Brad Stone

Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

The Everything Store

Jannis M

Great book! Very fair towards Amazon AND the reader. At least it feels like the author didn't keep anything from us... I now have a better understanding of the practices of Amazon and a new appreciation for local vendors. :-) also, what a remarkable life Jeff Bezos had up until now. I wonder where he is going with all his diverse ventures... (Hint: probably battling Elon Musk for world or even extraterrestrial domination... Likely both!) The similarity of the relationships towards their fathers among Steve Jobs, Elon musk and Jeff Bezos is striking. I wonder if this is enabled them somehow to achieve so much..

Gavin

Less critical than I was expecting, still good. The trouble with evaluating leaders (this goes for modern scientists as much as corporate founders) is that they are able to take so much credit for the work of those they hire / train. Even so, Bezos had a lot of ideas - we know this because some failures are attributed to him, putting an upper bound at least on the file-drawer problem of Amazon's creativity. (Stone seems pretty good at tracking down the real inventors. And he literally dug through Bezos' garbage in search of details.) And he is a hyperactive micromanager, pulling conference call screens off the walls, ramming through his pet projects over any amount of opposition:

  Almost alone, Bezos believed fervently in Prime, closely tracking sign-ups each day and intervening every timr the retail group dropped its promotions from the home page.



The management style is/was macho, with an uneasy mix of flat objectivity (if you show the maths of your idea works, you are likely to get serious consideration) and imperial whim (like making everyone write meeting notes in full prose - which is based on no science in particular).

  Bezos treats workers like expendable resources without taking into account their contributions to the company. That in turn allows him to coldly allocate capital and manpower and make hyperrational business decisions where another executive might let personal relationships intrude. But they also acknowledge that Bezos is primarily consumed with improving the company's performance and customer service...



 Some of Stone's anecdotes about this or that mid-level exec are neither funny nor illustrative, and make this feel like a reference text. I suppose there should be one.

With them so dominant now, it's easy to forget the stock crashing to $10, or Amazon being seriously threatened by a single Lehman analyst, or all the many failures like Auctions or zShops or A9.com. And that they really were another garage operation that took over the world.

Stone does push back a bit - the "two-pizza team" idea gets uncritically celebrated in business, but Stone says that the actual teams hate it. I'm fascinated by Bezos making each team come up with their own objective function - but apparently this is also hated, on "digging our own grave" grounds. (Isn't any quantified performance metric hated?)

Then there's the context switch that makes the billions seem small: since he was a child, Bezos seems to honestly see himself as shepherding humanity into space, with Amazon a means to that end.

Not enough coverage of just how weird Amazon is, in terms of shareholder quiescence, the astonishing amount of cheap capital it hoovers up, its terrible reputation among 90s and 00s analyst as a "nonprofit scam". It was almost never profitable for 20 straight years, but people kept throwing money into the bubble... which has stopped being a bubble (because of AWS, not really retail). The tiny tax burden that people decry should start growing, and antitrust attention too.

No attention to what we should expect of Amazon's effect on literature and ideas, given the mass die-off of local bookshops and the weakening of gatekeeper publishers. (I don't know what the effect is either, but if I wrote a book about them I hope I would have a go.)

Skimmed a bit, e.g. 2004, the Zappos chapter,

Erwin Lemuel Oliva

Brad Stone writes as if he has lived the lives of the Amazon founders including Jeff. It also gives you a unique perspective of the Internet when things started. Must-read for those who are big fans of the history of the Internet. This is a slice of it.

Jowanza Joseph

I gained quite an understanding of Jeff Bezos as a person and his techniques to lead Amazon to where it is now. Similar to Jobs and Musk Jeff demands an insanely high standard of those who work with him. The author was a little too positive on Bezos and sheltered us from any shortcomings he might have. Nonetheless I enjoyed the pace and tone of the book.

Arturo Hernández

I started reading this book hesitant as to how intriguing the Amazon story could really be and I was pleasantly surprised for what I discovered.

Jeff is portrayed as someone ambitious, structured and with a long-term vision that explains the success behind this company. It’s interesting to find out how the story was written for Amazon, the things that failed and those that are thriving currently.

I would love to know more about the internal culture though, I understand key elements (the passion of the people there, the compromise and the deliver) however I find it intriguing as to how “the cracks” the high stress levels present in projects and in the people working there.

Quite an interesting look into Bezos’ story with Amazon.

Alfredo santos

It's one of those few non fiction books that besides having a compelling and interesting story, filters and teaches great management lessons and gives you great business insights. It boils down the success of Amazon to two key factors, the non stop aggressive approach of Jeff Bezos and also his obsession for Customer satisfaction. I've never heard about any other company so focused on its customer that it just borderlines ridiculous. But I guess ridiculously obsessive gets you to where Amazon is nowadays.

Sonja H

Schlecht editierte Audiodatei, Sprecher kann kein Englisch. Außerdem ist nicht jede Geschichte eines "großen Gründers" interessant. Überflüssiges Buch.

The Everything Store Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

Reviews