Amazon Unbound Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire

I would give a shit. Yeah, they make like 35 million dollars in a day. I'm going to quote here from the book Amazon Unbound.

Quote from Amazon Unbound. In 2009, Oneto's human resources deputy, David Kneekirk, wrote a paper titled Respect for People and presented it at an Steam meeting.

I'm going to quote from Amazon Unbound and like how he does this. As they anticipated, the meeting did not go well. Bezos said that as a matter of fact, he did remember the paper and that it was so poorly written and ambiguous that no one had understood what course of action Oneto was recommending.

The Everything Store was really about the first 15 years of Amazon. It came out in 2013, but really it's the rise during the dot com boom, the near death during the dot com bust and then the remarkable reinvention with the Kindle and AWS and Prime, which kind of brings you to 2011 or so.

What I mean by that is sort of unbound from the kind of normal rules of gravity that seem to impact most large businesses. The bigger you are, the more complex bureaucracy the less likely you are to invent new things, the more boring you become.

Jeff does not wanna spend his time answering those questions. He wants to float above it.

In the HQ2 saga I have the memos, the internal memos where they're selecting what's the HQ2 team selects Raleigh, Chicago and Philadelphia as the finalists and Jeff blows up the whole process but they also identified the critics who they're really wary of and you're in there.

I think the impediment to breaking up Amazon is that it's enormously complicated.

Amazon Unbound (on Amazon, natch): https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Unbound-Invention-Global-Empire/dp/1982132612/

We were fortunate enough to have repeat acquired guest Brad Stone join us to talk about his most recent book, Amazon Unbound.

This book is the successor to Brad's first book, The Everything Store. It is about everything that has happened at Amazon since 2013, including Alexa, Amazon Go, third party sellers.

I finished it. I came in right under the finish line yesterday. I definitely felt like toward the end, your description of how the company did through covid and basically what they did for the world was really well balanced.

I don't know if listeners would agree or if you would agree. I felt to a certain extent like Everything Store was. It was kind of like the Liars poker or the social network of Amazon.

we are having brad stone back on acquired to hang out with all of our lps and talk about his new book dropping this month amazon unbound

i can't wait to read this book i've been and i both have a pre-ordered uh the uh brad's first book on amazon was just like a classic that's uh the everything store

When he wrote The Everything Store, Amazon was a bookstore and many other things, but really became the behemoth that it became in the years after that book.

It's a fascinating book. It's a book, I believe we carry here at The Painted Porch among others.