The Everything Store

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By Brad Stone

Publisher Description

The authoritative account of the rise of Amazon and its intensely driven founder, Jeff Bezos, praised by the Seattle Times as "the definitive account of how a tech icon came to life."

Amazon.com started off delivering books through the mail. But its visionary founder, Jeff Bezos, wasn't content with being a bookseller. He wanted Amazon to become the everything store, offering limitless selection and seductive convenience at disruptively low prices. To do so, he developed a corporate culture of relentless ambition and secrecy that's never been cracked. Until now. Brad Stone enjoyed unprecedented access to current and former Amazon employees and Bezos family members, giving readers the first in-depth, fly-on-the-wall account of life at Amazon. Compared to tech's other elite innovators -- Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg -- Bezos is a private man. But he stands out for his restless pursuit of new markets, leading Amazon into risky new ventures like the Kindle and cloud computing, and transforming retail in the same way Henry Ford revolutionized manufacturing.

The Everything Store is the revealing, definitive biography of the company that placed one of the first and largest bets on the Internet and forever changed the way we shop and read.

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522 Reviews

4.0

Jake Diamond

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Jingyao Liu

“This is a brilliantly entertaining, educational and inspiring book that explains the full history of Amazon's first 20 years. I loved learning about the strategic thinking behind Amazon's every decision, the disruption and transformation Amazon's rising brought to so many industries and everything about Bezos as a leader. Many people know about Amazon's leadership principles, but this book showed me that these principles have been around since the inception of Amazon and played a key role in Amazon's success. Some of the most memorable things in this book for me are: 1. Long-term vision. Bezos was wise in sensing the surge in Web activity around the time and landing on a great business idea. He had the courage to quit his job and start a business when he had an amazing job. In over two decades, he never lost sight of this original, crazy vision of an everything store and continued to work at it with a stable mindset. Excerpts: Bezos interpolated from this that Web activity overall had gone up that year by a factor of roughly 2,300—a 230,000 percent increase. “Things just don’t grow that fast,” Bezos later said. “It’s highly unusual, and that started me thinking, What kind of business plan might make sense in the context of that growth?” “If you look at why Amazon is so different than almost any other company that started early on the Internet, it’s because Jeff approached it from the very beginning with that long-term vision,” Hillis continues. “It was a multidecade project. The notion that he can accomplish a huge amount with a larger time frame, if he is steady about it, is fundamentally his philosophy.” 2. Customer obsession. Amazon ruthlessly fought for margins with its competitors and leveraged all kinds of ploys to break traditional business models, e.g. Amazon vs publishing industry for ebooks. Bezos was never ever afraid to throw away a ton of money in the short run, if it meant that Amazon can win over more market share and build customer loyalty, e.g. Harry Potter book release; Prime membership. Even when this led Wall Street to influent the market with a pessimistic attitude towards Amazon, Bezos never wavered. When Amazon became big, it played the price war aggressively to acquire target companies, e.g. diapers.com. Bezos was inspired by Costco's business model and deeply believed in delivering all the value it can squeeze out to its customers. Excerpt: “There are two kinds of retailers: there are those folks who work to figure how to charge more, and there are companies that work to figure how to charge less, and we are going to be the second, full-stop,” he said in that month’s quarterly conference call with analysts, coining a new Jeffism to be repeated over and over ad nauseam for years. 3. Frugality. Many people in tech know that Amazon employees tend to have bad WLB, but apparently Amazon had a borderline exploitative and certainly miserable work culture from the very beginning. Bezos was like many brilliant business leaders - his ability to see employees as replaceable resources allowed him to make the coldest yet most rational decisions. All of this goes back to retaining the max value for the customers. Excerpt: He blundered early by suggesting in a meeting that Amazon executives who traveled frequently should be permitted to fly business-class. Bezos often said he wanted his colleagues to speak their minds, but at times it seemed he did not appreciate being personally challenged. “You would have thought I was trying to stop the Earth from tilting on its axis,” Price says, recalling that moment with horror years later. “Jeff slammed his hand on the table and said, ‘That is not how an owner thinks! That’s the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard.’ 4. Over the course of 20 years, Amazon had had to adapt to many changes. Decisions such as allowing third-party sellers to sell on Amazon, building AWS and inventing Kindle were all pivots made along the way. Running a successful business is never an easy thing and a great CEO has to continuously make difficult decisions as times change. For the longest time, everyone thought that Amazon would be easily crushed by Barnes & Nobles. But this book showed why Amazon advanced to its current height, while companies like Barnes & Nobles, eBay, Walmart, IBM failed to catch up because: Excerpt: By that time, Bezos and his executives had devoured and raptly discussed another book that would significantly affect the company’s strategy: The Innovator’s Dilemma, by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen. Christensen wrote that great companies fail not because they want to avoid disruptive change but because they are reluctant to embrace promising new markets that might undermine their traditional businesses and that do not appear to satisfy their short-term growth requirements. 5. Amazon's flywheel: Excerpt: Lower prices led to more customer visits. More customers increased the volume of sales and attracted more commission-paying third-party sellers to the site. That allowed Amazon to get more out of fixed costs like the fulfillment centers and the servers needed to run the website. This greater efficiency then enabled it to lower prices further. Feed any part of this flywheel, they reasoned, and it should accelerate the loop. 6. Bezos also had to learn a lot through these twenty years. While he held on to his vision for Amazon and his core values, he still learned a lot in the process, drawing on a ton of business books and other business leaders he admired, e.g. Sam Walton. Things about Amazon that we take for granted today were not crystal clear at all before those decisions were made. Bezos and his team had to figure out Amazon's business model and competitive advantage over time. 7. Lack of gender diversity at the top level: expected but still unfortunate, the vast majority of Amazon's leaders mentioned in the book are men.”

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Created 4 months ago

About Brad Stone

Brad Stone is senior executive editor of global technology at Bloomberg News and the author of the New York Times bestseller The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. He has covered Silicon Valley for more than 15 years and lives in San Francisco.