The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon QUOTES

43 " In Silicon Valley, entrepreneurs and their backers got drunk on the overflowing optimism and abundant venture capital and threw a two-year-long party. Capital was cheap, opportunities seemed limitless, and pineapple-infused-vodka martinis were everywhere. "

― Brad Stone , The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

44 " Bezos had seemingly made up his mind that he was no longer going to indulge in financial maneuvering as a way to escape the rather large hole Amazon had dug for itself, and it wasn’t just through borrowing Sinegal’s business plan. At a two-day management and board offsite later that year, Amazon invited business thinker Jim Collins to present the findings from his soon-to-be-published book Good to Great. Collins had studied the company and led a series of intense discussions at the offsite. “You’ve got to decide what you’re great at,” he told the Amazon executives. Drawing on Collins’s concept of a flywheel, or self-reinforcing loop, Bezos and his lieutenants sketched their own virtuous cycle, which they believed powered their business. It went something like this: Lower prices led to more customer visits. More customers increased the volume of sales and attracted more commission-paying third-party sellers to the site. That allowed Amazon to get more out of fixed costs like the fulfillment centers and the servers needed to run the website. This greater efficiency then enabled it to lower prices further. Feed any part of this flywheel, they reasoned, and it should accelerate the loop. Amazon executives were elated; according to several members of the S Team at the time, they felt that, after five years, they finally understood their own business. But when Warren Jenson asked Bezos if he should put the flywheel in his presentations to analysts, Bezos asked him not to. For now, he considered it the secret sauce. "

― Brad Stone , The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

45 " Any process can be improved. Defects that are invisible to the knowledgeable may be obvious to newcomers. The simplest solutions are the best. Repeating all these anecdotes isn’t rote monotony—it’s calculated strategy. “The rest of us try to muddle around with complicated contradictory goals and it makes it harder for people to help us,” says his friend Danny Hillis. “Jeff is very clear and simple about his goals, and the way he articulates them makes it easy for others, because it’s consistent. "

― Brad Stone , The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

46 " Prime would eventually justify its existence. The service turned customers into Amazon addicts who gorged on the almost instant gratification of having purchases reliably appear two days after they ordered them. Signing up for Amazon Prime, Jason Kilar said at the time, “was like going from a dial-up to a broadband Internet connection. "

― Brad Stone , The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

47 " He announced his intentions to build a spaceport by walking into the office of a local newspaper, the Van Horn Advocate, and giving an impromptu interview to its bewildered editor. "

― Brad Stone , The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

48 " o ponto de vista vale oitenta pontos de QI” — "

― Brad Stone , The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

49 " Bezos is a fan of e-mail newsletters such as VSL.com, a daily assortment of cultural tidbits from the Web, and Cool Tools, a compendium of technology tips and product reviews written by Kevin Kelly, a founding editor of Wired. Both e-mails are short, well written, and informative. "

― Brad Stone , The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

50 " The high-tech community was getting a lesson in the dynamics of network effects—products or services become increasingly valuable as more people use them. "

― Brad Stone , The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

51 " In the copy he brought to Kathryn 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. "

― Brad Stone , The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

52 " Perhaps the most avid user of Amazon’s auction site was Bezos himself, who began to collect various scientific and historical curiosities. Most memorably, he purchased the skeleton of an Ice Age cave bear, complete with an accompanying penis bone, for $40,000. After the company’s headquarters moved yet again over the summer, out of the deteriorating Columbia Building and into the Pacific Medical Center building, a 1930s-era art-deco hospital that sat on a hill overlooking the I-5 freeway, Bezos displayed the skeleton in the lobby. Next to it was a sign that read PLEASE DON’T FEED THE BEAR. "

― Brad Stone , The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

53 " That either-or mentality, that if you are doing something good for customers it must be bad for shareholders, is very amateurish,” he said in our interview that summer. "

― Brad Stone , The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

54 " All new hires had to directly improve the outcome of the company. He wanted doers—engineers, developers, perhaps merchandise buyers, but not managers. “We didn’t want to be a monolithic army of program managers, à la Microsoft. "

― Brad Stone , The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

55 " We believe that a fundamental measure of our success will be the shareholder value we create over the long term. This value will be a direct result of our ability to extend and solidify our current market leadership position. The stronger our market leadership, the more powerful our economic model. Market leadership can translate directly to higher revenue, higher profitability, greater capital velocity, and correspondingly stronger returns on invested capital. Our decisions have consistently reflected this focus. We first measure ourselves in terms of the metrics most indicative of our market leadership: customer and revenue growth, the degree to which our customers continue to purchase from us on a repeat basis, and the strength of our brand. We have invested and will continue to invest aggressively to expand and leverage our customer base, brand, and infrastructure as we move to establish an enduring franchise. "

― Brad Stone , The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

56 " 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. "

― Brad Stone , The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

57 " the people closest to problems were usually in the best position to solve them. "

― Brad Stone , The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

58 " What we do is hard. This is not where people go to retire. "

― Brad Stone , The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

59 " 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. "

― Brad Stone , The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

60 " AWS helped introduce the ethereal concept known as the cloud, and it is viewed as so vital to the future fortunes of technology startups that venture capitalists often give gift certificates for it to their new entrepreneurs. "

― Brad Stone , The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon