
Jeff Bezos' annual shareholders letter - krelian
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312518121161/d456916dex991.htm
======
ceohockey60
Some of my favorite nuggets from this letter: "[H]igh standards are
teachable...High standards are contagious" "You can consider yourself a person
of high standards in general and still have debilitating blind spots." "To
achieve high standards...you need to form and proactively communicate
realistic beliefs about how hard something is going to be..." "[A] culture of
high standards is protective of all the 'invisible' but crucial work that goes
on in every company...doing that work well is its own reward – it’s part of
what it means to be a professional."

~~~
blub
One needs to be careful with high standards.

You go higher and higher and before you know it you're peeing in bottles to
reach your productivity goals.

~~~
chmaynard
Snarky comments are often amusing and are always self-satisfying, but they
degrade the conversation. (When I make comments like this on HN, they always
get downvoted. I'm trying to do better.)

~~~
quakenul
I agree with your statement, but I don't see how it applies here.

I did not consider the comment amusing. I do think putting the Bezos' ideas
about high standards in the sobering context that Amazons provides for most of
its workforce is right on point.

~~~
mjburgess
Satire is a perfectly valid form of communication.

Commenting here is increasingly feeling like a policed academic conference,
rather than a "tech salon" which seems closer to its ethos.

------
joemcb
"We established long-term relationships with many important strategic
partners, including America Online, Yahoo!, Excite, Netscape, GeoCities,
AltaVista, @Home, and Prodigy."

From the year one letter. It's incredible what Amazon has done when you
realize who their peers were when they started.

~~~
kaennar
What's really fascinating is hearing about people that work there now that
used to work with them in the early stages. I talked to a dude who was in
charge of a database tool called Tango back in the day who was worried they
wouldn't be able to make the yearly license cost and now he works for them.

Technology only grows more fascinating as the titans rise and fall.

------
timeimp
"Alexa – Customer embrace of Alexa continues, with Alexa-enabled devices among
the best-selling items across all of Amazon. We’re seeing extremely strong
adoption by other companies and developers that want to create their own
experiences with Alexa.

There are now more than 30,000 skills for Alexa from outside developers, and
customers can control more than 4,000 smart home devices from 1,200 unique
brands with Alexa."

Meanwhile, Siri recently was able to tell me cricket scores :/

~~~
supernovae
I'd love it if a colossal waste of resources on shitty voice search was the
downfall of giants.

I don't get the infatuation with voice skills and the associated tradeoffs.

~~~
miketery
Though it may not be as useful to you or the demographic to which you belong -
there are plenty of households who enjoy the device multiple times a day, and
multiple people in the same household.

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minimaxir
This is the first time in awhile Amazon has disclosed the number of Amazon
Prime users. ("exceeded" 100 million paid Prime members globally)

~~~
skellera
Based on the price of prime, they’re pulling in like $6-9 billion per year on
that. That’s crazy. Of course that goes back into shipping costs but still.

~~~
dorgo
There is a little known feature of prime: you can read a book (from a
selection) for free each 30 days. Theses books cost usually about 4€.

12 * 4€ = 48€. This little offer (which is usually not even advertised as a
prime feature) alone almost justifies the cost of a prime membership. Prime is
a cost-center for amazon. It's not meant to make money. It is a customer
loyality thing.

~~~
swarnie_
I've been a prime member for years and didn't know this.... Thank you very
much, ill be sure to nickle and dime Amazon for all the value it offers.

------
lifeisstillgood
"One thing I love about customers is that they are _divinely discontent_ " (my
emphasis)

OK Mr Bezos, I have to give you points for that one. It's a retailer's
philosophy in two words. I could imagine that coming from Jack Cohen or
Terence Conran.

~~~
mkempe
To err is human, to expect better divine.

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toephu2
I thought this letter provided many a great lessons, up until "we write
narratively structured six-page memos."

Wow, can any Amazonians speak to this? Sounds like a huge time sink to be
writing a 6 page memo instead of preparing a few slides (or writing a 1 page
technical design doc)

~~~
eigen-vector
Yes, we do write six-page memos. It's not just leadership, even on the
engineering side, design documents are six pagers. Contrary to your initial
reaction, six-pagers are very effective for both parties—the writer and the
reader. You're right in that writing narratives as opposed to making slides
takes longer, but that's not inherently a bad thing. Writing a narrative helps
me articulate my design well. If I cannot communicate my design via a
narrative, it means there are gaps in my understanding/formulation of the
same. For the readers, it gives them a coherent understanding of the problem,
approach, pros and cons, along with an appendix of material. This helps them
to attack the problem with almost as good an understanding of it as the
writer—sometimes better, because they come in with some prior knowledge. The
writing exercise takes a few months to get good at, but once you're
comfortable writing documents, you retain that skill forever. I'm not kidding
when I say this practice is something that'll make me stick with Amazon for a
long time.

~~~
idoh
Can you talk about the format of this doc? I did some googling but came up
with nothing / a bunch of fluff pieces.

~~~
blasdel
A common format is posed as a "Press Release" for the idea as if it existed,
with quotes from customers — even if it's purely an internal service, the
downstream teams are your customers

The documents are fixed length to 1, 2, or 6 pages for different
purposes/stages, and reference data goes in appendices that don't count. It's
also impossible to be hired as a senior contributor or any management role
without submitting a writing sample, which gets reviewed in the hiring meeting
along with everyone's interview feedback.

~~~
shostack
While I agree written communication skills are critical for senior roles, do
you ever find this format stifling for more visual ideas and concepts?

Or are designs and comps just included in the appendix with a couple embedded
highlight images?

~~~
xzel
They're either embedded in the text or as an appendix. Its not really a hard
fast 6 pages exactly thing, more of a guideline. You want it to have depth but
not be too long. Thats pretty much it. For more details: I'd say 1 pager is an
idea. 2 pager is idea with the why and some details fleshed out. 6 pager is
idea, why/how/people, design docs, stats/analysis and maybe even some tech
choices.

I thought it was a good model look into and plan projects. IMO, programming
should be / is only 20-30% of a softdev's job, the rest should be planning
(and probably fixing bugs afterwards haha).

Source: Former Amazon dev.

------
Stryder
It is 1000% true that /High Standards/ are "teachable, and contagious".

But what a company, or indeed, society as a whole set those /Standards/ on
matters so much much more than anything else.

------
nicodjimenez
Really well written and engaging as usual. If he ever writes a book I will buy
it. His extreme ambition to build the world's most dominant company may get in
the way of that, though.

~~~
mjburgess
And Bezos wept, for there were no more markets to disrupt.

------
lemming
Somewhat OT, but I can totally relate to the handstand anecdote. I've recently
been learning to do handstands, and while I knew it was something I'd have to
practice, I _completely_ underestimated how hard they are. I mean, kids do
them all the time, right? I'd say 6 months of daily practice is probably about
right.

I've always been impressed by handbalancers, but now that I have some inkling
of how hard it actually is, I'm totally blown away by it. Next time you see
someone balancing their whole freaking body _on one hand_ (something like
4-10x harder than a two-handed one according to estimates I've seen), stop and
marvel for a while, for it is truly incredible.

------
elvirs
100M prime customers making 5B purchases a year is $2 per purchase for 2 day
shipping that costs amazon 5-8 dollars to ship. Considering amazon takes 25%
cut from FBA products you can say any product sold for less than $15 is a cash
negative sale for amazon.

~~~
jblow
Wait what? Amazon often packs multiple products into the same shipment. I
assume each individual product is considered a purchase. And where do you get
the $5-8 figure from? I can ship things for that much, so you’d have to assume
Amazon gets a discount for massive volume.

------
known
Wish he addressed about inhuman working conditions in AMZ

------
slackoverflower
Credit where it's due. Customers love Amazon and that is what really matters
at the end of the day. The people they serve enjoy the service and products
Amazon provides. Bezos has very successful worked his way up to become one of
the top dogs of capitalism. 20 years is a considerable amount of time work
towards a goal, but Bezos was patient and hardworking.

------
Bekwnn
_" Amazon was also just named the #1 business on LinkedIn’s 2018 Top Companies
list, which ranks the most sought after places to work for professionals in
the United States."_

This statement/award strikes me as very far removed from reality.

~~~
sushisource
I don't think so at all. Sure, Amazon has a certain reputation, especially in
hacker-news circles. That said I think you're forgetting about the silent but
_huge_ majority of average joes who would _kill_ for an Amazon job.

~~~
hueving
You need to qualify that. Most people would not kill to work in a warehouse or
customer support, which is a huge portion of Amazon jobs.

~~~
CobrastanJorji
This absolutely. While we tech scene folks love to consider ourselves "average
joes," Amazon employs around 100,000 warehouse employees, and for them Amazon
is decidedly NOT the #1 place people want to work.

It's a fine place to be a software engineer, so long as you enjoy the high
stress/low perks part of the tech scene, but that's a very different, air
conditioned environment.

~~~
scarface74
I know someone who works as a low level manager at Amazon and I've seen
salaries of the average Software developer - for both the salary is like
$140-$160K. That's nothing to live in Seattle with the cost of living. You can
make that in 1 of 20 other metro areas that I know of with a much lower cost
of living and much lower stress. Even when considering the signing bonus and
stock, I was never enticed to actually fly out there and interview even after
I got through some preliminary phone screens.

~~~
nicoburns
I'm not sure what planet you live when $140k dollars is nothing. As a software
developer you might be able to do better, but you are _incredibly lucky_. I
assure you the median wage is significantly lower than that, and of course
many people make minimum wage.

~~~
scarface74
In context - $140K for an experienced _software engineer in a major
metropolitan city_ isn't outrageous. A "software architect" often does hands
on coding. For reference:

[https://www.matrixres.com/resources/salary-
survey/](https://www.matrixres.com/resources/salary-survey/)

If I can make $140K in metro Atlanta, where a newly built 3000 square foot
house can be had for less than $350K in a nice neighborhood, why would I want
to live in Seattle?

~~~
taeric
Politics. Nicer weather. Better environment for women/girls in schools. :)

The weather point is, of course, tough. Seattle summers are bloody amazing.
The winter sorta blows.

~~~
hueving
>Politics

Says nobody that's been to Atlanta or has taken two minutes to use the
internet to check preconceived notions about Georgia against the city.

[https://www.myajc.com/atlanta-
neighborhood-2016-presidential...](https://www.myajc.com/atlanta-
neighborhood-2016-presidential-election-results-map/)

~~~
AFNobody
Politics isn't just local laws but also state laws.

~~~
scarface74
Which state laws affect individuals more than they would n liberal states?
Atlanta being such a major city makes GA very pro business. Businesses are
doing a lot to keep pressure on the state to keep it from becoming more
conservative.

~~~
AFNobody
Laws about abortions, bathrooms, access to the social net, etc.

------
iosDrone
"Already today, a portion of our European delivery fleet is comprised of low-
pollution electric and natural gas vans and cars, and we have over 40 electric
scooters and e-cargo bikes that complete local urban deliveries."

Sad to see even the mighty Bezos misuse the word "comprise." The whole
comprises the parts!

~~~
5tk18
Isn't that what he said?

The European delivery fleet is comprised of low pollution cars. Low pollution
cars comprise the European delivery fleet.

~~~
CamperBob2
The way I always keep it straight is, if the sentence still works with the
word "compose," then that's the right word to use, and "comprise" isn't.

Whether _that 's_ correct depends on what dictionary you choose to cite. Some
have given up on this particular battle.

~~~
iosDrone
Garner's Modern English Usage is the final word on grammar, as far as I'm
concerned. Other dictionaries are pathetic postmodern excuses for language
guides.

~~~
CamperBob2
Hmm, I don't have that one. What does it say about Bezos's usage of
'comprise'?

------
pcunite
_Congratulations and thank you to the now over 560,000 Amazonians who come to
work every day_

Wow, that's incredible. How much pay could each one make and the company still
be profitable?

~~~
ve55
According to Wikipedia their profit was 3B last year. If they have 566,000
full-time employees at 2,000 hours each, that is 3 billion USD they have to
distribute to 1,132,000,000 hours, so they could raise the wage of each
employee evenly by around $3 an hour, and would then make $0 instead of $3B.

When a company has this many employees (compared to some other large tech
companies like Facebook with only 25,000), the math isn't as nice as you might
imagine. Amazon has very low margins.

~~~
mrguyorama
For the vast majority of their logistical staff, $3 an hour more would likely
be a substantial raise. Or at least equal to an extra yearly raise.

------
jrq
I don't think high standards are the same as expectations, and it seems
obvious to me how that misunderstanding can lead to poor management practice.

Some people, given a certain task, max out lower or higher than others. Which
is, people have different aptitudes for each task. If the bar to be 'ok' is
high enough to where not every person may meet it, and they're truly doing
their best, then there's a management problem.

You can push people psychologically, and gently, and be within the confines of
what I think is considered good management practice. But pushing people
physically, and pushing them in a way that's mechanical, like a global quota,
that's harmful to a person.

Just simply falling short of something and hearing "well, you fucked that up,
don't let that happen again." instead of "hey, you're fucking up, do you need
help? Is there anything wrong?" is enough to almost ensure that the person
will fall short again.

It's cliche to say that honey catches more flies than gall, but damn if it
isn't true. However, starving the flies until gall is all that's left is
diabolical.

Sorry for rant, but I've lived like those DC workers are living, and its not
pleasant.

