The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

"The Everything Store" was such an engaging and fascinating read, I inhaled it in less than 36 hours. (For the sake of my sleep and work schedule, I'm glad books like this don't come along too often.) As I write this review, Amazon just announced a partnership with the US Postal Service to start delivering on Sundays for Prime members in key cities. This backs up the best description I have heard of Amazon and its founder -- which, amusingly, comes from the blog of ex-Amazon employee Eugene Wei, someone who was not interviewed in this book. "Amazon has boundless ambition," Wei writes. "It wants to eat global retail... there are very few people in technology and business who are what I'd call apex predators. Jeff [Bezos] is one of them, the most patient and intelligent one I've met in my life. An apex predator doesn't wake up one day and decide it is done hunting." Stock valuation aside -- you either believe or you don't, and as of this writing Bezos is clearly having a messianic moment -- "The Everything Store" is an excellent chronicle of Amazon's rise. In the book -- and I don't mean this as a criticism -- Bezos comes off as the lead character in an Ayn Rand novel. A real world John Galt or Hank Rearden, with an e-commerce twist. The immigrant step-father who taught him the value of hard work... the maternal grandfather who instilled a deep do-it-yourself attitude... the flashes of extraordinary competitiveness from an early age... the burning desire to conquer space... it all coalesces into a sense of destiny (though, of course, a good portion of this could be narrative hindsight). Steve Jobs was the last great business figure, the hero entrepreneur of our time. I think that, reputationally, Bezos will ultimately surpass Jobs -- leave him in the dust, really -- because while, what Bezos is doing is unsexy, the fundamental nature of "hard problems" that Amazon approaches and solves (on its way to eating global retail) is adding to the free market knowledge base at a tremendous evolutionary rate. One of the most intriguing and powerful things about Amazon, in my opinion, is the sheer logistical prowess of what they do behind the scenes. The coordination of supply chains, manpower, algorithmic decision making, and countless other unseen problems they have had to solve on the way to delivering "everything" in a two-day shipping window is off-the-charts impressive. To a certain degree Apple accomplished a similar behind-the-scenes feat, in that Apple's masterful ability to implement and coordinate global supply chains made it the most profitable company in the world for a time. But Apple's breathtaking profit margins always had a slightly ephemeral feel to them. You knew that someone (like Samsung or Google's Android) would eventually come along and take a bite of the Apple so to speak... whereas with Bezos' strategy, staking out the hard, grinding, low-nutrient territory of thin margins, the next competitor is going to have to get bloody in the toughest octagon of all (logistics and scale). As Bezos likes to say, "Your margin is my opportunity," which should scare the hell out of any large retailer, perhaps save Wal-Mart (and maybe even Wal-Mart too). Those who doubt Amazon's business model (myself among them in the past) have been prone to use the "switch flip" criticism, e.g. bullish investors assume Amazon will one day be able to "flip a switch" and become profitable. But I agree with Eugene Wei that this is an overly simplistic characterization of a more subtle process. In reality, Amazon is less like a company with one switch to flip and more like one with tens of thousands of individual switches, each of which can be incrementally adjusted to swing from loss to profit when the time is right. This seems far less fantastical when you picture thousands upon thousands of instances where, say, a 2% margin mark-up creates profit where previously there was break-even, and/or a simple slowdown in the prodigious rate of ongoing capital expenditure spending lets more cash flow spill over into the profit column. As for the prodigious capital expenditures, Amazon's most recent quarterly revenue figure, as of this writing, was roughly $17 billion. Bezos no doubt foresees the day when that quarterly number will hit $100 billion. On the way there, it only makes sense for him to exploit every inch of leeway he can get from Wall Street -- in terms of taking all the money and opportunity he can for long-term investment -- with the goal of scaling up the infrastructure to serve and support an order-of-magnitude larger sales base. If investors get loopy with their valuation assessments in the meantime, so be it. The vision is the thing for Bezos... just as it has always been. But getting back to "The Everything Store," my favorite thing about this book was the brutally honest nature of the flaws and the messiness of Amazon's evolution (and the evolution of Bezos himself) in the first 5-10 years or so of the company's existence. Through an excellent weave of facts, narrative anecdotes and storytelling, you get a clear picture of how Amazon surged out of the gate in the late 1990s, and then almost choked to death on hundreds of millions of dollars worth of bad acquisitions it made with "bubble money." Many dumb mistakes were made, some deservedly fatal... but Amazon survived them all, and managed to learn from them too. The evolution of Bezos as a CEO is fully apparent as well. While those who ponder Bezos today are likely to assume he stepped on the world's stage as a wise genius fully formed, in actuality he picked up many of his strong core beliefs along the course of Amazon's existence, learning through intense study of rivals and mentors from afar, like D.E. Shaw (early on) and Sam Walton and Jim Sinegal of Costco. The book is really a gift for entrepeneurs and business builders of the new generation -- like myself, ahem cough cough -- in the manner it lays bare the luck, the guts, and the serious mistakes that are inevitably made on the way to forming a world-class enterprise. The other thing that really came through is the sheer ruthlessness of Bezos. (No doubt this is what got Mackenzie Bezos riled up -- what spouse wants to see their husband portrayed as a tyrant?) But as the book points out, there is a reason why so many of the great builders in tech -- Gates, Ellison, Jobs and so on -- all had that same ruthless character to them. Building and scaling a world-dominating business is hard. As in really, really hard. When you are trying do something on that kind of scale, with that level of competitiveness, you are not just fighting against cut-throat competitors. You are also fighting against entropy and mediocrity, that pull of ordinary results, ordinary outcome (as opposed to extraordinary) that holds back every ambitious endeavor in the same manner the NASA shuttle is held back by gravity. It takes something special to get off the launching pad, let alone into orbit. The fact that Bezos can be extremely ruthless, even cold-blooded, in pursuit of his vision, will not gain extra points with much of his audience. (No doubt a reason Amazon itself wants to tone that side down.) But investors should be glad for this trait, and it's a trait that benefits capitalism on the whole too. When a strong player legitimately uses skill and efficiency to best a weaker player in the marketplace, costs are lowered as such that customers benefit, and other businesses can learn from the strong player's pioneering example. The final chapters of the book showed Amazon at its most ruthless by far. I had no idea the level of wargame strategy that had occurred in the purchase of Zappos. The Quidsi (diapers.com) acquisition was simultaneously even more brilliant and brutal. You do not, not, not want to be in head-to-head competition with Amazon. It is here where I stop and whisper a small prayer of thanks to the free market gods that my own career path does not involve selling commodity-type retail products. I had reason to examine my own motives as to why I enjoyed this book so much. I am a trader, not a retailer. While I have plans to lead and scale a business to large (perhaps even very large) size, it has nothing to do with traditional retail really. So why was this book so fascinating? Perhaps for the sheer cultural value of what Bezos represents and what he has accomplished. Here is a guy who started out smart, talented and exceptionally bold, and had the chutzpah to act on a wildly ambitious vision and see it through every step of the way. Learning and stumbling as he went, sometimes screwing up royally, but always pulling in the errors and coming back from the brink... having laid the architecture more than a dozen years ago to sustain a vision ten times bigger (or maybe even 100 times). The broader inspirational lesson from the Amazon story, I think, is the reaffirmation of what's possible when motivated dreamers decide to work harder, work smarter, and break traditional molds all at the same time. You really can execute on a compelling vision. You really can get a team together and, with the help of that team, accomplish a hundred or a thousand times more than you ever could running solo. You really can practice patience and boldness -- no coincidence "bold" is one of Bezos' favorite words -- and in so doing apply an Art-of-War like strategic nous to flanking and beating your rivals. Big and exciting things can be done in this world.

So, I just finished reading "The Everything Store" by Brad Stone. I am not a fan of elaborate and long-winded reviews about whether a book is worth reading or not. I'll make it easy for you - this one is. It's a good read as a business book, as a tech book, and it is helpful if you're interested in Seattle history. I'll go into more detail below if you're reading what the "self absorbed internet troll" Robby Delaware thinks.* If you're like most people who peruse reviews, I hope this helps. I was contemplating writing a too-cool-for-school review that mentioned the time I thought I ran into Bezos in Ballard on the sidewalk in back of the BofA building. But I didn't. ... Now for some of my self absorbed ramblings. This isn't what I liked about the book, more about what I found surprising. The author himself acknowledges that this is one of the first complete histories of the company, and I would wager that there will be an afterword to future releases of this book. I've been looking forward to the release this book for some time. I downloaded it as soon as it was released for Kindle. I began reading this book in a sort of unusual way. I began reading it by kind of keeping a mental checklist in my own mind. I was curious if the author, who has covered Amazon for a long time, would omit certain things. The book is clearly biased towards Amazon and Bezos - which isn't surprising and doesn't diminish the appeal of the book. Still, I couldn't help but think that portions of the book were clearly written by someone who wasn't familiar with Seattle culture and by someone who didn't quite view events the same way that many other people did. I took notes while reading the book, and here's a list of things that I found surprising about the book while I was reading it: I was very surprised that a number of relatively small controversies since 2008 didn't make it into this book. I believe that the absence of these stories is unfortunate, and won't help those seeking a full understanding of the company. Amazon, since the rise of social media, has become the source of a number of controversies that I like to call "Twitter worthy." Many of you may recall stories like Amazon Japan selling whale meat, or a pedophile self-publishing an e-book how-to guide, or the remote removal of Orwell books from Kindle readers for DRM reasons, or the deranking of Gay and Lesbian literature. While these stories in an of themselves aren't the kind of stories that are likely to make it on the front page of a newspaper like the Wall Street Journal, these stories will be remembered. One of the only times I ever saw a DRM issue discussed on television was a segment I watched on a cable news show in 2009 about the kid in Minnesota whose Orwell books (and notes) were remotely removed. Why are these stories important, and why do they matter for Amazon? It's simple, because Amazon has grown so large and so global, obscure controversies become easier to understand and even easier to pin on a single retailer. Plus, you've got to feed the twitter beast. Remember the gay/lesbian deranking scandal in 2009? Didn't a hacker do it? Didn't the hacker claim that pulling the urls of gay/lesbian themed books was very easy, and that used an automated script to flag each one as adult? Didn't the hacker claim that he did it for very specific political reasons, and that if you're going to do something like that for political reasons - it's only natural to target Amazon? You see what I'm getting at. There's always been little stories like this - but in an age of twitter and Drudge the smallest story about a holocaust themed board game that one, solitary, third party seller offered can blow up in a spectacular manner. That was the controversies - I was also a little dismayed by how little space was given to Amazon's overall role in the life of Seattle, and I was shocked by how little of a role the Nisqually earthquake played in the narrative of the story. Why is the Nisqually earthquake important? Well, first off, the book claims the earthquake measure 6.9 on the richter scale. I don't believe that's correct - it measured 6.8. Why quibble over something so minor? I believe, strongly, that when future writers look back at the history of Seattle and Amazon's role in city life, the Ash Wednesday earthquake will play a much larger role than anyone who didn't experience it can imagine. That earthquake, which wasn't even that large, trashed a lot of Seattle's commercial real estate. It wasn't just Amazon's PacMed building - there are still boarded up buildings in the city of Seattle today. It is my belief that Paul Allen's South Lake Union project (which had been resounding defeated by Seattle voters during the "commons" debate years earlier) would not have proceeded if it had not been for that earthquake. Which company has dived head first into the transformation of South Lake Union? You guessed it, Amazon. I used to hanging out in the late 90s in South Lake Union. You know who occupied South Lake Union in the late 90s? Dudes who lived in vans, that's who. I went back to that same exact area in 2011 and the place was virtually unrecognizable. This isn't Apple building a UFO shaped HQ in a California suburb that already resembles a golf course combined with the set of "Logan's Run." The project to transform South Lake Union is like Robert Moses on ten lattes - a massive transformation of an urban environment - with Amazon at the center. I could go on about this. About how the book neglected to mention the 1999 WTO conference, when newspaper columnists berated that the "black clad" protestors were "raging against the dot-coms in their own backyard as much as they were against global trade." Or I could mention the recent Seattle Times series from the Blethen family that snootily noted that Bezos is the least engaged civic leader in a city that hosts the majority of America's richest people. But, I won't. You get the picture. I don't think the book covered Amazon's tangled relationship with the city that well. Two other small points - and then I'll stop yakking. The book mentioned Pelago (where I spent seven months as a contract tester) as having been engaged in a mobile search project. I don't think that description is entirely correct. Yes, search was important, and yes, i'd heard that somehow people had or hadn't been asked by Google to come aboard. Still, I remember being told (even as a lowly contract tester) several times - "you might have heard this start-up is about location, email notifications, and tying coupons and deals together. It's not about that. You're not getting it." What's the old saying that was used during the Clinton impeachment trial? "When they say it's not about the sex, it's about the sex!" Pelago might had a lot of energy focused on mobile search - but it was basically an attempt to be a location-based Groupon before Groupon. It's infrastructure fit so well with what Groupon wanted to do that it (surprise!) folded into Groupon. Why did the book make so little mention of the relationship between Groupon and Amazon? Seattle tech blogs like GeekWire are regularly filled with stories of Groupon poaching Amazon executives. Both the rise of Groupon and their quirky and endearing first CEO wouldn't have been possible without Amazon and the existence of Bezos. Wall Street wouldn't have allowed it. One final point before I get off my soapbox. The very end of the book mentions a woman who worked for seven months at Amazon trying to get the company to embrace social media more broadly. Talk about understatement of the year. I've been continually amazed at the haphazard and lazy approach of both Amazon and Apple to social shopping. If Bezos isn't a big fan of music (grabbing assorted cds off a shelf without even looking to see what they are) I'm going to guess he doesn't use or see much need in using social media for shopping - which is a shame, since the Kindle is such a perfect platform for doing this. The @Author program was a great idea - but with zero follow up. The twitter feed hasn't been updated since February. The purchase of Goodreads looks like buying your way out of the problem. Anyways, I could write more. Amazon's a fascinating company, that I have a variety of opinions about. Purchase this book. You won't regret it. *You have to refer to yourself in the third person to be truly self absorbed.

"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." (p. 72) So commented an Amazon engineer in the late 1990s. I really like this book. Best corporate biography I ever have read. (Okay it beats Lee Iacocca's autobiography that I read in 1986.) Biographer Brad Stone, a veteran financial journalist and longtime observer of Amazon, conducted 300 interviews for this book -- a staggering sweep of research. It shows. His knowledge of Amazon culture comes across with an insider's familiarity but an outsider's objectivity. The narrative goes deep in places, and yet it bounces along, carried by personal quotes and anecdotes. It's darn interesting. The story is about Bezos the person and Amazon the business. It's rife with Bezo's uncanny vision, with allusions to how he got that way. Problems at Amazon come through too -- it's not all glory. Some problems are strategic in terms of product buying and selling, finances, and technical execution; and other problems concern Amazon's disquieting treatment of employees, suppliers, and smaller rivals in markets where Amazon wields major power. The story frequently gets personal looking at Jeff Bezos, but mercifully, the author stops just short of sensationalism or blind hero-worship or a masked publicity stunt for Amazon. The Everything Book is none of those things. Brad Stone's narrative admires Amazon's innovation and behemoth power build-up. He spends a lot of time on the first few years of the world wide web's emergence as a popular place to play, communicate, and shop. The narrative pauses briefly along the way at iconic cultural artifacts like Netscape's IPO in 1995. The book revivifies my days dialing up on my PC modem and using Netscape to browse Amazon and many other websites. Someday, that memory will be the stuff of a museum-goer's revelry or curiosity. The book strikes up that nostalgia right now, and that adds to the fun in the early chapters. The Amazon story launches in the mid-1990s when it was a family affair run by Bezos the now ex-financier and his wife, MacKenzie, out of a garage in Bellevue, Washington. Bezos "wanted to build he next Sears,'a lasting company that was a major force in retail." (p. 75). Would anyone now snicker at that? This is no ordinary garage hobby -- never was. We get a feel for the ground-level entrepreneurship too, where Bezos figured out how to elbow into a bookselling marketplace that was highly institutionalized, with relatively low profit margins. Ground-level entrepreneurship turns into "Jeff against the world," a cultural theme at Amazon, one executive reported years later. (p. 116) In an early example, Bezos risked industry resistance when he insisted on publishing customer reviews, whether favorable or unfavorable. Stone writes, "One important element in the early vision was that customers could leave written evaluations of any product, a more egalitarian and credible version of the old Montgomery Ward catalog reviews of its own suppliers..." (p. 24-25) "Naturally, some of the reviews were negative. In speeches, Bezos later recalled getting an angry letter from an executive at a book publisher implying that Bezos didn't understand that his business was to sell books, not trash them. 'We saw it very differently,' Bezos said. '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." (p. 38) Stone displays the Amazon culture as bursting with creative tension and customer obsession that produces. Sometimes Amazon also missed, just narrowly, financial overreach and spinout. Do you remember the news stories in the late 90s about Amazon having not turned a profit after 16 quarters or something like that, despite a high volume of activity? And all the talk about Bezos insisting on playing a long game, buying and holding "waterfront property" on the internet, so that somebody else wouldn't get there first, while Amazon's business developed? This book shows all the expansionary fervor of those years, including a trove of corporate acquisitions and investments like Pets.com and Drugstore.com. Crucially, there came a turning point in 1999: "Kelyn Brannon, Amazon's chief accounting officer at the time, says that she and Joy Covey pulled Bezos into a meeting to show him a form of financial analysis called common-sizing the income statement; it expressed each part of the balance sheet as a percentage of value to sales. The calculations showed that at its current rate, Amazon wouldn't become profitable for decades. 'It was an aha moment,' Brannon says. Bezos agreed to lift his foot from the accelerator and begin to move the company toward profitability." (p. 91) Amazon turned in its first profitable quarter in late 2001, seven years after its founding. While the accountants and Jeff fretted at the top over the financial pace, the reader of Stone's book gets a feel for the factory floor too -- an exciting whoosh of making history, and also, grueling work weeks: "The young CEO liked to recite, 'You can work long, you can work hard, you can work smart, but at Amazon you can't choose two out of three." (p. 46) Twice in the initial chapters, we hear about "Save Santa" campaigns involving the abandonment of what was left of personal and family life, in order to compensate for explosive holiday sales volume and staff under-capacity. So if you ever wondered how your order "click" got your goods shipped so quickly in the holiday crush: "The rapid growth once again required the company to initiate the Save Santa operation. Employees said good-bye to their families and headed off on two-week shifts to staff the customer-service phone lines or work in distribution centers across the country. Frugal to the bone, Amazon packed them two to a hotel room. To some, it was the greatest experience they had ever had at the company. Others hated it and complained vociferously." (p. 94-95) If that sounds hard on employees, the Everything Store says yes, it is. "At ten years old, Amazon could be a deeply unhappy place to work. The stock price was flat, there were strict limits on annual raises, and the pace was unrelenting. Employees felt underpaid and overworked. When the new development centers opened in Palo Alto and elsewhere, the joke inside Amazon was that it was a necessary move because everyone in Seattle was aware of how abjectly miserable employees at the company were." (p. 201) Another through-line is that, like the better-known Steve Jobs at Apple, Jeff Bezos had a passion for the customer experience and would tolerate nothing less from his subordinate managers: "With Christmas sales ramping up and hold times on Amazon phone lines once again growing longer, Bezos began the meeting by asking Price what the customer wait times were. Price then violated a cardinal rule at Amazon: he assured Bezos that they were well under a minute but without offering much in the way of proof. "Really?' Bezos said. 'Let's see.' On the speakerphone in the middle of the conference table, he called Amazon's 800 number. Incongruously cheerful hold music filled the room. Bezos took his watch off and made a deliberate show of tracking the time. A brutal minute passed, then two. Other execs fidgeted uncomfortably while Price furtively picked up his cell phone and quietly tried to summon his subordinates. Bezos's face grew red; the vein in his forehead, a hurricane warning system, popped out and introduced itself to the room. Around four and a half minutes passed, but according to multiple people at the meeting who related the story, the wait seemed interminable. "Eventually a cheerful voice blurted out, 'Hello, Amazon.com!' Bezos said, "I'm just calling to check," and slammed down the phone. Then he tore into Price, accusing him of incompetence and lying. "Price was gone about ten months later. "(p. 113) Stone's book shows that I have been sheltered from all that in my place as a happy customer. I'll be more sympathetic next time Amazon delivers their customarily fine service. While I find it disconcerting to hear grueling tales of woe inside Amazon's walls, the fact remains that as a customer, I have been an Amazon enthusiast. That makes this book all the more interesting for me. I have never worked at Amazon, nor invested there, nor do I know anyone who did. But I have appreciated Amazon for more than a decade. When Rupert Murdoch bought the Wall Street Journal, I fretted; but when Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, I thought hmmm, this could get interesting. That's how I felt as the book unfolded, and I was not disappointed. Further, the Audible.com version is perfectly performed. I recommended it to a business associate already on day one, when I was only a few chapters in. Speaking of day one, I quite enjoyed Stone's recitation on the door to Jeff Bezos's office: "There is so much stuff that has yet to be invented. There's so much new that's going to happen. People don't have any idea yet how impactful the Internet is going to be and that this is still Day 1 in such a big way. Jeff Bezos" (p. 9)

The Everything Store is a well written book by Brad Stone that describes the growth of Amazon through its trials and tribulations under the disciplined genius of Jeff Bezos. Mr. Bezos established his uncompromising and firm strategic business plan to harness the internet as the vehicle to revolutionize business, with focus on delivering the highest value to the consumer. The book describes the brilliant tactics used to accomplish his business strategic plan and the hurdles he faced, but successfully overcame, in order to accomplish his business plan. The book is a tremendous lesson in ability to stay focussed on objectives while remaining flexible and creative, and adaptable to challenges and change. Jeff Bezos demonstrates the single mindedness of purpose that is a lesson to all those who set their goal to accomplish great things. Without question Brad Stones book on Amazon is one of the most informative and interesting books Ive read in years. I highly recommended the book. After major inroads into the book business through price cutting, automating service and reducing delivery costs and times, Amazon challenged historical manufacturers and retailers of a number of hard manufactured goods, including the North American higher margin business of jewelry, brand name tools, etc. bringing to the customer new opportunities to obtain quality products at reduced costs in a timely fashion. Jeff Benzos chose a strategy of selling large volumes at lower prices, facilitating market growth, and increased market share with positive cash flow cycles leading to market domination; which, in turn, provided strong negotiating position for facilitating Amazons further expansion and growth . Adding attractive new products at every opportunity. The book introduces the great challenge of the future-how internet retailers are going to deal with state policy initiatives to rebuild their defunct treasuries, by taxing goods and services sold in their states via the internet from outside their states. The potential impacts of state taxes on internet sales risks creating a nightmare of complexity through huge variation in state tax rates and strangling the innovation of internet marketing that has provided lower inflation and increased consumer satisfaction. Such taxation risks stifling mom and pop internet sites.While Amazon has some strategic tools such as establishing FC s in states introducing state taxes on their business as a short term solution, there may be a need to develop simpler and less expensive long term strategies to deal with state initiatives on taxation. Will this challenge Amazon staff to dig deep for new philosophical and strategic approaches to dealing with state and fed political power?. Will Amazon's control of markets or financial power provide them with the leverage to influence gvt tax authority and governments often unaccountable power?. What will be the impacts of government future tax policies on low capitalized internet businesses, historically the raw material of future growth of the digital paradigm. Stone's book invites thought as much as it provides interesting historical facts about Amazon. One thing is certain, if it is creativity, adaptability, negotiating skills, strategic business planning, or innovation, history has demonstrated that Amazon has the organization, staff skills and leadership to face the challenges whatever they may involve. The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon is a book that reads well, and provides new knowledge on business strategy in every chapter. A wonderfully entertaining read.

Full disclosure: I’m a big Amazon fan. I’ve been writing reviews on the site for over a decade. I’m a highly satisfied shareholder and avid Prime customer. I also happen to believe that Jeff Bezos is among the most visionary and accomplished entrepreneurs and chief executives of modern times. In “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon,” veteran business reporter Brad Stone delivers an incisive, balanced, and fast-paced peak inside the secretive and amazingly innovative $150 billion tech behemoth. As a Silicon Valley technology executive who has long admired what Jeff Bezos has done up in Seattle, this book delivered two critical insights I found especially noteworthy. First, nothing can compensate for a founder/CEO of genius with a commanding ownership share in the enterprise. The more I live and the more learn, the more I realize that individuals really, really matter, particularly when they are in a position to make sweeping decisions. Like Steve Jobs at Apple or Larry Ellison at Oracle or Henry Ford, truly amazing things happen only when lightning strikes: when visionary entrepreneurs are also strong enough to hold on to their business creations and guide them forward, often pushing the kind of bold gambles and innovative risks that classically trained CEOs beholden to Wall Street analysts simply would never ponder. Nowhere is this more evident than with Amazon’s improbable rise from the ashes of the Dotcom bubble in the 2000s. The early story of Amazon’s rise in the mid-90s is familiar and, frankly, not terribly interesting in my opinion. A few daring and naïve young men and women in a garage pursuing a crazy dream that nobody thinks can work. It’s been told a thousand times. What makes Amazon so impressive is how the company survived and then thrived in the later years when many in the industry had written the company off for dead or irrelevancy. If Amazon had had a founder like eBay’s Pierre Omyidar, who quickly hired a seasoned executive like Meg Whitman to take over leadership of his highflying startup, I’m quite certain that the Amazon we know today would not exist. In fact, I’m nearly certain it would be gone, gobbled up by Walmart or some other retailer. Amazon Web Services, Kindle, Prime; each of these strategic initiatives were risky multi-billion dollar bets that would takes years to pay off, and yet Bezos bet big on each despite much hand-wringing from his board of directors and top lieutenants. As Stone writes, “Amazon had grown from a beleaguered dot-com survivor battered by the vicissitudes in the stock market into a diversified company whose products and principles had an impact on local communities, national economies, and the marketplace of ideas.” In short, Amazon is the Amazon we know today only because of Jeff Bezos. He has a vision, an irrepressible will, and an iron grip on strategic decision making. The second key insight has to do with that Bezosian vision, which Stone demonstrates is a relatively simple philosophy. “We don’t have a single big advantage,” Bezos has said, “so we have to weave a rope of many small advantages.” What is so remarkable is how tenaciously Bezos adheres to those principles and makes the most out of those small advantages, even when conventional business school wisdom suggests they are being foolish or reckless. At the core of the philosophy is long-term, customer centric thinking. Here’s how Bezos describes it: “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 two or three years, and if they don’t work in two or three 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, that is why we are different.” Again, only a company with a visionary founder with general management acumen and a commanding ownership stake in the enterprise can ensure that a company sticks to those kinds of principles in the face of mounting losses and withering criticism from Wall Street analysts. Closely associated to this “long-term-customer-first” mentality is Amazon’s relentless focus on lowering prices. Stone suggests that a 2001 meeting between Bezos and Costco founder Jim Sinegal was pivotal. Sinegal told Bezos: “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.” For Bezos it was an epiphany – and a roadmap. Amazon was “going to be the second, full-stop.” The focus on “customer first” and low prices has allowed Amazon to emerge as a world class, truly unique retailer that blends the best of “Walmart AND Nordstrom’s.” These core values have shaped the culture at Amazon. The first, “frugality,” is starkly different from competitors like Google, famous for their free lunches and massages. “We try not to spend money on things that don’t matter to customers. Frugality breeds resourcefulness, self-sufficiency and invention. There are no extra points for headcount, budget pie or fixed expense.” To this day, senior Amazon executives flight coach and Stone notes that Bezos, one of the richest men in the world, still uses his coffee card at Amazon that allows him to get his 10th drink free. Next, Amazon prides itself on a no-holds-barred approach to getting things done, where teamwork is critical, yet all executives are exhorted to “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.” In Bezos’ own words: “The reason we are here is to get stuff done; that is the top priority. That is the DNA of Amazon. If you can’t excel and put everything into it, this might not be the place for you.” The drive for delivering lower costs has also developed a bare knuckles style of market competition. Stone suggests that Amazon is willing to go to extraordinary lengths to deliver on that low price promise, often throwing its weight around in a way that would even make the flinty executives in Bentonville blush. Once a new and threatening competitor like Zappos was identified, Bezos was prepared to go nuclear to ensure that either Zappos caved and sold out or they would be put out of business. “They have an absolute willingness to torch the landscape around them to emerge the winner,” one vanquished rival is quoted as saying. The story of Kindle is illustrative as well. Bezos witnessed how quickly Apple destroyed Amazon’s music business with the launch of iPod and iTunes. He was determined not to see the same thing happen to their core books business. His heavy handed approach with the major book publishers was reminiscent of Steve Jobs browbeating the major music labels. Bezos picked an eBook price of $9.99 despite the howls of publishers and the absence of any market research to back up the decision. He picked $9.99 straight from the gut, much as Jobs did with $0.99 per song. The price ensured that Amazon would lose money and generated a near revolt from their publisher partners. Bezos simply didn’t care; he stuck to his guns even in the face of a major lawsuit. One of the few disappointing aspects of this book for me was how little attention Stone devoted to Bezos’ private life, especially his marriage and family. Bezos married before founding Amazon and his wife, MacKenzie, was an early and important employee. Twenty-five years later they are still married and have four children. Yet none of this is discussed in the book. We learn in the book’s final pages that MacKenzie still often drives Jeff to work in a Honda mini-van after dropping their kids off at school, giving the corporate titan a peck-on-the-cheek before depositing him at the gates of his empire. It’s an intriguing glimpse into the human side of Bezos that the author did not pursue for one reason or another. In closing, “The Everything Store” is an eye-opening account into an iconic and innovative corporation, which Stone calls “…relentlessly innovative and disruptive, as well as calculating and ruthless.” Indeed, Amazon is something of a Jekyll and Hyde. Or to use Randy Komisar’s terms from his 2001 book “The Monk and the Riddle,” Amazon is both a “missionary” (a company with a mission beyond making money) and a “mercenary” (a company dedicated to competing and winning). “The Everything Store” is a good biography of a company; but only a lukewarm biography of Jeff Bezos the man, even though Amazon is, in many ways, the corporate manifestation of its brilliant founder and chief executive.

As a young boy I was fascinated by a bug; a water strider that was able to walk on water, was difficult to capture, and had strident ambitions to skitter to every remote corner of the ponds near my tiny home town. It seems to me, after reading Brad Stone's fascinating book "the everything store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon," that Bezos is the real life embodiment of that extraordinary creature. Stone has done his research. He has read innumerable books on discount retailing, human engineering, management principles, and similar subjects in his preparation for writing the book. He has included Jeff's own reading list at the end of the book, a diverse collection of subjects Bezos claims is integral to understanding Amazon's unorthodox ethic. With Bezos's approval, Stone has also interviewed many current and past employees of Amazon as well as innumerable Bezos friends and family members. The author's notes authenticate the sources for his material. According to Stone, Bezos maintains that he learns more from novels than nonfiction and, indeed, his direction of Amazon efforts seems unreal. His insistence on doing things his way despite advice and convention that would indicate he is on the wrong track seems to be the very essence of Amazon's success. He is stubborn, prickly, and sometimes bluntly rude but after the dust settles he stands undeniably as the top dog and correct in his direction. Amazon has emerged, through an undeniably rough odyssey, as the largest retail entity in history using innovative technology that seems to dwarf other companies' capabilities. The work environment at Amazon is not for the weak. Turnover is monumental. Bezos demands more than his executives can handle and is not generous with his praise or rewards. Where other companies offer generous employees perks such as lucrative stock and bonus programs, babysitting, employee gyms, free food, and free perking, Amazon has countered with anemic stock programs, explosive internal culture, a miserly parking program, no free food, lower pay, and tortuous working hours. Bezos turns a blind eye to the continuous turnover, knowing they always have a huge employment pool with people clamoring for jobs. Bezos fits into the mold of other famously irascible CEOs. He, along with Jobs, Gates, Ballmer, and Grove have all thrown monumental tantrums including spontaneous firing of employees, throwing phones and chairs, and screaming at under performing executives. Product managers suffer through constant micromanagement by Bezos, facing the possibility of being on the receiving end of one of his explosions. In the end, because of his creative genius and record of making the right choices, Amazon has created many millionaires among those who stuck it out. This book is an amazing look at the culture and inside workings of a notoriously secretive company. It features great insight into the dictums and principles of a company operating in rogue fashion that defies conventional practices and theories about manufacturing, personnel relations, and accounting. The single most dominating and cultural edict mandated by Jeff Bezos is that the customer is always right, above anything else that is practiced within the company. Based upon Amazon's success, it apparently works. Back to the bug. The water strider exists in a crowded community but yearns for freedom of movement. When things get too congested it reduces the crowd by either skimming to a new location or by cannibalization. I'm still amazed by the similarity to Jeff Bezos. Schuyler T Wallace Author of TIN LIZARD TALES

Author Brad Stone has written a fascinating account of the company - Amazon - and the icon - Jeff Bezos, who have changed the way of life for millions in the last two decades. An amazing story that how can one individual; all with his roaring laughter and volcanic temper; achieve so much for humanity, his company and himself. And if his life so far is any benchmark, there is much more to Jeff Bezos in the years ahead, including his forays into space. Jeff Bezos is not someone you love after reading this but now you know why you love Amazon as a customer- obsessed company. You take a thrilling ride on the Roller Coaster of Amazon's stock price. Get a bird's eye view on Amazon Prime, 1Click buying and recently, the Kindle series and many other ideas that failed. While reading it cover to cover (on my Kindle), I was often reminded of the other Icon and a similar biography that came out just a year back. "To me, A is a story of a brilliant founder who personally drove the vision. ..J is a classic technical founder of a business, who understands every detail and cares about it more than anyone. ...J has proved quite indifferent to the opinion of others. .... He is a micromanager with limitless spring of new ideas, and he reacts harshly to efforts that don't meet his rigorous standards. . A's corporate mission is to raise the bar across industries , and around the world, for what it means to be customer focused, but they can be ruthlessly competitive with partners and even partners. " The A and J here is obviously Amazon and Jeff (Bezos) but could be easily replaced with Apple and Jobs (Steve) , Two men with rocky childhoods yet rising up to being Time "Person of the Year" and impacting the whole of humanity in their own unique ways. These are some nuggets of wisdom from Bezos ("Jeffism", as sprinkled in the book) which I am tempted to share, raising the bar of respect a notch higher for Jeff Bezos and Amazon. 1. We are genuinely customer - centric, we are genuinely long term oriented and we genuinely like to invent. Most companies are not those things 2. When a company comes up with an idea, it's a messy process. There's no aha moment. 3. Every time we hire someone, he or she should raise the bar for the next hire, so that the overall talent pool is always improving. All new hires have to directly improve the outcome of the company. 4. You can work long, you can work hard, you can work smart but at Amazon, you can't choose two out of three. 5. Look, you should wake up worried, terrified every morning. But don't be worried about competitors because they are never going to send us money anyway. Let's be worried about our customers and stay heads-down-focused. We pay attention to our competitors but that's not where we put our energy. 6. Frugality breeds resourcefulness, self-sufficiency and invention. There are no extra points for headcount, budget size or fixed expense. 7. It is far better to cannibalize yourself than have someone else do it. 8. These are our Six core values: Customer obsession, frugality, bias for action, ownership, high bar for talent and innovation. 9. Inventing is cool. Explorers are cool. Conquerors are not cool. Thinking big is cool. The unexpected is cool. Missionaries are cool. Mercenaries are not cool. 10. When you are Eighty years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection only for yourself, the telling that will be be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices.

This is a well written business biography that includes many details about Amazon's growth. Brad Stone describes Jeff Bezos as a guy who just knew, from the very start, that he could do something that changed the way Americans bought things, and not just books. Bezos started on Wall Street as an investment banker, but he had the heart of an entreprenuer and knew when to jump at that astonishing innovation, the internet. Given the subject this book was destined to be a hit. Stone describes the way that many Amazon innovations came about including customer reviews, author and book rankings and fast shipping. He describes the early days of ordering and the painful growth that companies go through when they need more experienced talent, and must choose between the old employees who made them succeed and new employees who can help them grow. Bezos realized early on that he had a massive distribution challenge. To meet that challenge he hired the masters of distribultion...at Walmart. Its not always a pretty story, but its one that many business students will recognise--despite Bezos invention of a brand new business. I enjoyed this book as a business biography, but not as much as I expected to. What's missing is the magic, the crazy stories, the sheer fun of innovation. Amazon started in the book business, not home goods or auto parts but you wouldn't know it to read much of this book. Stone doesn't seem to have found many people with good stories to tell. Stone misses what made Amazon such a revelation and why the other websites could not compete. Amazon created not just a big bookstore, but a real online community bookstore. For the first time people who loved book shopping more than anything could do it from home. In 1998 Amazon was my home page. Why? I just loved browsing. I could not believe that I could do it from home. Millions of people, just like me, did the same thing. It seemed incredible, still does, that I could browse a website the way I browse in a bookstore. Not only that, I could have conversations with other booklovers about the books. Maybe Bezos loved that too. I have no idea because The Everything Store boils that kind of thing down to "caring about customers" and an "obsession with customer service." Its a shame. There was a lot more to Amazon's growth than customer service (fast delivery and a generous return policy) and good distribution, though those things were important. There was also the joy of being able to access thousand and thousands of books--and talk about them. For those addicted to the New York Times Book section Amazon was an undreamed of luxury. And once there was Kindle, the joy of being able to download sample after sample, to find the perfect book, just made everything better. Yes, I've bought all kinds of things through Amazon, clothing, appliances, cookware, even household goods for my child in college, but Amazon will always be a bookstore to me first. This is a good book, no question. But something tells me that the really great Jeff Bezos book, has yet to be written.

Compelling and nuanced. Comparable to Ashley Vance's Elon Musk: slightly less inspiring, slightly more detailed, more about the company than the person.

Vous ne ressortirez pas indemne de la lecture de ce livre fouillé et ambitieux, qui relate avec menus détails l'histoire des 20 premières années d'Amazon. Ce livre, c'est avant tout l'histoire fascinante d'une vision, d'une ambition, d'une détermination sans faille de construire LA référence en matière de commerce en ligne et, à cette fin, de servir au mieux les intérêts des consommateurs, quitte à faire grincer des dents les concurrents. A ce titre, l'ouvrage se révèle une formidable source d'inspiration pour tous ceux qui rêvent ou témoignent du désir d'embrasser de grandes choses. L'auteur présente brillamment, à travers les nombreux défis auxquels Amazon a été confronté, la manière dont l'Internet a révolutionné le commerce de détail, pour toujours. L'on apprend quantité de choses sur la création de l'entreprise (the glorious but chaotic early days), son développement en pleine période de bulle dot.com, la folle époque des acquisitions à tout va au début des années 2000, le scepticisme des investisseurs et des analystes, la politique de recrutement et les techniques de management très particulières de ce géant de l'Internet, la stratégie fiscale de l'entreprise, la politique d'innovation symbolisée par le Kindle, les conflits d'intérêts avec concurrents et fournisseurs, et plus encore... Lire ce livre, c'est vivre ce qu'est la "destruction créatrice" du capitalisme, si chère Joseph Schumpeter (ce qu'elle signifie réellement au quotidien, ce qu'elle implique pour les concurrents, les employés, les cadres de l'entreprise, les consommateurs) et c'est assister à l'application féroce, en matière de business, des préceptes de L'art de la guerre de Sun Tse. Ce livre fourmille de détails et d'anecdotes qui permettent au lecteur d'appréhender la réalité quotidienne et concrète d'une telle entreprise, loin des préjugés et autres a prioris trop communs aux médias de manière générale. En outre, j'ai beaucoup apprécié l'effort entrepris par l'auteur pour décrypter l'extraordinaire personnalité de Jeff Bezos et sa formidable intelligence (et ce rire...). La présentation de ses investissements dans d'autres projets (Washington Post, Blue Origin...) permet également de mieux mesurer la dimension de ce personnage. La bibliographie présentée en fin d'ouvrage constitue un ajout précieux. Dernier point. Je recommande la lecture de ce livre en anglais. L'écriture est fluide et très agréable, et il s'agit d'un excellent moyen de revoir ou d'acquérir du vocabulaire anglais des affaires.

One of the best business books ever. Period.

Brad Stone has done a superb job compiling years in the make of Amazon. There is a lot of research behind the pages of this book and the final delivery is simply outstanding!

Sono una lettrice seriale di biografie,dalle rockstars agli scienziati, dalle figure storiche fino alle storie vere e proprie delle aziende e dei loro fondatori....e quindi non potevo certo non leggere quella di Bezos e Amazon. Non nego che temevo un po’ quell’effetto autoreferenziale tipico di questo genere di libri (considerando questo nello specifico poi!) ma, nel raccontare la storia di Amazon, l’autore non si esime dal descrivere anche i lati meno positivi del carattere del suo fondatore: estremamente determinato nel realizzare la sua visione e nel migliorarmento costante dei propri risultati ma anche piuttosto intollerante nei confronti delle necessita’ dei suoi collaboratori, anche piu' stretti e fedeli e nonostante il loro impegno e devozione per l’azienda. Interessanti poi sono i molti retroscena dell’universo Bezos, dagli albori di Amazon (anzi Cadabra...) fino a Blue Origin... letto in inglese perche’ credo sia il genere di libri da leggere assolutamente in lingua originale, scorrevole per un livello di inglese medio.