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Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

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Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#611
post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloud Computing is uniquely an Amazon invention the way smartphones are uniquely an Apple invention. Which is to say there’s a sense in which you’re right and a sense in which this is an absurd statement..

Amazon invented cloud computing the way Ford invented the automobile.

I'd argue everyone who has heard of Ford is most likely familiar with Mercedes, whereas the number of people familiar with Amazon will likely be many orders of magnitude larger than the people who know who invented cloud computing. Not quite an apt comparison, imho.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This seems like nitpicking. I don’t know if it’s nitpicking. If it’s true that the Amazon #2 employee took time to post this here, Jeff Bezos should have remembered and be precise in his speech.

> Jeff Bezos should have remembered Who cares? It's getting into deep time (internet-wise), memories fade, do we care, I don't despite opening my first Amazon account ~1998. It was called "something", big deal. Not everyone has photographic memories of these things, perhaps Paul does, but wasn't asked to recall those memories. Again, who cares? And they might have worked through twenty other names after Paul left. I'…

1) The name "Amazon.com" was chosen in 1994 (or possibly January 1995). 2) Subsequently, the company never considered any other name 3) I'm older than you and Jeff 4) I don't have a photographic memory 5) I've been asked twice in court, on Amazon's behalf, to remember things that happened/took place/were done back then.

[ EDIT: added "subsequently" for clarity ]

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#613

(Email from Jeff Bezos to everyone in corporate because the larger culture in Amazon is nothing like this)

They sent the email to literally everyone, even people without amazon email accounts through the employment website but yeah you are right. There is a caste system within Amazon that even working out of corp office or having a tech job won't save you from.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#614

Love him or hate him, Jeff Bezos has been a legendary figure in the world of business for over 25 years now. His focus on the long term has led to the tremendous success Amazon has undergone. When he started selling just books, he was laughed at by some people; but he had a why behind starting off with books. One thing is certain, Bezos has stayed consistent on his principles. His annual letters to his shareholders c…

I'm curious, what was the reason for starting with books?

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#615

> This journey began some 27 years ago. Amazon was only an idea, and it had no name. It had a name, and that name was "Cadabra". It didn't become Amazon until Jeff watched a documentary about the Amazon River. His lawyer had already turned up his nose at "Cadabra", and Jeff was looking for something else. It's also worth noting that the idea didn't grow over time - Jeff always intended to build something like "Sears…

> the idea didn't grow over time

I always find retrospective and hypothetical discussions of idea genesis and maturation fascinating.

Amazon retail aside, I wonder if you (or anyone else) would be willing to give perspective on AWS:

Was it similarly fully formed on conception?

I’ve heard the (potentially stylized) stories about holiday traffic bursts, selling off-season compute to startups, etc.

But assuming AWS the idea did need to grow with increased perspective, the times, and experience - do you think AWS could have become what it is today if that had been the goal from the onset?

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#616
post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BS dude. He wasn't laughed at. The man went to Princeton. Right next to other billionaires like Andy Florence. His family was rich etc... He was already a millionaire. It's not a rags-to-riches story by any stretch.

He went to Princeton because he was smart, not because his family was rich. It isn't a school of billionaires or something. The majority of Ivy League enrollment is regular kids from working class families. They all have the best need-based scholarship programs in the country. His dad was a Cuban immigrant who worked as an engineer at Exxon.

I don’t disagree that he is/was super smart (and hardworking), but he came from a fairly wealthy family too. When he was starting Amazon, his parents invested $300,000 to help get it off the ground. You don’t have $300K to pour into your son’s startup if you aren’t wealthy. Also, when he was growing up his maternal grandparents owned a 25,000 acre ranch in Texas, which suggests significant wealth too. From what I understand his family wasn’t ultra wealthy, but they were well off.

Creating a mega-successful company is extremely difficult. Most people who do so are incredibly smart, incredibly hard working, got very lucky with the idea they chose to pursue (right place, right time), AND come from a wealthy family that can invest in their idea and make it feel like much less of a risk to found a company. Bezos fits all of these criteria, as do most successful tech founders.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It had a name, and that name was "Cadabra". Lol, so your take is that you have a better handle on the history of Amazon than its founder? He is likely referring to a point in time when Amazon was just an idea.

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-jeff-bezos-chose-comp...

This story is incorrect. I don't know how Brad Stone could have got this wrong, because I told him the actual origin of the name. It did not come from looking up words in a dictionary. It came from a documentary that Jeff watched about the Amazon river. The concept that particular stuck with him was that the Amazon is not just the biggest river in the world, but is 10x larger than the next largest river. In addition to the alphabetic sorting benefits of the name (important back then), Jeff loved the size metaphor.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#618
post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because money is power, corporations are not democratic, and putting so much power in the hands of one person or a handful of people is dangerous to society. I would also refer you to the entire history of US antitrust law, which will be hard for anyone to summarize in a comment. The whole field of competition law is a question of how to balance the rights of those running a business with the rights of those affected…

You’re going to have to try harder than this. Money is a form of power, it is not equivalent to power. Amazon is valued at $1.6T and this is a calculation that directly correlates to how much individual shares of Amazon. Shares can be sold for money, but this decreases the share of power the shareholder has by the exact amount of shares they sold to the buyer, which increases their shares and power over the company.…

You are confusing a whole lot of concepts here, and at times it seems you are arguing against yourself(?).

First you argue against great concentrations of capital also being great concentrations of power, in this "yes, but no" sentence:

>Money is a form of power, it is not equivalent to power.

This sentence seems to mean absolutely nothing. "not equivalent to power" is some sort of vague semantic argument about what power "is", that is not interesting to the discussion.

Wealth _is_ power in the sense that you can use money to affect change in the world. Wealth is the simplest and most flexible form of power, because it can be directed at anyone or any organization, and transformed into other forms of power. And it even grows by itself!

You then talk about the market cap of Amazon. Why? The market cap, while also representing a sum of money, is not really relevant to the discussion. You even seem to realize this yourself, but you do not really explain the reason for bringing it up.

Are you trying to say that competition exists and therefore everything is good?

That would be fine if it weren't for the fact that the companies you mentioned do not compete in the same markets. They share some markets, e.g. AWS vs GCP, but you offer no evidence that this market is healthy.

Competition is key if you want a healthy market, as is aligning corporate goals with societal ones. You could even argue that competition for customer business is the main mechanism for achieving alignment.

If you allow any one business to get too much power, competition will weaken. Excessive power can come in the form of excessive capital concentration. It can also come in the form of other bargaining chips that come with excessive capital concentration, such as: control over resources used by direct competitors in a market, e.g. the marketplace itself; the ability to create jobs, politicians love jobs; the ability to invade a new market by subsidizing a new department with capital from elsewhere in the organization; or even an information asymmetry created by a huge data collection operation.

Amazon exhibits all these forms of power and more. Some of the other companies you mentioned exhibit these as well. It would be in the interest of society to break up monopolies and other concentrations of power that are actively impeding competition in the way that Amazon is.

These ideas aren't new, developed nations typically create institutions to maintain healthy competition. In the US, the federal trade comission and the DOJ are tasked with keeping competition healthy by enforcing antitrust law. They used to be a lot more active than they are now, e.g. when they broke up Bell. I wonder what has made them slip...

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Jeff Bezos should have remembered Who cares? It's getting into deep time (internet-wise), memories fade, do we care, I don't despite opening my first Amazon account ~1998. It was called "something", big deal. Not everyone has photographic memories of these things, perhaps Paul does, but wasn't asked to recall those memories. Again, who cares? And they might have worked through twenty other names after Paul left. I'…

1) The name "Amazon.com" was chosen in 1994 (or possibly January 1995). 2) Subsequently, the company never considered any other name 3) I'm older than you and Jeff 4) I don't have a photographic memory 5) I've been asked twice in court, on Amazon's behalf, to remember things that happened/took place/were done back then. [ EDIT: added "subsequently" for clarity ]

Ok fine, but in your original post you don't provide any dates, and you assert that:

> It had a name, and that name was "Cadabra".

Now you're saying something different. So it's one thing or another. Maybe just clarify the "when" of these things as you remember them. Not having a go at you.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#620
post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To that end, it's worth reading up on the history of sex.com. The domain historically (and currently?) generates tonnes of revenue through advertising, and has been hijacked more than once.

I wonder if it's because people are likely to try `sex.com` in a web browser for laughs (and get surprised when it turns out to be a real site), but aren't likely to do so with `books.com` or `travel.com`.

there used to be (sadly not anymore) a very active forum on fuckyou.com and it was mostly populated by people that had just randomly typed it in one day.
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