The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

When I did the startup that was bought by Amazon, I said, "Leave us on our own. We're smart and independent enough to be able to do good work that will inject things from the side into your other organization." The thing that Jeff Bezos did that I thought was very smart was that he ran us through his organization and others through ours.

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The first? Selling things online. Bezos was a trader with some exposure to internet companies, but this wasn't a years-long journey of discovery and understanding. This was a dude who read a stat on some random website, and thought "there's something here." Early on, most of that skepticism came from an inability for a startup to compete with large... See more

as Jeff always noted, you can make micro-adjustments in the long run to tweak the profit leaks. For some really large, heavy items, you can tack on shipping surcharges or just remove them from qualifying for Prime. These days, some items in Amazon are marked as "Add-on items" and you can only order them in conjunction with enough other items such t... See more