Brad Stone Quotes

#1. have realized about myself that I'm very motivated by people counting on me," he answered. "I like to be counted on."14

Brad Stone

#2. Dearest Amabot,
If you only had a heart to absorb our hatred...
Thanks for nothing, you jury-rigged rust bucket.
The gorgeous messiness of flesh and blood with prevail!

Brad Stone

#3. You don't feel thirty percent smarter when the stock goes up by thirty percent, so when the stock goes down you shouldn't feel thirty percent dumber,

Brad Stone

#4. I don't think we yet know - because it's probably not big enough - what exactly Amazon does to our cities, but whatever it is, I don't anticipate retail wastelands. If anything, it's maybe a wake-up call to retailers that they just have to offer something meaningful to customers.

Brad Stone

#5. But don't be worried about our competitors because they're never going to send us any money anyway. Let's be worried about our customers and stay heads-down focused."15

Brad Stone

#6. Wilke subscribed to the principles laid out in a seminal book about constraints in manufacturing, Eliyahu M. Goldratt's The Goal, published in 1984.

Brad Stone

#7. In Silicon Valley, entrepreneurs and their backers got drunk on the overflowing optimism and abundant venture capital and threw a two-year-long party. Capital was cheap, opportunities seemed limitless, and pineapple-infused-vodka martinis were everywhere.

Brad Stone

#8. When someone resigns, he is asked to hand in all that equipment - including the backpack.

Brad Stone

#9. We would trust Jeff to take them to movies," Jackie Bezos says, "but the two of them would come back embarrassed, saying, 'Jeff laughs too loud.' It would be some Disney movie, and his laughter was drowning out everything." After

Brad Stone

#10. Jeff, one day you'll understand that it's harder to be kind than clever.

Brad Stone

#11. Bezos proclaimed at the time, according to numerous employees: "Developers are alchemists and our job is to do everything we can to get them to do their alchemy.

Brad Stone

#12. There are lots of retailers that are now scrambling to emulate the Amazon model, so Amazon does not have a monopoly on same-day distribution or broad selection or low prices. All that said, there are advantages that accrue to the largest player, so I don't see much in the way of Amazon slowing down.

Brad Stone

#13. The high-tech community was getting a lesson in the dynamics of network effects - products or services become increasingly valuable as more people use them.

Brad Stone

#14. Steady progress toward seemingly impossible goals will win the day. Setbacks are temporary. Naysayers are best ignored.

Brad Stone

#15. For the first time, Amazon was spoken in the same breath as Google and Apple - not as an afterthought, but as an equal. It had blasted off into high orbit.

Brad Stone

#16. willingness to try a lot of things and make many mistakes.

Brad Stone

#17. point of view is worth 80 IQ points" - a

Brad Stone

#18. Great merchants have never had the opportunity to understand their customers in a truly individualized way," he said. "E-commerce is going to make that possible."13

Brad Stone

#19. He announced his intentions to build a spaceport by walking into the office of a local newspaper, the Van Horn Advocate, and giving an impromptu interview to its bewildered editor.

Brad Stone

#20. Amazon was a family affair in another way. MacKenzie, an aspiring novelist,

Brad Stone

#21. Nevertheless, Blecharczyk came through with a new version of a site on March 3, a week before the annual conference in Austin, Texas. The new slogan was "A friend, not a front desk.

Brad Stone

#22. great companies fail not because they want to avoid disruptive change but because they are reluctant to embrace promising new markets that might undermine their traditional businesses

Brad Stone

#23. In the short term, the stock market is a voting machine. In the long run, it's a weighing machine" that measures a company's true value.

Brad Stone

#24. While he was charming and capable of great humor in public, in private, Bezos could bite an employee's head right off.

Brad Stone

#25. Thus did Jeff Bezos become one of the original investors in Google, his company's future rival,

Brad Stone

#26. Most execs, particularly first-time CEOs who get good at one thing, can only dance what they know how to dance.

Brad Stone

#27. Bezos said. "When I read that letter, I thought, we don't make money when we sell things. We make money when we help customers make

Brad Stone

#28. No matter how hard we strive for objectivity, writers are biased toward tension - those moments in which character is forged and revealed.

Brad Stone

#29. Bezos dismissed those objections and insisted that to succeed in books as Apple had in music, Amazon needed to control the entire customer experience,

Brad Stone

#30. he particularly admired a man named Frank Meeks,

Brad Stone

#31. Ultimately, Amazon is a weather pattern that disturbs everything around it.

Brad Stone

#32. We pay attention to what our competitors do but it's not where we put our energy.

Brad Stone

#33. I really can't say," the teacher replied. "Except that there is probably no limit to what he can do, given a little guidance.

Brad Stone

#34. Eric and Susan Benson didn't come to Amazon alone every day - they brought their dog Rufus, a Welsh corgi.

Brad Stone

#35. He had seen firsthand how technology, patience, and long-term thinking could pay off.

Brad Stone

#36. I think for Amazon's customers, it offers a kind of addictive service - the ability to shop without leaving your house, the ability to read without going to a bookstore or a library.

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#37. I don't think value to the customer is achieved at the expense of employees' welfare.

Brad Stone

#38. Bezos believed that high margins justified rivals' investments in research and development and attracted more competition, while low margins attracted customers and were more defensible.

Brad Stone

#39. As we have seen again and again, when Amazon doesn't get the economic conditions from suppliers that it seeks, it simply goes its own way. In the book business, that has meant publishing its own titles under the various Kindle imprints. Now it's making diapers.

Brad Stone

#40. Amazon is famously run by studying and responding to its own data; yet when it comes to promotions, decisions are often subjective and guided by human emotions and petty political dynamics.

Brad Stone

#41. Amazon isn't happening to the book business," he likes to say to authors and journalists. "The future is happening to the book business.")

Brad Stone

#42. incidentally, all Amazon senior executives had to read - the

Brad Stone

#43. When New York passed its Internet sales-tax law, Amazon's sales in New York State dropped 10 percent over the next quarter, according to a person familiar with Amazon's finances at the time.

Brad Stone

#44. The idea was always that someone would be allowed to make a profit as an intermediary. The key question is: Who will get to be that middleman?"7

Brad Stone

#45. They have an absolute willingness to torch the landscape around them to emerge the winner.

Brad Stone

#46. We don't have a single big advantage," he once told an old adversary, publisher Tim O'Reilly, back when they were arguing over Amazon protecting its patented 1-Click ordering method from rivals like Barnes & Noble. "So we have to weave a rope of many small advantages.

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#47. We are genuinely customer-centric, we are genuinely long-term oriented and we genuinely like to invent

Brad Stone

#48. a small bike shop north of Phoenix, in Glendale, Arizona. It's called the Roadrunner Bike Center.

Brad Stone

#49. Amazon tried to combat employee delinquency by using a point system to track how workers performed their jobs. Arriving late cost an employee half a point; failing to show up altogether was three points. Even calling in sick cost a point. An employee who collected six such demerits was let go.

Brad Stone

#50. It is far better to cannibalize yourself than have someone else do it,

Brad Stone

#51. Life inside successful Web startups - especially the really successful ones - can be nasty, brutish, and short. As companies grow exponentially, egos clash, investors jockey for control, and business complexities rapidly exceed the managerial abilities of the founders.

Brad Stone

#52. Chris Brown, a software-development manager at the time.

Brad Stone

#53. the chairman of Random House, Alberto Vitale, told a Wall Street Journal reporter about the new online bookselling sensation from the Pacific Northwest.

Brad Stone

#54. Most companies are not those things. They are focused on the competitor, rather than the customer.

Brad Stone

#55. In customers' minds, the Amazon brand meant books only.

Brad Stone

#56. Mike Bezos's job took them to Miami - a city Mike had first encountered fifteen years before as a penniless immigrant. Now he was an executive at Exxon, and the family bought a four-bedroom house with a backyard pool in the affluent Palmetto neighborhood in unincorporated Dade County. Miami

Brad Stone

#57. Bezos ultimately concluded that if Amazon was to continue to thrive as a bookseller in a new digital age, it must own the e-book business in the same way that Apple controlled the music business. "It is far better to cannibalize yourself than have someone else do it," said Diego Piacentini

Brad Stone

#58. Bezos is like a chess master playing countless games simultaneously, with the boards organized in such a way that he can efficiently tend to each match.

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#59. really a hedge fund but a versatile technology laboratory full of innovators and talented engineers who could apply computer science to a variety of different problems.5 Investing was only the first

Brad Stone

#60. Missionaries have righteous goals and are trying to make the world a better place. Mercenaries are out for money and power and will run over anyone who gets in the way.

Brad Stone

#61. Friends suggested that it sounded a bit sinister. But something about it must have captivated Bezos: he registered the URL in September 1994, and he kept it. Type Relentless into the Web today and it takes you to Amazon.

Brad Stone

#62. I've always had the opinion that we have shamelessly stolen any good ideas,

Brad Stone

#63. While other dot-coms merged or perished, Amazon survived through a combination of conviction, improvisation, and luck.

Brad Stone

#64. You have to start somewhere,' he said. 'You climb the top of the first tiny hill and from there you see the next hill.

Brad Stone

#65. Jeff didn't believe in work-life balance," says Kim Rachmeler. "He believed in work-life harmony. I guess the idea is you might be able to do everything all at once.

Brad Stone

#66. Amazon may be the most beguiling company that ever existed, and it is just getting started. It is both missionary and mercenary ... That has always been a potent combination.

Brad Stone