Walter Isaacson

Jeff Bezos

The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos, With an Introduction by Walter Isaacson

Invent and Wander

Eylon gil

Bezos was taken aback when Apple disrupted Amazon’s music business. He was well aware of how great companies failed when they ignored to embrace the new disruptive changes and allowed newcomers to disrupt the market. He had failed to notice the warning signs in the music category and didn’t want to repeat his mistakes. Instead of waiting for someone else to disrupt his market, he decided he would disrupt it himself. He set up a team to come up with ideas to kill their own business. He chose ‘Books’ as the first category and asked the team to find ways to disrupt this business. Thus ‘Kindle’ was born which went on to transform the publishing business.

Bezos knew that if he didn’t take the lead, Apple or Google would lead digital reading. He was willing to bet on long-term growth benefits than satisfying short-term growth requirements.

withing  year of adding adding those sellers. third party sales accounted for 5% of unit sale, and it quickly became clear that customers loved the convinienc

To invent you have to take big risks, to invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that its going to work, it's not an experiment. outsized returns come from betting against conventional wisdom, but conventional wisdom is usually right. a lot of observers characterized aws as a risky distraction when we started, 

it turned out the world was ready and hungry for cloud computing but didnt know it yet.

 -  amazing has made billions of dollars of failures, failure inevitably comes along with invention and risk taking which is why we try to make amazon the best place in the world to fail 

we have some very specific ideas about what we want to do in life, but i believe in the power of wandering, all my best decisions in life and business, have been made with heart, intuition, and guts. not analysis, when you can make a decision with analysis you should do so, but it turns out in life most that your most important decisions are always made with instinct,, intuition, taste and heart, and that is day 1 mentality 

In buisness however, several buisness compettitors can do well. thats very normal. the most importent thing for doing well against competition is to be both robust and nimble, and it scales. scale is gigantic advantage because it gives you robustness, you can take a punch, but it's also good if you can dodge a punch, and thats the nimblness.

the most importnent factor for nimblness is decision making speed, the second most importentn factor is being willing to be experimental. 

to be willing taking risks, you have to be willing to fail, and people dont like failing. 

I always point out there are two different kinds of failure: theres expermntial faliurs- thats the kind of failurs you should be happy with,

I don't like the term work life balance, its misleading, i like the term work life harmony, i know if im energized at work,happy at work, felling like i'm adding value, whatever energizes you that make me better at home, it makes me a better father, a better husband, likewise, if i'm happy at home it makes me a better employee, a better bose,

It's a flywheel, a cycle, not a balance. that's why that metaphor is so dangerous.

I Suppose if you went crazy and worked 100 hours a week or something, maybe there are limits, but i've never had that problem, and i suppose its because both sides of my life give me energy. that's what i recommend to both interns and executives

the device team had just done fantastic job and there so much progress still to come, we have big third party ecosystem of other companies have built what we call alexa skills 

when i'm eighty, i want to minimize the number of regrets i made, and most of our regrets are acts of omission, things we didn't try, the path untraveled those are the things that haunt us. 

I didn't think i regret trying and failing, and i suspected i would always be haunted by a decision to not try at all. after much consideration, I took the *

 path to follow my passion and i'm proud of that choice everyday.

tomorrow in a very real sense, your life - the life you author from scratch on your own-begins: how will you use your gifts? what choices will you make? 

will inertia will be your guide, or will you follow your passion? 

will you follow dogma? or will you be original?

will you choose a life of ease, or life of service and adventures?

will you wilt under criticism, or will you follow your convictions? 

will you bluff it out when your wrong, or will you apologize?

will yu play it safe or will you be a little bit swashbuckling? 

when its tough, will you give up? or will you be relentless? 

will you be cynic or will you be a builder?

I WILL HAZARD A PREDICTION. when you are 80 years old and in uite 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, build yourself a great story.

When something bad happens to you you have three choices, you can either let it define you, let it destroy you, or you can let it strengthen you.

AWS at itself is an example of a product the customers wanted but didn't talked about it- no one asked for aws, turns out the was in fact ready and hungry for an offering like aws but didnt know it/ we had a hunch and curiosity, took the necessary financial risks and began building- reworking experiments and iterating countless times as we proceeded. 

There are many ways to centre your business. you can be competitor focused, product focused, technology focused, business model focused, but in my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of day 1 vitality

Why? there are many advantages to customer centric approach, but here's the big one: customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy. even when your customers don't know it yet, they want something better. 

your desire to delight customers will drive you to invent on their behalf. bo customer ever asked for amazon prime, but it sure turns out they wanted it. 

staying in day 1 will require you to experiment, accept failures, plant seeds, protect saplings, and double then when you see a customer delight. 

A customer obsessed culture best creates the conditions where all of that can happen.

our energy at amazon comes from the desire to impress customers rather than the zeal to best competitors,A

perhaps a somewhat subtle one- of customer driven focus is that it aidsa certain type of proactivity. 

when were at our best, we don't wait for external pressures. we are inherently driven to improve our services, adding benefits, and features, before we have to. these investments are motivated by customer focus rather than by reaction to competitions 

An investor complained that Bezos was forgetting that amazon only makes money when it sells things, so negetive reviews hurt the business, "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. 

"Focus relentlessly and passionately on the customer" 

As he put in his own mantra. we intend to build the worlds most customer centric company, I constantly remind our employees to be afraid, to wake up every morning in fear, not of out competition, but for our customers. 

the genesis of amazon echo was in one way, like steve jobs development of apple ipod. it arouse out of intuition rather than demand. no customer was asking for echo.

Bezos had a rule, which was to use his hearth and his intuition as well as empirical data in making big decision. there has to be risk taking. you have to have instinct. all the good decisions have made that way.

He knew that creating amazon prime was what he calls a one way door. it was a difficult decision to reverse, but necessary one.

Customer service business rather than internet business. 

So i asked the CEO of time inc whether i was making a mistake by choosing bezos and would look silly in the years to come if the internet economy deflated. No, Don told me. "Stick with your choice, jeff bezos is not in the internet business, he is in the customer-service business. he will be around for decades to come.

To make the decision, Bezos used a mental exercise that would become a famous part of his risk calculation process. He called it a "regrat minimaztion framework". He would imagine what he would fell when he turned eighty and though back to the decision/ "I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have, "he explains - I knew that when i was eighty, I was not going to regret doing this. 

matej yangwao

** spoiler alert **
           Experiments are integral part of every development process. Learn to risk based on math in the long run. Learn to be long-term thinker to see particular business models. 

>Don't try to copy the value of a specific item; instead, create new values for it, and your clients will be happy to buy it.

>risk can lead to innovation.

>When planning to do something, try to predict the long-term outcomes.

A bit repetitive, but those repeats are essential after all...

Harsha G

Incredible repetitive to the extent that it’s literally the same sentences in every other chapter, yet when you can skim through it the ideas are fabulous.

Invent and Wander The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos, With an Introduction by Walter Isaacson

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