Jeff Bezos

Ethan Evans says the person Jeff Bezos quoted a lot was Benjamin Graham, the investor Warren Buffett also follows. Graham's line is that the market is a voting machine in the short term and a weighing machine in the long term. Bezos used his own version. When Amazon's stock rises 10 percent, the company did not just get 10 percent smarter. When it falls 10 percent, people should not walk around feeling 10 percent dumber. The vote swings. The work is to increase the weight, and the price gets pulled back toward that weight.

He told the company to live with the volatility. His letters said Amazon would take cash flow over short-term results and would prioritize free cash flow instead of optim

Sam Parr uses Amazon as the example of bad design beating good design. A fashionable designer thinks good design means colors and a flat layout. The Kindle page is mostly copy, a stack of reviews, and some photos. It is not a page that designer would draw.

Ethan Evans says the site is run by A/B tests, and the winner is whatever increases sales. The program is called WebLab. Thousands of experiments can run at the same time, and the system can still tell you what one of them did. Nobody cares about the pixels if they sell. Design VPs were hired to make Amazon prettier, and they lost those fights.

For a long time the hidden rule was load time, not layout. Amazon grew up on a slow internet,

Ethan Evans says two people claim Amazon Prime. Charlie Ward, then a principal engineer and later a VP, says he invented it. Jeff Bezos also says he invented it. Evans joined right after Prime and does not know whether they had the same idea at once or whether one of them took the credit.

The original idea was not a bundle of perks. It was only fast shipping. Bezos could see a bad quarter lining up, still in the aftermath of the internet crash, and he wanted something to tell Wall Street. The effort was called Project 100 because they had to announce it and start doing it in 100 days. He insisted on the words two-day delivery, not two-day shipping. It began with a lot of FedEx two-day shipp

Ethan Evans says his target pay in his last year at Amazon was $900,000. The stock usually did better than the target, so he tended to make a low $1 million. That was what Amazon thought he was worth. This year, working for himself, he expects to finish around $700,000 or $800,000.

The hours are the other half of the comparison. Amazon was 50 to 60 hours a week, plus travel. Now it is an average of 20 hours a week, with a lot of vacation. If you had asked him at Amazon how happy he was, he would have said 7 or 8 out of 10. He was well paid and the work was large. Now he says 11 out of 12. He moved up about three points, and he had not known the scale went to 12. He had not known he could wo

Ethan Evans says Amazon talked about the hours in euphemisms. Jeff Bezos's line was that he did not like "work-life balance." He preferred "work-life harmony." If you enjoy the work, working a lot can still be a life in harmony. Evans heard that as a polite way to say: forget balance, and put the hours in.

Bezos would also say they work long, hard, and smart, and that two out of three do not count. A good idea was not permission to go home at three. Write it down, and bring another by seven and another by ten. The company said a career has seasons, and that if you have kids and you want to see them, Amazon may be the wrong season. The alternative on offer was to go home at six, put them to

Ethan Evans says "strategically patient, tactically impatient" was a Jeff Bezos idea. Important things take a long time. Putting people in space still takes years of rockets, a base, and software, even when the vision is right. Prime is the other example. Two-day shipping, then one-day, then same-day, is decades of work. You have to be patient about the end.

You do not get to be patient about today. Every day has to produce every bit of progress you can squeeze out. The difference between a day that is a nine and a day that is a ten, one thing finished versus three, is what accumulates. Bezos pushed people on what else they could do this quarter on a five-year project. A five-year project i

Ethan Evans says a question mark email was how Jeff Bezos scaled customer obsession when he was too busy to investigate every complaint. If a customer wrote him about your area, you received a forward of that complaint with a single question mark at the top. Everyone knew what it meant. You had 24 hours to explain what happened to that customer.

The best reply showed it was a weird exception and not a real pattern. The next best showed a real problem with a fix already underway. The worst was admitting the fix would take a while. When Evans ran Amazon's app store, Bezos sent something harsher than a question mark: "Please tell me we're not doing this." The team had to answer that they were.

Ethan Evans says Jeff Bezos kept his Amazon email open to the world. Anybody could write to Jeff at Amazon and complain, and Bezos read a lot of those notes himself. Later a team told him which ones to read. His rule was to trust the anecdotes over the data.

The reason is scale. Even if 99 percent of packages arrive on time and correct, 1 percent of Amazon is still about 25 million packages a day that do not. A dashboard can make that remainder look small. One customer email, or the same email five times in a week, shows the trend. Evans calls reading those complaints one of Bezos's tricks for not losing the customer.

Ethan Evans says Jeff Bezos once stopped a meeting and asked whether the A team for the project was available, because the people in the room were clearly the B team.

That was attack mode. Bezos would get frustrated with the team that had screwed up and with himself for letting it get that way, and he was relentless. One case was an app that let a customer photograph a price in a store and send it to Amazon, so Amazon could match it. In the press it became Amazon using its customers to spy on small-town America. A woman from PR sat across from him while he said, how could we be so stupid, how could anyone screw this up. She thought he meant her. Evans says Bezos was saying it to himself. Wh

Ethan Evans says Jeff Bezos fell into the flaw of every great man. He had been right so often that he started to believe his vision was perfect, and that is what produced the Fire Phone. The hardware thrown in a dumpster was a $170 million write-off, before the opportunity cost.

Everyone was trying to tell him the Fire Phone was not a good product. Evans compares that to telling a new father the baby is ugly. It is not a message you can deliver effectively. The hard part is that Bezos had already shipped products people said would fail, and those products worked. This time everybody else was right, and Jeff was not. Evans does not know how a leader fixes that.

Ethan Evans says Jeff Bezos was not mean, but he was demanding, and he almost never said anything good. He would hear an idea and name the three things to fix. Whatever results a team brought him, they got a nod and then the corrections. The feedback was only criticism.

Evans watched him try to change that after he hired an executive coach. In one meeting Bezos spent about an hour on everything the team had missed, stood up to leave, then turned back and said, "Oh, yeah, but good job. You're doing great." Evans could see him checking the coach's list. The praise was an item on the list, not a habit. His taste was still usually right. He fought the right battle on Kindle, and he fought the r

Ethan Evans says Jeff Bezos always declined pitches to turn Amazon into a bank. People kept pitching finance because Bezos came from D. E. Shaw, Amazon had a billion credit cards on file, and Amazon already had financial relationships with customers. His argument was that finance is well served, a lot of people are already in it, and it is heavily regulated. He tried to avoid heavy regulation because it slowed his ability to do what he wanted.

He was pitched healthcare, and he has dabbled there. Evans was part of a pitch to take Amazon into travel and compete with Expedia or Airbnb on those same customer relationships. Bezos declined. Evans says the choice of what to swing at includes wheth

Jared Diamond says he is not aware of Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg having a philosophy of life beyond their business. The business leader he admires as a person is the Patagonia leader he knows. For the Patagonia leader, as with John Wooden, Patagonia is a model for life, and he has a philosophy of life. Steve Jobs had a philosophy of life as regards business.

Jared Diamond has had several lengthy conversations with Bill Gates and likes him. People who met Bill Gates under other circumstances hold different views. Jared Diamond met Elon Musk once and met Jeff Bezos once, and he does not know many leaders in the business world. The Patagonia leader emphasized time off for his staff and Pata

Will O'Brien says the hardware founders he sees start companies to make something the world needs, not only something people want. They look different from the usual software founders: a bit louder, the kind who go to church on Sunday, and typically working on hardware rather than software. The Y Combinator line, make something people want, sits against that other motivation, and a spiritual reason is part of his own decision to start.

Jeff Bezos is his example of a head-oriented founder: the internet was growing at 30% per annum, books move easily and do not go off, so Bezos started Amazon. Steve Jobs is the heart-based founder, tied to the bicycle for the mind. Founders in the present era

Amazon was almost called Cadabra Inc, until a lawyer argued the name was not good because it sounded so much like cadaver. Jeff Bezos later took the name Amazon from a TV documentary about the Amazon River, after hearing that the Amazon is 10 times bigger than the next biggest river.

David Senra, reading Bloomberg by Bloomberg, says Michael Bloomberg refuses a fair fight because a business battle should never be even. Bloomberg was always up against companies many times its size, so each commercial contest had to start with an advantage. The company does not want fair fights. It wants to enter already ahead.

Senra sets that next to a Jeff Bezos line he had covered before: being one of the best is not good enough, because you should not plan a future in which you might have to fight someone just as good as you are. Bloomberg is making the same demand. Enter every contest with an unfair advantage.

David Senra, reading Peter Thiel and Blake Masters, says every startup should start with a very small market because creative monopolies start excessively small and then monopolize. Every startup is small at the start, and every monopoly dominates a large share of its market. Always err on the side of starting too small. If the first market looks too big, it almost certainly is.

Small still has to be a real sale. Apple's first sale was 50 computers for $25,000 to a shop Senra believes was in Palo Alto, and Steve Jobs walked in barefoot. The perfect target is a small group of particular people, concentrated together and served by few or no competitors. Once a company dominates a niche, it ex

David Senra, reading Kevin Kelly's Excellent Advice for Living, says obsessing about customers will take you further than obsessing about beating the competition. Both work, but of the two, obsessing about customers goes farther. The useful question is which of the two options will actually take you further.

Jeff Bezos talked about the same point over and over, and his view is obvious. Customer obsession takes you farther than competitor obsession because it compounds into a moat, pushes you to invent proactively, and keeps you oriented towards durable needs instead of reactive copycat behavior.

David Senra says Rick Rubin holds a paradox for the best work: stay patient and avoid rushing the process, and at the same time work quickly and without delay.

When the work is flowing, keep going. Schedules get set aside when fleeting moments of illumination come. Summon strength and commit to the offering, even when it arises at an inopportune time. The commitment is the serious artist's obligation. Alongside that duty, the work reveals itself as you go, which cuts against overthinking and overanalyzing. The move is to just get started. Action produces information. Finishing still matters. Release the work, then move on to the next thing. The reward for great work is more work. Patience m

David Senra reads Larry Ellison's reason for picking Microsoft as the enemy: he set out to stop people talking about Oracle and other database companies and to get them talking about Oracle and Microsoft. A smaller database company would have put Oracle in the wrong category. Ellison told people to compare Oracle with IBM and Microsoft, the class he wanted. He gets attention by picking a fight, and he is most focused when he has something to beat.

Once a customer committed to a database vendor, the customer was pretty well locked in for the next 10 years or so, and Ellison understood the lock-in right away. With a winning system like Oracle's database, he did what Jeff Bezos did at Amazon i