The Everything Store Quotes

“In the short term, the stock market is a voting machine. In the long run, it’s a weighing machine” that measures a company’s true value.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Bezos kept pushing for more. He asked Blake to exact better terms from the smallest publishers, who would go out of business if it weren't for the steady sales of their back catalogs on Amazon. Within the books group, the resulting program was dubbed the Gazelle Project because Bezos suggested to Blake in a meeting that Amazon should approach these small publishers the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle.

As part of the Gazelle Project, Blake's group categorized publishers in terms of their dependency n Amazon and then opened negotiations with the most vulnerable companies. Three book buyers at the time recall this effort. Blake herself said that Bezos meant the cheetah-and-gazelle analogy as a joke and it was carried too far. Yet the program clearly represented something real--an emerging realpolitik approach toward book publishers, an attitude whose ruthlessness startled even some Amazon employees. Soon after the Gazelle Project began, Amazon's lawyers heard about the name and insisted it be changed to the less incendiary Small Publisher Negotiation Program.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“By that time, Bezos and his executives had devoured and raptly discussed another book that would significantly affect the company’s strategy: The Innovator’s Dilemma, by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen. Christensen wrote that great companies fail not because they want to avoid disruptive change but because they are reluctant to embrace promising new markets that might undermine their traditional businesses and that do not appear to satisfy their short-term growth requirements. Sears, for example, failed to move from department stores to discount retailing; IBM couldn’t shift from mainframe to minicomputers. The companies that solved the innovator’s dilemma, Christensen wrote, succeeded when they “set up autonomous organizations charged with building new and independent businesses around the disruptive technology.”9 Drawing lessons directly from the book, Bezos unshackled Kessel from Amazon’s traditional media organization. “Your job is to kill your own business,” he told him. “I want you to proceed as if your goal is to put everyone selling physical books out of a job.” Bezos underscored the urgency of the effort. He believed that if Amazon didn’t lead the world into the age of digital reading, then Apple or Google would. When Kessel asked Bezos what his deadline was on developing the company’s first piece of hardware, an electronic reading”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Bezos dismissed those objections and insisted that to succeed in books as Apple had in music, Amazon needed to control the entire customer experience, combining sleek hardware with an easy-to-use digital bookstore. “We are going to hire our way to having the talent,” he told his executives in that meeting. “I absolutely know it’s very hard. We’ll learn how to do it.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“He announced his intentions to build a spaceport by walking into the office of a local newspaper, the Van Horn Advocate, and giving an impromptu interview to its bewildered editor.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“We believe that a fundamental measure of our success will be the shareholder value we create over the long term. This value will be a direct result of our ability to extend and solidify our current market leadership position. 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. Our decisions have consistently reflected this focus. We first measure ourselves in terms of the metrics most indicative of our market leadership: 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. We have invested and will continue to invest aggressively to expand and leverage our customer base, brand, and infrastructure as we move to establish an enduring franchise.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

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

“I didn’t know Jeff Bezos but I just remember being blown away by the fact that he was there with his sleeves rolled up, climbing around the conveyors with all of us,”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“All new hires had to directly improve the outcome of the company. He wanted doers—engineers, developers, perhaps merchandise buyers, but not managers. “We didn’t want to be a monolithic army of program managers, à la Microsoft.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“great companies fail not because they want to avoid disruptive change but because they are reluctant to embrace promising new markets that might undermine their traditional businesses”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Bill Miller, the chief investment officer at Legg Mason Capital Management and a major Amazon shareholder, asked Bezos at the time about the profitability prospects for AWS. Bezos predicted they would be good over the long term but said that he didn’t want to repeat “Steve Jobs’s mistake” of pricing the iPhone in a way that was so fantastically profitable that the smartphone market became a magnet for competition.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“the people closest to problems were usually in the best position to solve them.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Communication is a sign of dysfunction. It means people aren’t working together in a close, organic way. We should be trying to figure out a way for teams to communicate less with each other, not more.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“If you want to get to the truth about what makes us different, it’s this,” Bezos says, veering into a familiar Jeffism: “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. They want to work on things that will pay dividends in two or three years, and if they don’t work in two or three years they will move on to something else. And they prefer to be close-followers rather than inventors, because it’s safer. So if you want to capture the truth about Amazon, that is why we are different. Very few companies have all of those three elements.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Perhaps the most avid user of Amazon’s auction site was Bezos himself, who began to collect various scientific and historical curiosities. Most memorably, he purchased the skeleton of an Ice Age cave bear, complete with an accompanying penis bone, for $40,000. After the company’s headquarters moved yet again over the summer, out of the deteriorating Columbia Building and into the Pacific Medical Center building, a 1930s-era art-deco hospital that sat on a hill overlooking the I-5 freeway, Bezos displayed the skeleton in the lobby. Next to it was a sign that read PLEASE DON’T FEED THE BEAR.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“In the copy he brought to Kathryn Dalzell, he had underlined one particular passage in which Walton described borrowing the best ideas of his competitors. Bezos’s point was that every company in retail stands on the shoulders of the giants that came before it.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“technologies. In one chart,”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Jeff’s clarity, intensity of focus, and ability to prioritize, which has no doubt become ingrained in his key team, is unusual and behind his ability to keep leaping forward versus protecting existing ground. Seeing the future, he put in place the critical DNA that would help the whole company embody his vision. His focus was on very bright, high-growth-potential and fluid-minded people, with the right values as “builders.” He looked for people that absolutely prioritized customer trust and delight, who at all times were long-term focused and driven to be bold and innovative.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“think about the early days and the level of clarity, vision, potential, and values that Jeff brought. And then I look at Amazon today, and reflect on some conversations I have had with him in the intervening years. It is easy to draw a straight line from the vision he had back then to the Amazon of today. There were a few little wobbles and detours in places, but really I don’t know any other company that has created such a juggernaut that is so consistent with the original ideas of the founder. It is almost like he fired an arrow and then followed that arc.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Amazon may be the most beguiling company that ever existed, and it is just getting started. It is both missionary and mercenary, and throughout the history of business and other human affairs, that has always been a potent combination. “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

“Like the late Steve Jobs, Bezos has gradually worn down employees, investors, and a skeptical public and turned them toward his way of thinking. Any process can be improved. Defects that are invisible to the knowledgeable may be obvious to newcomers. The simplest solutions are the best. Repeating all these anecdotes isn’t rote monotony—it’s calculated strategy. “The rest of us try to muddle around with complicated contradictory goals and it makes it harder for people to help us,” says his friend Danny Hillis. “Jeff is very clear and simple about his goals, and the way he articulates them makes it easy for others, because it’s consistent.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“All of this comes from Bezos himself. Amazon’s values are his business principles, molded through two decades of surviving in the thin atmosphere of low profit margins and fierce skepticism from the outside world. In a way, the entire company is scaffolding built around his brain—an amplification machine meant to disseminate his ingenuity and drive across the greatest possible radius. “It’s scaffolding to magnify the thinking embodied by Jeff, to the greatest extent possible,” says Jeff Wilke when I bounce that theory off him. “Jeff was learning as he went along. He learned things from each of us who had expertise and incorporated the best pieces into his mental model. Now everyone is expected to think as much as they can like Jeff.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“New hires are given an industry-average base salary, a signing bonus spread over two years, and a grant of restricted stock units over four years. But unlike other technology companies, such as Google and Microsoft, which spread out their stock grants evenly, Amazon backloads the grant toward the end of the four-year period. Employees typically get 5 percent of their shares at the end of their first year, 15 percent their second year, and then 20 percent every six months over the final two years. Ensuing grants vest over two years and are also backloaded, to ensure that employees keep working hard and are never inclined to coast.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“There was an animated argument. Amazon’s culture is notoriously confrontational, and it begins with Bezos, who believes that truth springs forth when ideas and perspectives are banged against each other, sometimes violently.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“On an attached spreadsheet, Bezos listed seventeen attributes, including polite, reliable, risk taking, and thinks big, and he ranked a dozen companies on each particular characteristic. His methodology was highly subjective, he conceded, but his conclusions, laid out at the end of the Amazon.love memo, were aimed at increasing Amazon’s odds of standing out among the loved companies. Being polite and reliable or customer-obsessed was not sufficient. Being perceived as inventive, as an explorer rather than a conqueror, was critically important. “I actually believe the four ‘unloved’ companies are inventive as a matter of substance. But they are not perceived as inventors and pioneers. It is not enough to be inventive—that pioneering spirit must also come across and be perceivable by the customer base,” he wrote.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

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

“But like Circuit City, Borders had a narrow operating philosophy and repeatedly missed the changing tastes of consumers. It was obsessively focused on opening new stores and increasing same-store sales while fighting Barnes & Noble on all fronts and dutifully guiding and meeting Wall Street’s quarterly expectations. The Internet didn’t fit into this traditional calculus and thus didn’t get the company’s capital or its most talented executives. Like Circuit City, Borders allowed Amazon to run its online business so it could focus on its physical stores. One longtime Borders executive, who asked for anonymity, says the early perception of Amazon was that it “was just another catalog—a version of Lands’ End.” The executive suggests that this sentiment was now suitable for a bumper sticker.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Jeff Blackburn, Amazon’s chief of business development, said that Amazon’s bruises from the 1990s helped to create a “building culture” there. Every major company faces decisions over whether it should build or buy new capabilities. “Jeff almost always prefers to build it,” Blackburn says. Bezos had absorbed the lessons of the business bible Good to Great, whose author, Jim Collins, counseled companies to acquire other firms only when they had fully mastered their virtuous circles, and then “as an accelerator of flywheel momentum, not a creator of it.”3”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“By that time, Bezos and his executives had devoured and raptly discussed another book that would significantly affect the company’s strategy: The Innovator’s Dilemma, by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen. Christensen wrote that great companies fail not because they want to avoid disruptive change but because they are reluctant to embrace promising new markets that might undermine their traditional businesses and that do not appear to satisfy their short-term growth requirements.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“is not hyperbole to say that AWS, particularly the original services like S3 and EC2, helped lift the entire technology industry out of a prolonged post-dot-com malaise. Amazon also completely outflanked the great hardware makers of the time, like Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard, and defined the next wave of corporate computing.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon