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Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their startups

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Re: Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their startups

#71

Post by manigandham »

ng12 wrote: post #62
manigandham wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon doesn't need a turnaround. Entire industries are afraid of its relentless march to perfect execution at the lowest possible price. It's only accelerating in new developments and innovation and is far from its peak.

> to perfect execution Their retail business is pretty far from perfect. Just a few days ago I got my first obviously fake product that was "sold by Amazon".

I'm talking about operating as a business. Nobody executes better than Amazon right now.

As for as the store experience, their selection, price, speed and convenience has led to their wild success. The fakes from 3rd-party sellers are not as big of a problem as HN makes it seem, and they could drop them overnight if they really wanted to in case any liability arises.

Re: Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their startups

#72

Post by manigandham »

nine_k wrote: post #56
manigandham wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Retail is far from dead with just about every retailer reporting record sales and consumer confidence remaining high. Amazon has plenty marketshare to take, whether as a monolithic organization or several independent companies.

Retail as a business is fine. Amazon's retail may be slowly dying, overcome with fakes, razor-thin margins, dwindling faith of buyers, and a looming anti-trust investigation. The retail department is at some risk of downsizing back to mostly books. It would be wise for them to concentrate on stuff that goes well: AWS, Alexa.

Downsizing back to books? That goes against every available metric.

Amazon retail is growing like crazy. They have more retail channels opening up beyond the main ecommerce store and they're investing 1.5B for 1-day delivery (while trivially putting Fedex on death watch as a side effect). The only serious competition they have is Walmart which has hit on groceries as a magic bullet, and Target.

Fakes are not as big of a problem as HN makes it seem. Margins only help Amazon beat its competitors. And there's nothing antitrust can do since there's no monopoly on retail outlets, people want to shop there by choice.

Re: Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their startups

#73

Post by ng12 »

manigandham wrote: post #71
ng12 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to perfect execution Their retail business is pretty far from perfect. Just a few days ago I got my first obviously fake product that was "sold by Amazon".

I'm talking about operating as a business. Nobody executes better than Amazon right now. As for as the store experience, their selection, price, speed and convenience has led to their wild success. The fakes from 3rd-party sellers are not as big of a problem as HN makes it seem, and they could drop them overnight if they really wanted to in case any liability arises.

> Even with occasional 3rd-party product issues

The problem with Amazon is anything can be "3rd-party" and you'll never know until you have a problem with it. Maybe the fraudulent product was the result of a sketchy 3rd-party dealer but also I don't really care -- I bought it from "Amazon" and they sent me tainted inventory.

Target and Walmart are catching up with their online operations and at least with them I don't have to worry about being shipped fake products.

Re: Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their startups

#74

Post by hitekker »

bcantrill wrote: post #70
hitekker wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, what kind of research went into articulating Oxide’s culture?

Honestly, we just sat down and figured out the values that really bonded us: values that we deeply shared, not merely aspired to. There are some values in there that are subtler than they look -- but that the three of us hold very deeply...

Thank you. Another follow-up if you don't mind: have you and the others considering ranking Oxide's values separately, and then coming together to determine their hierarchy? It would help a candidate to know which values are more deeply shared, equally shared, or less shared by their own leaders.

Gitlab describes this concept here: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/values/#hierarchy

Re: Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their startups

#75

Post by heavyset_go »

celticmusic wrote: post #54
heavyset_go wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It works well as it is Search is horribly broken, sorting is broken, ratings are broken, products are broken up into categories that don't make sense and searching and sorting between categories is broken.

That hasn't been my experience at all, but the further point is that is all background stuff. They can improve the search without changing the UI, so it's not really a response to my point.

It's very much a response to your point. From your original post:

> It works well as it is, I certainly never find myself wanting something it doesn't currently do.

You are talking about functionality, and I am responding about Amazon's functionality.

Re: Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their startups

#76

Post by heavyset_go »

minblaster wrote: post #60
heavyset_go wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It works well as it is Search is horribly broken, sorting is broken, ratings are broken, products are broken up into categories that don't make sense and searching and sorting between categories is broken.

"Broken" is one-dimensional-black-and-white-thinking-speak for "works for most, most of the time, but has some behavior I don't like so it's 100% useless." So you can't perfectly compare an item that is cross-listed in multiple categories. Is that "broken", or not ideal? Even ratings, the worst thing about amazon, are "useful" in that you can instantly look at the distribution. All 5's and 1's? Product sucks.

> "Broken" is one-dimensional-black-and-white-thinking-speak for "works for most, most of the time, but has some behavior I don't like so it's 100% useless."

Please do not strawman my position just because you disagree with it. Sorting by price doesn't sort by price, sorting by average customer review doesn't sort by average customer review and so on.

> So you can't perfectly compare an item that is cross-listed in multiple categories. Is that "broken", or not ideal?

When the feature says "sort by price" and it doesn't sort by price, it is broken. I assume you work in software development, so you should know this.

> Even ratings, the worst thing about amazon, are "useful" in that you can instantly look at the distribution. All 5's and 1's? Product sucks.

This isn't even remotely true. I've come across hundreds of listings that have reviews for products that are clearly not the product in the listing. The fact that this is even allowed means that the rating system is broken.

Re: Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their startups

#77

Post by dang »

batt4good wrote: post #7

As someone who left Amazon, I'd never want to deal with that garbage culture ever again in any form or permutation. It gives me a headache that founders who previously worked at Amazon would want to promote the "culture" dissonance of Amazon at their own companies.

Rather than just denouncing something without explaining it, it would be better if you described what your experience was and how you arrived at these conclusions. That would gratify curiosity more.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their startups

#78

Post by bcantrill »

hitekker wrote: post #74
bcantrill wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, we just sat down and figured out the values that really bonded us: values that we deeply shared, not merely aspired to. There are some values in there that are subtler than they look -- but that the three of us hold very deeply...

Thank you. Another follow-up if you don't mind: have you and the others considering ranking Oxide's values separately, and then coming together to determine their hierarchy? It would help a candidate to know which values are more deeply shared, equally shared, or less shared by their own leaders. Gitlab describes this concept here: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/values/#hierarchy

That's a great question, but honestly, we deeply share all of them -- so much so that it's very hard to rank them. And not because each is unequivocally good! Indeed, each of these values can be taken to excess and must be held on tension by the others. So it's hard to imagine any of them taken away -- or valued to the exclusion of the others. (With my apologies for the profoundly unhelpful answer!)

Re: Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their startups

#79

Post by ignoramous »

jariel wrote: post #27
remarkEon wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are we sure that Amazon is stagnating right now like Microsoft was though? A more appropriate question might be along the lines of who could prevent sliding into the Ballmer-Microsoft-like Stagnation.

There was never any stagnation at Microsoft other than in the stock price. Have a look: [1] [2] - what changed really was simply the price/earnings multiplier, not really the underlying fundamentals. Though this is very important, I don't think it's the most important part of the Ballmer culture era. Revenues and product line expansion grew phenomenally, Ballmer brought huge new business lines and the cloud into the…

> very few companies have done that really well - i.e. gone from 15K -> 100K and maintained dynamism. Probably few if any.

A footnote: Amazon is approaching a 1,000,000 employees.

Re: Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their startups

#80

Post by whelsemin »

manigandham wrote: post #29
0zymandias wrote: post #3

What I hear from Amazonians in Seattle is that the culture is markedly different today than it was 5-10 years ago. That shouldn’t be surprising. Things are slower now and layered. VPs report to VPs who report to VPs. More politics. More focus on competitors. Less belief in the upside. Using Jeff’s words: We are well into Day 2. As a result, great people are leaving in droves. Satya managed an incredible cultural and…

Amazon doesn't need a turnaround. Entire industries are afraid of its relentless march to perfect execution at the lowest possible price. It's only accelerating in new developments and innovation and is far from its peak.

Truth
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