Relevant book: The Everything Store

It's been pretty good so far.

I recently read "The Everything Store" and and my take away was that customer is the only relationship you want with Amazon. Everyone else gets hosed.

I meant "from a book citing Bezos".

It's not as written as well as other books, but it's definitely factual and based off of new information (interviews with Amazon employees).

- Brad Stone's "The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon" [1]

- Richard Branson's "Everything I Know About Leadership The Virgin Way" [2]

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Everything-Store-Jeff-Bezos-Amazon/dp/...

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Everything-About-Leadership-Virgin-Har...

"The couple was leaving behind a wealthy existence on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, according to Brad Stone, the author of the 2013 book The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. “They gave up a really comfortable lifestyle and successful careers to move across the country and start something on the internet,” says Stone. “The only reason [Jeff] was able to do that is because he had an extremely supportive spouse. It was an incredible risk and one that they both took on jointly.”

"In a 2010 commencement speech he gave at Princeton, Jeff himself acknowledged the gamble his wife had taken. “I told my wife MacKenzie that I wanted to quit my job and go do this crazy thing that probably wouldn’t work since most startups don’t, and I wasn’t sure what would happen after that,” he said. “MacKenzie … told me I should go for it.” (Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)"

The PR wars begin! Grab you're popcorn.

> Bezos and his lieutenants sketched their own virtuous cycle, which they believe 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 they needed to run the website. This greater efficiency then enabled it to lower prices further. Feed any part of this flywheel… and it should accelerate the loop. Amazon executives were elated… after five years, they finally understood their business."

All politics aside, I find it very interesting that this seems to be a law that people just think companies are evil when they are big.

Similarly, On Intelligence is an absolutely brilliant book on what 'intelligence' is, how it works, and how to define it.

2) Hooked. Although it's very formulaic, Hooked provides a lot of good ideas and approaches on building a product.

3) REWORK. If you're a fan of 37 Signals and/or DHH, this is a succinct and enjoyable read about their principles on building and running a business.

Currently I'm reading SmartCuts and The Everything Store - both of which are great so far.

The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt - a management novel. Oddly engrossing and educational at the same time

The Everything Store by Brad Stone - about Amazon's history, culture, businesses

(None of these books was written in 2018. I just read them in 2018)

Main point though is that Bezos was literally a genius, he was part of an experimental educational program for gifted children, and he was one of the most gifted in that program. He was also ruthless. I want to say, how could you not bet on someone like that? He was working with geniuses, had a vision, and the ability to lead them.

I think the book gave the example of a high-end kitchen knife brand, maybe Wüsthof, that would not allow Amazon to sell their knives. Before you know it, cheap knockoffs appeared claiming to be Wüsthof knives. When they let Amazon sell the real deal, suddenly the knockoffs disappeared from the store.

I have a feeling the same thing is happening with the high-end perfumeries, like Creed. Everything sold on Amazon is a knockoff because the company doesn't sell there. I bet if they did, the fake stuff would magically disappear...

Once you've got that kind of thing going on, only retirements and deaths can effect good change at an organization.

1) Hatching Twitter
2) The Everything Store (Amazon Story)
3) Mindset: The New Psychology of Success --This one was particularly interesting when thinking about employees and recruiting and what to look for in people that you are working with. After the author introduces the concept it gets a little dry for a chapter or two, but then really interesting after that.
4) The Hard Thing About Hard Things - this one was inspiring from a management/CEO perspective. When thinking about building a company that people enjoy working for (and all the tough stuff that comes with it) this is a great read.

Sure, it's not your fault that Foxconn employees jump off buildings, but it is why you have your lifestyle. (that's meant to be illustrative, not literal. Hence overly specific to Foxconn)

Sure, it's not in the same way through your direct choices, but like Bezos you are playing the game, and choosing not to reward those supporting your lifestyle.

But more importantly here Bezos is choosing this, as opposed to buying some more and bigger private islands. Yet he's being criticised for this more than if I had.

> If Jeff Bezos gives up the same percentage of his accumulated wealth, that helps many, many, many more people and affects his lifestyle even less.

As someone else wisely pointed out: Bezos has already helped people more than you have. That's how he got his money.

People telling him he "should" give away most or all are ignoring that he earned his vast wealth by creating orders of magnitude larger wealth in the world, and taking a cut for providing what wealth.

Yes, Amazon has done some pretty shady stuff (see book "The Everything Store", for example), but Amazon got big from providing value to people.

That said, no I don't think there should be decabillionaires at all. Nobody can "earn" that much. Nobody is truly that irreplaceable. But given that he is that rich, this spending isn't the unfairness you're looking for.

- The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory

- The 48 Laws Of Power

- Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

- Crossing the Chasm

- The Richest Man in Babylon

- Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

- Europe: A History

- The Penguin History of Europe

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

- Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Every of the books was awesome. The only thing is that I haven't finished Europe: A History from Norman and read The Penguin History of Europe instead because the Norman book was just too long for me. But It has way more details.

I switch between business-related books and non-business related (it can be everything from philosophy to language history to hardcore science) but I don't read fiction (The Richest Man in Babylon is fictional, but still the focus is on self-development).

Hope you could see some titles that might interest you.

If you are wondering how Amazon can attract any talent at all, the answer is that 70% staff is college hires that were promised significant stock. The caveat is that it doesn't even start getting vested until after 3rd year. Most of the hires leaves in about 2 year (attrition rate is being rumored as much as 70%). So their secret is feeding the growth engine on huge swaths of college hires that can be lured for stock options in distant futures with expectation that they will just leave before vesting starts.

Well, I do love Amazon. One thing they have got absolutely right is obsessing about customers. Everything starts with customers, period.

If you're just starting out, I recommend reading business books that are good at explaining things like value proposition, market creation, etc, but also have a compelling narrative.

One book I really like is "The Everything Store" that is a brief history of Amazon.com and the challenges they faced as one of the few high-profile survivors of the dotcom boom.

Another I've enjoyed reading is "Losing the Signal", which covers BlackBerry's rise and fall, starting from its origins in the 1980s to its struggle to adapt to the consumer smartphone age. It's a great read because BB originally began as a telecom engineering company that developed a once-insurmountable advantage in enterprise communications.

Ethically, I agree with you. They shouldn't treat their employees like shit. Some things are worth more than money.

But financially, it's 100% untrue that Amazon would be more valuable if they focused on employee happiness over cutting costs. It's not an accident that Amazon generates more revenue than any other Internet company in existence.

- Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

- A Briefer History of Time by Stephen Hawking

- The Lean Startup by Eric Ries

- Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

- The Industries of the Future by Alec Ross

- Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss

- Start with No by Jim Camp

- How Google Works by Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg

- The Everything Store by Brad Stone

- The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly

N.B.: "Today", in the context of that quote, is ca. 2013, when the book was published. relentless.com redirected to amazon.com for me this morning (2021-02-03).

The "self-demotion" is real though, especially since, according to the (much disputed) book, The Everything Store, alv declined Bezos' offer to lead AWS, and the job then of course was Andy Jassy's (who took over from Colin Bryar) which laid the foundation for him to eventually become the CEO-elect of one of the most enduring companies of all time.

I mean, in an alternate universe, alv is the CEO-elect :) Imagine the scenes!

I'll even include the Amazon link =p
http://www.amazon.com/The-Everything-Store-Bezos-Amazon/dp/0...

EDIT
Also, if you read "The Everything Store", tactics like the above are common knowledge.

Then it comes time for me to buy something. I needed a new pair of size 14 sneakers. I drove to Adidas, Footlocker, dicks, and a few other stores but I just couldn’t justify $100 sneakers that didn’t look like prison issued.

Opened my Amazon app in my car after leaving the crowded mall, and find what appear to be a decent pair of shoes. FakeSpot agreed with the reviews, and I bought then for $35. They will arrive tomorrow.

That kind of convenience is terribly addicting. I haven’t figured out the solution, but I remember what it was like when Walmart came to town, put others out of business, mistreated employees, etc. We were unable to stop it then, how the heck are we going to stop it now?

So aside from “just stop buying from Amazon” what can we do ?

>"If you're not good, Jeff will chew you up and spit you out," notes one former employee. "And if you're good, he will jump on your back and ride you into the ground."

It's a good read on how not to lead a company, and I'm reasonably sure Amazon will fail once Bezos dies - the success seems tobe based on Bezos' enormous drive.

I would never work there.

0. Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High, Second Edition

1. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable

2. Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

3. Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

4. Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography

5. What Got You Here Won't Get You There

6. The Power of Vulnerability: Teachings of Authenticity, Connection, and Courage

7. The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph

8. The Like Switch: An Ex-FBI Agent's Guide to Influencing, Attracting, and Winning People Over

9. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

10. Pre-Suasion: Channeling Attention for Change

11. Thinking, Fast and Slow

12. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

13. Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life

14. Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World

15. Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity

16. Sapiens

17. The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

18. If you like space: Endurance: A Year in Space, a Lifetime of Discovery

19. Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike

20. Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

21. Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela

22. The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

That isn't a coincidence. According to[0] "The Everything Store"[1], the latest biography of Amazon, Bezos picked up the model for Amazon retail from Costco founder James Sinegal.

The first aspect was "value trumps everything" - where prices would be slashed and net margins thin. The second was the subscription model - Bezos learned that 70%+ of Costco's profit was from the membership fees. It was easier to charge a membership fee once and offer lower prices than it was to attempt to spread your profit margin across products and into the pricing.

Amazon slashed its prices and adopted the thin margin model in the future and then implemented Amazon Prime.

"The Everything Store" is a decent read, easy to flick through and some interesting cases and anecdotes within it. Ignore the negative reviews and give it a read if you haven't already.

[0] http://bobmorris.biz/what-jeff-bezos-learned-from-jim-sinega...

[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Everything-Store-Bezos-Amazon-eboo...

(via http://allthingsd.com/20131010/how-jeff-bezos-crushed-diaper...)

"Amazon has a secretive unit — dubbed Competitive Intelligence — responsible for ordering large quantities of goods from competitors to analyze their businesses. This division eventually became aware of Diapers.com and its parent company Quidsi, and dispatched M&A chief Jeff Blackburn to initiate acquisition discussions.

Quidsi’s founders originally rebuffed acquisition offers from Amazon. So Bezos’s Amazon sent them a message, Stone [author of a book on Bezos and Amazon called 'The Everything Store'] explains:

“Soon after, Quidsi noticed Amazon dropping prices up to 30 percent on diapers and other baby products,” Stone writes. “As an experiment, Quidsi executives manipulated their prices and then watched as Amazon’s website changed its prices accordingly. Amazon’s pricing bots — software that carefully monitors other companies’ prices and adjusts Amazon’s to match — were tracking Diapers.com.”
Diapers.com revenue growth eventually slowed under Amazon’s pricing pressure, and the founders engaged in acquisition talks, agreeing to a $540 million buyout.

As Stone tells it, Walmart eventually made Quidsi a better offer of $600 million, but it was too late by then.

“The Quidsi executives stuck with Amazon, largely out of fear,” Stone writes."

When I thought about the whole situation, it became apparent constitution has a bug here. The sales tax is not supposed to be levied because the state is providing some service to the business. It is levied because that's how states want to distribute the burden of taxes on two components: What you earn and what you spend. This way you can target most of the money flow that happens in the state even for edge cases where a person don't have regular income but spends a lot out of his or her inheritance.

So summary here is that online retailers got lucky from this bug in constitution. It was extremely unfair to brick-and-mortar guys who not only have to spend lot of capital but also pay full taxes losing their competitive edge even faster.

Note: Above are just observations and logical arguments. Personally I don't have lot of respect for current tax system.

Bowden, Mark (2011) Worm: The First Digital World War

Brooks, Frederick (1995) Mythical Man-Month, 2nd ed.

Christensen, Clayton (1997) Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail

Hafner, Katie and Matthew Lyon (1996) Where Wizards Stay Up Late: Origins of the Internet

Hunt, Andrew and David Thomas (1999) Pragmatic Programmer

MacCormick, John (2012) Nine Algorithms that Changed the Future

McConnell, Steve (2004) Code Complete, 2nd ed.

Mitnick, Kevin and William Simon (2002) Art of Deception

Poulsen, Kevin (2011) Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cyber-Crime Underworld

Raymond, Eric (2003) Art of Unix Programming

Stone, Brad (2013) The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

Torvalds, Linus and David Diamond (2001) Just for Fun: Story of an Accidental Revolutionary

Wallace, James and Jim Erickson (1992) Hard Drive: Bill Gates and Making of the Microsoft Empire

Williams, Sam (2002) Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software

Wilson, Mike (1996) The Difference between God and Larry Ellison: Inside Oracle Corp

On the contrary, it's first party interviews:

"In dozens of interviews ranging over two years for my book, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, employees often sounded... But in my interviews with rank and file employees... No one I talked to..."

Just because Wikipedia has a "no original research" policy doesn't make first party research "poorly sourced".

I like a conspiracy theory as much as the next guy but couldn't the book just be... unavailable? If they wanted to impede its distribution why are they still selling the Kindle, Hardcover, and Audio versions?

Does anyone know what happened generally to Amazon's relationship with brands over the past six years? Presumably over this time, Amazon has only gained in bargaining power over brands at the expense of physical locations, in accordance with Ben Thompson's Aggregation Theory. As an outsider, it seemed like Amazon and brand buyers have done well at the expense of brands and retail stores.