Quotes from Brad Stone

When Kessel asked Bezos what his deadline was on developing the company's first piece of hardware, an electronic reading device, Bezos told him, "You are basically already late.

Look, you should wake up worried, terrified every morning," he told his employees. "But don't be worried about our competitors because they`re never going to send us any money anyway. Let's be worried about our customers and stay heads-down focused.

The death knell for any enterprise is to glorify the past, no matter how good it was—especially for an institution like The Washington Post.

Companies that make things and companies that sell them have waged versions of this battle for centuries.

Do I need to go down and get the certificate that says I'm CEO of the company to get you to stop challenging me on this?

You can work long, hard, and smart, but at Amazon.com you can pick only two out of three.

You can work long, you can work hard, you can work smart, but at Amazon you can't choose two out of three.

Up until that point, I had seen Jeff only at one speed, the go-go speed of grow at all costs. I had not seen him drive toward profitability and efficiency," says Scott Cook, the Intuit founder and an Amazon board member during that time. "Most execs, particularly first-time CEOs who get good at one thing, can only dance what they know how to dance. "Frankly, I didn't think he could do it.

Joy was substance over optics," he said. "Joy was a long-term thinker. Joy was bold.

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.

the chairman of Random House, Alberto Vitale, told a Wall Street Journal reporter about the new online bookselling sensation from the Pacific Northwest.

Bezos wanted to personally approve each equation and track the results over time. It would be his way of guiding a team's evolution.

Step by Step, Ferociously.

We see Google experimenting in so many places outside of its core search and advertising business, whether that's bringing broadband Internet to the world or funding an entirely separate company to pursue solutions to disease and mortality. Amazon's one of the few other companies that thinks as big as Google does.

With tough interpretation of taxi and zoning regulations, neither Uber nor Airbnb would have gotten started. By the time many cities recognized their existence, both were fairly large and had the political support of their customers.

On Sept. 12, 2016, there was a momentary realignment in the constellation of global business. For the first time, the five largest public corporations in the world by market capitalization were all technology companies: Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon.com, and Facebook.

A lot of the drawbacks, a lot of the difficulties that Uber has had, have been completely predictable, and they handled them poorly, so by their own standards they made a lot of mistakes, and I think that they would admit that.

I think for Amazon's customers, it offers a kind of addictive service - the ability to shop without leaving your house, the ability to read without going to a bookstore or a library.

Executives are rarely comfortable speaking on the record, particularly in secretive Silicon Valley companies.

Airbnb is a company with values around hospitality.

As we have seen again and again, when Amazon doesn't get the economic conditions from suppliers that it seeks, it simply goes its own way. In the book business, that has meant publishing its own titles under the various Kindle imprints. Now it's making diapers.

The emergence of Uber X was really the most important pivot maybe in the history of Silicon Valley. It's a vast majority of Uber's revenues, and so that flexibility and the rapid growth and the fighting the battles, it's all Travis. You can't take any credit away from him.

Amazon is famously run by studying and responding to its own data; yet when it comes to promotions, decisions are often subjective and guided by human emotions and petty political dynamics.

There's a new set of transformative technologies such as machine learning, AI, and virtual reality that will spawn another set of big tech franchises. But in terms of cultural impact, perhaps we are at peak Valley.