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Founders: Jeff Bezos (Insights, Stories, and Secrets)

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What I learned from Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr. ---- [3:58] What is best for the customer? Do that: "Amazon believes that long-term growth is best produced by putting the customer first. If you held this conviction, what kind of company would you build?" [7:05] Jeff skips the conferences and dinners: "95 percent of the time I spent with Jeff was focused on internal work issues rather than external events like conferences, public speeches, and sports matches." [25:08] Don't encourage communication—eliminate it: "Jeff said many times that if we wanted Amazon to be a place where builders can build, we needed to eliminate communication, not encourage it. When you view effective communication across groups as a "defect," the solutions to your problems start to look quite different from traditional ones." (There is nothing conventional about Jeff) [27:29] Why companies must run experiments: "Time and time again, we learned that consumers would behave in ways we hadn't imagined especially for brand-new features or products." [30:16] Jeff on the importance of making decisions quickly: "Most decisions should probably be

[00:00:00] An insider's guide to the principles and practices that drove Amazon's meteoric rise. Colin Breyer and Bill Carr joined Amazon in the late 1990s, at a time when it was making the transition from a small company that used doors for desks to one of the fastest growing and most respected companies in the world. In working backwards, these two long-serving Amazon executives reveal and codify the principles and practices that drive the successes of one of the most extraordinary companies the world has ever known. With 27 years of Amazon experience between them, much of it in the early…

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