Amazon

“You can drive away great people by making the speed of decision-making really slow.”

“Something Jeff repeats over and over and over again in his letters is that you need to obsess over customers. That's the exact same message that David Packard is writing in that introduction.”

“I would argue that he's the most influential retailer of all time. If you factor in how many people Are on record saying that they took Sol's ideas and applied it to their own life and work. Jim Senegal of Costco, obviously. Sam Walton of Walmart. Jeff Bezos o…”

“Every time a new feature or a product was proposed, Jeff Bezos decreed that the narrative should take the shape of a mock press release. The goal was to get employees to distill a pitch into its purest essence.”

“The Kindle goes on sale for the first time All the way in November of 2007. It retails for 399 dollars and would hold 200 books. It's sold out in less than six hours.”

“If we wanted Amazon to be a place where builders can build, we need to eliminate communication, not encourage it.”

“The best way to fail at inventing something is by making it somebody's part-time job.”

“He assumes each sentence he reads is wrong until he can prove otherwise. He's challenging the content of the sentence, not the motive of the writer”

“At this time, I think 77% of Amazon, 70 or 77%, somewhere around there, of Amazon's revenue came from, like, physical books, books, CDs, music, that kind of thing, right?”

“The two co-authors actually worked with Jeff for a combined 27 years, and one of the co-authors, Colin, was actually Jeff's shadow. Went everywhere with him, every single meeting, for two straight years.”

“Not outsourcing means it's gonna be more expensive. We're gonna spend a lot more money. It's gonna take longer to get a product out there. But at the end of that, if we are successful, we have a set of skills that we lacked beforehand, then we can go out and d…”

“Working backwards exposes skill sets that your company needs, but does not yet have. So the longer your company works backwards, the more skills it develops and the more valuable, valuable it becomes, the more things it can invent.”

“Working backwards documents for the early AWS products, the PRFAQ stated that we wanted the student in a dorm room to have access to the same world-class computing infrastructure as any Amazon software engineer.”

“Data and anecdotes make a powerful combination when they're in sync, and they're a valuable check on one another when they're not.”

“The reason writing a four page memo is harder than writing a 20 page PowerPoint is because the narrative structure of a good memo forces better thought and better understanding of what's more important than what and how things are related. PowerPoint style pre…”

“Jeff had one simple rule. It has to be perfect. He'd remind his team that one bad customer experience would undo the goodwill of hundreds of perfect ones.”

“Failure and invention are inseparable twins. He just said, Amazon will be a place, the best place in the world to invent. So failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent, you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it's going to work, it'…”

“Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, he said, in most cases, you're probably being slow. Plus, either way, you need to be good at quickly recognizing and correcting bad decis…”

“Jeff wrote his own narrative about a device. He called the Amazon puck when I'm about to, this is crazy. When I'm about to read to you, he wrote in 2004. He is going to describe the Amazon echo, which is going to sell hundreds of millions of these things. The …”

“Amazon has a program called Customer Connection, which is mandatory for corporate employees. Every two years, the corporate employee is required to become a customer service agent for a few days. They have to listen in on calls, watch email and chat interactio…”

“And so the Kindle is going to be the first product in which they used and they created using this press release approach.”

“In fact, to this day, you might already know this, but Jeff Bezos owns the domain relentless.com. If you go in your browser and you type relentless.com, it will forward to Amazon for a brief moment. He's He loved the word so much he was thinking about naming A…”

“If I have to choose between agreement and conflict, I'll take conflict every time. It always yields a better result.”

“And so they start buying Amazon aggressively in 2005 around 30 dollars per share.”

“By 2018, Amazon had risen so much that it accounted for more than 70% of Nick's net worth. Nick began to worry. Could Amazon's market value grow to three or four trillion dollars or were there limits even to Amazon's greatness? He wasn't sure. So after 13 year…”

“Amazon went so far as to save 20,000 dollars a year by removing the light bulbs from the vending machines in its offices.”

“3.1% of all retail sales happened online in the year 2006.”

“In the end of 2004, the market cap of Amazon, when Nixleep is discovering this earned secret was nine, was eighteen billion dollars. Eighteen billion. The market cap in that same time for eBay was seventy seven billion.”

“On the busiest day in the run-up to Christmas this year in 2008, order volumes at Amazon were 16% higher than the previous year compared to the overall retail industry, which are down 10%.”

“He's actually one of the largest tech company landlords in the world. Tech companies like Facebook, Google, Apple, Spotify, Amazon, All lease property from Ortega. In fact, his commercial real estate portfolio alone is worth around twenty billion dollars.”

“I watched the stock fall from 113 dollars to six, but I was also watching all of our internal business metrics, numbers of customers, profit per unit. Every single thing about the business was getting better and fast, even as the stock was dropping.”

“In some large companies, it might be difficult to grow new businesses from tiny seeds because of the patience and nurturing required. Amazon's culture is unusually supportive of small businesses with big potential. And I believe that a source, that's a source …”

“Most decisions are probably made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, you're being too slow.”

“Wandering is an essential counterbalance to efficiency. You need to employ both. The outsized discoveries, the nonlinear ones, are highly likely to require laundering.”

“We have significant data related to price elasticity with rare exceptions. The volume increase in the short term is never enough to pay for the price decrease.”

“Physical ward world retailing is cagey and ancient, but it's already well served. And we don't have any ideas for how to build a physical world store experience. That's a meaningfully differentiated for customers.”

“If you want to be the best at what you're doing, if the people that survive and thrive for decades, usually what you'll find, and you see this in the biographies as well, is they just identify a handful of principles. They repeat these principles year after ye…”

“As the company grows, everything needs to scale, including the size of our failed experiments. If the size of your failures isn't growing, you're not going to be inventing at a size that can actually move the needle.”

“When a memo isn't great, it's not the writer's inability to recognize the high standard, but instead a wrong expectation on scope. They mistakenly believe a high standard six-page memo can be written in one or two days, or even a few hours, when in reality, it…”

“I'm glad about that because missionaries make better products.”

“There are folks who work hard to figure out how to charge more, and there are companies that work to figure out how to charge less. We are going to be the second full stop”

“Even well-meaning gatekeepers slow innovation. When a platform is self-service, even the improbable ideas can get tried because there's no expert gatekeeper ready to say that will never work. And guess what? Many of those improbable ideas do work, and society …”

“Day two is stasis, followed by irrelevance, followed by excruciating, painful decline, followed by death. That is why it's always day one.”

“In July, we added a third customer experience pillar. Relentlessly lowering prices.”

“So if Amazon at this time when they're just selling books was able, if it was, if you could contain all their inventory in one store, it would be over six football fields large.”

“These two partners include America Online, Yahoo, I guess Yahoo kind of exists still Apollo still owns it, but you get the point. Excite, Netscape, GeoCities, Alta Vista, At Home, and Prodigy, all gone.”

“People, when they, this is just human nature, when they find something they like, We don't keep it ourselves where it's a movie, a podcast, a product, like we tell other people. What I realized reading through the lines in that her autobiography is like, oh, s…”

“A dreamy business offering has at least four characteristics. Number one, customers love it. Number two, it can grow to a very large size. Number three, it has strong returns on capital. And number four, it is durable in time with the potential to endure. Ther…”

“Outsized returns often come from betting against conventional wisdom, and conventional wisdom is usually right. Given a 10% chance of a 100 times payoff, you should take that bet every time. But you're still going to be wrong nine times out of 10.”

“The fairytale version of be yourself is that all the pain stops as soon as you allow your distinctiveness to shine. That version is misleading. Being yourself is worth it, but don't expect it to be easy or free. You'll have to put energy into it continuously”

“In fact, he would go around giving copies of Sam Walton's autobiography With his own highlights and annotations to early leaders in Amazon.”

“He says over and over again, step by step, ferociously. He is willing to be patient. He is willing to focus on the long-term, but he wants you to take your day-to-day steps ferociously.”

“Working backwards from customer needs can be contrasted with a skills forward approach where existing skills and competencies are used to drive business opportunities. The skills forward approach says, Hey, we're really good at X. What else can we do with X? I…”

“Amazon, I think the last number I saw, Amazon sold something like five hundred million devices, Echo and Alexa powered devices so far.”

“The difference between baseball and business 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 pla…”

“Our decision to invest in smaller e-commerce companies like living.com and pets.com Both of which shut down operations in the year, 2000 lost a significant amount of money for us.”

“Online selling is a scale business characterized by high fixed costs and relatively low variable costs. This makes it difficult to be a medium sized e-commerce company.”

“Talent is the most, you have to work with the smartest, most talented people you possibly can find overpay for talent. Cause talents are you, it's really hard to overpay for talent, right?”

“And he tells you that because he appends it, the 1997 shareholder letter, To every single shareholder letter he's going to write over the next 23 years.”

“He toyed around with the idea of naming Amazon relentless. He was going to, instead of amazon.com, it was going to be relentless.com. In fact, to this day, when you type in relentless.com, it forwards, he still owns that domain, it forwards to amazon.com.”

“A remarkable customer experience starts with heart. Intuition, curiosity, play, guts, taste. You will not find any of it in a survey.”

“Sequencing markets correctly is underrated, and it takes discipline to expand gradually. The most successful companies make the core progression to first dominate a specific niche and then scale to adjacent markets, a part of their founding narrative, just lik…”