The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

Breier’s tenure at Amazon was short and rocky. Bezos wanted to reinvent everything about marketing, suggesting, for example, that they conduct annual reviews of advertising agencies to make them constantly compete for Amazon’s business. Breier explained that the advertising industry didn’t work that way.

Instead, it should be creating primitives—the building blocks of computing—and then getting out of the way.

To everyone’s surprise, they all got swept up in a swift current.

Jenson and Bezos were at loggerheads. Jenson had tried to placate angry investors by getting the company to profitability. He raised the last round of capital from European bonds at a critical time and forced Bezos to make tough decisions when the company’s runway was getting short. But he also pushed to raise prices and campaigned against free shi

Employees soon learned of a new motto: Get Big Fast.

Three senior executives recall meeting privately in a conference room that year to write a list of all of Bezos’s successes and failures on a whiteboard. The latter column included Auctions, zShops, the investments in other dot-coms, and most of Amazon’s acquisitions. It was far longer than the first column, which at that time appeared to be limite

Amazon executives reasoned that day that they had the Internet’s most authoritative product catalog and that they should exploit it. That, it turned out, was the central insight that not only turned Amazon into a thriving platform for small online merchants but powers a good deal of its success today.

Amazon’s chief rivals, Apple and Google, are arguably better positioned in this burgeoning digital world and have considerably greater resources.

style—leadership by example, augmented with a healthy dose of impatience—that was positively Bezosian in character.