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“At first Jeff and MacKenzie and a few early employees handled everything, including packing, wrapping, and driving the boxes off to be shipped. “We had so many orders that we weren’t ready for that we had no real organization in our distribution center at all,” Bezos says. “In fact, we were packing on our hands and knees on a hard concrete floor.”
― Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos
― Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos
“When he told David Shaw that he wanted to leave the hedge fund to pursue this idea, Shaw took him on a two-hour walk through Central Park. “You know what, Jeff, this is a really good idea. I think you’re onto a good idea here but this would be a better idea for somebody who didn’t already have a good job.” He convinced Bezos to think about it for a couple of days before making a decision.”
― Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos
― Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos
“To make the decision, Bezos used a mental exercise that would become a famous part of his risk-calculation process. He called it a “regret minimization framework.” He would imagine what he would feel when he turned eighty and thought back to the decision. “I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have,” he explains. “I knew that when I was eighty, I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed, I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. I knew that that would haunt me every day.”
― Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos
― Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos
“You know you can count me in 100 percent,”
― Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos
― Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos
“At the end of 1999 I was the editor of Time, and we made a somewhat offbeat decision to make Bezos our Person of the Year, even though he wasn’t a famous world leader or statesman. I had the theory that the people who affect our lives the most are often the people in business and technology who, at least early in their careers, aren’t often found on the front pages. For example, we had made Andy Grove of Intel the Person of the Year at the end of 1997 because I felt the explosion of the microchip was changing our society more than any prime minister or president or treasury secretary. But as the publication date of our Bezos issue neared in December 1999, the air was starting to go out of the dot.com bubble. I was worried—correctly—that internet stocks, such as Amazon, would start to collapse. So I asked the CEO of Time Inc., the very wise Don Logan, whether I was making a mistake by choosing Bezos and would look silly in years to come if the internet economy deflated. No, Don told me. “Stick with your choice. Jeff Bezos is not in the internet business. He’s in the customer-service business. He will be around for decades to come, well after people have forgotten all the dot.coms that are going to go bust.”
― Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos
― Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos
Sycamore ’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Sycamore ’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
232 books
|
73 friends
287 books
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35 friends
576 books
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28 friends
3,340 books
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206 friends
838 books
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90 friends
21 books
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86 friends
145 books
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43 friends
225 books
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183 friends
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