YOUR KINDLE NOTES FOR: The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone Free Kindle instant preview: http://a.co/0Nozh5I 178 Highlights Highlight (Yellow) | Location 121 PowerPoint decks or slide presentations are never used in meetings. Instead, employees are required to write six• page narratives laying out their points in prose, because Bezos believes doing so fosters critical thinking. For each new product, they craft their documents in the style of a press release. The goal is to frame a proposed initiative in the way a customer might hear about it for the first time. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 152 He devotes his full attention to the conversation, and, unlike many other CEOs, he never gives you the sense that he is hurried or distracted—but he is highly circumspect about deviating from well•established, very abstract talking points. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 169 “When a company comes up with an idea, it’s a messy process. There’s no aha moment,” Bezos said. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 236 “point of view is worth 80 IQ points”—a reminder that looking at things in new ways can enhance one’s understanding. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 261 After the interviews, everyone who had participated in the hiring process gathered and expressed one of four opinions about each individual: strong no hire; inclined not to hire; inclined to hire; or strong hire. One holdout could sink an applicant. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 299 DESCO would develop that idea into a company called Juno, which went public in 1999 and soon after merged with NetZero, a rival. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 304 One important element in the early vision was that customers could leave written evaluations of any product, a more egalitarian and credible version of the old Montgomery Ward catalog reviews of its own suppliers. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 319 Bezos concluded that a true everything store would be impractical—at least at the beginning. He made a list of twenty possible product categories, including computer software, office supplies, apparel, and music. The category that eventually jumped out at him as the best option was books. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 324 there were three million books in print worldwide, far more than a Barnes & Noble or a Borders superstore could ever stock. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 471 In the spring of 1995, Bezos and Kaphan sent links to the beta website to a few dozen friends, family members, and former colleagues. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 478 His Amazon account history records the date of that inaugural order as April 3, 1995. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 488 Each order during those early months brought a thrill to Amazon’s employees. When someone made a purchase, a bell would ring on Amazon’s computers, and everyone in the office would gather around to see if anyone knew the customer. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 493 It took Amazon a week to deliver most items to customers, and it could take several weeks or more than a month for scarcer titles. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 499 “Their systems were programmed in such a way that you didn’t have to receive ten books, you only had to order ten books. So we found an obscure book about lichens that they had in their system but was out of stock. We began ordering the one book we wanted and nine copies of the lichen book. They would ship out the book we needed and a note that said, ‘Sorry, but we’re out of the lichen book.’ Highlight (Yellow) | Location 502 In early June, Kaphan added a reviews feature that he’d coded over a single weekend. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 505 Bezos decided to watch reviews closely for offensive material rather than read everything before it was published. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 510 “When I read that letter, I thought, we don’t make money when we sell things. We make money when we help customers make purchase decisions.” Highlight (Yellow) | Location 519 Paul Davis once surveyed the odd assortment of books squirreled away on the shelves in the basement and with a sigh called it “the smallest and most eclectic bookstore in the world.” Highlight (Yellow) | Location 559 investors he projected $74 million in sales by 2000 if things went moderately well, and $114 million in sales if they went much better than expected. (Actual net sales in 2000: $1.64 billion.) Highlight (Yellow) | Location 575 “It’s one thing to have a good idea, but it’s another to have confidence in a person to execute it,” he says. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 604 And if the potential employees made the mistake of talking about wanting a harmonious balance between work and home life, Bezos rejected them. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 651 That summer, the company launched what could be considered its first big innovation: allowing other websites to collect a fee when they sent customers directly to Amazon to buy a book. Amazon gave these approved sites an 8 percent commission for the referral. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 744 Over the first decade at Amazon, marketing VPs were the equivalent of the doomed drummers in the satirical band Spinal Tap; Bezos plowed through them at a rapid clip, looking for someone with the same low regard for the usual way of doing things that Bezos himself had. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 785 Amazon had a measly $16 million in sales in 1996; Barnes & Noble notched $2 billion in sales that same year. Still, after the Wall Street Journal article in 1996, Riggio called Bezos and told him he wanted to come to Seattle with his brother Stephen to talk about a deal. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1017 The company lost hundreds of millions on these investments. “Amazon had to be focused on its own business,” says Tinsley. “Our biggest mistake was thinking we had the bandwidth to work with all these companies.” Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1020 After watching the wild expansion for a few months, Pope said to Spiegel, “What we are doing here is building a giant rocket ship, and we’re going to light the fuse. Then it’s either going to go to the moon or leave a giant smoking crater in the ground. Either way I want to be here when it happens.” Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1051 “Walmart did not even have Internet in the building back then,” says Kerry Morris, a product buyer who moved from Walmart to Amazon. “We weren’t online. We weren’t e•mailing. None of us even knew what he meant by online retail.” Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1104 Jeff Blackburn, the former Dartmouth football player who later would become Amazon’s chief of business development, saw eBay coming before almost anyone else at Amazon. The Silicon Valley startup, founded in 1995 as a site called AuctionWeb, made $5.7 million in 1997, $47.4 million in 1998, and $224.7 million in 1999. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1121 The venture capitalists backing eBay asked around and heard that one did not work with Jeff Bezos; one worked for him. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1131 Foreseeing the need to marry auctions with a seamless way for buyers and sellers to exchange money, he paid $175 million to acquire the six•month•old payment firm Accept.com, which had not yet introduced an actual service but was already in the process of finalizing a deal with eBay when Bezos swooped in. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1139 The high•tech community was getting a lesson in the dynamics of network effects—products or services become increasingly valuable as more people use them. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1155 It sent Amazon stock $46 dollars higher that first day alone, and the stock hit the $400 mark just three weeks later (after two subsequent stock splits, it peaked at $107). Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1167 An even more absurd Bezos fever dream was named Project Fargo, after the Coen brothers’ film. Bezos wanted to obtain one of every product ever manufactured and store it in a distribution center. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1175 “for many years we were on a journey to figure out if we could get to same•day delivery.” The quest sparked a $60 million investment in Kozmo.com, Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1188 Shop the Web lasted on Amazon.com for just a few months and then died a quiet death. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1190 the acquisition of Junglee was a failure. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1204 Thus did Jeff Bezos become one of the original investors in Google, his company’s future rival, and four years after starting Amazon, he minted an entirely separate fortune that today might be worth well over a billion dollars. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1217 He was looking for versatile managers—he called them “athletes”—who could move fast and get big things done. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1260 To satisfy customers and their own demanding boss during the upcoming holiday, Amazon executives were going to have to substitute artifice and improvisation for truly comprehensive selection. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1277 Bar raisers at Amazon—the program still exists today—are designated employees who have proven themselves to be intuitive recruiters of talent. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1282 Bezos instituted the Just Do It award—an acknowledgment of an employee who did something notable on his own initiative, typically outside his primary job responsibilities. Even if the action turned out to be an egregious mistake, an employee could still earn the prize as long as he or she had taken risks and shown resourcefulness in the process. Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1295 “The reason we are here is to get stuff done, that is the top priority,” he answered bluntly.