Book of the Week: The Everything Store

10 Aug 2014

My book club decided to start with The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. It is quite fitting that I read the book on an Amazon Kindle. I’ve heard most of the stories about Amazon (AMZN) before, like how he was adopted and how Amazon has two pizza teams. What I learned most were the people around Jeff in the early days. A lot of the mythology of a company surrounds the founder, but it is nice to learn about the other people too. Things get crazy in the early days of startups when there is explosive growth. One wonders how the company survived. Surviving

As crazy as it might sound, it did appear that the first challenge was to do something better than these other guys. There was competition already. It wasn’t as if Jeff was coming up with something complete new - Paul Davis

It was entertaining to see how Jeff imposed cultural values of frugality and keeping the customer in mind. Amazon was able to survive, because of the culture. They used doors as desks to save money. Employees pay for parking. Executives flew coach. Customer issues flagged by Jeff became top priority, because he considered them to be signals of something wrong with the system. Amazon burned through money to achieve scale that it used to benefit the customer. Flying Drones In the opening where Jeff says it is too early to write a book on Amazon. It feels like their story is just starting after reading the story so far. I am interested to see how the next chapter plays out.