Brad Stone > Quotes

“It’s easier to invent the future than to predict it.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“When you are eighty years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices. —Jeff Bezos, commencement speech at Princeton University, May 30, 2010”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Most companies are not those things. They are focused on the competitor, rather than the customer.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“It is far better to cannibalize yourself than have someone else do it,”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“In the end, we are our choices.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Some of these investments will pay off, others will not, and we will have learned another valuable lesson in either case.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Missionaries have righteous goals and are trying to make the world a better place. Mercenaries are out for money and power and will run over anyone who gets in the way.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“One early challenge was that the book distributors required retailers to order ten books at a time. Amazon didn’t yet have that kind of sales volume, and Bezos later enjoyed telling the story of how he got around it. “We found a loophole,” he said. “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.’ ”4”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“But don’t be worried about our competitors because they`re never going to send us any money anyway. Let’s be worried about our customers and stay heads-down focused.”15”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“We pay attention to what our competitors do but it’s not where we put our energy.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“In a world where consumers had limited choice, you needed to compete for locations,” says Ross, who went on to cofound eCommera, a British e-commerce advisory firm. “But in a world where consumers have unlimited choice, you need to compete for attention. And this requires something more than selling other people’s products.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“In early 2002, as part of a new personal ritual, he took time after the holidays to think and read. (In this respect, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, who also took such annual think weeks, served as a positive example.) Returning to the company after a few weeks, Bezos presented his next big idea to the S Team in the basement of his Medina, Washington, home. The entire company, he said, would restructure itself around what he called “two-pizza teams.” Employees would be organized into autonomous groups of fewer than ten people—small enough that, when working late, the team members could be fed with two pizza pies. These teams would be independently set loose on Amazon’s biggest problems.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Naturally, some of the reviews were negative. In speeches, Bezos later recalled getting an angry letter from an executive at a book publisher implying that Bezos didn’t understand that his business was to sell books, not trash them. “We saw it very differently,” Bezos said. “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.”5”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Rudeness is not cool. Defeating tiny guys is not cool. Close-following is not cool. Young is cool. Risk taking is cool. Winning is cool. Polite is cool. Defeating bigger, unsympathetic guys is cool. Inventing is cool. Explorers are cool. Conquerors are not cool. Obsessing over competitors is not cool. Empowering others is cool. Capturing all the value only for the company is not cool. Leadership is cool. Conviction is cool. Straightforwardness is cool. Pandering to the crowd is not cool. Hypocrisy is not cool. Authenticity is cool. Thinking big is cool. The unexpected is cool. Missionaries are cool. Mercenaries are not cool.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Friends suggested that it sounded a bit sinister. But something about it must have captivated Bezos: he registered the URL in September 1994, and he kept it. Type Relentless.com into the Web today and it takes you to Amazon.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Amazon isn’t happening to the book business,” he likes to say to authors and journalists. “The future is happening to the book business.”)”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“If you want to get to the truth about what makes us different, it’s this,” Bezos says, veering into a familiar Jeffism: “We are genuinely customer-centric, we are genuinely long-term oriented and we genuinely like to invent.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“If you want to build a truly great company you have got to ride a really big wave. And you’ve got to be able to look at market waves and technology waves in a different way than other folks and see it happening sooner, know how to position yourself out there, prepare yourself, pick the right surfboard—in other words, bring the right management team in, build the right platform underneath you. Only then can you ride a truly great wave. At the end of the day, without that great wave, even if you are a great entrepreneur, you are not going to build a really great business.”
― Brad Stone, The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World

“It’s easier to invent the future than to predict it.” —Alan Kay”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Bezos ultimately concluded that if Amazon was to continue to thrive as a bookseller in a new digital age, it must own the e-book business in the same way that Apple controlled the music business. “It is far better to cannibalize yourself than have someone else do it,” said Diego Piacentini”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Wow, you guys are like cockroaches,” Graham finally said. “You just won’t die.”16”
― Brad Stone, The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World

“McAdoo and Graham were discussing that most essential characteristic of great entrepreneurs: mental toughness, the ability to overcome the hurdles and negativity that typically accompany something new. McAdoo and his partners had identified this kind of true grit as the most important attribute in the founders of their successful portfolio companies, like Google and PayPal.”
― Brad Stone, The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World

“If I have to choose between agreement and conflict, I’ll take conflict every time,” Bezos often said. “It always yields a better result.”
― Brad Stone, Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire

“The production philosophy pioneered by Toyota calls for a focus on those activities that create value for the customer and the systematic eradication of everything else.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“We all know that if you swing for the fences, you’re going to strike out a lot, but you’re also going to hit some home runs. The difference between baseball and business, however, is that baseball has a truncated outcome distribution. When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs. This long-tailed distribution of returns is why it’s important to be bold.”
― Brad Stone, Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire

“When someone resigns, he is asked to hand in all that equipment—including the backpack.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Amazon may be the most beguiling company that ever existed, and it is just getting started. It is both missionary and mercenary, and throughout the history of business and other human affairs, that has always been a potent combination.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“We believe that a fundamental measure of our success will be the shareholder value we create over the long term. This value will be a direct result of our ability to extend and solidify our current market leadership position. The stronger our market leadership, the more powerful our economic model. Market leadership can translate directly to higher revenue, higher profitability, greater capital velocity, and correspondingly stronger returns on invested capital. Our decisions have consistently reflected this focus. We first measure ourselves in terms of the metrics most indicative of our market leadership: customer and revenue growth, the degree to which our customers continue to purchase from us on a repeat basis, and the strength of our brand. We have invested and will continue to invest aggressively to expand and leverage our customer base, brand, and infrastructure as we move to establish an enduring franchise.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“It’s the tale of how one gifted child grew into an extraordinarily driven and versatile CEO and how he, his family, and his colleagues bet heavily on a revolutionary network called the Internet, and on the grandiose vision of a single store that sells everything.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Chesky was moving slowly, but at the same time, he was frustrated that his imagined success wasn’t arriving quickly enough. “Every day I was working on it and thinking, Why isn’t it happening faster?” he told me.4 “When you’re starting a company it never goes at the pace you want or the pace you expect. You imagine everything to be linear, ‘I’m going to do this, then this is going to happen and this is going to happen.’ You’re imagining steps and they’re progressive. You start, you build it, and you think everyone’s going to care. But no one cares, not even your friends.”
― Brad Stone, The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World