The Everything Store Quotes

“Traffic on Amazon was oriented around Amazon’s reliable product catalog. On eBay, a customer might search for the Hemingway novel The Sun Also Rises and get dozens of auctions of new and vintage copies. If a customer searched for the book on Amazon, there was one single page, with a definitive description of the novel, and that’s where customers flocked. Amazon executives reasoned that day that they had the Internet’s most authoritative product catalog and that they should exploit it. That, it turned out, was the central insight that not only turned Amazon into a thriving platform for small online merchants but powers a good deal of its success today. If Amazon wanted to host other sellers on its site, it would have to list their wares right alongside its own products on the pages that customers actually visited. “It was a great meeting,” says Jeff Blackburn. “By the end of the day we all felt one hundred percent sure that this was the future.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“As if to prove his singular obsession with customer experience, Bezos placed an expensive bet, hitching Amazon’s Quidditch broom to the rising fantasy series Harry Potter. In July, author J. K. Rowling published the fourth book in the series, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Amazon offered a 40 percent discount on the book and express delivery so customers would get it on Saturday, July 8—the day the book was released—for the cost of regular delivery. Amazon lost a few dollars on each of about 255,000 orders, just the kind of money-losing gambit that frustrated Wall Street. But Bezos refused to see it as anything other than a move to build customer loyalty. “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. The Harry Potter promotion unsettled even the executives working on it. “I was thinking, Holy shit, this is a lot of money,” says Lyn Blake, the Amazon executive in charge of books at the time. She was later inclined to admit that Bezos was right. “We were able to assess all the good press and heard all these stories from people who were meeting their deliverymen at their front doors. And we got these testimonials back from drivers. It was the best day of their lives.” Amazon was mentioned in some seven hundred stories about the new Harry Potter novel in June and July that year.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Kelyn Brannon, Amazon’s chief accounting officer at the time, says that she and Joy Covey pulled Bezos into a meeting to show him a form of financial analysis called common-sizing the income statement; it expressed each part of the balance sheet as a percentage of value to sales. The calculations showed that at its current rate, Amazon wouldn’t become profitable for decades. “It was an aha moment,” Brannon says. Bezos agreed to lift his foot from the accelerator and begin to move the company toward profitability. To mark the occasion, he took a photo of the group with his ever-present point-and-shoot digital camera and later taped the picture to the door of his office.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Amazon’s purchase of Telebuch in Germany and BookPages in the UK in 1998 gave Bezos an opportunity to articulate the company’s core principles. Alison Allgor, a D. E. Shaw transplant who worked in human resources, pondered Amazon’s values with Bezos as he prepared for an introductory conference call with the Telebuch founders. They agreed on five core values and wrote them down on a whiteboard in a conference room: customer obsession, frugality, bias for action, ownership, and high bar for talent. Later Amazon would add a sixth value, innovation.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Bezos claimed he was impervious to the hype, but as the dot-com frenzy intensified, he used the unique climate to hasten Amazon’s growth. If there was to be a great Internet landgrab, he reasoned, Amazon should rush to carve out the biggest parcel of territory. “We don’t view ourselves as a bookstore or a music store,” he said that year. “We want to be the place for someone to find and discover anything they want to buy.”5 There were two ways to accomplish this: either slowly, category by category, or all at once. Bezos tried both paths, and some of his ideas were so outlandish that employees called them “fever dreams.”
― 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. In online marketplaces, the network effect was pervasive; sellers stuck around for access to a critical mass of buyers, and vice versa. In the auctions category, eBay already had an insurmountable advantage. Amazon’s executives remember this significant failure as painful but strangely uplifting. “Those days in the nineties were the most intense, fun time I ever had at the company,” Blackburn says. “We had an insanely talented group of people trying to figure out how to launch a superior auctions site. In the end the network effect mattered. You could say we were naïve, but we built a great product.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“On the last page, a section completed a few weeks before his death, Walton wrote: Could a Wal-Mart-type story still occur in this day and age? My answer is of course it could happen again. Somewhere out there right now there’s someone—probably hundreds of thousands of someones—with good enough ideas to go all the way. It will be done again, over and over, providing that someone wants it badly enough to do what it takes to get there. It’s all a matter of attitude and the capacity to constantly study and question the management of the business.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“So that spring, Jassy researched music, Kilar looked into the home-video market, a former Harvard classmate named Victoria Pickett examined shrink-wrapped software, and the list went on. At a management offsite at the Westin Hotel, the MBAs presented their findings. Amazon executives chose music as the first expansion target, and DVDs as the second. To the discomfort of early employees wedded to the zeal of creating a literary hub on the Web, the mission was now more comprehensive. The motto on the top of the website changed from Earth’s Largest Bookstore to Books, Music and More, and, soon after, to Earth’s Biggest Selection—the everything store.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“You seem like a really nice guy, so don’t take this the wrong way, but you really need to sell to Barnes and Noble and get out now,” one student bluntly informed Bezos. Brian Birtwistle, a student in the class, recalls that Bezos was humble and circumspect. “You may be right,” Amazon’s founder told the students. “But I think you might be underestimating the degree to which established brick-and-mortar business, or any company that might be used to doing things a certain way, will find it hard to be nimble or to focus attention on a new channel. I guess we’ll see.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“It was a distilled version of the dissatisfaction felt by many early Amazon employees. With his convincing gospel, Bezos had persuaded them all to have faith, and they were richly rewarded as a result. Then the steely-eyed founder replaced them with a new and more experienced group of believers. Watching the company move on without them gave these employees a gnawing sensation, as if their child had left home and moved in with another family. But in the end, as Bezos made abundantly clear to Shel Kaphan, Amazon had only one true parent.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“From New York, Bezos called into the Amazon office on the day of the IPO and asked employees not to overcelebrate the moment or obsess over the stock price. Henry Weinhard’s beer, an inexpensive local brew, was passed around the Seattle offices and then everyone went back to work, although they all occasionally stole furtive glances at Amazon’s stock price.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Later Bezos recalled speaking at an all-hands meeting called to address the assault by Barnes & Noble. “Look, you should wake up worried, terrified every morning,” he told his employees. “But don’t be worried about our competitors because they`re never going to send us any money anyway. Let’s be worried about our customers and stay heads-down focused.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Kaphan asked Bezos why, now that they had accomplished some of their earliest goals, he was so bent on rapid expansion. “When you are small, someone else that is bigger can always come along and take away what you have,” Bezos told him. “We have to level the playing field in terms of purchasing power with the established booksellers.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Similarities eventually displaced Bookmatch and became the seed that would grow into Amazon’s formidable personalization effort. Bezos believed that this would be one of the insurmountable advantages of e-commerce over its brick-and-mortar counterparts. “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.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“within the first month of their launch they had sold books to people in all fifty states and in forty-five countries.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“The site went live on July 16, 1995, and became visible to all Web users. And as word spread, the small Amazon team saw almost immediately that they had opened a strange window onto human behavior.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“He says he came up with what he called a “regret-minimization framework” to decide the next step to take at this juncture of his career. “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

“Several executives who worked at DESCO at that time say the idea of the everything store was simple: an Internet company that served as the intermediary between customers and manufacturers and sold nearly every type of product, all over the world. One important element in the early vision was that customers could leave written evaluations of any product, a more egalitarian and credible version of the old Montgomery Ward catalog reviews of its own suppliers. Shaw himself confirmed the Internet-store concept when he told the New York Times Magazine in 1999, “The idea was always that someone would be allowed to make a profit as an intermediary. The key question is: Who will get to be that middleman?”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“When a company comes up with an idea, it’s a messy process. There’s no aha moment,” Bezos said. Reducing Amazon’s history to a simple narrative, he worried, could give the impression of clarity rather than the real thing.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“unanticipated question from the hyperintelligent boss. The narrative fallacy, Bezos explained, was a term coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his 2007 book The Black Swan to describe how humans are biologically inclined to turn complex realities into soothing but oversimplified stories.”
― 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. It kept piling up losses. It lost hundreds of millions of dollars. But Jeff was very garrulous, very smart. He’s a classic technical founder of a business, who understands every detail and cares about it more than anyone.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“The excesses of the dot-com boom had begun to wear on investors. Companies without actual business models were raising hundreds of millions of dollars, rushing to go public, and seeing their stock prices roar into the stratosphere despite unsound financial footing.”
― 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

“Step by Step, Ferociously.” The phrase accurately captures Amazon’s guiding philosophy as well. Steady progress toward seemingly impossible goals will win the day. Setbacks are temporary. Naysayers are best ignored. An interviewer once asked Bezos why he was motivated to accomplish so much, considering that he had already amassed an exceedingly large fortune. “I 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

“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

“The narrative fallacy, Bezos explained, was a term coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his 2007 book The Black Swan to describe how humans are biologically inclined to turn complex realities into soothing but oversimplified stories. Taleb argued that the limitations of the human brain resulted in our species’ tendency to squeeze unrelated facts and events into cause-and-effect equations and then convert them into easily understandable narratives. These stories, Taleb wrote, shield humanity from the true randomness of the world, the chaos of human experience, and, to some extent, the unnerving element of luck that plays into all successes and failures.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“If you’re not good, Jeff will chew you up and spit you out. And if you’re good, he will jump on your back and ride you into the ground.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“If you don’t know anything about the business, launch it through the Marketplace, bring retailers in, watch what they do and what they sell, understand it, and then get into it.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“John Doerr, the venture capitalist who backed Amazon early and was on its board of directors for a decade, has dubbed Amazon’s miserly public-relations style “the Bezos Theory of Communicating.” He says Bezos takes a red pen to press releases, product descriptions, speeches, and shareholder letters, crossing out anything that does not speak simply and positively to customers.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Up until that point, I had seen Jeff only at one speed, the go-go speed of grow at all costs. I had not seen him drive toward profitability and efficiency,” says Scott Cook, the Intuit founder and an Amazon board member during that time. “Most execs, particularly first-time CEOs who get good at one thing, can only dance what they know how to dance. “Frankly, I didn’t think he could do it.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon