Amazon

“A few months back, I posted on Twitter asking, anyone want to form a learning group to read, reflect, and discuss all of Amazon shareholder letters? That simple question and that simple tweet got 4800 likes and 1100 responses.”

“In 1993, Costco ended up merging with Sol Price's Price Club, and it has gone on to boast one hundred and sixty seven billion dollars in revenue. It has more than 800 locations worldwide, and it is the sixth largest retailer in the world behind Walmart, Amazon…”

“It was the classic thing where product sucks but people still use it. Like, oh, I mean, it's like Amazon. Amazon looks terrible. It's the worst design site that I use, yet people, people use it.”

“I think in like the near and medium case, we're really not going to be displacing that much labor. I think what we're seeing every day we're walking into a warehouse or manufacturing a retail scenario, they have a tremendous amount of unemployment. The turnove…”

“And I think there's like, there's, like, there's basically two bifurcated cultures out here in Silicon Valley. There's the culture of like, you know, Google, Facebook, Pinterest, that like, you know, we're here for you. We'll pay you as much money as possible,…”

“I'm really an inventor, and I look at things, and I can come up with Atypical solutions, and, you know, and then I can create a hundred such atypical solutions for something. 99 of them may not survive, you know, scrutiny, but one of those 100 is like maybe th…”

“Meetings at Amazon and Blue Origin are unusual. When we get new, when new people come in, like a new executive joins, they're a little taken aback sometimes, because a typical meeting, We'll start with a six-page narratively structured memo, and we do study ha…”

“A good six-page memo might take two weeks to write. You have to write it. You have to rewrite it. You have to edit it. You have to talk to people about it. They have to poke holes in it for you. You write it again. It might take two weeks.”

“Told all of our early investors that I thought there was a 30% chance of success, by which I'd just been getting your money back, not, like, Not what actually happened.”

“A really good force function for founders or investors or potential employees of startups is to be really good at separating what is story from what is fact. It is important to know both, but fact is what makes a business strong or weak today. Story is a possi…”

“A huge failure of entrepreneurs in general, especially in the early days of their business, is to set unrealistic expectations of what the work or the culture is like because they are afraid of scaring away employees. Bezos takes the complete opposite approach…”

“And I think a written culture of communication is one of the best ways to solidify clear thinking across the organization.”

“Revenue was up 838% to one hundred and forty-seven million dollars in revenue from just fifteen million a year earlier. The number of unique customers grew from 180,000 to 1.5 million, and the employee base three acts from 158 to 614.”

“If you want a high growth entrepreneurial culture, you need to treat your business like a science experiment where your employees are like lab workers creating hypotheses and running constant tests, making decisions based on data and results versus having an e…”

“So you've got to go find people who haven't yet proven what they can do that these large organizations think meta, Think Google, think Apple, think Amazon, think Microsoft, or even these days open AI. They don't know how to assess these people.”