- In fact, when we lower prices, we go against the math that we can do, which always says that the smart move is to raise prices. We have significant data related to price elasticity. With fair accuracy, we can predict that a price reduction of a certain % will result in an increase in units sold of a certain percentage...Our judgment is that relentlessly returning efficiency improvements and scale economies to customers in the form of lower prices creates a virtuous cycle that leads over the long term to a much larger dollar amount of free cash flow, and thereby to a much more valuable Amazon.com. We've made similar judgments around Free Super Saver Shipping and Amazon Prime, both of which are expensive in the short term and - we believe - important and valuable in the long term
- Our pricing objective is to earn customer trust, not to optimize short-term profit dollars. We take it as an article of faith that pricing in this manner is the best way to grow our aggregate profit dollars over the long term. We may make less per item, but by consistently earning trust we will sell many more items. therefore, we offer low prices across our entire product range. For the same reason, we continue to invest in our free shipping programs, including Amazon Prime. Customers are well informed and smart, and they evaluate the total cost, including delivery charges, when making their purchasing decisions. In the last 12 months, customers worldwide have saved more than $800m by taking advantage of our free shipping offers
- Invention comes in many forms and at many scales. The most radical and transformative of inventions are often those that empower others to unleash their creativity - to pursue their dreams
- Our heavy investments in Prime, AWS, Kindle, digital media, and customer experience in general strike some as too generous, shareholder indifferent, or even at odd with being a for-profit company. "Amazon, as far as I can tell, is a charitable organization being run by elements of the investment community for the benefit of consumers," writes one outside observer. But I don't think so. To me, trying to dole out improvements in a just-in-time fashion would be too clever by half. It would be risky in a world as fast-moving as the one we all live in. More fundamentally, I think long-term thinking squares the circle. Proactively delighting customers earns trust, which earns more business from those customers, even in the new business arenas. Take a long-term view, and the interest of customers and shareholders align.
- A dreamy business offering has at least 4 characteristics. Customers love it, it can grow to very large size, it has strong returns on capital, and it's durable in time - with the potential to endure for decades. When you find one of these, don't just swipe right, get married
- I'm talking about customer obsession rather than competitor obsession, eagerness to invent and pioneer, willingness to fail, the patience to think long term, and the taking of professional pride in operational excellence. Through that lens, AWS and Amazon retail are very similar indeed
- In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score one thousand runs. This long-tailed distribution of returns is why it's important to be bold. Big winners pay for so many experiments
- Many characterized as AWS as a bold - and unusual - bet when we started. "What does this have to do with selling books?" We could have stuck to the knitting. I'm glad we didn't. Or did we? Maybe the knitting has as much to do with our approach as the arena. AWS is customer obsessed, inventive and experimental, long-term oriented, and cares deeply about operational excellence
- Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you're probably being too slow. Plus, either way, you need to be good at quickly recognizing and correcting bad decisions. If you're good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure.
- Recognize true misalignment issues early and escalate them immediately. Sometimes teams have different objectives and fundamentally different views. They are not aligned. no amount of discussion, no number of meetings will resolve that deep misalignment. Without escalation, the default dispute resolution mechanism for this scenario is exhaustion. Whoever has more stamina carries the decision. So, opt for "disagree and commit."
- ...We show him this problem and he looks at it. He stares at it for a while and says, "Cosign." I'm like, "What do you mean," and Yosanta says, "That's the answer." And I'm like, "That's the answer?" Yeah, let me show you." He sits us down. He writes out 3 pages of detailed algebra. Everything crosses out, and the answer is cosign, and I say, "Listen, Yosanta, did you just do that in your head?" And he says, "No, that would be impossible. Three years ago I solved a very similar problem, and I was able to map this problem onto that problem, and then it was immediately obvious that the answer was cosign." That was an important moment for me because it was the very moment when I realized I was never going to be a great theoretical physicist, and so I started doing some soul-searching. in most occupations, if you're in the ninetieth percentile or above, you're going to contribute. In theoretical physics, you've got to be like, one of the top fifty people in the world, or you're really just not helping out much. It was very clear. I saw the writing on the wall and changed my major very quickly to electrical engineering and computer science.
- The way you earn trust, the way you develop a reputation is by doing hard things well over and over. The reason, for example, that the US military, in all polls, has such high credibility and reputation is because, over and over again, decade after decade, it has done hard things well. It really is that simple. It's also that complicated. It's not easy to do hard things well, but that's how you earn trust. And trust, of course, is an overloaded word. It means so many different things. It's integrity, but it's also competence. It's doing what you said you were going to do - and delivering. And so we deliver billions of packages every year; we say we're going to do that and then we actually do it. And it's also taking controversial stances. People like it when you say, "NO, we're not going to do it that way. I know you want us to do it that way, but we're not going to." And even if they disagree, they might say, "We kind of respect that, though. They know who they are."
What I got out of it
- Inspiring and motivating - a peek into an incredible thinker, his vision, his thought process
