The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 64 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Verrilli: Hex and AI match two weeks of 2017 Amazon L7 work
“You know, you can pull data now on a hex thread. That is basically what it would take a week, two weeks with an Amazon L seven, you know, a data scientist in 2017.”
Apple alumni resonated better with Airbnb's culture than Amazon alumni did
“In fact, Airbnb saw it, I think when with Amazon people Apple people have resonated pretty well at Airbnb, Amazon people less so.”
Carr: Prioritizing Customers Over Revenue Is an Unprovable Article of Faith
“We had, as Jeff would say, we took it as an article of faith. If we served customers well, if we prioritized customers and delivered for them, we took it as an article of faith that then things like sales, Things like revenue and active customers and things li…”
Carr: Fire Phone failed because 3D effects solved no meaningful customer problem
“I would argue this is a case where we made the mistake of what we had a technology solution in mind, which was three D effects. And then, and we took that solution and we're then in search of a problem. I don't think it's solved any meaningful problems for cus…”
Söderström: Decentralized team autonomy risks shipping org chart complexity to users
“You get the benefit of speed. But you get the drawback of kind of shipping your org chart and shipping complexity to the end user.”
Pricing low to drive growth is a fallacy without Amazon-like costs
“Often I see entrepreneurs who say, let's just price low to like grain, gain growth. That's a fallacy. I mean, if you don't have a business model that actually supports this compared to Amazon, then You probably know shouldn't be in a penetration strategy.”
Evans: Major tech incumbents are unlikely to be fundamentally disrupted by AI
“You can look at, you know, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and say, it's hard to see a problem for them, really, with all of this. You can certainly see questions for all of them and one of them may drop the ball, but it's worth, you know, kind of remembering…”
Baxley: Meta Is Still a Startup, But Amazon Is Not
“I had this other theory that a startup is still a startup until the founder moves aside. So by my definition of even meta is still a startup in a way that Amazon's not. And, you know, an Airbnb is still a startup in a way that Pinterest is not because Ben's mo…”
Baxley: Google and Amazon Do Not Compete on Design Like Apple
“And Apple does, Airbnb does. I don't get the sense that Google does. And I don't get the sense that Amazon does. And that's not a critique on them. I don't think that those organizations are competing on design in the same way.”
Brand names no longer matter for products purchased on Amazon
“Brand names don't matter anymore. And you there, it's like someone threw up on a keyboard and that's the name of the company now for half the products you buy on Amazon, because that's not how you actually choose the product.”
Nickels: Uber is to Amazon as DoorDash is to Shopify
“So the analogy I use is like Uber is to Amazon as DoorDash is to Shopify, if that makes sense, right? Amazon has been more consumer focused. Shopify is obviously very merchant focused.”
Schwartz: Voice Assistants Failed Because They Provided Single Answers Without Choice
“One of the reasons I think these home assistants, whether it's from Google or Apple or Amazon have never taken off is because you don't have choice.
You talk to your Google and it gives you only one answer.
You talk to Amazon and it gives you only one answer.”
Beykpour: Amazon Burying Order Details in Confirmation Emails Is Customer-Hostile
“Amazon doesn't send you when you get older confirmation from Amazon, they intentionally bury the order details. It's like, click the link and authenticate to go see what you ordered. I don't give two shits what metrics that drive for Amazon. That is one of the…”
Evans: Beta testing and risk of leaks beat high-risk surprise launches
“The problem I came to say is the biggest thing I learned with surprise launches is that you're surprised by what doesn't work. And so I shifted the approach to let's do a lot of beta testing. We always Even if others don't agree quite and say, you're right. We…”
Evans: The Fire Phone failure will permanently burden Jeff Bezos's reputation
“Jeff's, I mean, Jeff and fire phone, which, you know, it's like his, that'll be an albatross around his neck. You know, Jeff and fire phone will be a phrase of anybody who knows Amazon for the rest of his life.”
Carr: Amazon developed nearly all core products and processes between 2003-2007
“This period of both product and process innovation actually occurred in this one narrow window of 2003 to 2007. During that window of time, all the products I just mentioned and all of the processes except for one Were all developed in this one four year perio…”
Carr: Working with visionary executives requires identifying their core thinking vector
“And so there'd be times when even after we've had that discussion, I maybe still disagree, but then what I would do is I'd focus on, okay, well, what is the kernel or the core of like why Jeff thinks that we should do this? And I would focus on that kernel. I …”
Carr: Team members should commit once leaders show they understand the pushback
“Now that is the point at which as long as the disagreeer is hearing back from the leader that they understand their point of view, understand like why they are pushing back and seem to fully understand it. And they've taken that into consideration. That is the…”
Carr: Single-threaded leadership requires permanent program ownership over temporary projects
“Fundamentally we've moved from what we called a project orientation to a program orientation. So project orientation means, oh, we're going to do this project to change our search result page and algorithm, and the project is defined in this way, and it's goin…”
Carr: Only 10 of Amazon's ~500 leadership goals tracked financial metrics
“And I can't remember exactly what year, something around like two South, 2007, 2008. They, you know, looked at that list, which is about 500 items long, by the way, and they counted it up. And of that list, Only 10 of them actually had a financial metric in it…”
Pincus: Every member of Andy Jassy's C-suite was Bezos's technical assistant
“And in fact, Andy Jassy at Amazon, everyone on the C staff used to be someone who'd been the tech assistant to Bezos.”
Wilkinson: Enterprise SaaS is definitely easier to build than Instacart or Amazon
“Would it be easier to start Instacart, Amazon, or Coupang, or would it be easier to start an enterprise SaaS software company? Definitely the enterprise SaaS software company.”
Rachitsky: Major tech companies hire product managers, not product owners
“Google has no product owners as far as they know. Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, like no company you, you've heard of that's a tech company has a product owner. They have, or they're all product managers. They're all product managers.”
Great companies require named, templated rituals known by an employee's first Friday
“Great companies have a small list of golden rituals, and they have three tests. And he quickly rattled them off. Number one, they're named. Number two, every employee knows them by their first Friday. And number three, they're templated. And he quickly gave hi…”
Yehoshua: Jeff Bezos is by far the smartest person I've met
“He is by far the smartest person I've ever met in my life. In that, ah, I've worked with a lot of smart people, but his ability to go deep in any domain And nail that the core issue and remember, like we would have quarterly meetings and from quarter to quarte…”
Maples: Floodgate made 85x on Twitch despite forgetting they owned shares
“About 10 years ago, Twitch was acquired by Amazon for nine hundred and seventy million. And we made something like 85 times our money. And normally you'd think that's a really good thing. It was a good thing, but I had forgotten that I was even a shareholder a…”
Duggal: Product concepts need more work if not explainable in two paragraphs
“Because if you can't tell me in two paragraphs why the customer you're building this for should care, then it's still work to do.”
Caldwell: Reading popular sales books gets founders 80% of the way
“I think a lot of founders are afraid of doing sales and they don't know how to do sales and they think they need these really experienced sales coaches and they need all this training. And I'll be like, well, go onto Amazon and Find the most popular sales book…”
Evans: You can earn executive promotions even after massive public blunders
“What I want people to understand is if I can get away with publicly failing One of the richest and most famous inventors on earth, and then get promoted and finish my career at Amazon very successfully, you can dig out of any hole. You just have to manage it r…”
Evans authored Amazon's rule: an owner never says that's not my job
“And I propose these six words, which are an owner never says that's not my job. Maybe that's seven words. So. I propose this specific language as a part of it. And we sent off this draft and months go by, we hear nothing. And then one day the leadership princi…”
Evans: In-person presence diffuses executive anger compared to email
“Angry emails are easy. Stitting three feet from someone and being angry with them face to face is hard.”
Evans predicts Amazon will ultimately adopt his truck-based drone delivery patent
“You know, I'm waiting for the, my idea to become part of Amazon's drone delivery system, but I think ultimately it will.”
Rathi: Working backwards is about building operational launch machinery, not just customer value
“My insight, or at least my, the way that I thought about this one is, it's not working backwards only from a customer value proposition. Will our customers love, love it, and will they pay for it, and is it noteworthy, and is it something that we should even b…”
Carr: Amazon shielded early AWS and digital media teams with direct CEO oversight
“One was when we went to go build, you know, digital media and AWS, we put like two of our smartest, you know, leaders in the company on those things, Steve Kessel and Andy Jassy. And number two, they were meeting with Jeff regularly. Jeff was deeply engaged wi…”
Carr: A metric is an input if you control it and it impacts customers
“So, you know, you're doing input metrics. If it is do you control it? Meaning can you apply resources to make this thing better or worse? Is it, does it touch customers? It doesn't always have to touch customers, but if it is affecting the customer experience,…”
Carr: Amazon Bar Raisers never actually exercised formal hiring vetoes in practice
“I was a bar raiser and in my 15 years at Amazon, I never used it, never saw it used.”
Carr: Internal PR/FAQs must be data-rich without marketing hyperbole
“You don't wanna use like hyperbole and it would be like very factual, like with like, you know, numbers, like data rich document too. So so again, not like a real press release. A lot of like internal confidential data would be like in this press release.”
Carr: Jim Collins' 'Good to Great' was Amazon's most influential management book
“I think that this was the single most influential and effective management book for our company, because what it caused Jeff to do, and I won't describe what, you know, most of you probably know what it is. If you don't know what it is, go read the good to gre…”
Carr: Amazon senior engineers maintained cross-org duties to preserve functional excellence
“Effectively what it also meant is that anyone who is a, an engineering vice president, or in many cases, a director, they would often have Something else beyond their day job of some sort of subject matter expertise area where they would also contribute to the…”
Carr: Compound metrics obscure the actions that drive business outcomes
“The problem is it's actually becomes totally meaningless. When you're measuring things, you're trying to understand, like, what actions or reactions are creating, you know, the good outputs that you want revenue, customer growth, but by putting them all togeth…”
Carr: Ideas outside existing org structures must be shelved or given dedicated owners
“When something came up, some idea that didn't neatly fit within my org structure, I couldn't necessarily delegate it to someone that this, there were only two things I could possibly do, which is just sort of set it aside altogether. Cause otherwise just be a …”
Carr: Amazon board meetings about launching the Kindle were highly contentious
“A lot of people inside Amazon doubted that the Kindle was going to be a good idea. I remember contentious, you know, board meetings on this topic.”
Carr: PR/FAQ documents should develop through concentric circle reviews
“There's this iterative nature to writing PRFAQs where it's sort of a concentric circle review. Like you start off small, like with one author and with low fidelity writing these things, and then you start to share them with, you know, small group and get feedb…”
Carr: Amazon tied executive compensation to stock price, not unit performance bonuses
“So there were no performance bonuses. So if I was running the book business and I had a killer year from a financial point of view, there was no like extra kicker for me. And if I ran the book business and it had a bad year, there was no financial penalty for …”
Carr: Cost Cutting Only Benefits Customers If Savings Lower Prices
“In itself, driving out costs, you know, doing things more efficiently doesn't inherently benefit customers because you could just choose to take more profit. It only does if you decide that I'm in doing so, I'm going to lower my prices to customers or provide …”
Over half of Amazon's recommendation emails had negative ROI due to unsubscribes
“And then when we started to incorporate this formula, more than half the campaigns that were being sent were negative.”
Singhal: Early PMs should define their narrative before focusing on day-to-day execution
“And then maybe goal number two is having a story to tell to that next employer and that next, next. You know, what I worry about is sometimes when I'm in an interview, and you and I have probably done hundreds, and you're talking to someone, and then they talk…”
McAllister: Amazon's 'working backwards' method works without the PR/FAQ format
“Teach that and write some posts about with templates and things like that, because it's a great way to start of like the press release has a paragraph about the problem. That's what you write, and then you write the solution paragraph, and then the customer qu…”