The Everything Store Quotes

“that either-or mentality, that if you are doing something good for customers it must be bad for shareholders, is very amatuerish”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“by reducing the friction of online buying even marginally, amazon could reap additional millions in revenue while simultaneously digging a protective moat around its business and hobbling its rivals”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“new motto: get big fast”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“jeff was always an expansive thinker, but access to capital was an enabler”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“this is not only the largest river in the world, it's many times larger than the next biggest river. it blows all other rivers away.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“relentless.com takes you to amazon”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

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

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

“You can work long, you can work hard, you can work smart, but at Amazon you can’t choose two out of three.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“You can work long, hard, and smart, but at Amazon.com you can pick only two out of three.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Every time we hire someone, he or she should raise the bar for the next hire, so that the overall talent pool is always improving,”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“It’s one thing to have a good idea, but it’s another to have confidence in a person to execute it,”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“didn’t understand that his business was to sell books, not trash them. “We saw it very differently,” Bezos said. “When I read that letter, I thought, we don’t make money when we sell things. We make money when we help customers make purchase decisions.”5”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

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

“On one side of the desk sits a bowl of dog biscuits for employees who bring their dogs to the office (a rare perk in a company that makes employees pay for parking and snacks).”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“На одной из таких встреч сотрудница поинтересовалась у Безоса, когда Amazon собирается обеспечивать соблюдение баланса между интересами компании и личной жизнью своих работников. Безосу не понравилась такая постановка вопроса. «Мы здесь для того, чтобы делать то, что от нас требуется. Данная задача имеет наивысший приоритет, – жестко ответил он. – Она заложена в Amazon на генном уровне. Если вы не можете отдавать компании все свои силы, значит, это место не для вас»”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Um dos primeiros desafios era que as distribuidoras de livros exigiam que os revendedores fizessem pedidos de pelo menos dez livros. A Amazon ainda não tinha esse volume de vendas, e Bezos mais tarde se divertiria contando como resolveu o problema. “Encontramos uma brecha”, revelou ele. “Os sistemas deles eram programados de forma que você não tinha que receber dez livros, só precisava pedir dez livros. Então encontramos um livro obscuro sobre líquens que eles tinham no sistema, mas que não havia em estoque. Começamos a pedir o livro que realmente queríamos e nove exemplares do livro sobre líquens. Eles mandavam o livro de que precisávamos e uma nota dizendo: ‘Desculpem-nos, mas não temos o livro sobre líquens.’” 4”
― Brad Stone, A loja de tudo: Jeff Bezos e a era da Amazon

“and that this is still Day 1 in such a big way. Jeff Bezos Amazon’s internal customs are deeply idiosyncratic. PowerPoint decks or slide presentations are never used in meetings. Instead, employees are required to write six-page narratives laying out their points in prose, because Bezos believes doing so fosters critical thinking. For each new product, they craft their documents in the style of a press release. The goal is to frame a proposed initiative in the way a customer might hear about it for the first time. Each meeting begins with everyone silently reading the document, and discussion commences afterward—just like the productive-thinking exercise in the principal’s office at River Oaks Elementary. For my initial meeting with Bezos to discuss this project, I decided to observe Amazon’s customs and prepare my own Amazon-style narrative, a fictional press release on behalf of the book. Bezos met me in an eighth-floor conference room and we sat down at a large table made of half a dozen door-desks, the same kind of blond wood that Bezos used twenty years ago when he was building Amazon from scratch in his garage. The door-desks are often held up as a symbol of the company’s enduring frugality. When I first interviewed Bezos, back in 2000, a few years of unrelenting international travel had taken their toll”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Bezos nevertheless made an impression. Minor remembers that Bezos had closely studied several wealthy businessmen and that he particularly admired a man named Frank Meeks, a Virginia entrepreneur who had made a fortune owning Domino’s Pizza franchises.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Think Big Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Leaders create and communicate a bold direction that inspires results. They think differently and look around corners for ways to serve customers.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“We try not to spend money on things that don’t matter to customers. Frugality breeds resourcefulness, self-sufficiency and invention. There are no extra points for headcount, budget size or fixed expense.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

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

“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

“Let’s give them credit,” Schmidt says. “The book guys got computer science, they figured out the analytics, and they built something significant.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Bezos’s counterintuitive point was that coordination among employees wasted time, and that 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

“Employees remember that when the home and kitchen category was introduced in the fall of 1999, kitchen knives would fly down the conveyor chutes, free of protective packaging. Amazon’s internal logistics software didn’t properly account for new categories, so the computers would ask workers whether a new toy entering the warehouse was a hardcover or a paperback book.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

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

“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

“What we are doing here is building a giant rocket ship, and we’re going to light the fuse. Then it’s either going to go to the moon or leave a giant smoking crater in the ground. Either way I want to be here when it happens.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Eric Benson took about two weeks to construct a preliminary version that grouped together customers who had similar purchasing histories and then found books that appealed to the people in each group. That feature, called Similarities, immediately yielded a noticeable uptick in sales and allowed Amazon to point customers toward books that they might not otherwise have found.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon