The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

Market leadership can translate directly to higher revenue, higher profitability, greater capital velocity, and correspondingly stronger returns on invested capital.

The elevated competition

Kaphan couldn’t imagine

Bezos also pitched

These were all

“It’s easier to invent the future than to predict it.”

—Alan Kay

“When you are in the thick of things, you can get confused by small stuff,” Bezos said a few years later. “I knew when I was eighty that I would never, for example, think about why I walked away from my 1994 Wall Street bonus right in the middle of the year at the worst possible time. That kind of thing just isn’t something you worry about when you’re eighty years old. At the same time, I knew that I might sincerely regret not having participated in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a revolutionizing event. When I thought about it that way… it was incredibly easy to make the decision.”

Manber’s mission was a broad one: use technology to improve Amazon’s operations and invent new features. He would see Bezos once a week—an exception to the CEO’s aversion to one-on-one meetings—to review ongoing projects and brainstorm new ideas. Manber always had Bezos’s full attention, even on a day when they met just a few hours before Amazon’s quarterly earnings announcement

“If you don’t know anything about the business, launch it through the Marketplace, bring retailers in, watch what they do and what they sell, understand it, and then get into it.”

At the time, Bezos had selected jewelry as the company’s next big opportunity. It was a tempting target: the products were small, the prices were high, and shipping was relatively cheap