1. Some information:
Why did Jeff Bezos later rename the company after a river?
Amazon—“This is not only the largest river in the world; it’s many times larger than the next biggest river. It blows all other rivers away”.
What do these shorthands stand for?
A9: shorthand for Algorithm (nine letters in the word). A subsidiary of Amazon in Palo Alto.
Lab126: another subsidiary in Palo Alto in addition to A9. Lab126, the 1 stands for a, the 26 for z. It is a subtle indication of Bezos’s dream to allow customers to buy any book ever publish, from a to z.
AWS: Amazon Web Services – a platform for small online merchants. “It is not hyperbole to say that AWS helped lift the entire technology industry out of a prolonged post-dot-com malaise.”
2. Descriptions of Jeff Bezos’s outlook, his temper and his laugh
“Bezos was in his midtwenties at the time, five foot eight inches tall, already balding and with the pasty, rumpled appearance of a committed workaholic. “
“Back in 2000, a few years of unrelenting international travel had taken their toll and he looked pasty and out of shape. Now he is lean and fit. He’s even cropped his awkwardly balding pate right down to the dome, which gave him a sleek look suggestive of one of his science-fiction heroes, Captain Picard of Star Trek: The Next Generation. “
“Single at the time, he started taking ballroom-dance classes, calculating that it would increase his exposure to what he called n+ women”
“… with his cheerful demeanor, southern drawl, and pendant for wearing shorts year-round.”
"Steely-eye founder; steely expression"
"volcanic temper; went off like a bomb"
“In private, Bezos could bite an employee’s head right off”.
"He barked into his cell phone at his underlings, "This is pathetic."
“Bezos was prone to melodramatic temper tantrums that some Amazon employee called, privately, nutters.”
"honking laugh; raucous laugh; hearty laugh;"
“…heart-stabbing sound that slices through conversation and rocks its target back on their heels. Bezos wields his laugh like a weapon. It’s disarming and punishing.”
"Gunfire burst of laughter, startling Birtwistle, who almost veered off the highway."
“…Jeff’s laugh rebounding against the walls”
"...his laugh cutting through the Mexican night."
“His booming, uninhibited laugh occasionally causes problem.”
“Jeff laughs too loud..” his brothers complained, “And his laughter was drowning out everything.”
“He (Bezos) has Ted’s (his biological father) laugh. It’s almost exact.”
3. Jeff Bezos’s family:
Mother: Jacklyn Gise (Maiden last name); Jacklyn Bezos (after the second marriage). Jackie married Ted Jorgensen at the age of 16 when she was pregnant. Ted was two years senior than her. Both of them were still at high school then.
Biological father: Theodore John Jorgensen, a renowned circus performer, was one of Albuquerque’s best unicyclists. He married Jackie at the age of 18. Jackie filed for divorce when Jeff Bezos was seventeen months old. When Jackie was remarried in 1968, Ted Jorgensen was asked to “stay away” from their lives. Ted gave the promise not to interfere them, and lost track of the family afterwards. “His own bad choices haunted him”.
Stepfather: Miguel Bezos (later called himself Mike), an immigrant from Cuban, came to the U.S. (Miami) in 1962 at the age of 16. Miguel married Jackie in April 1968 and then moved to Houston when he got a job at Exxon. Four-year-old Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen became Jeffrey Preston Bezos and started calling Miguel Bezos Dad.
In 1995, Bezos’s parents, Jackie and Mike Bezos, invested $100,000 in Amazon. And more afterwards.
“Mike and Jackie were the kind of parents who always encouraged Jeff and nurtured his creativity.”
Grandpa: Lawrence Preston "Pop" Gise. "Between the age of 4 and 16, Jeff Bezos spent every summer with his grandparents.
Gise, was in many ways bezos's mentor, who Instilled in him the value of self-reliance and resourcefulness. There was very little he couldn't do himself.
Pop Gise taught bezos checkers and then soundly and repeatedly defeated him, despite Jackie's pleading with him to let Jeff win a match. He'll beat me when he's ready to."
"It later emerged that he was looking to buy land for a Texas ranch. Bezos wanted to give his kids the same experience he'd had growing up in his grandparents' ranch in Cotulla.
4. More about Jeff Bezos, his personality, likes, dislikes, the company practice, etc.
“Bezos didn’t just love books—he fully imbibed them, methodically processing each detail. Stewart Brand, the author of How Buildings Learn, recalls being startled when Bezos showed him his personal copy of the 1995 book. Each page was filled with Bezos’s carefully scribbled notes.”
"He was precocious and determined and incredibly focused"(his mother's comment on Jeff Bezos when he was a child)
“He was disciplined and precise, constantly recording ideas in a notebook he carried with him, as if they might float out of his mind if he didn’t jot them down."
He's hell on the details and in the thick of the design and very strict in where costs are going.
“… he never takes the office elevator, always the stairs”
"Bezos has proved quite indifferent to the opinion of others. He is an avid problem solver, a man who has a chess grand master’s view of the competitive landscape, and he applies the focus of an obsessive-compulsive to pleasing customers and providing services like free shipping. He has vast ambitions- not only for Amazon, but to push the boundaries of science and remake the media. In addition to funding his own rocket company, Blue Origin, Bezos acquired the ailing Washington Post newspaper company in August 2013 for $250 million in a deal that stunned the media industry."
"Bezos and his employees are indeed absorbed with catering to customers, but they can also be ruthlessly competitive with rivals and even partners. Bezos likes to say that the markets Amazon competes in are vast, with room for many winners. That’s perhaps true, but it’s also clear that Amazon has helped damage or destroy competitors small or large, many of whose brands were once world renowned: Circuit city, Borders, Best Buy, Barnes & Noble."
“a TV both as a clumsy attempt at interoffice communication and an extravagant expenditure”
“…repeating his quote about working smart, hard, and long. Jeff did not believe in work-life balance. He believed in work-life harmony. I guess the idea is you might be able to do everything all at once.”
“Physically, I am a chicken. Mentally I’m bold”. (Jeff Bezos said)
Bezos used that word a lot: bold.
"Bezos is an excruciatingly prudent communicator for his own company. He is sphinxlike with details of his plan, keeping thoughts and intentions private, and he’s an enigma in the Seattle business community and in the broad technology industry. He rarely speaks at conference and gives media interview infrequently."
“Five core values: customer obsession, frugality, bias for action, ownership, and high bar for talent. Later Amazon would add a sixth value, innovation.”
“The door-desks are often held up as a symbol of the company’s enduring frugality."
"We try not to spend money on things that don't matter to customers. Frugality breeds resourcefulness, self-sufficiency and invention."
"Bezos suggested to Blake in a meeting that Amazon should approach these small publishers the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle."
"Amazon was like a high-school bully picking on an elementary-school kid."
“ He was capable of both hyperbole and cruelty in these moments, and over the years he delivered some devastating rebukes to employees.”
"Bezos, like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Larry Ellison, lacks a certain degrees of empathy and that as a result he treats workers like expendable resources without taking into account their contributions to the company.”
“Jeff does not tolerate stupidity, even accidental stupidity.”
“Then Jeff Bezos, his face red and blood vessel in his forehead pulsing, spoke up."
"As many of his employees will attest, Bezos is extremely difficult to work for. …He is a micromanager with a limitless spring of new ideas, and he reacts harshly to efforts that don’t meet his rigorous standards."
“If you’re not good, Jeff will chew you up and spit you out. And if you’re good, he will jump on your back and ride you into the ground.”
“Kaphan felt bitter resentment about his five year odyssey. He calls bezos’s decision to remove him from active participation in Amazon “a betrayal of a sacred trust” between people who had started a business together….It was a distilled version of dissatisfaction felt by many early amazon employees.”
“He demanded more than they could possibly deliver and was extremely stingy with praise.”
"...reprimand Lye and her colleagues in his customarily devastating way."
"He was as stingy about handing out stock as he was about allowing employees to fly business-class. "
"frugal to bone"
"Bezos enforced strict frugality in Amazon’s daily operations; he made employees pay for parking and required all executive to fly coach."
"Most of the executives left after a year or two, repulsed by the frenetic pace, the dreary Seattle weather, or both."
"Bezos worked his subordinates to exhaustion, supplied little in the way of corporate creature comforts, and allowed many key personnel to leave without showing any remorse. But he was also capable of deeply gracious and unexpected expressions of his appreciation. Dalzell had performed heroically for a decade and kept company on the track in the gloomy days when infrastructure was a mess and Google was poaching (stealing) every other engineer."
The book “revealed the company as relentlessly innovative and disruptive, as well as calculating and ruthless. Amazon’s behavior was a manifestation of Bezos’s own competitive personality and boundless intellect, writ large on the business landscape.” (ending paragraph of chapter 8)
“We did not want to be Kodak”. The reference was to the century-old photography giant whose engineers had invented digital cameras in the 1970s but whose profit margins were so healthy that its executives could not bear to risk it all on an unproven venture in a less profitable frontier."
"Bezos made a big show of keeping one chair open at the conference-room table "for the customer”."
"Amazon wielded its market power neither light nor gracefully, employing every bit of leverage to improve its own margins and pass along savings to its customers."
"Bezos was sponging up everything the older man said."
"We are trying to create a tide that will lift all boats."
"We all worried the sun wasn't going to come out again the next day, but it did."
"I think it is a bit of stretch to say that we are cornering the market."
"The move stirred up an avalanche of criticism."
The critics piled on.
They wished away the things they did not want to face.
She had watched Tim’s rise to fame and fortune over the past two decades with admiration and amazement but without much surprise.
Amazon is increasingly a daily presence in modern life.
Powerpoint decks or slide presentations are never used in meetings.
What happened next became one of the founding legends of the Internet.
When you are in the thick of things, you can get confused by small stuff.
It wasn’t naivete about new technology that unnerved them. Rather, it was seeing their accomplished son leave a well-paying job on Wall Street to pursue an idea that sounded like utter madness.
Disruptive small companies could triumph.
Spout off big ideas faster than anyone could practically do anything with them
Go on a wild $300 million spending spree
Bezos had imbibed Walton’s book thoroughly and wove the Walmart founder’s credo about frugality and a “bias for action” into the cultural fabric of Amazon. Bezos’s point was that every company in retail stands on the shoulders of the giants that came before it.
The book clearly resonated with Amazon’s founder. He minted an entirely separate fortune that today might be worth well over a billion dollars.
Bezos adamantly refuses to discuss whether he kept some or all of his Google holdings after its IPO in 2004. He’s so prescient. It’s like he can peer into the future.
As Bezos’s fever dreams receded in the face of practical concerns inside the company But the deluge of spending and the widening losses had fueled fear among Amazon’s management team. Campbell had a reputation for being an astute listener who could parachute into difficult corporate situations and get executives to confront their own shortcomings.
As a new millennium dawned, Amazon stood on the precipice.
But despite the case’s visibility in the media, it was a sideshow to the larger rise of Amazon at the time, an ascent interrupted by the great recession that resumed with renewed vigor afterward.
It was a stunning fall from grace.
It also began a concerted effort to improve efficiency in its far-flung distribution centers.
But through it all, Bezos never showed anxiety or appeared to worry about the wild swings in public sentiment. “I have never seen anyone so calm in the eye of a storm. Ice water runs through his veins.
A characteristic volatility, lashing out at executives who failed to meet his improbably high standards.
In the midst of all this, Bezos burned out many of his top executives and saw a dramatic exodus from the company. But amazon escaped the downdraft that sucked hundreds of other similarly overcapitalized dot-coms and telecoms to their deaths.
As Amazon’s losses mounted, Bezos’s opposition hardened.
He started a secretive skunkworks with the mysterious name Lab126.
It was a nearly impossible mission, and it had to be executed on Amazon’s typical shoestring budget.
It is far better to cannibalize yourself than have someone else do it.
An executive was interviewed with only one question: “What is your negotiation strategy?” He replied that he believed that a successful negotiation must make both sides happy. This was an “un-Amazon” response and that one party must always win.
The culture was self-perpetuating, and those who could not channel Bezos’s fervor on behalf of Amazon and its customers did not stay with the company. Those who could do it stayed and advanced.
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.
The tic-for-tat price war spread like a brushfire.
Knowing that Walmart hovered on sidelines, he gave Quidsi a window of forty-eight hours to respond and made it clear that if the founders didn’t take the offer, the heightened competition would continue.
They ratcheted up the pressure even further, threatening the Quidsi founders that ‘sensei’, being such a furious competitor, would drive diaper price to zero if they went with Walmart. So the Quidsi executive stuck with Amazon, largely out of fear. The deal was announced on November 8, 2010.
Sensei: a teacher or instructor usually of Japanese martial arts (as Karate or Judo)
And insiders were once again left their mouths agape, marveling at how Bezos had ruthlessly engineered another acquisition by driving his target off a cliff. “They have absolute willingness to torch the landscape around them to emerge the winner.”
Amazon’s own employees have compared the third-party selling on the site to heroin addiction—sellers get a sudden euphoric rush and a lingering high as sales explode, then progress to addiction and self-destruction when Amazon starts gutting the sellers’ margins and undercutting them on price.
The face of his child, frozen in infancy, has been stuck in his(Ted's) mind for nearly half a century.
Bezos’s silence on the topic of his long-lost biological father is unsurprising: he is far more consumed with pressing forward than looking back.
Amazon’s culture is notoriously confrontational, and it begins with Bezos, who believes that truth springs forth when ideas and perspectives were banged against each other, sometimes violently.
