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https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/amazon-unbound-jeff-bezos-and-the-invention-of-a-global-empire-1d857c8f | Colleagues thought it was crazy for the perennially money losing Amazon to make gadgets. "I absolutely know it's hard, but we'll learn how to do it," Bezos told them. | Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire | 2021-05-17T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/amazon-unbound-jeff-bezos-and-the-invention-of-a-global-empire-1d857c8f | He was a ravenous reader. He was a ravenous reader, leading senior executives in discussion of books like Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma. | Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire | 2021-05-17T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/amazon-unbound-jeff-bezos-and-the-invention-of-a-global-empire-1d857c8f | 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. | Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire | 2021-05-17T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/amazon-unbound-jeff-bezos-and-the-invention-of-a-global-empire-1d857c8f | Bezos and Kessel were getting impatient. Despite three years of work, Amazon hadn't opened a single store. So in the peculiar fashion of invention at Amazon, they created separate teams to pursue the singular goal of bringing the company into the vast realm of physical retail. Bezos liked to say Amazon was "stubborn on vision, flexible on details," and here was an illustration: groups working on parallel tracks would essentially compete to fulfill the "Just Walk Out" ideal and solve the problem of the cashierless store. | Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire | 2021-05-17T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/amazon-unbound-jeff-bezos-and-the-invention-of-a-global-empire-1d857c8f | “Don't come to me with a plan that assumes I will only make a certain level of investment," Bezos continued, "Tell me how to win." | Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire | 2021-05-17T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/amazon-unbound-jeff-bezos-and-the-invention-of-a-global-empire-1d857c8f | "It has always seemed strange to me. . .The things we admire in men—kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding, and feeling—are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest—sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism, and self-interest—are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first, they love the produce of the second." | Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire | 2021-05-17T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/amazon-unbound-jeff-bezos-and-the-invention-of-a-global-empire-1d857c8f | Bezos wanted to set his own metrics for success, without interference from impatient outsiders, so he encoded his operating philosophy in his first letter to shareholders, vowing a focus not on immediate financial returns or on satisfying the myopic demands of Wall Street, but on increasing cash flow and growing market share to generate value over the long term for loyal shareholders. | Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire | 2021-05-17T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/amazon-unbound-jeff-bezos-and-the-invention-of-a-global-empire-1d857c8f | What followed was one of the most remarkable turnarounds in business history. | Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire | 2021-05-17T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/amazon-unbound-jeff-bezos-and-the-invention-of-a-global-empire-1d857c8f | How does one of the most disciplined men in the world get himself into a situation like that? | Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire | 2021-05-17T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/amazon-unbound-jeff-bezos-and-the-invention-of-a-global-empire-1d857c8f | Eventually Bezos and Hart crossed off all the items on the list except one-pursuing Bezos's idea for a voice-activated cloud computer.“Jeff, I don't have any experience in hardware, and the largest software team I've led is only about forty people," Hart recalled saying."You'll do fine," Bezos replied. | Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire | 2021-05-17T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/amazon-unbound-jeff-bezos-and-the-invention-of-a-global-empire-1d857c8f | Bezos also suggested "Alexa," an homage to the ancient library of Alexandria, regarded as the capital of knowledge. | Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire | 2021-05-17T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/amazon-unbound-jeff-bezos-and-the-invention-of-a-global-empire-1d857c8f | Two Echo engineers recall another harrowing review-from Bezos himself. The CEO was apparently testing a unit in his Seattle home, and in a pique of frustration over its lack of comprehension, he told Alexa to go “shoot yourself in the head." | Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire | 2021-05-17T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/amazon-unbound-jeff-bezos-and-the-invention-of-a-global-empire-1d857c8f | Their boss was right. Internal testing with Amazon employees was too limited and they would need to massively expand the Alexa beta while somehow still keeping it a secret from the outside world. | Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire | 2021-05-17T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/amazon-unbound-jeff-bezos-and-the-invention-of-a-global-empire-1d857c8f | By 2014, it had increased its store of speech data by a factor of ten thousand. Bezos was giddy. Hart hadn't asked for his approval of the AMPED project, but a few weeks before the program began, he updated Bezos with a six-page document that described it and its multimillion-dollar cost. A huge grin spread over Bezos's face as he read, and all signs of past peevishness were gone. "Now I know you are serious about it! What are we going to do next?" | Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire | 2021-05-17T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/amazon-unbound-jeff-bezos-and-the-invention-of-a-global-empire-1d857c8f | Alexa's division-wide motto became "Get Big Fast," the same slogan used in the early years for Amazon. History was repeating itself. An organization of a few hundred employees swelled to a thousand in the first year after the launch, and then, incredibly, to ten thousand over the next five years. Through it all, like a crazed pyromaniac, Bezos kept spraying lighter fluid on the fire. | Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire | 2021-05-17T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/amazon-unbound-jeff-bezos-and-the-invention-of-a-global-empire-1d857c8f | He told them that while they all had done a fine job, the experience was too complicated. Customers would have to wait in line for meat, seafood, and fruit to be weighed and added to their bill, which contrasted with the store's major selling point: the absence of time-wasting queues. He felt the magic was walking out without waiting-the physical equivalent of Amazon's famous one-click ordering-and wanted to focus the effort on that, with a smaller and simpler experience. | Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire | 2021-05-17T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/amazon-unbound-jeff-bezos-and-the-invention-of-a-global-empire-1d857c8f | "If I have to choose between agreement and conflict, I'll take conflict every time," Bezos often said. “It always yields a better result." | Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire | 2021-05-17T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/amazon-unbound-jeff-bezos-and-the-invention-of-a-global-empire-1d857c8f | Bezos and Kessel were getting impatient. Despite three years of work, Amazon hadn't opened a single store. So in the peculiar fashion of invention at Amazon, they created separate teams to pursue the singular goal of bringing the company into the vast realm of physical retail. Bezos liked to say Amazon was "stubborn on vision, flexible on details," and here was an illustration: groups working on parallel tracks would essentially compete to fulfill the "Just Walk Out" ideal and solve the problem of the cashierless store. | Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire | 2021-05-17T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/amazon-unbound-jeff-bezos-and-the-invention-of-a-global-empire-1d857c8f | Bezos invested Amazon's winnings like a crazed gambler at the craps table in Las Vegas. Years ago, he had learned that there were no annuities in retail. Customers were fickle and could change their loyalties at the moment they were presented with a better offer elsewhere. Amazon could only stay ahead of rivals if it kept inventing new technologies and improving levels of service. | Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire | 2021-05-17T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/amazon-unbound-jeff-bezos-and-the-invention-of-a-global-empire-1d857c8f | "I was not excited about breaking our financials out because they contained useful competitive informațion," Jassy admitted. | Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire | 2021-05-17T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/amazon-unbound-jeff-bezos-and-the-invention-of-a-global-empire-1d857c8f | Steve Jobs, upon returning full-time to Apple in 1997, had addressed an audience of the company's human resources employees in Cupertino and bluntly told them, "It seems to me you are all just a bunch of barnacles." | Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire | 2021-05-17T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/amazon-unbound-jeff-bezos-and-the-invention-of-a-global-empire-1d857c8f | Bezos also advocated for the practice of stack ranking, where employees were rated by their managers on the basis of job performance, with the lowest performers pushed out the door. | Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire | 2021-05-17T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/amazon-unbound-jeff-bezos-and-the-invention-of-a-global-empire-1d857c8f | Stack ranking would force managers to upgrade the talent on their teams. | Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire | 2021-05-17T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/amazon-unbound-jeff-bezos-and-the-invention-of-a-global-empire-1d857c8f | Amazon then outbid Apple and Netflix to sign him and his cohosts to a three-year, $250 million deal to make a similar show, The Grand Tour. It was one of the largest deals in unscripted television history. Riggs recalled that Bezos approved the expenditure via email in "about 15 seconds." | Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire | 2021-05-17T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/amazon-unbound-jeff-bezos-and-the-invention-of-a-global-empire-1d857c8f | Wilke announced that he wanted to attack this problem from a totally different angle. They were going to form an independent team to build a service that was separate from the Amazon website and singularly devoted to ultra-fast delivery. The goal, he declared, was to launch it within a hundred days. | Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire | 2021-05-17T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/amazon-unbound-jeff-bezos-and-the-invention-of-a-global-empire-1d857c8f | In the fall of 2019 the S-team and Amazon's board of directors read The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America, by the economic historian Marc Levinson. The book traces the rise and fall of the first American grocery chain of the twentieth century, as well as its strategic drift after the death of its founders and the decades-long crusade against it by populist politicians and determined trustbusters. | Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire | 2021-05-17T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/amazon-unbound-jeff-bezos-and-the-invention-of-a-global-empire-1d857c8f | Though A&P was known for strong-arming suppliers and undercutting rivals with predatory prices, the idea that the company actually doomed itself by failing to properly answer its critics, and then to plan for succession after the death of its founders, seemed to resonate with Bezos and other Amazon executives. "The takeaway was, we really can't ourselves get distracted by all the noise out there. This is going to happen. It's inevitable. This is kind of how our society reacts to large institutions." | Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire | 2021-05-17T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/the-everything-store-jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon-9b259e94 | When you are eighty years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices. | The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon | 2021-05-10T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/the-everything-store-jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon-9b259e94 | Relentless and ruthless. Those words show up repeatedly in the following pages. They are extreme but familiar values at most successful companies. Getting the lethal combination precisely right has been Bezos’s prodigious talent and perhaps Amazon’s greatest asset. | The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon | 2021-05-10T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/the-everything-store-jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon-9b259e94 | There is so much stuff that has yet to be invented. There’s so much new that’s going to happen. | The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon | 2021-05-10T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/the-everything-store-jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon-9b259e94 | Amazon’s internal customs are deeply idiosyncratic. | The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon | 2021-05-10T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/the-everything-store-jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon-9b259e94 | “If you want to get to the truth about what makes us different, it’s this,” Bezos says, “We are genuinely customer-centric, we are genuinely long-term oriented and we genuinely like to invent. Most companies are not those things. They are focused on the competitor, rather than the customer. They want to work on things that will pay dividends in two or three years, and if they don’t work in two or three years they will move on to something else. And they prefer to be close-followers rather than inventors, because it’s safer. So if you want to capture the truth about Amazon, that is why we are different. Very few companies have all of those three elements.” | The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon | 2021-05-10T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/the-everything-store-jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon-9b259e94 | I brought him very bad news about our business, and for some reason, he got excited. | The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon | 2021-05-10T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/the-everything-store-jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon-9b259e94 | The goal of this book is to tell the story behind one of the greatest entrepreneurial successes since Sam Walton flew his two-seat turboprop across the American South to scope out prospective Walmart store sites. It’s the tale of how one gifted child grew into an extraordinarily driven and versatile CEO and how he, his family, and his colleagues bet heavily on a revolutionary network called the Internet, and on the grandiose vision of a single store that sells everything. | The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon | 2021-05-10T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/the-everything-store-jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon-9b259e94 | Amazon.com was an idea floating through the New York City offices of one of the most unusual firms on Wall Street: D. E. Shaw & Co. A quantitative hedge fund, DESCO, as its employees affectionately called it, was started in 1988 by David E. Shaw, a former Columbia University computer science professor. Along with the founders of other groundbreaking quant houses of that era, like Renaissance Technologies and Tudor Investment Corporation, Shaw pioneered the use of computers and sophisticated mathematical formulas to exploit anomalous patterns in global financial markets. | The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon | 2021-05-10T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/the-everything-store-jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon-9b259e94 | The broader financial community knew very little about D. E. Shaw, and its polymath founder wanted to keep it that way. | The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon | 2021-05-10T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/the-everything-store-jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon-9b259e94 | Shaw felt strongly that if DESCO was going to be a firm that pioneered new approaches to investing, the only way to maintain its lead was to keep its insights secret and avoid teaching competitors how to think about these new computer-guided frontiers. | The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon | 2021-05-10T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/the-everything-store-jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon-9b259e94 | Bezos was in his midtwenties at the time, five foot eight inches tall, already balding and with the pasty, rumpled appearance of a committed workaholic. He had spent five years on Wall Street and impressed seemingly everyone he encountered with his keen intellect and boundless determination. | The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon | 2021-05-10T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/the-everything-store-jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon-9b259e94 | Minor remembers that Bezos had closely studied several wealthy businessmen and that he particularly admired a man named Frank Meeks, a Virginia entrepreneur who had made a fortune owning Domino’s Pizza franchises. | The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon | 2021-05-10T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/the-everything-store-jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon-9b259e94 | Bezos also revered pioneering computer scientist Alan Kay and often quoted his observation that “point of view is worth 80 IQ points”—a reminder that looking at things in new ways can enhance one’s understanding. | The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon | 2021-05-10T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/the-everything-store-jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon-9b259e94 | He went to school on everybody. I don’t think there was anybody Jeff knew that he didn’t walk away from with whatever lessons he could. | The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon | 2021-05-10T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/the-everything-store-jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon-9b259e94 | Bezos would later say he found a kind of workplace soul mate in David Shaw—“one of the few people I know who has a fully developed left brain and a fully developed right brain.” | The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon | 2021-05-10T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/the-everything-store-jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon-9b259e94 | At DESCO, Bezos displayed many of the idiosyncratic qualities his employees would later observe at Amazon. He was disciplined and precise, constantly recording ideas in a notebook he carried with him, as if they might float out of his mind if he didn’t jot them down. | The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon | 2021-05-10T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/the-everything-store-jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon-9b259e94 | He was “the most introspective guy I ever met. He was very methodical about everything in his life.” | The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon | 2021-05-10T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/the-everything-store-jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon-9b259e94 | So in 1994, when the opportunity of the Internet began to reveal itself to the few people watching closely, Shaw felt that his company was uniquely positioned to exploit it. And the person he anointed to spearhead the effort was Jeff Bezos. | The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon | 2021-05-10T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/the-everything-store-jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon-9b259e94 | Shaw and Bezos discussed another idea as well. They called it “the everything store.” | The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon | 2021-05-10T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/the-everything-store-jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon-9b259e94 | Bezos interpolated from this that Web activity overall had gone up that year by a factor of roughly 2,300—a 230,000 percent increase. “Things just don’t grow that fast,” Bezos later said. “It’s highly unusual, and that started me thinking, What kind of business plan might make sense in the context of that growth?” | The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon | 2021-05-10T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/the-everything-store-jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon-9b259e94 | What happened next became one of the founding legends of the Internet. That spring, Bezos spoke to David Shaw and told him he planned to leave the company to create an online bookstore. Shaw suggested they take a walk. They wandered in Central Park for two hours, discussing the venture and the entrepreneurial drive. Shaw said he understood Bezos’s impulse and sympathized with it—he had done the same thing when he’d left Morgan Stanley. He also noted that D. E. Shaw was growing quickly and that Bezos already had a great job. He told Bezos that the firm might end up competing with his new venture. The two agreed that Bezos would spend a few days thinking about it. | The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon | 2021-05-10T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/the-everything-store-jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon-9b259e94 | Bezos would later describe his thinking process in unusually geeky terms. He says he came up with what he called a “regret-minimization framework” to decide the next step to take at this juncture of his career. “When you are in the thick of things, you can get confused by small stuff,” Bezos said a few years later. “I knew when I was eighty that I would never, for example, think about why I walked away from my 1994 Wall Street bonus right in the middle of the year at the worst possible time. That kind of thing just isn’t something you worry about when you’re eighty years old. At the same time, I knew that I might sincerely regret not having participated in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a revolutionizing event. When I thought about it that way… it was incredibly easy to make the decision.” | The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon | 2021-05-10T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/the-everything-store-jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon-9b259e94 | “The whole thing seemed pretty iffy at that stage,” says Kaphan, who some consider an Amazon cofounder. “There wasn’t really anything except for a guy with a barking laugh building desks out of doors in his converted garage. | The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon | 2021-05-10T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/the-everything-store-jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon-9b259e94 | One of their driving goals was to create something superior to the existing online bookstores, including Books.com. “As crazy as it might sound, it did appear that the first challenge was to do something better than these other guys. There was competition already. It wasn’t as if Jeff was coming up with something completely new.” | The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon | 2021-05-10T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/the-everything-store-jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon-9b259e94 | One early challenge was that the book distributors required retailers to order ten books at a time. Amazon didn’t yet have that kind of sales volume, and Bezos later enjoyed telling the story of how he got around it. “We found a loophole,” he said. “Their systems were programmed in such a way that you didn’t have to receive ten books, you only had to order ten books. So we found an obscure book about lichens that they had in their system but was out of stock. We began ordering the one book we wanted and nine copies of the lichen book. They would ship out the book we needed and a note that said, ‘Sorry, but we’re out of the lichen book. | The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon | 2021-05-10T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/the-everything-store-jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon-9b259e94 | The next day, Bezos, MacKenzie, or an employee would drive the boxes to UPS or the post office. | The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon | 2021-05-10T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/the-everything-store-jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon-9b259e94 | Though they could not have known it, investors were looking at the opportunity of a lifetime. This highly driven, articulate young man talked with conviction about the Internet’s potential to deliver a more convenient shopping experience than crowded big-box stores where the staff routinely ignored customers. | The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon | 2021-05-10T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/the-everything-store-jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon-9b259e94 | Bezos was going to do more than establish an online bookstore; now he was set on building one of the first lasting Internet companies. | The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon | 2021-05-10T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/the-everything-store-jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon-9b259e94 | The assumption was that no one would take even a weekend day off. | The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon | 2021-05-10T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/the-everything-store-jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon-9b259e94 | Bezos wanted to reinvent everything about marketing, suggesting, for example, that they conduct annual reviews of advertising agencies to make them constantly compete for Amazon’s business. Breier explained that the advertising industry didn’t work that way. He lasted about a year. Over the first decade at Amazon, marketing VPs were the equivalent of the doomed drummers in the satirical band Spinal Tap; Bezos plowed through them at a rapid clip, looking for someone with the same low regard for the usual way of doing things that Bezos himself had. | The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon | 2021-05-10T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/the-everything-store-jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon-9b259e94 | “You have no physical presence,” the lanky Starbucks founder said as he brewed coffee for his guests. “That is going to hold you back.” Bezos disagreed. He looked right at Schultz and told him, “We are going to take this thing to the moon.” | The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon | 2021-05-10T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/the-everything-store-jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon-9b259e94 | Amazon’s ratio of fixed costs to revenue was considerably more favorable than that of its offline competitors. In other words, Bezos and Covey argued, a dollar that was plugged into Amazon’s infrastructure could lead to exponentially greater returns than a dollar that went into the infrastructure of any other retailer in the world. | The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon | 2021-05-10T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/the-everything-store-jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon-9b259e94 | “Look, you should wake up worried, terrified every morning,” he told his employees. “But don’t be worried about our competitors because they`re never going to send us any money anyway. Let’s be worried about our customers and stay heads-down focused.” | The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon | 2021-05-10T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/the-everything-store-jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon-9b259e94 | In early 1997, Jeff Bezos flew to Boston to give a presentation at the Harvard Business School. He spoke to a class taking a course called Managing the Marketspace, and afterward the graduate students pretended he wasn’t there while they dissected the online retailer’s prospects. At the end of the hour, they reached a consensus: Amazon was unlikely to survive the wave of established retailers moving online. “You seem like a really nice guy, so don’t take this the wrong way, but you really need to sell to Barnes and Noble and get out now." “You may be right,” Amazon’s founder told the students. “But I think you might be underestimating the degree to which established brick-and-mortar business, or any company that might be used to doing things a certain way, will find it hard to be nimble or to focus attention on a new channel. I guess we’ll see.” | The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon | 2021-05-10T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/the-everything-store-jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon-9b259e94 | Wright showed Bezos the blueprints for a new warehouse. The founder’s eyes lit up. “This is beautiful, Jimmy,” Bezos said. Wright asked who he needed to show the plans to and what kind of return on investment he would have to demonstrate. “Don’t worry about that,” Bezos said. “Just get it built.” “Don’t I have to get approval to do this?” Wright asked. “You just did,” Bezos said. | The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon | 2021-05-10T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/the-everything-store-jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon-9b259e94 | Bezos and MacKenzie stopped by Dalzell’s home with a copy of Sam Walton’s autobiography, Sam Walton: Made in America. Bezos had imbibed Walton’s book thoroughly and wove the Walmart founder’s credo about frugality and a “bias for action” into the cultural fabric of Amazon. In the copy he brought to Dalzell, he had underlined one particular passage in which Walton described borrowing the best ideas of his competitors. Bezos’s point was that every company in retail stands on the shoulders of the giants that came before it. The book clearly resonated with Amazon’s founder. | The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon | 2021-05-10T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/the-everything-store-jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon-9b259e94 | 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. | The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon | 2021-05-10T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/the-everything-store-jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon-9b259e94 | Jeff didn’t believe in work-life balance. He believed in work-life harmony. | The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon | 2021-05-10T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/the-everything-store-jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon-9b259e94 | Bill Campbell himself revealingly described his role at Amazon this way in an interview with Forbes magazine in 2011: “Jeff Bezos at Amazon—I visited them early on to see if they needed a CEO and I was like, ‘Why would you ever replace him?’ He’s out of his mind, so brilliant about what he does.” | The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon | 2021-05-10T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/the-everything-store-jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon-9b259e94 | Perhaps that is why hyperrational Bezos grew so obsessed with the mild-mannered, bespectacled New York analyst. To Bezos, Suria represented a strain of illogical thinking that had infected the broader market: the notion that the Internet revolution and all of the brash reinvention that accompanied it would just go away. | The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon | 2021-05-10T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/the-everything-store-jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon-9b259e94 | Bezos was obsessed with the customer experience, and anyone who didn’t have the same single-minded focus or who he felt wasn’t demonstrating a capacity for thinking big bore the brunt of his considerable temper. | The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon | 2021-05-10T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/the-everything-store-jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon-9b259e94 | Price came to Amazon in 1999. He blundered early by suggesting in a meeting that Amazon executives who traveled frequently should be permitted to fly business-class. “You would have thought I was trying to stop the Earth from tilting on its axis,” Price says, recalling that moment with horror years later. “Jeff slammed his hand on the table and said, ‘That is not how an owner thinks! That’s the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard.’" | The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon | 2021-05-10T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/the-everything-store-jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon-9b259e94 | In early 2001, Amazon’s position and future prospects remained dubious. Growth appeared to be slowing. | The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon | 2021-05-10T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/the-everything-store-jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon-9b259e94 | Bezos met Jim Sinegal, the founder of Costco. Sinegal was a casual, plain-speaking native of Pittsburgh, a Wilford Brimley look-alike with a bushy white mustache and an amiable countenance that concealed the steely determination of an entrepreneur. Well into retirement age, he showed no interest in slowing down. The two had plenty in common. For years Sinegal, like Bezos, had battled Wall Street analysts who wanted him to raise Costco’s prices on clothing, appliances, and packaged foods. Like Bezos, Sinegal had rejected multiple acquisition offers over the years, including one from Sam Walton, and he liked to say he didn’t have an exit strategy—he was building a company for the long term.Bezos listened carefully and once again drew key lessons from a more experienced retail veteran. Sinegal explained the Costco model to Bezos: it was all about customer loyalty. There are some four thousand products in the average Costco warehouse, including limited-quantity seasonal or trendy products called treasure-hunt items that are spread out around the building. Though the selection of products in individual categories is limited, there are copious quantities of everything there—and it is all dirt cheap. Costco buys in bulk and marks up everything at a standard, across-the-board 14 percent, even when it could charge more. It doesn’t advertise at all, and earns most of its gross profit from the annual membership fees. “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.”“My approach has always been that value trumps everything,” Sinegal continued. “The reason people are prepared to come to our strange places to shop is that we have value. We deliver on that value. | The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon | 2021-05-10T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/the-everything-store-jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon-9b259e94 | The Monday after the meeting with Sinegal, Bezos opened an S Team meeting by saying he was determined to make a change. The company’s pricing strategy, he said, according to several executives who were there, was incoherent. Amazon preached low prices but in some cases its prices were higher than competitors’. Like Walmart and Costco, Bezos said, Amazon should have “everyday low prices.” The company should look at other large retailers and match their lowest prices, all the time. If Amazon could stay competitive on price, it could win the day on unlimited selection and on the convenience afforded to customers who didn’t have to get in the car to go to a store and wait in line. | The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon | 2021-05-10T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/the-everything-store-jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon-9b259e94 | If you’re not good, Jeff will chew you up and spit you out. And if you’re good, he will jump on your back and ride you into the ground. | The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon | 2021-05-10T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/the-everything-store-jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon-9b259e94 | "I understand what you’re saying, but you are completely wrong,” he said. “Communication is a sign of dysfunction. It means people aren’t working together in a close, organic way. We should be trying to figure out a way for teams to communicate less with each other, not more.” Bezos’s counterintuitive point was that coordination among employees wasted time, and that the people closest to problems were usually in the best position to solve them. | The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon | 2021-05-10T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/the-everything-store-jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon-9b259e94 | “Jeff does a couple of things better than anyone I’ve ever worked for,” Dalzell says. “He embraces the truth. A lot of people talk about the truth, but they don’t engage their decision-making around the best truth at the time. “The second thing is that he is not tethered by conventional thinking. What is amazing to me is that he is bound only by the laws of physics. He can’t change those. Everything else he views as open to discussion.” | The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon | 2021-05-10T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/the-everything-store-jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon-9b259e94 | 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. | The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon | 2021-05-10T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/let-my-people-go-surfing-041b1db4 | I learned at an early age that it’s better to invent your own game; then you can always be a winner. | Let My People Go Surfing | 2021-04-21T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/let-my-people-go-surfing-041b1db4 | In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness. Studying Zen has taught me to simplify; to simplify yields a richer result. | Let My People Go Surfing | 2021-04-21T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/let-my-people-go-surfing-041b1db4 | Where other designers would work to improve a tool’s performance by adding on, Tom Frost and I would achieve the same ends by taking away—reducing weight and bulk without sacrificing strength or the level of protection. | Let My People Go Surfing | 2021-04-21T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/let-my-people-go-surfing-041b1db4 | I began to see clothing as a way to help support the marginally profitable hardware business. At the time we had about 75 percent of the climbing hardware market, but we still weren’t making much of a profit. | Let My People Go Surfing | 2021-04-21T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/let-my-people-go-surfing-041b1db4 | I had always avoided thinking of myself as a businessman. I was a climber, a surfer, a kayaker, a skier, and a blacksmith. We simply enjoyed making good tools and functional clothes that we, and our friends, wanted. | Let My People Go Surfing | 2021-04-21T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/let-my-people-go-surfing-041b1db4 | One day it dawned on me that I was a businessman and would probably be one for a long time. It was also clear that in order to survive at this game, we had to get serious. I also knew that I would never be happy playing by the normal rules of business; I wanted to distance myself as far as possible from those pasty-faced corpses in suits I saw in airline magazine ads. If I had to be a businessman, I was going to do it on my own terms. | Let My People Go Surfing | 2021-04-21T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/let-my-people-go-surfing-041b1db4 | One of my favorite sayings about entrepreneurship is: If you want to understand the entrepreneur, study the juvenile delinquent. The delinquent is saying with his actions, “This sucks. I’m going to do my own thing.” | Let My People Go Surfing | 2021-04-21T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/let-my-people-go-surfing-041b1db4 | Work had to be enjoyable on a daily basis. We all had to come to work on the balls of our feet and go up the stairs two steps at a time. We needed to be surrounded by friends who could dress whatever way they wanted, even be barefoot. We all needed to have flextime to surf the waves when they were good, or ski the powder after a big snowstorm, or stay home and take care of a sick child. | Let My People Go Surfing | 2021-04-21T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/let-my-people-go-surfing-041b1db4 | I’ve always thought of myself as an 80 percenter. I like to throw myself passionately into a sport or activity until I reach about an 80 percent proficiency level. To go beyond that requires an obsession and degree of specialization that doesn’t appeal to me. Once I reach that 80 percent level I like to go off and do something totally different. | Let My People Go Surfing | 2021-04-21T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/let-my-people-go-surfing-041b1db4 | What was your single toughest climb? Probably when my friends, including [Patagonia founder] Yvon Chouinard, and I did the Kautz Glacier on Mount Rainier. I had never really done ice climbing before, and they gave me a 30-second lesson in crampons and ice-ax use. At one point, we were going across a very steep patch of black ice, and if you slipped, you would’ve gone about 1,000 feet. I said to Yvon, “We should rope up here,” and he said, “No way—if you go, then I go, and I don’t want to do that. This is like catching a taxi in New York on a rainy day: It’s every man for himself.” It’s been helpful to me to be [Yvon’s] friend. . . . He makes me think about things in new ways. | Let My People Go Surfing | 2021-04-21T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/let-my-people-go-surfing-041b1db4 | Can a company that wants to make the best-quality outdoor clothing in the world be the size of Nike? Can a ten-table, three-star French restaurant retain its third star when it adds fifty tables? Can you have it all? The question haunted me throughout the 1980s as Patagonia evolved. | Let My People Go Surfing | 2021-04-21T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/let-my-people-go-surfing-041b1db4 | I considered myself a craftsman who had just happened to grow a successful business. | Let My People Go Surfing | 2021-04-21T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/let-my-people-go-surfing-041b1db4 | The first part of our mission statement, “Make the best product,” is the raison d’être of Patagonia and the cornerstone of our business philosophy. Striving to make the best quality product is the reason we got into business in the first place. | Let My People Go Surfing | 2021-04-21T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/let-my-people-go-surfing-041b1db4 | “Make the best” is a difficult goal. It doesn’t mean “among the best” or the “best at a particular price point.” It means “make the best,” period. | Let My People Go Surfing | 2021-04-21T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/let-my-people-go-surfing-041b1db4 | The functionally driven design is usually minimalist. Or as Dieter Rams, head of design at Braun, maintains, “Good design is as little design as possible.” | Let My People Go Surfing | 2021-04-21T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/let-my-people-go-surfing-041b1db4 | Complexity is often a sure sign that the functional needs have not been solved. Take the difference between the Ferrari and the Cadillac of the 1960s. The Ferrari’s clean lines suited its high-performance aims. The Cadillac really didn’t have functional aims. It didn’t have the steering, suspension, torque, aerodynamics, or brakes appropriate to its immense horsepower. But then nothing about its design really had to work. All it had to do was convey the idea of power, creature comfort, of a living room floating down the highway to the golf course. So, to a basically ugly shape were added all manner of useless chrome gingerbread: fins at the back, breasts at the front. Once you lose the discipline of functionality as a design guidepost, the imagination runs amok. Once you design a monster, it tends to look like one too. | Let My People Go Surfing | 2021-04-21T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/let-my-people-go-surfing-041b1db4 | When I die and go to hell, the devil is going to make me the marketing director for a cola company. I’ll be in charge of trying to sell a product that no one needs, is identical to its competition, and can’t be sold on its merits. I’d be competing head-on in the cola wars, on price, distribution, advertising, and promotion, which would indeed be hell for me. | Let My People Go Surfing | 2021-04-21T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/let-my-people-go-surfing-041b1db4 | I’d much rather design and sell products so good and unique that they have no competition. | Let My People Go Surfing | 2021-04-21T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/let-my-people-go-surfing-041b1db4 | Successful inventing requires a tremendous amount of energy, time, and money. The big inventions are so rare that even the most brilliant geniuses think up only a few marketable inventions in their lifetimes. It may take thirty years to come up with an invention, but within a few years or months there can be a thousand innovations spawned from that original idea. | Let My People Go Surfing | 2021-04-21T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/let-my-people-go-surfing-041b1db4 | Like creative cooks, we view “originals” as recipes for inspiration, and then we close the book to do our own thing. The resulting designs are like the fusion recipes of the best chefs. | Let My People Go Surfing | 2021-04-21T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/let-my-people-go-surfing-041b1db4 | To stay ahead of the competition, our ideas have to come from as close to the source as possible. With technical products, our “source” is the dirtbag core customer. He or she is the one using the products and finding out what works, what doesn’t, and what is needed. | Let My People Go Surfing | 2021-04-21T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/let-my-people-go-surfing-041b1db4 | People in focus groups are usually not visionaries. | Let My People Go Surfing | 2021-04-21T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/let-my-people-go-surfing-041b1db4 | The entrepreneurial way is to immediately take a forward step and if that feels good, take another, if not, step back. Learn by doing, it is a faster process. | Let My People Go Surfing | 2021-04-21T00:00:00 |
https://world.hey.com/davidsenra/let-my-people-go-surfing-041b1db4 | Again, like the Zen approach to archery or anything else, you identify the goal and then forget about it and concentrate on the process. | Let My People Go Surfing | 2021-04-21T00:00:00 |
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