The Everything Store Quotes

“Engadget, the technology blog, had the first details about Amazon’s new e-reading device,”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Just like Creation author Steve Grand had predicted, the creatures were evolving in ways that Bezos could not have imagined. It was the combination of EC2 and S3—storage and compute, two primitives linked together—that transformed both AWS and the technology world.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“At the same time, Bezos became enamored with a book called Creation, by Steve Grand, the developer of a 1990s video game called Creatures that allowed players to guide and nurture a seemingly intelligent organism on their computer screens.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Bezos didn’t believe anyone could make a good decision about a feature or a product without knowing precisely how it would be communicated to the world—and what the hallowed customer would make of it.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Bezos announced that employees could no longer use such corporate crutches and would have to write their presentations in prose, in what he called narratives.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“The television episode was the foundation of another official award at Amazon, this one presented to an employee who identified an activity that was bureaucratic and wasteful. The suddenly super-fluous televisions were given as the prize. When the supply ran out, that commendation morphed into the Door-Desk award, given to an employee who came up with “a well-built idea that helps us to deliver lower prices to customers”—the prize was a door-desk ornament. Bezos was once again looking for ways to reinforce his values within the company.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Whenever Jeff Bezos roamed a fulfillment center or his own Seattle headquarters, he looked for defects—flaws in the company’s systems or even its corporate culture.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Wilke subscribed to the principles laid out in a seminal book about constraints in manufacturing, Eliyahu M. Goldratt’s The Goal, published in 1984. The book, cloaked in the guise of an entertaining novel, instructs manufacturers to focus on maximizing the efficiency of their biggest bottlenecks.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“resonance. “We had a key decision to make,” he says. “Was distribution a commodity or was it a core competency?”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“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

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

“The book clearly resonated with Amazon’s founder. 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. Jeff Bezos embodied the qualities Sam Walton wrote about.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“He had the marketing department organize tests, running commercials in only the Minneapolis and Portland media markets and measuring whether they generated an uptick in local purchases. They did—but, Bezos concluded, not enough to justify the investment.12 “It was pretty clear afterward that TV advertising wasn’t really having an impact,” says Mark Stabingas, a finance vice president who joined the company from Pepsi.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Drawing on Collins’s concept of a flywheel, or self-reinforcing loop, Bezos and his lieutenants sketched their own virtuous cycle, which they believed powered their business. It went something like this: Lower prices led to more customer visits. More customers increased the volume of sales and attracted more commission-paying third-party sellers to the site. That allowed Amazon to get more out of fixed costs like the fulfillment centers and the servers needed to run the website. This greater efficiency then enabled it to lower prices further. Feed any part of this flywheel, they reasoned, and it should accelerate the loop.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“There are two kinds of retailers: there are those folks who work to figure how to charge more, and there are companies that work to figure how to charge less, and we are going to be the second, full-stop,” he”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Bezos insisted the company needed to master anything that touched the hallowed customer experience, and he resisted any efforts to project profitability.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“At least one anointed bar raiser would participate in every interview process and would have the power to veto a candidate who did not meet the goal of raising the company’s overall hiring bar.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Miller knew nothing about toy retailing, but in a pattern that would recur over and over, Bezos didn’t care. He was looking for versatile managers—he called them “athletes”—who could move fast and get big things done. Miller was given”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

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

“We don't make money when we sell things. We make money when we help customers make purchase decisions.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Any process can be improved. Defects that are invisible to the knowledgeable may be obvious to newcomers. The simplest solutions are the best. Repeating”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Any process can be improved. Defects that are invisible to the knowledgeable may be obvious to newcomers. The”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“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

“Developers are alchemists and our job is to do everything we can to get them to do their alchemy.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“That summer, Harrison Miller and Bezos butted heads in front of the board of directors over the size of the bet on toys. Bezos wanted Miller to plow $120 million into stocking every possible toy, from Barbie dolls to rare German-made wooden trains to cheap plastic beach pails, so that kids and parents would never be disappointed when they searched for an item on Amazon. But a prescient Miller, sensing disaster ahead, pushed to lower his own buy. “No! No! A hundred and twenty million!” Bezos yelled. “I want it all. If I have to, I will drive it to the landfill myself!” “Jeff, you drive a Honda Accord,” Joy Covey pointed out. “That’s going to be a lot of trips.” Bezos prevailed. And the company would make a sizable contribution to Toys for Tots after the holidays that year. “That first holiday season was the best of times and the worst of times,” Miller says. “The store was great for customers and we made our revenue goals, which were big, but other than that everything that could go wrong did. In the aftermath we were sitting on fifty million dollars of toy inventory. I had guys going down the back stairs with ‘Vinnie’ in New York, selling Digimons off to Mexico at twenty cents on the dollar. You just had to get rid of them, fast.” The electronics effort faced even greater challenges. To launch that category, David Risher tapped a Dartmouth alum named Chris Payne who had previously worked on Amazon’s DVD store. Like Miller, Payne had to plead with suppliers—in this case, Asian consumer-electronics companies like Sony, Toshiba, and Samsung. He quickly hit a wall. The Japanese electronics”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Do I need to go down and get the certificate that says I’m CEO of the company to get you to stop challenging me on this?”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Steady progress toward seemingly impossible goals will win the day. Setbacks are temporary. Naysayers are best ignored.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“The membership fee is a onetime pain, but it’s reinforced every time customers walk in and see forty-seven-inch televisions that are two hundred dollars less than anyplace else,” Sinegal said. “It reinforces the value of the concept. Customers know they will find really cheap stuff at Costco.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“You don't feel thirty percent smarter when the stock goes up by thirty percent so when the stock goes down you shouldn't feel thirty percent dumber" Jeff Bezos”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon