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Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

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Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#721

Post by solipsism »

paxys wrote: post #515
chrshawkes wrote: post #395

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.

> The majority of Ivy League enrollment is regular kids from working class families

HN does so much moderation, with dang slapping people for being nasty. Why is obvious, egregious misinformation like this not subject to moderation?

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#722

Post by cm2012 »

ineedasername wrote: post #570
paxys wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$180K is like 1-1.5x the median family income in a high CoL area in the US, so that's actually about what in line with what I would expect. You're not poor, sure, but it's not close to the kind of rich the original comment is implying when clubbing him with billionaires. A kid whose family earns $186K/yr isn't exactly on the fast track to becoming the next Jeff Bezos.

About the fast track portion sure, but otherwise, really, no. The median household income in NYC is about $100,000. San Francisco is about $90,000. Even at the high end of your estimate that's falling up to 25% short of $180k. Also it's really not proper to take the highest cost of living areas in this situation and say "it's okay they're kind of close to $180,000!" Taking the outliers as examples to support the idea…

Median household income in nyc proper is 50k. It's only 100k if you include the burns further out.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#723

Post by raverbashing »

biztos wrote: post #320
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #231

> 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…

Does AWS have a Sears-type analogue or was that a new concept? Just curious, no agenda, I grew up on the Sears Catalogue.

Well the way they're adding services I suppose they could make a "paper" version of it soon.

Would be a fun conceptual project

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#724

Post by sharkweek »

treis wrote: post #499
MisterTea wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony is domains like books.com sounded like a sure winner but that only works for books. How would Jeff be doing today if he ran books.com and just sold ... books. bookswebservice (BWS) doesn't have that same ring to it.

In retrospect the idea of selling everything online was the first great idea. Even if it was a bit of rehash of Sears I think they were the only one that had that vision. Second great idea was free 2 day shipping with Prime. Great for their cash flow and customer retention. Third great idea was AWS. Still TBD are advertising and the marketplace. They make a lot of money but at the long term risk of customer satisfact…

For fun... what are the major “bad” plays they’ve made?

The phone is probably the first that comes to mind.

That big MMO they tried to release was pretty bad.

I’m gonna try and predict the future and suggest their LotR original series will be bad.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#725

Post by GraffitiTim »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #511
GraffitiTim wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My memory is there were some stores that had "customer reviews" before Amazon, but they were all screened by the company before being published. So every product would only have 5 star reviews. When Amazon came out with real reviews, it seemed crazy to many at the time -- like why would you want to share bad things about your products on your own website? I thought it was awesome.

OK, so now this hinges on the idea that such stores had an online e-commerce-y presence before amzn. Again, I'm not ruling it out, but I don't remember us having any real models for this. Amazon's customer review system was created as a barrier to entry for competitors, as much as anything else.

Your memory would be more credible than mine certainly!

Perhaps I'm remembering my/people's reaction to first seeing reviews on Amazon.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#726

Post by vishnugupta »

kevstev wrote: post #421
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something that always stuck with me is I remember reading in a book about the internet long ago about how innovative the name Amazon.com was and how it was the future of internet business. It said it needs to be more memorable. You aren’t going to buy your books on Books.com you are going to use Amazon. Turned out to be very right. And this was in the pets.com era. Everyone thought you needed the most generic name po…

I think you are leaving out a really important aspect of the early internet- content discovery was really hard for users. If you were looking for something about Pets until google became dominant, you were just as likely, if not more likely, to type pets.com into your browser as you were to go to a search engine. Getting the initial traffic to your site was really hard in those days, the domain was really important f…

I can totally second this as someone who began surfing web in 1997 as a university student.

Content discovery was next to non-existent. You had these directories like Y! or Lycos which more or less mirrored yellow pages. My group of friends would exchange interesting site links over e-mail, floppy disk or the good old way, write them down in a note book. Before you ask, internet surfing was only available in expensive public kiosks so browser book marks weren't of much use. Only when I got my own PC + internet in 2000 did I began using browser bookmarks.

And then Google became popular around 2002 just when I entered post-graduation and changed web surfing forever.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#728

Post by yashap »

runarberg wrote: post #717
yashap wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 und…

Note mentioning that “smart” in this context usually means “able to get a large return on investment”. Making it a redundant trait description. “Good at business” is a better description. But people aren’t normally satisfied with calling billionaires “good at business” so they add this glittering “smart”, as if he is somehow a better person then you or I, which is a ridiculous statement.

From his Wikipedia page:

> He was high school valedictorian, a National Merit Scholar, and a Silver Knight Award winner in 1982.

> ... In 1986, he graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University with a 4.2 GPA and a Bachelor of Science in Engineering degree (B.S.E.) in electrical engineering and computer science

> ... After Bezos graduated from Princeton University in 1986, he was offered jobs at Intel, Bell Labs, and Andersen Consulting, among others. He first worked at Fitel, a fintech telecommunications start-up, where he was tasked with building a network for international trade. Bezos was promoted to head of development and director of customer service thereafter. He transitioned into the banking industry when he became a product manager at Bankers Trust. He worked there from 1988 to 1990. He then joined D. E. Shaw & Co, a newly founded hedge fund with a strong emphasis on mathematical modelling in 1990 and worked there until 1994. Bezos became D. E. Shaw's fourth senior vice-president at the age of 30.

Yes, he’s very good at business, but he’s clearly very “book smart” too.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#729

Post by hodgesrm »

93po wrote: post #622
wheybags wrote: post #368

> I don’t know of another company with an invention track record as good as Amazon’s Come on man, that's just bs. From wikipedia: > Researchers working at Bell Labs are credited with the development of radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, the photovoltaic cell, the charge-coupled device (CCD), information theory, the Unix operating system, and the programming languages B, C, C++, S, SNOBOL, AWK, AMPL, and othe…

And Amazon has great inventions like... the fire phone.

Plus...

* public cloud computing -- Amazon got it to work in a scalable and secure way.

* S3 object storage

* Dynamo -- A distributed, key-value store that ended up in products from S3 to Cassandra

* Redshift -- First cloud SQL data warehouse with ground-breaking ease of use

* RDS -- Cloud relational databases

* Amazon Aurora -- Relational DBMS that pushes the log and store into a virtualized, replicated storage layer

They've been particularly innovative in applications related to data.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#730

Post by hrktb »

airstrike wrote: post #360
hrktb wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My mental image is that people want to spin off AWS for society’s benefits because Amazon grew too big and abuses the integration. Amazon squarely resisting this idea seems uncontroversal.

People argue companies like Walmart don't want to pay their rival Amazon for cloud hosting, but the truth is if AWS is the best cloud provider, it makes business sense to go with them

Was in the industry for a stint, and the issue was not only about money going to Amazon. There was a serious fear for their usage data to be used as a window into their business (if not fear of more illegal and unethical access to their data)

The case of Amazon using internal market place data to guide their own product strategy has already been made over and over, so the precedent exists.

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