Quotes from Brad Stone

Airbnb's genius was moving into cities and recognizing that millennials would want to go and maybe spend a vacation or visit some friends in an urban center.

I don't think we yet know - because it's probably not big enough - what exactly Amazon does to our cities, but whatever it is, I don't anticipate retail wastelands. If anything, it's maybe a wake-up call to retailers that they just have to offer something meaningful to customers.

I think the idealism has always been marketing. Even back in the early days of Apple and the 'pirate' mentality, they were building a computer that they wanted to differentiate from IBM and Microsoft.

Certainly some hosts on Airbnb are opening up their spare bedrooms to meet new people; and some drivers use Uber to carpool with strangers for the companionship. But the most productive members of each community are professional operators, making available their homes or cars as a way to earn or supplement a living.

Uber, and Airbnb to a different extent, implemented the same battle plan. Bezos is an investor in both companies and, to some degree, has relationships with both CEOs. It is not a surprise that they are heirs to Amazon.

Ultimately, Amazon is a weather pattern that disturbs everything around it.

Life inside successful Web startups - especially the really successful ones - can be nasty, brutish, and short. As companies grow exponentially, egos clash, investors jockey for control, and business complexities rapidly exceed the managerial abilities of the founders.

Amazon may be the most beguiling company that ever existed, and it is just getting started. It is both missionary and mercenary... That has always been a potent combination.

I don't think value to the customer is achieved at the expense of employees' welfare.

There are lots of retailers that are now scrambling to emulate the Amazon model, so Amazon does not have a monopoly on same-day distribution or broad selection or low prices. All that said, there are advantages that accrue to the largest player, so I don't see much in the way of Amazon slowing down.

I think it's a competitive advantage that both Amazon and Google and other tech companies have over a lot of their counterparts. They take big risks and are pioneering new markets with the promise of big rewards. It's why Amazon is kind of reliably starting new businesses and opening kind of new frontiers.

For decades, technology entrepreneurship has been revered, and people like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk were heroes.

No matter how hard we strive for objectivity, writers are biased toward tension - those moments in which character is forged and revealed.

I think Facebook has a lot of work to do to make sure people are seeing meaningful things and not garbage.

Donald Trump won, or he got the majority of the electoral votes, a large majority. I think it would be patronizing to say that the majorities of people in Florida and Ohio, smaller majorities in Wisconsin and Michigan, that they voted for him because they were misled by something on Facebook.

The one thing that Airbnb had was, Brian and Joe were designers, and they did a great job. They also had Nate Blecharczyk, who was the CTO, who I describe his history as a high schooler and at Harvard as really a creator of tools for spammers.

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 University, May 30, 2010

It's easier to invent the future than to predict it.

Most companies are not those things. They are focused on the competitor, rather than the customer.

It is far better to cannibalize yourself than have someone else do it,

Missionaries have righteous goals and are trying to make the world a better place. Mercenaries are out for money and power and will run over anyone who gets in the way.

In the end, we are our choices.

In a world where consumers had limited choice, you needed to compete for locations," says Ross, who went on to cofound eCommera, a British e-commerce advisory firm. "But in a world where consumers have unlimited choice, you need to compete for attention. And this requires something more than selling other people's products.

Some of these investments will pay off, others will not, and we will have learned another valuable lesson in either case.