Founders
Episode 17 #17 Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
Founders

Episode 17: #17 Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

Founders

Episode 17

#17 Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

David Senra is the host of Founders, where he studies history's greatest entrepreneurs. This is what he learned from reading The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone.

What I learned from reading The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone. 

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#17 Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

Introduction

Amazon's internal customs are deeply idiosyncratic. PowerPoint decks or slide presentations are never used in meetings. Instead, employees are required to write 6 page narratives laying out their points and pros because Bezos believes doing so fosters critical thinking. For each new product, they craft their documents in the style of a press release.

The goal is to frame a proposed initiative in the way a customer might hear about it for the first time. Each meeting begins with everyone silently reading from that document and discussion commences afterwards.

For my initial meeting with Bezos to discuss this project, I decided to observe Amazon's customs and prepare my own Amazon style narrative, a fictional press release on behalf of this book. Bezos met me in the executive conference room, and we sat down at a large table made of half a dozen door desks. The same kind of blonde wood that Bezos used 20 years ago when he was building Amazon from scratch in his garage. The door desks are often held up as a symbol of the company's enduring frugality.

We sat down and I slipped the press release across the table to him. When he realized what I was up to, he laughed so hard that spit came flying out of his mouth. Much has been made over the years of Bezos famous laugh. It's a startling pulse-pounding bray that he leans into while craning his neck back, closing his eyes and letting loose with a guttural roar that sounds like a cross between a mating elephant seal and a power tool. Often, it comes when nothing is obviously funny to anyone else.

I've spoken to Bezos probably a dozen times over the past decade, and our talks are always spirited, fun and frequently interrupted by his machine gun burst of laughter. He's engaged in full of twitchy, passionate energy. If you catch him in the hallway, he will not hesitate to inform you that he never takes the office elevator, always the stairs. He is highly circumspect about deviating from a well-established, very abstract talking points. Some of these maxims are so well worn that one might even call them Jeff-isms.

A few have stuck around for a decade or more. If you want to get the truth about what makes us different, it's this, Bezos says, we are genuinely customer-centric, we are genuinely long-term oriented, and we genuinely like to invent. 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 2 or 3 years. And if they don't work in 2 or 3 years, they will move on to something else, and they prefer to be close followers rather than inventors because it's safer.

So if you want to capture the truth about Amazon, this is why we are different. Very few companies have all those 3 elements. The idea for Amazon was conceived in 1994 on the 40th floor of a Midtown New York City Skyscraper.

Nearly 20 years later, the resulting company employed more than 90,000 people, and now I think that number is over 300,000 and had become one of the best-known corporations on the planet, frequently delighting its customers with its wide selection, low prices, and excellent customer service while also remaking industries and unnerving the stewards of some of the most storied brands in the world.

This is one attempt at describing how it all happened. It is based on more than 300 interviews with current and former Amazon executives and employees, including my conversations over the years with Bezos himself, who in the end was very supportive of this project, even though he judged that it was way too early for a reflective look at Amazon. Nevertheless, he approved many interviews with his top executives, his family, and his friends.

And for that, I am grateful. The goal of this book is to tell the story behind one of the greatest entrepreneurial successes since Sam Walton flew his two-seat turboprop across the American South to scope out prospective Walmart store sites. Actually, I did a podcast on Sam Walton's autobiography that talks about Sam's use of his plane.

If you haven't listened to it yet, I recommend going back and listening to it. It's really good, and it will inform a lot of Jeff Bezos’ ideas, which he admits he just took from Sam Walton. It's a tale of how one gifted child grew into an extraordinarily driven and versatile CEO and how he, his family, and his colleagues bet heavily on a revolutionary network called the Internet and on the grandiose vision of a single store that sells everything.

Okay. So that was from the introduction of the book that I want to talk to you about today. It's The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone. Okay. So I want to talk about -- because this is really interesting. I see a lot where people think, oh, if you don't start really young, like, oh, if I didn't start my company like when I was 20, now it's too late. Jeff didn't start his business until he was 30 years old. He was already working on Wall Street, which most people know who Jeff Bezos is. Almost none of the people know what he did before he did Amazon.

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