The Everything Store Quotes

“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

“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

“Bezos and other startup founders were reacting to lessons from previous technology giants. Microsoft took a top-down management approach with layers of middle managers, a system that ended up slowing decisions and stifling innovation. Looking at the muffled and unhappy hierarchy of the software giant across Lake Washington, Amazon executives saw a neon sign warning them exactly what to avoid.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“In the seminal high-tech book The Mythical Man-Month, IBM veteran and computer science professor Frederick Brooks argued that adding manpower to complex software projects actually delayed progress. One reason was that the time and money spent on communication increased in proportion to the number of people on a project.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

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

“Bezos felt that hiring only the best and brightest was key to Amazon’s success.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“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

“Steve Jobs was known for the clarity of his insights about what customers wanted, but he was also known for his volatility with coworkers. Apple’s founder reportedly fired employees in the elevator and screamed at underperforming executives. Perhaps there is something endemic in the fast-paced technology business that causes this behavior, because such intensity is not exactly rare among its CEOs. Bill Gates used to throw epic tantrums. Steve Ballmer, his successor at Microsoft, had a propensity for throwing chairs. 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

“The entire company, he said, would restructure itself around what he called “two-pizza teams.” Employees would be organized into autonomous groups of fewer than ten people—small enough that, when working late, the team members could be fed with two pizza pies. These teams would be independently set loose on Amazon’s biggest problems. They would likely compete with one another for resources and sometimes duplicate their efforts, replicating the Darwinian realities of surviving in nature. Freed from the constraints of intracompany communication, Bezos hoped, these loosely coupled teams could move faster and get features to customers quicker. There were some head-scratching aspects to Bezos’s two-pizza-team concept. 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.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Unlike brick-and-mortar retailers, whose inventories were spread out across hundreds or thousands of stores around the country, Amazon had one website and, at that time, a single warehouse and inventory. Amazon’s ratio of fixed costs to revenue was considerably more favorable than that of its offline competitors”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Amazon customers who joined Prime doubled, on average, their spending on the site, according to a person familiar with the company’s internal finances at the time. A Prime member was like a shopper who walked into a Costco warehouse for a case of beer and walked out with the beer plus an armful of DVDs, a nine-pound smoked ham, and a flat-screen television.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“if the potential employees made the mistake of talking about wanting a harmonious balance between work and home life, Bezos rejected them.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

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

“He embraces the truth. A lot of people talk about the truth, but they don’t engage their decision-making around the best truth at the time.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“rag doll that they often prop up in an empty chair during meetings. the doll is meant to represent the student they are trying to help - just as bezos once had a habit of keeping a chair empty in meetings to represent the customer”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“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

“when given the choice of obsessing over competitors or obsessing over customers, we always obsess over customers”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“amazon customers who joined prime doubled, on average, their spending on the site”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“your job is to kill your own business. i want you to proceed as if your goal is to put everyone selling physical books out of a job”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“if you are running both businesses you will never go after the digital opportunity with tenacity”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“as soon as the electric power grid came online, they dumped their electric power generator, and they started buying power off the grid. it just makes more sense. and that's what is starting to happen with infrastructure computing. bezos wanted AWS to be a utility with discount rates, even if that meant losing money in the short term.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“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

“there's only one way out of this predicament, and that is to invent our way out”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“there's only one way out of this predicament, and that is to invent out way out”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“when friction was removed from online shopping, customers spent more”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“it was never about the seventy-nine dollars. it was really about changing people's mentality so they wouldn't shop anywhere else”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“steady progress toward seemingly impossible goals will win the day”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“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

“he just never stopped believing. he never blinked once”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“word of mouth could deliver customers to amazon. he wanted to funnel the saved marketing dollars into improving the customer experience and accelerating the flywheel”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon