
Amazon's Jeff Bezos on profits, failure, succession, big bets - davidw
http://uk.businessinsider.com/amazons-jeff-bezos-on-profits-failure-succession-big-bets-2014-12
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santacluster
> The Kindle is trying to reduce friction for reading a whole book. It’s
> working.

Yes, yes it does. At least it does for me. I haven't read as much and bought
as many books in decades. A considerable part of my media consumption time has
shifted away from series, movies and internet back to books. Mostly because
it's so damn easy to get the next book. And the next. Etc.

~~~
ntaso
I got a Kindle when I was traveling around the world for 6 months. Buying a
book, carrying it around and selling it for a fraction of its price 3 days
later got very tiresome very soon. So I bought a Kindle, which weighs the same
no matter how many books are on it.

Since then, I read way more than before (about 25 books per year, fiction and
non-fiction, sometimes 2-3 in a week, sometimes nothing for a month). I also
feel like I read faster.

I mostly read in English, although my native language is German, because
translation is so damn easy (just point your cursor in front of a word),
because English books are often way cheaper on the Kindle and there's simply a
bigger selection, and because I enjoy reading English books in their original
language.

~~~
jared314
> which weighs the same no matter how many books are on it

Fun fact: a fully loaded kindle weighs more than an empty kindle, by about
10^-18 grams. So, at a maximum of 50mb per book, each book would come in below
12.5 zeptograms (normally below 0.25 zeptograms).

[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/25/science/25qna.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/25/science/25qna.html)

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dntrkv
Here is the full interview on YouTube. Bezos is actually a very interesting
person to listen to.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xx92bUw7WX8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xx92bUw7WX8)

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davidw
Bezos doesn't give many interviews, so this was interesting to see. I also
recommend the book about him and Amazon that came out earlier this year:

[http://blog.liberwriter.com/2014/06/04/review-the-
everything...](http://blog.liberwriter.com/2014/06/04/review-the-everything-
store-jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon/)

In some ways, Amazon is the most unusual of the big tech companies; at least
it seems that way to me. Microsoft, Apple, Google, and even newer companies
like Facebook seem to have a lot more in common with one another than with
Amazon.

~~~
sumedh
> Amazon is the most unusual of the big tech companies

I believe Amazon is the only company which includes the CEO's message from its
first annual report(1997) where Bezos says that its all about the long term.

~~~
rahimnathwani
[https://investor.google.com/corporate/2004/ipo-founders-
lett...](https://investor.google.com/corporate/2004/ipo-founders-letter.html)

"As a private company, we have concentrated on the long term, and this has
served us well. As a public company, we will do the same."

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dalke
This was posted a couple of days ago at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8746111](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8746111)
, though with the given title of "I Asked Jeff Bezos About The Tough
Questions"

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sumedh
I didnt know that Bezos's invested in Google. Does he still hold the stock?

~~~
ignoramous
I wouldn't know anything about that. But Bezos did buy a startup (junglee.com)
whose founders went on to invest in Google (and become billionaires, and hold
board positions there and then challenge Amazon's core business which is
e-commerce).

------
known
"You'll buy anything/unwanted you think the store is losing money on"
\--eCommerce business model

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michaelochurch
These aren't really "tough questions". Still, Bezos gives a good interview and
makes Amazon sound like a good place to work. He's right-on with this:

 _What really matters is, companies that don’t continue to experiment,
companies that don’t embrace failure, they eventually get in a desperate
position where the only thing they can do is a Hail Mary bet at the very end
of their corporate existence._

I've seen that first hand. It's ugly, especially because the best people leave
companies where they don't get to innovate and own new things, so you're doing
that "Hail Mary pass" with a lot of deadwood in your ranks.

That said, I'm having a hard time reconciling his pro-innovation stance with
Amazon's use of stack-ranking, which causes divisions to ossify and halts
innovation. It seems hard, after a point, to innovate if you don't trust your
own people. You'll have a core in-crowd that will toss you ideas for a while,
but eventually they run out and lose the ability to keep pace.

That's the question that I would want to see asked: how do you reconcile your
ideals (which are admirable) with the reality of a company known to use stack
ranking?

~~~
mabbo
Stack ranking may, in a sense, exist at Amazon. But as a developer here, it's
invisible to me. I write my reviews of some of my colleagues (I choose which),
they write reviews of me. All reviews of me go directly to my manager, who
will compile them together with his review of me and my review of myself to
build a full year-end review of my performance.

Those yearly reviews will factor somehow into my pay, bonuses, etc, but I only
see the final result of it. Was I stack ranked?

~~~
davidw
Do people who otherwise did an acceptable job get canned just because they
ranked at the bottom? That's the concern about the practice, I think.

~~~
ryanobjc
Yes. That is exactly what us happened. I know a few people who were edged out
like that.

Make no mistake, Amazon is not a great place to work. Ok place to work maybe.
Good if you have managed to fit in. But even after that, they underpay.
Friends with literally a decade of time out in are making relatively low
considering their wide areas of responsibility.

~~~
npinguy
You can criticize Amazon for a million things, but underpayment is not one of
them.

~~~
xyzzy_plugh
You're the first person I've ever heard defend Amazon's compensation. What are
your sources?

~~~
consideranon
Comparing with my friends over at Microsoft, while the base salary is
certainly lower, cash bonus and stock pretty much equalizes compensation, at
least as an SDE I. Total compensation is lower than Google/Facebook, but
that's a high bar for ANY company.

I think this myth really continues both because people tend to only pay
attention to base salary and don't consider cost of living/state taxes, and
due to the fact that Amazon does underpay warehouse workers, as evidenced by
the current strike in Germany.

I can't speak for higher level positions though. But Amazon tends to strongly
favor giving out more stock over more cash, which goes back to the same issue
of not comparing total compensation.

~~~
marssaxman
Recruiters push the "total compensation" idea because it's cheaper than
offering real money, but in my experience salary is all that matters.

Stock always comes with a vesting schedule and a forfeit clause, which means
that if you accept more stock as a substitute for a better salary, you are
implicitly agreeing to let them retroactively underpay you for the last couple
years of your tenure, whenever you move on to the next thing.

Don't kid yourself that you're going to stay at the same company long enough
that it won't matter, either; the raise you get by switching jobs always
dwarfs the raise you get by sticking around and jumping through the perf hoops
and trying to get a promotion. So the only way to make the stock pay out is to
screw yourself on salary over the long term.

What's more, keeping a large portion of your net worth in your employer's
stock is a terrible diversification strategy, so you will probably end up
flipping it and investing in something else as soon as it vests. So.... what
was gained by accepting compensation in stock, again? I'd rather they just pay
me cash money and let me invest it however I want.

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curiously
What I don't get with Amazon is that they continue to spend whatever they make
to capture market share but at what point will they start reaping what they
sowed? What happens when there is suddenly no capital around to help this
growth but competitors have plenty of cash in their vaults?

~~~
adventured
What happens when there is no capital around?

I'm not sure in what scenario that would happen. Amazon is funding its other
growth with cash from its core business, which continues to expand. Your
scenario would require that Amazon's core retail business die.

