decreed, would be called not warehouses but distribution centers, as they were in Walmart’s internal lexicon.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Color-coded maps were widely distributed to employees at headquarters in Seattle. Travel to green states like Michigan was okay, but orange states like California required special clearance so that the legal department could track the cumulative number of days Amazon employees spent there. Travel to red states, like Texas, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, required employees to complete an intensive seventeen-item questionnaire about the trip that was designed to determine whether they would make the company vulnerable to sales-tax collection efforts (number 16: “Will you be holding a raffle?”). Amazon lawyers then either nixed the trip altogether or obtained a private letter ruling from that state spelling out its specific treatment of that particular situation.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“When New York passed its Internet sales-tax law, Amazon’s sales in New York State dropped 10 percent over the next quarter, according to a person familiar with Amazon’s finances at the time.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable,”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement,”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

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

“The Innovator’s Dilemma:”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“To adjudicate the matter, he turned to a Silicon Valley legend, a former Columbia University football coach named Bill Campbell.”
― 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,” Bezos said a few years later. “I knew when I was eighty that I would never, for example, think about why I walked away from my 1994 Wall Street bonus right in the middle of the year at the worst possible time. That kind of thing just isn’t something you worry about when you’re eighty years old. At the same time, I knew that I might sincerely regret not having participated in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a revolutionizing event. When I thought about it that way… it was incredibly easy to make the decision.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

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

“Step by Step, Ferociously.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon