Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire

by Brad Stone

A Washington Post Notable Book

This New York Times bestseller is a “masterful” ( The Washington Post ), “juicy tour of the company [Jeff] Bezos built” ( The New York Times Book Review ), revealing the most important business story of our time by the bestselling author of The Everything Store .

Almost ten years ago, Bloomberg journalist Brad Stone captured the rise of Amazon in his bestseller The Everything Store . Since then, Amazon has expanded exponentially, inventing novel products like Alexa and disrupting countless industries, while its workforce has quintupled in size and its valuation has soared to nearly two trillion dollars. It’s almost impossible to go a day without encountering the impact of Jeff Bezos’s Amazon, between services like Whole Foods, Prime Video, and Amazon’s cloud computing unit, AWS, plus Bezos’s ownership of The Washington Post . We live in a world run, supplied, and controlled by Amazon and its iconoclast founder.

In Amazon Unbound , Brad Stone presents an “excellent” ( The New York Times ), deeply reported, vividly drawn portrait of how a retail upstart became of the most powerful and feared entities in the global economy. Stone also probes the evolution of Bezos himself—who started as a geeky technologist totally devoted to building Amazon, but who transformed to become a fit, disciplined billionaire with global ambitions, who ruled Amazon with an iron fist, even as he found his personal life splashed over the tabloids.

Definitive, timely, and “engaging” (Jon Meacham, author of The Soul of America ), Stone has provided an unvarnished portrait of a man and company that we couldn’t imagine modern life without.

Genres: Business, Biography, Nonfiction, Technology, Audiobook, History, Leadership

512 pages, Paperback

First published May 11, 2021

About the author

I am the senior executive editor for global technology coverage at Bloomberg and the author of "Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire," published in May 2021 by Simon and Schuster.

The book is a sequel to my earlier work, "The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon," which won the Book of the Year Award in 2013 from The Financial Times and Goldman Sachs. I'm also the author of The Upstarts: Uber, Airbnb, and the Battle for the New Silicon Valley.

Over the last few years, I have authored a few dozen cover or feature stories for Bloomberg Businessweek on companies such as Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, Costco and the Chinese tech companies Didi, Baidu and Xiaomi. I joined the magazine from the New York Times, where I covered Silicon Valley from the newspaper's San Francisco bureau. Before that, I was a reporter for the once proud magazine known as Newsweek. I am also the author of a previous work of non-fiction, Gearheads, which the San Francisco Chronicle selected as one of the best books of 2003.

I graduated from Columbia University in 1993 and am originally from Cleveland, Ohio. I've lived in San Francisco for over 20 years but I'm still a Clevelander at heart- or should I say, at heartbreak, since the sports teams always manage to lose big (except the Cavs!) I have twin daughters and am teaching them to root for Cleveland teams as well because I believe adversity builds character. I hope you enjoy my books. Feel free to write me at brad.stone at gmail to let me know what you think.

Reviews

[Sudarshan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Riveting. Enthralling. Difficult to put down. I promised myself that I won’t finish this book within a day and I embarrassingly broke that promise by a couple of hours.

I am a huge admirer of Jeff Bezos. Amazon has been a pioneer in an array of fields, AI, retail, e-commerce, Cloud Computing, a list of fields which is frankly too long to list here. But my key takeaway from this book is that Jeff Bezos has pioneered the culture of invention. He is an innovator at innovating itself.

The book goes into excruciating details into Amazon’s unparalleled success in the second decade of the 21st century driven by products like Alexa, AWS, Prime etc. Each products frenetic launch, its genesis is very carefully researched by the author. Although the world only gets to know about Amazon’s successes, there have been quite a few failures like Fire Phone whose history has been explored in detail.

My personal favourite from this book were the war stories that members of the S-team had. The cutthroat politics they encountered, the insane deadlines that the hard taskmaster Bezos had set for them, these experiences altered their professional and quite frequently their personal lives as well.

All the major events of the second decade of 21st century, involving Amazon have been covered. Fire phone fiasco, the Alexa launch, AWS stupendous profitability, Prime and Amazon Studio’s spectacular success, Blue Origin and many many more.

Finally, the subject of the book, Jeffrey Preston Bezos has received a good hard look. His transformation from an inventive, geeky family man to muscled billionaire who jet sets across the world with his Hollywood celebrity mistress. No stone was left uncovered covering his divorce and infidelity and his sudden transformation from the former to latter. Although the author only covers what is already known to the public.

On the whole, it’s rightfully adulatory of Bezos and Amazon because of Amazon’s exploding market capitalisation and subsequently the explosion in Bezos’s wealth. In the annals of American corporate history, Amazon rightfully would be the most successful and innovative company mankind has seen yet. But it doesn’t shy away from asking the tough questions about Amazon and its effects on small retailers, labour markets, on climate change and its seemingly entrenched role in World economy where every action from buying something online to running servers passes through Amazon and it gets a hefty cut of the transaction. Its increasingly monopolistic power has also been examined although not in too much detail.

Lest you the reader think I am Amazon employee, I am not. I am just an incredibly satisfied customer who not surprisingly is writing this review on Goodreads (Amazon subsidiary) after buying this e-book from Amazon and having read it on his second Amazon Kindle.

[Gordon · Rating 2 out of 5]

Douche chills.

Bezos is a dork. This shitty book pretends to not be directly sanctioned by the beez, but his dorky smell is all over it. The author is right up his ass.

The guy is the richest feller on earth. Congratulations. I've read a few biographies of these ultra-rich ppl - they suck, they're boring. They're essentially ultra-high functioning psychopaths.

Some of this ilk are inspirational, they're creative and interesting, they do interesting things, things that make you go "oh cool, that's a cool idea, I'd never have thought of that, wow awesome". Others are essentially vacuum cleaners for sucking up capital, grotesque vampires that actually fit Marx's resentiment-laiden description of the capitalist.

If you stan successful entrepreneurs solely on the basis of entrepreneurial success; well here's your king - king mid-life-crisis, who leaves his wife for another woman at 50, sending horny texts like a teenager, king loser who needs to hire a consultant to discuss whether or not to return trash-talk fire to Donald Trump on twitter.

Douche chills.

[Gary Lang · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book completely describes the people and the initiatives that were underway or started during my years at Amazon as a VP, and correctly. This is not surprising; Stone's previous book, "The Everything Store" is what influenced me to take the offer Amazon made to me. He is a great writer.

This book also describes why I only regret that I did not go to Amazon earlier in my career, rather than just before retirement.

When, after my first 6 months, Jeff Wilke asked me what I thought of Amazon, I said it was fantastic and that when asked what it was like I often said that Amazon was "10,000 startups knit together by 14 leadership principles". The company is far less top-down driven than what this book seems to suggest. The culture of ownership demands that ownership is pushed downward. But that's a minor flaw in an otherwise excellent book.

[Carole · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire by Brad Stone is more of the same on the subject of Amazon, the company we love to hate yet cannot seem to live without: as if we don’t already have too much information. What made this book interesting is the author’s research on Jeff Bezos himself, even as he shuns personal publicity and is somewhat of an enigma. It is difficult not to admire a man who created a colossal empire from so little. There is all the usual Amazon stuff but it is freshened up and is presented in informative and interesting chapters. The reader’s attention does not waver. This is not your usual “how to succeed in business”type of book. Recommended.

[Joe · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is unique for covering contemporary content and collecting a lot of good anecdotes, but it focused too much attention on flashy projects that didn’t alter Amazon’s trajectory and on Jeff Bezos’ personal life.

Amazon Fresh, Amazon Go, Alexa, and HQ2 are all interesting initiatives — but they weren’t meaningful drivers of Amazon’s growth or competitive moat.

I would have liked to learn more about AWS, international expansion, fulfillment center efficiency, and the growth of 3rd party fulfillment.

[Steven Z. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Remember when Amazon first came online in 1995, they would discount books by 33-40%. This pricing lasted for a good 10-15 years then the discounts were reduced under the theory that once they conditioned you as a customer, they could slowly increase their profit margins. After a year of Covid-19 restrictions Amazon’s popularity and bottom line boomed as people were sequestered at home. Today the discount on books is usually 10-15%, and sometimes less, reflecting Amazon’s commitment to the bottom line. Only speaking of book pricing, but I have noticed similar trends with other products. The question is how we arrived at the present juncture, who is responsible, what are the historic trends when it comes to Amazon, and lastly what role has Jeff Bezos played in the process. These questions are answered in full along with a partial biographical portrait of Bezos and how he built Amazon into the most dominant consumer source in the world and a company worth $1.76 trillion today in Brad Stone’s new book, AMAZON UNBOUND: JEFF BEZOS AND THE INVENTION OF A GLOBAL EMPIRE.

Stone, the senior executive editor of global technology at Bloomberg News has written an in depth account of Amazon’s phenomenal growth from 2010 through 2021 focusing on the managerial style of Jeff Bezos and his incredible ability to support, develop, and implement projects that would be worth billions. Stone also digs deeply into the culture at Amazon and its mantra of putting the customer first, however, that “bumper sticker” is disingenuous as its record of employee safety, philanthropy, and demanding a certain belief system from executives and others reflects.

Bezos’ genius and overbearing personality are on full display in Stone’s account. According to the author the watershed year for Amazon’s overwhelming dominance in multiple markets with varied products is 2010. From its inception through 2010 Amazon was not a very profitable company, but the infrastructure groundwork for what Bezos was able to achieve was in place. Stone covers every facet of the Amazon experience and how it developed into the economic behemoth it is today. Stone delves into the development of Alexa, Kindle, Amazon Go, Amazon Web Services, Amazon Prime, Amazon Prime Video, Amazon advertising, the creation of Fulfillment Centers, its success in India, development of third party sellers, and the purchase of Whole Foods and the Washington Post in detail.

Bezos was the driving force behind Amazon’s technology innovations harnessing artificial intelligence, robotics, and other ingenious developments. However, his management style pushed his engineers to the breaking point in many instances and his nasty commentary when not happy at meetings are legend. Bezos could be “remorseless with those that did not meet his exacting standards, but he seemed to have an unusual wellspring of patience for those who practiced the challenging act of invention.” Bezos gets a great deal of the credit for the Amazon experience and success, but he had tremendous executive talent and engineers to work with. Stone explores the work of people such as Dilip Kumar, Greg Hart, Andy Jassy, Dave Clark, Jeff Wilke, Stephanie Landry among many others. Bezos and his deputies believed that algorithms could do the job better and faster than people. In many ways it explains the insensitivity that exists at Amazon toward certain employees especially in Fulfillment centers.

According to Stone the ultimate goal was turning Amazon’s retail business into a self-service technology platform that could generate cash with a minimum amount of human intervention. In accomplishing their mission, a number of negatives emerge. Stone’s research uncovers a male dominated culture at Amazon reflected in the lack of women in upper echelon positions. Women complained about the working environment and deals made with the likes of Harvey Weinstein, Woody Allen, Kevin Spacey, Jeff Tomba, and Ray Price all for naught. Female anger emerged at the same time the “Metoo” movement gathered momentum as sexual inuendo, jokes, touching etc. came to the fore. Casting a net around Amazon working conditions and treatment of employees also does not enhance the company’s reputation. The use of robotics at Fulfillment Centers created repetitive motion/health issues; pressure on workers to gather products quickly and package them; worker performance was monitored by tyrannical invisible robots, poor benefits and low pay, periodically firing people at the lowest level of the employee chain, in addition to the constant threat of termination, all take the luster off of Amazon’s workplace propaganda. Further, Bezos and company are very anti-union and went out of their way to expand in areas, i.e.; airplane procurement and location which were also anti-union. During the pandemic when Amazon’s work force passed one million and its annual earnings exceeded $380 billion as sales rose by 37%, the company pursued a virulently anti-union policy. A way to sum this up is that the monograph highlights genius, innovation, and greed.

Stone is not a stylist, but he has the ability to explain a great deal of technical jargon in a very easy manner. Whether explaining the role of artificial intelligence in the creation of Alexa or Amazon Go the reader can easily comprehend the arguments presented at executive conferences and meetings, particularly those of engineers. Stone explores numerous topics aside from the development of new products or strategies that in the end created billions in sales and profits. A key part of his discussion is not to reinforce the role of retail in Amazon’s success but focus on “Cloud Computing” which generated the revenue to fuel Amazon’s supercharged expansion. As Mark Levinson points out in his review in the Washington Post, “with cloud computing, an organization can rent computers, programmers and security experts from an external provider such as Amazon instead of maintaining its own data centers. Amazon pioneered cloud computing in the early 2000s, and by the 2010s it was easily the market leader. Bezos divined that finding new uses for Amazon’s burgeoning cloud infrastructure was the key to the company’s future.”

Stone’s discussion of the location process for a second headquarters when difficulties developed in Seattle with the city government and the ability to expand facilities is eye opening reflecting Amazon’s insensitivity toward local government. In addition, the chapter on Amazon Web Services which became the most profitable component of the company is key as was the formation of their own advertising strategy and the creation of an airplane fleet and purchase of delivery vans to bring about next day delivery.

The Amazon story is one of amazement. How could one company become so powerful economically and culturally as most people seem to consult Amazon on a daily basis, even before the onset of Covid-19 which would allow Amazon to expand exponentially as people had few alternatives to acquire products they needed while they quarantined. By the end of 2020 “Amazon boasted a $1.6 trillion market cap and Jeff Bezos was worth more than $190 billion. His wealth had increased more than 70% during the pandemic…a breathtaking achievement.” Stone stresses that the key aspect of how this was achieved was Bezos’ management style as his underlings knew if the boss had an idea, it was their job to bring it to fruition which in most cases they did. To his credit Stone has laid out the Amazon success story for the general public, but also its warts. Though at times the narrative gets bogged down in details it is worth the read if you wonder when you “click” how did it come to that action by your finger for everything you need.

[TheBookWarren · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.25 Stars (Rnd Down⬇️) — Unsure of what exactly this was, I knew it a book I’d maintain interest in. Jeff Bezos is nothing if not an utterly intriguing, fascinating character of modern history. But was it a memoir? A biography? An expose? The title —I guess—does give away the overall thematic angle I suppose.

Post reading, I am still unsure what ‘Unbound’ is, perhaps it’s an -eye-of-the-beholder type deal. What I can say, is that this is an expertly composed, exquisitely researched & sparkle-free written bit of nonfiction, that reads like a Novel — this surprised me — and one that I found difficult to put down throughout, hitting the ground running from page one with a wonderfully versed and descriptive narrative that Conjoins the past and the present with aplomb. The Author sets an insider viewpoint but maintains the perception of objectivity, portraying a man that is almost the complete mirror-image of his leviathan of a business — perfectly run — and simultaneously —horrendously flawed, with the true and full scope of its legacy perhaps still unknown, despite what many on either side of the ledger may — rather vehemently — voice without one asking for it.

Unbound gets into the weeds with JB now and through his formative years, pacing out the story in economic and fashionable form. Love or hate Amazon, the story remains utterly incredible. From garage to warehouse to Fulfilment Centres the size of not-so-small cities, to revoltingly efficient supply-chain, drone to door delivery to ethically challenged IP and tech that’s done more for antitrust spy-society culture brewing than anything Snowden could ever relinquish — Unbound is a fascinating insight into a strange and eclectic mind that’s also amazingly-innovative & driven beyond the comprehending-possibility of most humans.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

I do have a soft spot for Amazon. In its early days, at the end of the nineties, when I was relatively new in Sweden and English books over here were far too few and far too expensive, the internet bookshop with unlimited access to an unlimited number of books was nothing short of a miracle. True, that you had to wait for a delivery for an ungodly amount of weeks, but what joy it was to browse! Or how great was the possibility of drifting from one book to another through what others have bought? And do you remember the first time that you were able to look inside the book?
A lot has changed during those nearly thirty years, and the direction that Amazon has taken is perhaps not always the most admirable, but you have to give it to the man behind it, that he is a genius at seeing what the customers want. And I personally feel that I owe him (or them) a debt of gratitude, for all the joy they have given me when they were just a bookshop - the largest one that I’ve ever seen and the first one that never closed.
This is a book about Jeff Bezos’ empire in its “grown-up years”. From the first Alexa, through AmazonGo, expansion in the cloud and in Hollywood, through venture into space, until the years of the pandemics. It is also about Jeff Bezos himself and his transformation from a geek to a king of business.
It is no panegyrics but neither is it an angry criticism directed against the reachestman on earth. I would like to describe the tone of this book as neutrally positive. It leads the reader at a fast pace and in a journalistic tone, through the meanders of the world where impossible is not a word, and where everything can always be done both better and faster. It is hard not to find it at least a little bit fascinating.
I absorbed it in only a couple of days despite its nearly five hundred pages and I enjoyed it a lot - It brought back a lot of memories and there apparently is a second book (or rather the firs one written in 2013) by the author about Amazon. I think that I might consider reading that one too, some time in the future.

[Hellen (Kat Reader) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Qué buen trabajo periodístico el de Brad Stone para plasmar la historia de una empresa que para bien o mal a revolucionado la manera de comprar en Internet.

Te da un panorama del polémico estilo de liderazgo de Bezos, las prácticas administrativas y financieras de Amazon, la ejecución de ambiciosos proyectos, sus roces con Elon Musk por la industria espacial, las demandas por monopolio, y sus luchas contra los sindicatos dentro de la empresa.

Sin dudas un libro que te deja con un amplio panorama sobre Amazon y su creador. Dejando al lector elegir si amar u odiar este imperio.

"Se piense lo que se piense de la empresa - y el hombre-que controla gran parte de nuestra realidad económica en la tercera década del siglo 21, ya no hay vuelta atrás"

[Zhou Fang · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really enjoyed reading Brad Stone's predecessor book on Amazon, The Everything Store, so I had to pick up the sequel. Amazon Unbound basically picks up where The Everything Store left off, discussing some of the more recent innovations and flops among Amazon's product lines, including Alexa, Amazon Go, Fire Phones, AWS, and Prime Video. It also traces Jeff Bezos' evolution as CEO, transitioning from an obsessive product micromanager to a strategic leader more reliant on his "S-Team." The book focuses a lot on the members of the S-Team and their critical roles in each of the business verticals (for example Andy Jassy in AWS and Dave Clark in retail). Brad Stone also casts a critical eye towards Bezos' evolving personal life and tastes, characterizing Bezos as a man who began to enjoy the limelight of being the world's richest man and relished schmoozing with Hollywood stars. The book is a narrative of the transition of a startup and its fearless leader from the scrappy underdog into the dominant behemoth, and is an exhaustive examination at what has happened at Amazon and Blue Origin between the late-2000s and today.

Overall, the book is thoroughly researched and engaging. However, I wonder if Brad Stone has been influenced by the general shift in media sentiment towards Amazon and Big Tech in recent years. While The Everything Store read like a balanced account of Amazon's early years, Amazon Unbound seems to insist on letting critics have the last word on every issue. For example, Amazon has come under significant scrutiny for its third party marketplace. Sellers who build businesses through Amazon have reported exasperation at Amazon's handling of listings, copycats, and fake reviews with what looks like flippant arbitrariness. Stone effectively explains the problem sellers face. However, he seems to neglect to highlight the fact that (1) Amazon enabled many of these small businesses to exist in the first place, (2) what exactly is problematic about copycat competitive sellers who offer a similar product to customers with a lower price, and (3) the experiences of sellers on the marketplace who may continue to have positive experiences. Similarly, although much is made of Amazon's usage of user data to promote its private label products, little is discussed about the actual effectiveness of that strategy or the low penetration of Amazon's private label products overall. I'm not suggesting that the conclusions that Stone reaches on these specific issues are wrong per se--it's just that the book seems to lean much more critical on every one of these issues. This coincides also with the narrative on Bezos. Stone does an effective job of treating the Lauren Sanchez saga, careful to present the facts without embracing tabloid speculation. But the reporting on this issue, along with Prime Video's involvement in Hollywood seem to bend back to the story Stone is eager to present: one of a man who began to indulge his ego as he rose to be the richest men in the world. All of this is fair game for an author. But it seems like the positive influences Bezos and Amazon have had on the world are lost in this book. And maybe that's the point; once you're writing about a behemoth, it's no longer interesting to talk about the successes. Who wants to hear about Goliath's feats of strength?

[Mike Morrissey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Couldn't put it down

[Mal Warwick · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s far more than “the everything store”

How does a company get to be as big as Amazon in just twenty-seven years? And how does a man become as rich as Jeff Bezos? After all, as of this writing Amazon employs nearly 1.3 million people and is valued by the stock market at $1.7 trillion. That’s trillion, with a T. And Jeff Bezos, with a fortune estimated today at about $195 billion, is the second-richest person on Earth. In Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire, journalist Brad Stone’s second book on the company and its founder, the answers emerge. The Jeff Bezos story is an impressive tale, but it’s not pretty.

To the nearly 200 million people who visit Amazon every month, the company represents an online shopping service. It’s the source of books, shoes, groceries, and millions of other items. “The everything store,” as Brad Stone described it in the title of his first account of the Jeff Bezos story. But Amazon is far more than an online store. It’s a conglomerate, ripe for the picking by the trustbusters. And the lion’s share of its profits comes not from the sale of products on its website but primarily from Amazon Web Services, which provides cloud computing resources to businesses and other institutions, and secondarily from online advertising.

Three world-class businesses

The online store garnered 51 percent of all online sales in 2020 and 9.2 percent of total US retail sales (compared with 9.5 percent for WalMart). But the Jeff Bezos story isn’t a profile of a merchant. Two other businesses operated by the company turned in equally impressive results.

** Amazon Web Services (AWS) commanded 32 percent of the worldwide market for cloud computing services, compared to runners-up Microsoft (19 percent) and Google (7 percent). In the most recent quarter, AWS’s revenue accounted for 47% of Amazon’s profit.

** Then there’s Amazon Logistics, which delivered 2.3 billion of the company’s packages in the U.S. in 2019. That compares with total package deliveries of 3.1 billion by FedEx, 4.7 billion by UPS, and 6.2 billion by the U.S. Postal Service. The numbers for Amazon are even more startling now, after a year of the pandemic. And according to Morgan Stanley, the company’s shipping service will surpass both UPS and FedEx by 2022.

Amazon’s online advertising operations are also remarkable, although less so. The company scored 10 percent of US digital advertising revenue in 2020; front-runner Google received 29 percent, Facebook 25 percent. And it’s worth watching Amazon’s media business, too. Prime Video was recently in the news for purchasing the storied MGM film studio. For perspective on this, see “Why Is Amazon in Entertainment?” by Shira Ovide and “James Bond, Meet Jeff Bezos: Amazon Makes $8.45 Billion Deal for MGM” (both in the New York Times, May 27, 2021).

The Jeff Bezos story also stars the two men now at the top

In Amazon Unbound, Stone introduces some of the executives who have worked most closely with Bezos. Much of the author’s attention focuses on Dave Clark, who is now CEO of the company’s worldwide consumer sales. (In other words, he runs the business most of us interact with.) Like his colleague, Andy Jassy, Clark has been with Amazon for a long time. He joined the company in January 2001 as one of the managers at an Amazon fulfillment center (warehouse) in Kentucky. Andy Jassy, now tapped as Bezos’ successor as CEO of the whole business, ran Amazon Web Services from its start in 2003.

Why is Amazon so successful?

Stone profiles many other Amazon executives as well as Clark and Jassy. (The two are members of what Amazon calls the S-Team, or what in other companies might be termed the C-Suite.) A fair number of those executives have left the company drained to the point of exhaustion by unrelenting pressure from the top. And that pressure helps explain Amazon’s extraordinary success. But many other company founders and CEOs hound those around them without letup. Other factors seem more important in explaining the company’s success. Bezos’ intense focus on big-picture thinking. His willingness to wait for years for profits to emerge. His ability to learn from mistakes and to allow others to fail without consequences. And his insistence on constant innovation. In telling the Jeff Bezos story, Stone illustrates each of these traits with abundant examples.

No doubt about it: Jeff Bezos is a business genius

Amazon and its wide-flung operations are, of course, the centerpiece of Stone’s book. But he also relates in passing the stories of Bezos’ two other major businesses. (He owns both independently of Amazon.) At the Washington Post, which he purchased in 2013 for $250 million, Bezos has managed to turn around a money-losing enterprise into a vital, diversified media company. And at the rocket company Blue Origin, which Bezos founded in 2000, he vies with Elon Musk‘s SpaceX for primacy in the private space industry. Bezos has come in second best to date, but given his history of success piled on success it would be foolhardy to count him out. The Jeff Bezos story is far from over.

About the author

Journalist Brad Stone (1971-) is senior executive editor of the global technology group at Bloomberg News. He’s based in Bloomberg’s San Francisco bureau. Earlier in his career, he worked as a reporter for the New York Times and Newsweek. Amazon Unbound is the fourth of his books and the second he has written about Amazon.

[Mindaugas Mozūras · Rating 4 out of 5]

If I have to choose between agreement and conflict, I’ll take conflict every time. It always yields a better result.

I've enjoyed "Amazon Unbound" even more than the previous book by Brad Stone about Amazon "The Everything Store." I found the book even-handed - portraying both the positive and the negative impact of Bezos' empire. The writing itself was ready to consume - it's simple in the best possible way.

Most of the book is divided into chapters that focus on specific projects/areas (fulfillment, Washington Post, Alexa, HQ2, etc.). The structure makes sense for a book of this scope, even if the jumps from chapter to chapter don't always feel natural.

I really liked the book and would recommend it to anyone who's interested in these types of business stories.

[Tomas Bella · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vydarená kniha o tom, čo sa udialo v Amazone odkedy o ňom Stone napísal svoju prvú knihu (The Everything Store) a ako prebieha všetko rozhodovanie v zákulisí Amazonu.
tl;dr môžete zarobiť veľa peňazí, ak vám záleží len na peniazoch.

[Mide S · Rating 5 out of 5]

My key take away from this book was Jeff. Bezos words, "don't waste too much time on precision, keep trying stuff."

The book is detailed and well narrated. There's a lot to learn from the innovative incentive culture of Jeff.

The world is still in day 1. I'm optimistic that entrepreneurs will invent new models to give power back to small businesses in the nearest future.

[Traveller · Rating 1 out of 5]

.... does Bezos really think people adore him? ..and seemingly there are people who admire him - the mind boggles.

[Jonathan Mckay · Rating 3 out of 5]

Everything Store -> Everything Platform

It's easy to get caught up in the impact that Amazon as a company has had on American politics. Lina Khan is now the FTC advisor, candidates like Bernie Sanders use Amazon as a punching bag for all that is wrong with tech and American inequality. Yet in the last 5 years, the impact of Amazon as a business has been far greater. Perhaps unique among FAANG businesses, Amazon has reinvented itself, growing by leaps and bounds in the process. Stone describes the differences between his first book and today succinctly:

Amazon was a 100 billion company in 2012, now it is 1 trillion. It had 150,000 employees, and now employs over 1.3 million employees. It was the Kindle company, now it's the AWS company, alexa company, grocer company etc.

Amazon has gone from the everything store to the everything platform, by using its 22.6 billion dollars of annual R&D to take massive bets, and cash in on enough of those bets to rival the volume of success achieved by nearly all of the silicon valley ecosystem. Two things that stood out to me were the massive success of AWS, perhaps the most important technology since the iPhone, and the focus on company mechanisms (see: Working Backwards) , allowing the sort of scaling that has plagued companies like Facebook and Google. This has created successes like Alexa, the Amazon platform, singlehandedly introducing Chinese suppliers directly to American consumers, and of course the acquisition of whole foods and grocery delivery.

Sadly Amazon deserves a better chronicler than Brad Stone. His focus follows the headlines of any given year, and the book fails to provide insight beyond what could be achievable in a series of Bloomberg articles. In Stone's retelling, Bezos is "brilliant, and rather cruel" and ends up overly focused on the glamour of holywood before retirement. A 30 second conversation yesterday with one of many Amazonion friends gets more insight: "They’re scaling too fast to establish rigorous processes... The organizational structure is really wonky and not super functional, which is probably part of the reason they haven’t actually had a successful game yet". After two books, Stone fails to get beyond any buzzwords of what makes Amazon or Bezos successful beyond 'ruthlessness'.

55th book of 2021

[Mahendra Palsule · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unparalleled inside look at Amazon the company and Bezos the CEO. Discusses wide swathes of Amazon's rise as an e-commerce powerhouse during the past two decades. Must read for anyone interested in tech, startups, innovation, and business.

The only negative thing about the book is Brad does not discuss the acquisitions of IMDB and Goodreads. How do acquisitions perform at Amazon? Are they a success or failures? What happened to the IMDB and Goodreads acquisitions and why are these sites left neglected by this multi-billion dollar company and lying undeveloped for so many years? With Brad's access to Amazon executives, these would have been great questions to ask and this topic to be covered. However, Brad seems focused only on what he could get access to and leave other aspects of Amazon untouched.

Apart from the above gripe, this is a fascinating, well-researched book. Do read!

[Igor Pejic · Rating 5 out of 5]

While Facebook’s ambitions to take over the world of finance are unparalleled, Amazon is quietly launching one successful financial product after the other: From credit cards, to corporate loans and its own payment system called Amazon Pay. But even more than that, most of the systems banks run in the cloud are hosted in Amazon’s data centers. Its servers even run a major part of the world’s leading cryptocurrencies. And don’t forget that Amazon today is one of the most trusted companies of all.

Brad Stone delivers an impressive portrait of Jeff Bezos, an extremely disciplined, structured, and visionary leader who has probably created the company best positioned to upend global finance. For everybody that loved The Everything Store like I did, this is an update on one of the most powerful companies of all time that you should not miss.

[Kevin Narvaes · Rating 4 out of 5]

La historia de amazon, de como inicio como un simple negocio de libros, a ser uno de los agentes de venta más importantes del siglo XXI.

Creo que la parte más importante de este libro, es que es un reflejo de nuestro enorme número de cambios como humanidad en los últimos 30 años.

Antes la facilidad de entrega de paquetes al hacer solo un click se miraba como algo distante, y hoy en día los problemas son tan diferentes como que hacer con los empleados que tienen mucha carga de trabajo ante una pandemia.

[Bouke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jeff Bezos is a terrifying dude, and so is Amazon. The absolute drive for efficiency in everything they do is awe-inspiring. This book is a good look into all the various projects and scandals that happened since _The Everything Store_. Even though Amazon is so huge, it seems like they could grow to be 5x as large even still.

[David Dayen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Again, doing a review of this for The American Prospect, so cannot say a whole lot here. But a better title would have been "Amazon: Ain't Nothing You Can Do About It Now." That's what the conclusions mostly came down to.

[Anu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Engaging for tech crowds interested in the sausage making behind many of Amazon’s products, businesses and company culture. I really enjoyed the non-Amazon chapters on Blue Origin as well as Washington Post. I wish the author covered more of AWS and competitive pressures in the Cloud infrastructure space. Despite the many flaws of Jeff Bezos, it is amazing to watch how he’s been able to instil and sustain a corporate culture so deeply based on his personal values. Also fascinating to learn about the early execs at Amazon in addition to the usual suspects plus Bezos himself.
The author being a journalist displays a healthy skepticism towards a lot of Amazon doled out koolaid and takes a more realistic look at the drivers behind Amazon’s moves. It does disenchant much of the narrative behind Amazon and also makes you think about ESG and stakeholder responsibility more holistically.
Having said that, a bunch of references to something someone said in the heat of a crisis, or hearsay from a confidential meeting or quotes without context feel like they’re included for provocation rather than for fair coverage of the topic. Plus the chapters covering Bezos’ personal life and scandals seem more like entertainment than a cogent part of the book. But even then, gotta say it’s hard not to side with Bezos as he preemptively published the Medium post when slimy tabloids try to blackmail and extort him. They f$&@ed with the wrong guy. 🤷🏽‍♀️

[Brinlee Priddis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Turns out the sequel I had hoped for had already been written, and I was able to indulge my current hyper fixation with Amazon. It’s fascinating and mind boggling how they’ve literally taken over the world. I don’t think I like Bezos as a person, but his brilliance, creativity, and intentionality are undeniable- Amazon is only what it is because of his ruthless leadership. This book is definitely dense and sometimes a little dry, but nothing needed to be edited for brevity.

[anchi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Couldn't really put it down, but unsure if this would be another 5-star read. I love the storytelling of the book, but something's missing...

4/5 - review comes later

[Joanne Preece · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF. zZZzzZ

Maybe just wasn't what I wanted or expected, but spoiler alert: They brainstorm hard, invent all the time, work hard, Jeff personally takes interest in projects, they succeed or fail, repeat.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

I appreciated how the interviews of former employees add a lot of detail to the mosaic of Amazon, especially to the cultural transformation into a lumbering political bureaucracy and a ruthless empire.

It’s somewhat ironic that for someone as obsessive and detail-oriented as Bezos, he didn’t have the self-awareness (or more likely had enough money to not care and operated in a bubble) about how the employees hidden in the “averages” of the company would one day come back to tarnish his legacy (but he also spent $5bn to hop into a rocket for 10 minutes, so clearly it does not matter).

Stylistically, I thought the ending was rushed, but the book served up the last decade of the company properly.

[Rishabh Srivastava · Rating 3 out of 5]

Far too much airtime given on Jeff Bezos' personal and the politics around Amazon towards the end of the book

But the bits that went deep into how Amazon is run as a company, the drawbacks and benefits of its management style, and how it launched products like Alexa and the Fire Phone were great

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brad Stone's ostensible sequel to "The Everything Store" is sharper and more purposeful in design. The former serves as a well-researched corporate biography, lifting the veil to provide insights on Amazon's birth and how its blistering expansion stemmed from Jeff Bezos' insatiable customer-focused vision. A decade ago this company creed seemed admirable. But whew, the goodwill around that approach, chiefly because of the externalities it's wrought in the American and global marketplace, has dramatically shifted since.

Stone drops the gloves and tackles Amazon's blooming role in the American consciousness, troublesome and otherwise, headfirst. He lays out major benchmarks in the last 10 years of Amazon & Bezos — Alexa, Prime Studios, AWS, the WaPo to name a few — in successive chapters, each forming a foundational slab that informs the company's overreach seen in later chapters. There's frank assessments of the HQ2 debacle and Blue Origin's whimpering growth.

Stone dabbles in more editorial content than I recall in Everything Store, but the material covered demands greater nuance than a corporate battle with Borders Books did. Through it all, he uses the backdrop of Bezos' increasing appetite for the limelight to hint at foreboding storms in his and Amazon's future. At times these hints resemble an end-of-episode cliffhanger akin to the final ticks on an installment of "24." This can be a tad melodramatic. Still, they keep a forward pace that drives the reader to the next page.

Amazon Unbound summarizes a incredible and tumultuous decade for the retail juggernaut. There's intriguing revelations, and I'd say it's a relevant read for any frequent Amazon consumer. Equally for those finding themselves disillusioned with the results delivered on the lofty promises preached by our modern magnates in Tech.

[Rick Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s good. It’s definitely better than the first. Documenting Amazon while so much of it is still changing and hidden from the light is the sort of Herculean task that one has to admire. However, as such a task, one is doomed to fail. There’s simply so much to Amazon that the cursory glance this book takes, while better than most, still falls short of a real portrait. It’s like flying over the Midwest and saying you understand Ohio and Kansas.

As is the case with so many of these tech companies, it’s a sort of Cronenberg monstrosity that has grown from a cuddly garage sized startup, into a respectable large company, and now into the multi limbed krakennesque behemoth that you see today. The sheer scope of Amazons operations is insane, and no book can truly cover it. There are hundreds of books written about fulfillment by Amazon and this book touches maybe 5 pages of it. AWS gets mentioned in passing, but without much depth. I’ve paid my rent several times over with KDP and it’s not even mentioned at all.

That said, for a reasonable view of Amazon from 10,000 feet, read this book. This was a good overview of the unwieldy monster that seems to have snaked a limb into all of our lives.