The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

Key takeaways:

These are the points I took away from Jeff's style, not necessarily points that I agree with or aspire to.

- Be relentless. Set your goal and work toward it without wavering.
- Expect a lot from your team. Be okay to lose people if they don't share your vision, passion, or style. Be okay to remove people if they don't produce.
- Predict the future. Knowing what is coming will allow you to stay ahead. Jeff seems unusually good at this. Be willing to cannibalize your existing business to move forward. Ex: Jeff saw the future of reading was digital. To be a leader in that business he had to hurt the bookstore component of his business.
- It's all about the customer experience.
- Offer the lowest prices.
- Be frugal, incredibly so.
- Have ‘Jeffisms', a set of values that are easily expressed in short, concise ‘mantras'.
- Never stop.

On a separate, side note, I should read more books of successful businesses and their leaders. I found many parts of this book hugely inspiring, even if I don't aspire to be like Jeff.

A detailed and well researched documentary on Jeff Bezos and Amazon. Almost every block of text refers to an interview or some other types of documented references. The only book with the same level of details I have in my mind is Bad Blood (the story of Theranos)
Although the edition I read ends with events of 2014 and was old. In addition I think among the English books I have read so far, the language of this book was the most complex one, filled with unknown words needing me to look them up in dictionary in which I ignored them and satisfied myself the imaginary meanings that I brought to my mind for them.

It gave me a rather accurate account of how Amazon grew and how it works. The most surprising thing was their frugality.

Meh. Far too long.

A fun, lively bio of Amazon's founder, Jeff Bezos. It kind of styles itself an exposé, but there isn't much to expose: Bezos just seems like a super-driven, super-smart, super-productive dude who's sometimes a screamer and a giant TNG fan (word). This doesn't necessarily make me dislike him (though I prefer non-screaming bosses, of course). In fact, I went into this book feeling all champagne socialist about it - woe the Amazon warehouse workers, woe the independent bookstore, a pox on DRM, etc etc - and the author certainly includes warts and all. But I ended up - gosh - kinda excited about my Kindle again (cuz it is basically my intellectual lifeline when I am in Far Off Lands, and its design - oh, so silky smooth!). Like, as a physical manifestation of TNG-ish futurism. Tech optimism! Nice feelings. Seriously, I could marry my Kindle.

Somebody smartly remarked that the Fear of Bezos derives less from his current activities, than from Amazon positioning itself as a potential monopoly (they basically operate on near-zero profits at the moment). Fair. But I guess he's just hauling us all into the post-dead-tree book world (seriously, people, stop fetishizing the “smell of books” and blah blah), and creating the stage for a Bezos 2.0. Which means structural change (structural unemployment!), which means pain in the short run. But cars and jet planes in the long run!

What else, what else. Oh yeah - the author does a SUPERB job of enriching sometimes dry business case study-feeling moments with fun, human details. Great journalism.

Definite recc.

Jeff Bezos comes across as very smart and ruthlessly driven. The author must have done a lot of work to get this story. Recommended if you want to see the inside of the dot com business.

An interesting story, despite the author being a really terrible writer. He repeats himself countless times and appears to just completely give up the last 1/3 of the book.