Author: Brad Stone
_Brad Stone_
Reading time: 17 minutes
Synopsis
Amazon started in Jeff Bezos’s garage. He had a vision for an “Everything Store.” It grew into a multi-billion dollar company. This was thanks to its founder’s unique way of thinking. These Blinks for The Everything Store (2013) will show you how Bezos made his vision come true.
What’s in it for you: Learn from the founder of a very successful online company.
In 1994, few people understood what the internet could do in the future. Jeff Bezos had always dreamed of an online business. This business would sell almost every product in the world. It would connect producers and customers directly.
He was amazed by how fast the internet was growing. So, he quit his well-paid job at the hedge fund D.E. Shaw & Co. He wanted to focus completely on his “Everything Store” vision. He quickly moved to Seattle. There, in his garage, he started a company called Amazon.
Bezos soon realized that building his “Everything Store” would not be easy. At first, he would need to sell only a few types of products. This would help him build the company. After careful study, he chose books.
What came next was an amazing success story.
In these Blinks, you will learn:
- the secrets behind Amazon’s success,
- how Amazon founder Jeff Bezos thinks, and
- why the best team size should be based on how many pizzas it takes to feed them.
Blink 1 – Customer happiness is Amazon’s top priority.
From the start, Amazon aimed to set higher standards for customer service. This was true across all industries and around the world.
Since then, the online store has added many features. They all had one goal: to serve the customer.
For example, Amazon added customer reviews. Publishers did not like this. But Amazon placed these independent and often critical opinions clearly next to the publishers’ own ads. Amazon also decided to let sellers and private people offer used products. This met with resistance inside the company at first. But customers liked it very much.
Amazon also works hard to make its delivery systems better. It wants to meet customers’ wish to get their ordered products as quickly as possible. The complex delivery work needed for this is mostly hidden from customers.
Jeff Bezos knew early on that online business had clear advantages over traditional shops. You can analyze what customers do very accurately. Amazon does this consistently. Product suggestions shown to each customer are based on their past actions on the website. This feature brought high sales for Amazon from the start. It helped guide customers to products that were right for them.
We cannot deny that Amazon is driven by an almost obsessive focus on the customer. This is at the heart of its business model. Amazon states this simply: “Our goal is to be the most customer-centric company on the planet.”
The company fears nothing more than a customer complaint sent by email. Especially if Bezos personally forwards it with a question mark.
Blink 2 – Frugality is important in all company areas.
Amazon is now a multi-billion dollar company. But it started in a garage and fought hard in the business world for twenty years. Because of this, Amazon is still very frugal today. Many people might find it too much. Jeff Bezos truly believes that being frugal helps. It helps focus on important things like customer happiness. It also helps with being creative when resources are limited.
Amazon employees pay for their own parking tickets. They do not get free snacks. When they travel for work, they share hotel rooms. Managers also pay for their own flights. Work life at Amazon is tough. It is shaped by competition. The company motto shows this: „You can work long, you can work hard, you can work smart, but at Amazon you can’t choose two out of three.“
The same is true for the delivery centers. Low-paid employees walk up to 30 km every day at work. The huge halls are very quiet. It is said that employees are even fired if they talk to each other.
Since it began, Amazon has hired tens of thousands of temporary workers. This happens especially during busy times like Christmas. Most of them are then let go again. The pattern is this: Delivery centers are built in poor areas. People often welcome this at first. They hope it will improve the local economy. But Amazon simply takes advantage of being able to hire and fire workers as needed, at low wages. It knows there will always be enough temporary workers locally for the next time.
Blink 3 – Amazon has a unique company culture.
Amazon’s company culture is unique. For example, there are never presentations in internal meetings. Instead, employees must write their points in a six-page document. All meeting attendees then read this document in silence. This can take up to 30 minutes. Jeff Bezos believes this forces employees to question their ideas carefully. This way, they can present them more clearly on paper.
Another unusual idea at Amazon is the Two-Pizza Team rule. In the company, no team should be so large that two pizzas cannot feed it. Bezos thinks meetings with large groups are not useful. So, the whole company is divided into independent teams of fewer than ten people. These teams compete with each other. They compete for resources. Their job is to solve any problems that might affect customer happiness.
Bezos is said to have once said: „Communication is terrible!“ He wants a company that works without central control. It should develop new ideas in small groups. This avoids wasting valuable time on big brainstorming sessions. Small groups are quick to act. They can put ideas into practice faster. This ensures that ideas quickly reach where they need to go: to the customer.
Amazon meetings are usually very data-focused. All employees must prove their claims with data. It is less about customer stories and more about detailed Excel tables. These tables contain numbers important for the business. Everything is measured with numbers. This includes customer behavior or how well marketing works. The idea is: „Numbers don’t lie.“
Blink 4 – Thinking long-term leads to the biggest success.
According to Bezos, Amazon’s greatest strength is its willingness to be misunderstood by others. This is especially true for Amazon’s business model. Many people only see that Amazon often makes short-term losses. What they don’t consider is that the company thinks long-term. It accepts short-term losses if they help reach its goals.
For many years, Amazon spent huge amounts of money to build its infrastructure. These losses kept many investors awake at night. Today it is clear: These huge investments allowed Amazon to secure its place in online retail.
In general, Jeff Bezos tells his employees to do whatever makes customers happy right now. Even if it costs money, it creates loyal customers. These customers promise profit in the long run.
An interesting example is the e-book. When e-books started to become popular, Bezos decided to sell them for a standard price of $9.99. However, Amazon bought e-books for the same price as printed books. So, the company lost about five dollars on each e-book sold. Bezos accepted this. He believed that publishers would lower prices eventually. He also wanted to establish Amazon as the main place for e-books early on. In the end, this strategy led to a billion-dollar business. It paved the way for the great success of the Kindle.
What makes Amazon very different from many other companies is its long-term thinking. This was true from the very start of the company. Bezos had a huge vision. He knew it would take decades to make it real.
His idea is that long-term thinking and strong effort lead to the biggest success.
Blink 5 – In his private life, Jeff Bezos invests in long-term projects.
One of Jeff Bezos’s childhood dreams, which drives his search for wealth, is space travel. This dream cannot happen overnight, of course. It shows that Bezos’s private projects also reflect his long-term thinking.
For example, Bezos funds the building of an underground clock in Texas. It will run for 10,000 years with almost no repairs. It ticks only once a year. The century hand moves every 100 years. When a new millennium begins, a cuckoo bird comes out of the clock.
This special clock will also be open to visitors. It aims to give people a sense of longer time spans. It supports the idea of long-term thinking. It wants to offer a new view of time. This is like how pictures of Earth from space help us understand how big things are.
Speaking of space: Let’s return to the Amazon founder’s childhood dream. Bezos’s most famous project right now is the „Blue Origin“ space program. This program develops technology to allow private people to fly into space. It aims to make it easier and much cheaper than before. The long-term goal of the program is to settle people in space.
Blink 6 – At Amazon, doers and brave people are rewarded.
During the Dot-com bubble in the late 1990s, Amazon lost hundreds of millions. This was because it bought start-ups that were part of the bubble. Amazon struggled with its mistakes. But it also learned important lessons. From then on, it was extra careful with buying other companies. It also developed a “do-it-yourself” culture. Now, the company simply makes new products itself instead of getting them from others.
It acts very bravely. It is not afraid to start things before they are thought through in every detail. Even if this leads to mistakes, Jeff Bezos prefers this approach. This is because analyzing everything too much also means missing many chances.
That Bezos is a doer is clear from his decision to start Amazon. Most other people would have kept their well-paid job as a hedge fund manager. They would not have quit to start an online bookstore with their own and their parents’ savings.
Since Amazon started, Bezos has encouraged his employees to risk making mistakes and try new things. This led to big failures, such as Amazon Auctions. They could not compete with eBay and were stopped. But in many other cases, great new ideas came out, like the 1-Click purchase option.
Inside the company, Bezos even created a „Just Do It” Award. This award goes to employees who have done something great on their own, especially outside their normal work. It can also honor a failed attempt that was started with courage and bravery.
But because Amazon is frugal, the prize is not money. It is a pair of Nike sneakers from a former basketball player.
Blink 7 – Amazon’s range of products extends to unexpected areas.
After Bezos successfully made Amazon a strong online bookseller, he started selling music, movies, electronics, and toys. He also created a marketplace. Here, other sellers could sell their own goods. With the Kindle, Amazon also became the most important player in the world of e-books.
Bezos saw early on that his customers would need a mobile e-reader. This was to read the e-books that were slowly becoming popular. So, Amazon took on this challenge and developed the Kindle. When the first version came out in November 2007, the device sold out in six hours. In 2011, Amazon released sales numbers for the Kindle. More than one million were sold per week.
What many people don’t know: Amazon also offers tech services. One example is the cloud computing service Amazon Web Services (AWS). Many other companies, as well as the US government, NASA, and the CIA, use Amazon’s storage space and computing power through AWS. This service supports many online start-ups. It provides servers for Instagram and Netflix, among others.
With AWS, Amazon changed its image. Amazon customers were suddenly not just book readers. They were also start-up developers buying terabytes to solve the world’s problems.
Blink 8 – Amazon’s journey has only just begun.
Almost 20 years after starting in a garage, Amazon is closer than ever to its first vision of an “Everything Store.” But for Jeff Bezos, this is no reason to relax. He believes the company’s growth is far from over.
Many challenges await Amazon: same-day delivery, its own fleet of trucks, Amazon Fresh, becoming a publishing and media company, building its own film studio, making its own smartphones and TVs, global expansion, and maybe even setting up a 3D printing service.
Bezos does not believe in limits. For him, there is nothing Amazon cannot do. There is no product that cannot be sold online. So much is still to be invented. So much lies in the unknown future. According to Bezos, most people do not know about the endless possibilities of the internet.
Bezos’s unique way of thinking has made Amazon what it is today. It is a company that fulfills customers’ wishes every day and creates new ones. It makes its own rules and constantly grows. After some difficulties at the start, Bezos managed to make his vision a reality. With every new product Amazon adds to its already huge range, it becomes more and more the “Everything Store.”
Today, Amazon’s yearly sales are a huge $75 billion. Yet, for Bezos, the journey has only just begun.
Blink 9 – Summary
The great success of the online giant Amazon comes from rules shaped by its founder, Jeff Bezos. Customer focus, long-term and future-focused thinking, and a desire to grow are at the heart of the company. Amazon sees itself as the “Everything Store.”
For further reading: Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance
Elon Musk is one of the most amazing people of our time. Ashlee Vance’s biography takes readers on a journey through Musk’s life. It covers his career, his technical inventions, his personal values, and his private life. We learn that he is an ambitious leader and a talented mind. Most of all, he is a person with a vision: Elon Musk wants to save humanity from dying out.
Source: https://www.blinkist.com/https://www.blinkist.com/de/books/der-allesverkaufer-de