The Everything Store Quotes

“Book publishers needed only to listen to Jeff Bezos himself to have their fears stoked. Amazon’s founder repeatedly suggested he had little reverence for the old “gatekeepers” of the media, whose business models were forged during the analogue age and whose function it was to review content and then subjectively decide what the public got to consume. This was to be a new age of creative surplus, where it was easy for anyone to create something, find an audience, and allow the market to determine the proper economic reward. “Even well meaning gatekeepers slow innovation,” Bezos wrote in his 2011 letter to shareholders. “When a platform is self-service, even the improbable ideas can get tried, because there’s no expert gatekeeper ready to say ‘that will never work!’ And guess what—many of those improbable ideas do work, and society is the beneficiary of that diversity.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Bezos had seemingly made up his mind that he was no longer going to indulge in financial maneuvering as a way to escape the rather large hole Amazon had dug for itself, and it wasn’t just through borrowing Sinegal’s business plan. At a two-day management and board offsite later that year, Amazon invited business thinker Jim Collins to present the findings from his soon-to-be-published book Good to Great. Collins had studied the company and led a series of intense discussions at the offsite. “You’ve got to decide what you’re great at,” he told the Amazon executives. Drawing on Collins’s concept of a flywheel, or self-reinforcing loop, Bezos and his lieutenants sketched their own virtuous cycle, which they believed powered their business. It went something like this: Lower prices led to more customer visits. More customers increased the volume of sales and attracted more commission-paying third-party sellers to the site. That allowed Amazon to get more out of fixed costs like the fulfillment centers and the servers needed to run the website. This greater efficiency then enabled it to lower prices further. Feed any part of this flywheel, they reasoned, and it should accelerate the loop. Amazon executives were elated; according to several members of the S Team at the time, they felt that, after five years, they finally understood their own business. But when Warren Jenson asked Bezos if he should put the flywheel in his presentations to analysts, Bezos asked him not to. For now, he considered it the secret sauce.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Andy Grove, the longtime CEO of Intel, was known to be so harsh and intimidating that a subordinate once fainted during a performance review.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

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

“o ponto de vista vale oitenta pontos de QI” —”
― Brad Stone, A loja de tudo: Jeff Bezos e a era da Amazon

“Prime would eventually justify its existence. The service turned customers into Amazon addicts who gorged on the almost instant gratification of having purchases reliably appear two days after they ordered them. Signing up for Amazon Prime, Jason Kilar said at the time, “was like going from a dial-up to a broadband Internet connection.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“We found a loophole,” he said. “Their systems were programmed in such a way that you didn’t have to receive ten books, you only had to order ten books. So we found an obscure book about lichens that they had in their system but was out of stock. We began ordering the one book we wanted and nine copies of the lichen book. They would ship out the book we needed and a note that said, ‘Sorry, but we’re out of the lichen book.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“There is so much stuff that has yet to be invented. There’s so much new that’s going to happen. People don’t have any idea yet how impactful the Internet is going to be and that this is still Day 1 in such a big way. Jeff Bezos”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“What we do is hard. This is not where people go to retire.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Lower prices led to more customer visits. More customers increased the volume of sales and attracted more commission-paying third-party sellers to the site. That allowed Amazon to get more out of fixed costs like the fulfillment centers and the servers needed to run the website. This greater efficiency then enabled it to lower prices further. Feed any part of this flywheel, they reasoned, and it should accelerate the loop.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“The goal was to get employees to distill a pitch into its purest essence, to start from something the customer might see—the public announcement—and work backward.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Get Big Fast. The bigger the company got, Bezos explained, the lower the prices it could exact from Ingram and Baker and Taylor, the book wholesalers, and the more distribution capacity it could afford. And the quicker the company grew, the more territory it could capture in what was becoming the race to establish new brands on the digital frontier.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“AWS helped introduce the ethereal concept known as the cloud, and it is viewed as so vital to the future fortunes of technology startups that venture capitalists often give gift certificates for it to their new entrepreneurs.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“We had beautiful documents and everyone was really prepared,” Jones says. Bezos read the paper, said, “You’re all wrong,” stood up, and started writing on the whiteboard. “He had no background in control theory, no background in operating systems,” Jones says. “He only had minimum experience in the distribution centers and never spent weeks and months out on the line.” But Bezos laid out his argument on the whiteboard and “every stinking thing he put down was correct and true,” Jones says. “It would be easier to stomach if we could prove he was wrong but we couldn’t. That was a typical interaction with Jeff. He had this unbelievable ability to be incredibly intelligent about things he had nothing to do with, and he was totally ruthless about communicating it.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Great merchants have never had the opportunity to understand their customers in a truly individualized way,” he said. “E-commerce is going to make that possible.”13”
― 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

“Over time it became clear that the humans couldn’t compete. PEOPLE FORGET THAT JOHN HENRY DIED IN THE END, read a sign on the wall of the P13N office, a reference to the folktale of the steel driver who raced to dig a hole in competition with a steam-powered drilling machine; he won the contest but died immediately afterward.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“The high-tech community was getting a lesson in the dynamics of network effects—products or services become increasingly valuable as more people use them.”
― 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.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“IBM veteran and computer science professor Frederick Brooks argued that adding manpower to complex software projects actually delayed progress.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Scott noted that Walmart had similar techniques. It could measure whether a certain item, such as a globe for children, could lift the sale of another item, like a coloring book, if they were placed next to each other on a store display. Both companies had a deep interest in testing these combinations.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“It is far better to cannibalize yourself than have someone else do it,” said Diego Piacentini in a speech at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business a few years later. “We didn’t want to be Kodak.” The reference was to the century-old photography giant whose engineers had invented digital cameras in the 1970s but whose profit margins were so healthy that its executives couldn’t bear to risk it all on an unproven venture in a less profitable frontier.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“To me Amazon is a story of a brilliant founder who personally drove the vision,” says Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Google and an avowed Amazon competitor who is personally a member of Amazon Prime, its two-day shipping service. “There are almost no better examples. Perhaps Apple, but people forget that most people believed Amazon was doomed because it would not scale at a cost structure that would work.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“That either-or mentality, that if you are doing something good for customers it must be bad for shareholders, is very amateurish,” he said in our interview that summer.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“We don’t have a single big advantage,” he once told an old adversary, publisher Tim O’Reilly, back when they were arguing over Amazon protecting its patented 1-Click ordering method from rivals like Barnes & Noble. “So we have to weave a rope of many small advantages.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“These are not fever dreams. They are near inevitabilities. It’s an easy prediction to make—that Jeff Bezos will do what he has always done. He will attempt to move faster, work his employees harder, make bolder bets, and pursue both big inventions and small ones, all to achieve his grand vision for Amazon—that it be not just an everything store, but ultimately an everything company.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“You don’t feel thirty percent smarter when the stock goes up by thirty percent, so when the stock goes down you shouldn’t feel thirty percent dumber,”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“It was the combination of EC2 and S3 - storage and compute, two primitives linked together - that transformed both AWS and the technology world. Startups no longer needed to spend their venture capital on buying servers and hiring specialized engineers to run them. Infrastructure costs were variable instead of fixed, and they could grow in direct proportion to revenues. It freed companies to experiment, to change their business models with a minimum of pain, and to keep up with the rapidly growing audiences of erupting social networks like Facebook and Twitter.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“he liked to say he didn’t have an exit strategy—he was building a company for the long term.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Bezos is a fan of e-mail newsletters such as VSL.com, a daily assortment of cultural tidbits from the Web, and Cool Tools, a compendium of technology tips and product reviews written by Kevin Kelly, a founding editor of Wired. Both e-mails are short, well written, and informative.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon