Amazon Unbound Quotes

“If I have to choose between agreement and conflict, I’ll take conflict every time,” Bezos often said. “It always yields a better result.”
― Brad Stone, Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire

“We all know that if you swing for the fences, you’re going to strike out a lot, but you’re also going to hit some home runs. The difference between baseball and business, however, is that baseball has a truncated outcome distribution. When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs. This long-tailed distribution of returns is why it’s important to be bold.”
― Brad Stone, Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire

“Averages are bad measures. I want to see actuals, highs, lows and why—not an average. An average is just lazy.”
― Brad Stone, Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire

“You know, the name is about 3 percent of what matters. But sometimes, 3 percent is the difference between winning and losing.”
― Brad Stone, Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire

“They used an old internal Microsoft term to describe it: “cookie licking,” or the act of claiming to do something before you actually do it, in order to capture notoriety and prevent others from following.”
― Brad Stone, Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire

“Jeff always said that when you focus on the business inputs, then the outputs such as revenue and income will take care of themselves.”
― Brad Stone, Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire

“Do you trust storytellers, or do you trust data; the ingenuity of artists or the wisdom of the crowd?”
― Brad Stone, Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire

“Every interesting thing I’ve ever done, every important thing I’ve ever done, every beneficial thing I’ve ever done, has been through a cascade of experiments and mistakes and failures,”
― Brad Stone, Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire

“If Bezos took one leadership principle most to heart—which would also come to define the next half decade at Amazon—it was principal #8, “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. In 2010, Amazon was a successful online retailer, a nascent cloud provider, and a pioneer in digital reading. But Bezos envisioned it as much more. His shareholder letter that year was a paean to the esoteric computer science disciplines of artificial intelligence and machine learning that Amazon was just beginning to explore. It opened by citing a list of impossibly obscure terms such as “naïve Bayesian estimators,” “gossip protocols,” and “data sharding.” Bezos wrote: “Invention is in our DNA and technology is the fundamental tool we wield to evolve and improve every aspect of the experience we provide our customers.”
― Brad Stone, Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire

“Bezos surprised him with his response. “I remember his answer because he has lived it to this day,” Ryan said. “He said he feels that it is essential to have a strong and independent press for the health of our society and democracy.”
― Brad Stone, Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire

“For example, he suggested that every leader should be required to take a course called “As Life Happens,” to learn how to sensitively manage an employee whose personal life might be interfering with their work obligations. Niekerk recalled that colleagues who read his paper said that it was among the best analyses they had seen of the cultural challenges that were so obviously plaguing the company at its twentieth anniversary.”
― Brad Stone, Amazon Unbound

“You’ve built this lovely castle, and now all the barbarians are going to come riding on horses to attack the castle,” Bezos said, according to a former AWS exec who reports hearing the comment. “You need a moat; what is the moat around the castle?” (Amazon denied that Bezos said this.)”
― Brad Stone, Amazon Unbound

“Inside AWS, Jassy applied that adage ferociously. The rhythms of a week at AWS revolved around several formal “mechanisms” or well-honed processes or rituals. Ideas for new services, their names, pricing changes, and marketing plans were meticulously written as six-page documents and presented to Jassy in his twentieth-floor meeting room, dubbed “the Chop” (the name Jassy and his roommate had given their Harvard dorm room, from a novel they were assigned in European literature, Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma).”
― Brad Stone, Amazon Unbound

“Bezos liked to say that “good intentions don’t work, but mechanisms do.”
― Brad Stone, Amazon Unbound

“These were typically Amazonian names: geeky, obscure, and endlessly debated inside AWS, since according to an early AWS exec, Bezos had once mused, “You know, the name is about 3 percent of what matters. But sometimes, 3 percent is the difference between winning and losing.”
― Brad Stone, Amazon Unbound

“There are two ways of building a business. Many times, you aim, aim, aim, and then shoot,” he said, according to three executives who were there. “Or, you shoot, shoot, shoot, and then aim a little bit. That is what you want to do here. Don’t spend a lot of time on analysis and precision. Keep trying stuff.”
― Brad Stone, Amazon Unbound

“Later, Alexa execs would say that Bezos’s close involvement made their lives more difficult but also produced immeasurable results. Jeff “gave us the license and permission to do some of the things we needed to do to go faster and to go bigger,” Toni Reid said. “You can regulate yourself quite easily or think about what you’re going to do with your existing resources…. Sometimes, you don’t know what the boundaries are. Jeff just wanted us to be unbounded.”
― Brad Stone, Amazon Unbound

“Alexa execs, like leaders elsewhere in Amazon, became frequent recipients of the CEO’s escalation emails, in which he forwarded a customer complaint accompanied by a single question mark and then expected a response within twenty-four hours.”
― Brad Stone, Amazon Unbound

“George instead reorganized Alexa around the Amazonian ideal of fast-moving “two pizza” teams, each devoted to a specific Alexa domain, like music, weather, lighting, thermostats, video devices, and so on. Each team was run by a so-called “single-threaded leader” who had ultimate control and absolute accountability over their success or failure. (The phrase comes from computer science terminology; a single-threaded program executes one command at a time.)”
― Brad Stone, Amazon Unbound

“Most importantly, Bezos didn’t penalize Ian Freed and other Fire Phone managers, sending a strong message inside Amazon that taking risks was rewarded—especially if the entire debacle was primarily his own fault.”
― Brad Stone, Amazon Unbound

“My Amazon had under 150,000 employees. By the end of 2020, it had an astounding 1.3 million employees.”
― Brad Stone, Amazon Unbound

“kitchens”
― Brad Stone, Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire

“Amazon Go remained a money loser. But Bezos was still looking at it as a bet on computer vision and artificial intelligence, the kind of long-term, high-stakes experiment that was necessary to produce meaningful outcomes for large companies. As he wrote in his 2015 shareholder letter: We all know that if you swing for the fences, you’re going to strike out a lot, but you’re also going to hit some home runs. The difference between baseball and business, however, is that baseball has a truncated outcome distribution. When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs. This long-tailed distribution of returns is why it’s important to be bold.”
― Brad Stone, Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire

“In 2017, Amazon spent $22.6 billion on R&D, compared to Alphabet ($16.6 billion), Intel ($13.1 billion), and Microsoft ($12.3 billion).”
― Brad Stone, Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire

“later published a trove of these documents, which revealed Amazon execs strategizing back in 2009 to run the company’s diapers business at a loss to combat the company that operated Diapers.com, and to buy the internet doorbell company Ring in 2018—not for its technology, but to gain a dominant position in the market.”
― Brad Stone, Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire

“The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America,”
― Brad Stone, Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire

“His personal wealth was larger than the gross domestic product of Hungary; larger than even the market capitalization of General Motors.”
― Brad Stone, Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire

“It’s better to assume trust and find out that you are wrong than to always assume people are trying to screw you over,”
― Brad Stone, Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire

“And on the other side of the world, there was Mohammed bin Salman—the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, who was embittered at Bezos for the Washington Post’s coverage of the murder of dissident Jamal Khashoggi, and who some cybersecurity experts would come to believe had hacked Bezos’s cell phone.”
― Brad Stone, Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire

“Capital goes where it is welcome and stays where it is well treated.”
― Brad Stone, Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire