Jeff Bezos Shareholder Letters | Founders Podcast with David Senra #282 • Podcast Notes

Setting the bar high for hiring has been the single most important element of Amazon’s success

• Bezos announced his intention to offer the lowest prices possible while providing a world-leading customer experience


• This combination seemed paradoxical to some 


• Henry Ford’s philosophy for building companies could be distilled into five words: “Maximum service at minimum costs” 


• Henry Ford did not want to make a low-quality, inexpensive

Differentiation is survival; maintaining and increasing differentiation requires an enormous amount of continuous energy because the universe wants you to be typical  

A lign customer and shareholder interests as much as possible  

• “I believe high standards are teachable. High standards are contagious.” 


• Both high standards and low standards are contagious


• High standards are domain-specific and must be learned separately in every arena of interest   


• “Leaders have relentlessly high standards. Many people think these standards are unreasonably high.”

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• Wandering in business is not efficient, but it may yield the most asymmetric results for your company Wandering is an essential counterbalance to efficiency 


• Both wandering and efficiency must be employed


• AWS was a result of Amazon wandering 


• Wander, listen to your hunch, follow your curiosity, take the necessary financial risk, iterate, an

The best decisions that Bezos made were intuitive, gut-drive decisions and not math-based decisions

Jeff embraced the Japanese business philosophy “Kaizen”, which describes how improvement in productivity is a gradual and methodical process  

From 2016: “Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by an excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.”