Home > Work > The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
121 " There are two kinds of retailers: there are those folks who work to figure how to charge more, and there are companies that work to figure how to charge less, and we are going to be the second, full-stop,” he "
― Brad Stone , The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
122 " The idea was always that someone would be allowed to make a profit as an intermediary. The key question is: Who will get to be that middleman?”7 "
123 " You have to start somewhere,' he said. 'You climb the top of the first tiny hill and from there you see the next hill. "
124 " What we are doing here is building a giant rocket ship, and we’re going to light the fuse. Then it’s either going to go to the moon or leave a giant smoking crater in the ground. Either way I want to be here when it happens. "
125 " have realized about myself that I’m very motivated by people counting on me,” he answered. “I like to be counted on.”14 "
126 " 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. —Jeff Bezos, commencement speech at Princeton "
127 " 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. "
128 " We would trust Jeff to take them to movies,” Jackie Bezos says, “but the two of them would come back embarrassed, saying, ‘Jeff laughs too loud.’ It would be some Disney movie, and his laughter was drowning out everything.” After "
129 " 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. "
130 " Eric Benson took about two weeks to construct a preliminary version that grouped together customers who had similar purchasing histories and then found books that appealed to the people in each group. That feature, called Similarities, immediately yielded a noticeable uptick in sales and allowed Amazon to point customers toward books that they might not otherwise have found. "
131 " Mike Bezos’s job took them to Miami—a city Mike had first encountered fifteen years before as a penniless immigrant. Now he was an executive at Exxon, and the family bought a four-bedroom house with a backyard pool in the affluent Palmetto neighborhood in unincorporated Dade County. Miami "
132 " one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever. "
133 " He had the marketing department organize tests, running commercials in only the Minneapolis and Portland media markets and measuring whether they generated an uptick in local purchases. They did—but, Bezos concluded, not enough to justify the investment.12 “It was pretty clear afterward that TV advertising wasn’t really having an impact,” says Mark Stabingas, a finance vice president who joined the company from Pepsi. "
134 " Each group was required to propose its own “fitness function”—a linear equation that it could use to measure its own impact without ambiguity. For example, a two-pizza team in charge of sending advertising e-mails to customers might choose for its fitness function the rate at which these messages were opened multiplied by the average order size those e-mails generated. A group writing software code for the fulfillment centers might home in on decreasing the cost of shipping each type of product and reducing the time that elapsed between a customer’s making a purchase and the item leaving the FC in a truck. Bezos wanted to personally approve each equation and track the results over time. It would be his way of guiding a team’s evolution. Bezos was applying "
135 " In customers’ minds, the Amazon brand meant books only. "
136 " Employees remember that when the home and kitchen category was introduced in the fall of 1999, kitchen knives would fly down the conveyor chutes, free of protective packaging. Amazon’s internal logistics software didn’t properly account for new categories, so the computers would ask workers whether a new toy entering the warehouse was a hardcover or a paperback book. "
137 " When I read that letter, I thought, we don’t make money when we sell things. We make money when we help customers make purchase decisions.”5 "
138 " If somebody else can sell it cheaper than us, we should let them and figure out how they are able to do it. "
139 " Bezos even wondered aloud whether Amazon could hire college students on every block in Manhattan and get them to store popular products in their apartments and deliver them on bicycles. "
140 " He wondered why Microsoft’s large base of users had never come out in any significant way to defend the company against its critics and speculated that perhaps customers were simply not satisfied with its products. He "
