Quotes from Brad Stone

if you are running both businesses you will never go after the digital opportunity with tenacity

If you don't know anything about the business, launch it through the Marketplace, bring retailers in, watch what they do and what they sell, understand it, and then get into it.

your job is to kill your own business. i want you to proceed as if your goal is to put everyone selling physical books out of a job

Uma coisa é ter uma boa ideia; outra é ter confiança em alguém para executá-la", conta.

amazon customers who joined prime doubled, on average, their spending on the site

when given the choice of obsessing over competitors or obsessing over customers, we always obsess over customers

It's better to assume trust and find out that you are wrong than to always assume people are trying to screw you over,

they have an absolute willingness to torch the landscape around them to emerge the winner

On one side of the desk sits a bowl of dog biscuits for employees who bring their dogs to the office (a rare perk in a company that makes employees pay for parking and snacks).

rag doll that they often prop up in an empty chair during meetings. the doll is meant to represent the student they are trying to help - just as bezos once had a habit of keeping a chair empty in meetings to represent the customer

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.

been finished. A month after the launch, Alan Atlas recalled, it crashed for nine hours, and hardly anyone in the outside world

really a hedge fund but a versatile technology laboratory full of innovators and talented engineers who could apply computer science to a variety of different problems.5 Investing was only the first

willingness to try a lot of things and make many mistakes.

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You've built this lovely castle, and now all the barbarians are going to come riding on horses to attack the castle," Bezos said, according to a former AWS exec who reports hearing the comment. "You need a moat; what is the moat around the castle?

Amazon tried to combat employee delinquency by using a point system to track how workers performed their jobs. Arriving late cost an employee half a point; failing to show up altogether was three points. Even calling in sick cost a point. An employee who collected six such demerits was let go.

George instead reorganized Alexa around the Amazonian ideal of fast-moving "two pizza" teams, each devoted to a specific Alexa domain, like music, weather, lighting, thermostats, video devices, and so on. Each team was run by a so-called "single-threaded leader" who had ultimate control and absolute accountability over their success or failure. (The phrase comes from computer science terminology; a single-threaded program executes one command at a time.)

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." —John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

Alexa execs, like leaders elsewhere in Amazon, became frequent recipients of the CEO's escalation emails, in which he forwarded a customer complaint accompanied by a single question mark and then expected a response within twenty-four hours.

There are lots of lessons to learn from Amazon. Never stop innovating or questioning the fundamentals of your business. Disrupt yourself before others do. Continually motivate employees so that they never get too complacent - see Yahoo, AOL and many other Internet companies for evidence of what happens when they do.

When New York passed its Internet sales-tax law, Amazon's sales in New York State dropped 10 percent over the next quarter, according to a person familiar with Amazon's finances at the time.

My Amazon had under 150,000 employees. By the end of 2020, it had an astounding 1.3 million employees.

Sinegal explained the Costco model to Bezos: it was all about customer loyalty.