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Founders: #179 Jeff Bezos

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What I learned from The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone. This is part one of a three part series on Jeff Bezos. The next two books are Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon and Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire. ---- (0:54) It may very well be that the absolute intensity of drive and focus is essential and incompatible with all of the nice management thought about consensus and gentle demeanor.(2:07) Jeff’s clarity, intensity of focus, and ability to prioritize is unusual.(4:05) As I read the Steve Jobs biography I even had an insight and question about myself, that maybe I haven’t begun to really find my own limits.(10:49) You have to be able to think what you're doing for yourself. (11:42) There is probably no limit to what he can do. (12:34) People forget that most people believed Amazon was doomed because it would not scale at a cost structure that would work. It kept piling up losses. It lost hundreds of millions of dollars. But Jeff was very smart. He’s a classic technical founder of a business, who understands every detail and cares about it more than anyone.(13:45) Bezos has proved

[00:00:00] In January 2013, eight months before her death, I received a lengthy email from Joy Covey. She had been generous with her memories and insights as I crafted the first few chapters of this book, and was wondering how my writing was progressing. She was reading the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson, and was thinking about how Bezos' leadership style compared to the late Apple co-founder's famously direct demeanor. When I rediscovered Kobe's email after her death, I was struck by its thoughtfulness and eloquence. Here it is, lightly edited for clarity. Hello, Brad. I have been…

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