The Everything Store Quotes

“The first week after the official launch, they took $12,000 in orders and shipped $846 worth of books, according to Eric Dillon, one of Amazon’s original investors. The next week they took $14,000 in orders and shipped $7,000 worth of books. So they were behind from the get-go and scrambling to catch up.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Usenet bulletin-board posting, August 21, 1994: Well-capitalized start-up seeks extremely talented C/C++/Unix developers to help pioneer commerce on the Internet. You must have experience designing and building large and complex (yet maintainable) systems, and you should be able to do so in about one-third the time that most competent people think possible. You should have a BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science or the equivalent. Top-notch communication skills are essential. Familiarity with web servers and HTML would be helpful but is not necessary. Expect talented, motivated, intense, and interesting co-workers. Must be willing to relocate to the Seattle area (we will help cover moving costs). Your compensation will include meaningful equity ownership. Send resume and cover letter to Jeff Bezos.”
― 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. We wanted independent teams to be entrepreneurial,” says Neil Roseman. Or, as Roseman also put it: “Autonomous working units are good. Things to manage working units are bad.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“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

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

“Joy was substance over optics,” he said. “Joy was a long-term thinker. Joy was bold.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Bezos invested tens of millions of Amazon’s cash in a variety of dot-com hopefuls, including Pets.com, Gear.com, Wineshopper.com, Greenlight.com, Homegrocer.com, and the urban delivery service Kozmo.com. In exchange for its cash, Amazon took a minority ownership position and a seat on the board for each, and the company believed it was well positioned for the future if those product categories succeeded on the Internet.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“It is far better to cannibalize yourself than have”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

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

“Type Relentless.com into the Web today and it takes you to Amazon.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“As part of his ongoing quest for a better allocation of his own time, he decreed that he would no longer have one-on-one meetings with his subordinates. These meetings tended to be filled with trivial updates and political distractions, rather than problem solving and brainstorming. Even today, Bezos rarely meets alone with an individual colleague.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Autonomous working units are good. Things to manage working units are bad.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Sinegal explained the Costco model to Bezos: it was all about customer loyalty.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“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

“If somebody else can sell it cheaper than us, we should let them and figure out how they are able to do it.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Unlike traditional retailers, Amazon returned few unsold books, often less than 5 percent. The big book chains regularly returned 40 percent of all the books they acquired from publishers, for full refunds,”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

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

“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

“There were several immediate reasons for the stock market’s reversal. 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. In March of 2000, a critical cover story in Barron’s pointed out the self-destructive rate at which Web companies like Amazon were burning through their venture capital. The dot-com boom had been built largely on faith that the market would give these young, unprofitable companies plenty of room to mature; the Barron’s story reinforced fears that a day of reckoning was coming. The NASDAQ peaked on March 10,”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“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 junior executives recommended a variety of different techniques to foster cross-group dialogue and afterward seemed proud of their own ingenuity. Then Jeff Bezos, his face red and the blood vessel in his forehead pulsing, spoke up. “I understand what you’re saying, but you are completely wrong,” he said. “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.” That confrontation was widely remembered. “Jeff has these aha moments,” says David Risher. “All the blood in his entire body goes to his face. He’s incredibly passionate. If he was a table pounder, he would be pounding the table.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Bezos took a series of odd jobs throughout high school. One summer he famously worked as a fryer at a local McDonald’s, learning, among other skills, how to crack an egg with one hand.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Two other technology icons, Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison, were adopted, and the experience is thought by some to have given each a powerful motivation to succeed.”
― 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.”15”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Despite his famously hearty laugh and cheerful public persona, he is capable of the same kind of acerbic outbursts as Apple’s late founder, Steve Jobs, who could terrify any employee who stepped into an elevator with him.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“There was little science to Amazon’s earliest distribution methods. The company held no inventory itself at first. When a customer bought a book, Amazon ordered it, the book would arrive within a few days, and Amazon would store it in the basement and then ship it off to the customer. It took Amazon a week to deliver most items to customers, and it could take several weeks or more than a month for scarcer titles.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“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

“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

“Just as Clayton Christensen had predicted in The Innovator’s Dilemma, technological innovation caused wrenching pain to the company and the broader industry”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“The Kindle wasn’t an overnight success, of course, but an avalanche of publicity and its prominent placement at the top of the Amazon website ensured that the company would quickly run through its stock of devices.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon