Quotes from Brad Stone

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Bezos proclaimed at the time, according to numerous employees: "Developers are alchemists and our job is to do everything we can to get them to do their alchemy.

In 2017, Amazon spent $22.6 billion on R&D, compared to Alphabet ($16.6 billion), Intel ($13.1 billion), and Microsoft ($12.3 billion).

Developers are alchemists and our job is to do everything we can to get them to do their alchemy.

Não ganhamos dinheiro quando vendemos coisas. Ganhamos dinheiro quando ajudamos os clientes a decidir o que comprar.

Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. Leaders have conviction and are tenacious. They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly.

point of view is worth 80 IQ points"—a

For example, he suggested that every leader should be required to take a course called "As Life Happens," to learn how to sensitively manage an employee whose personal life might be interfering with their work obligations. Niekerk recalled that colleagues who read his paper said that it was among the best analyses they had seen of the cultural challenges that were so obviously plaguing the company at its twentieth anniversary.

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

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

You have to start somewhere,' he said. 'You climb the top of the first tiny hill and from there you see the next hill.

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.

Walton described borrowing the best ideas of his competitors. Bezos's point was that every company in retail stands on the shoulders of the giants that came before it.

have realized about myself that I'm very motivated by people counting on me," he answered. "I like to be counted on."14

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

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

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.

Considering what his grandfather had been through a generation before during the infamous witch hunt for Communist sympathizers, Price saw bitter historical parallels.

one day you'll understand that it's harder to be kind than clever.

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.

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.

We are genuinely customer-centric, we are genuinely long-term oriented and we genuinely like to invent

His personal wealth was larger than the gross domestic product of Hungary; larger than even the market capitalization of General Motors.

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