"The king is dead, long live the king!"
Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
561–570 of 1001 posts
Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
#562Wow. I still remember when Amazon started as an online bookstore selling books and people kind of laughed at the idea, and the time Amazon kept losing money and refused to post an earning and people got mad. Amazing long game.
Amazon's stock went up like a rocket since its IPO. Wall Street didn't laugh at Bezos.
Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
#563Earlier 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 wonder if the browsers themselves weren't responsible for the reversal of this trend. Back in the day, if you typed something into address bar, there wasn't a "fallback to search" like we have today.
Well, some older browsers would try slapping .com at the end, and adding www at the start too, if no domain was found...
So just typing sex could be fruitful...
Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
#564Earlier 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…
We are firing on all cylinders
And yet, reviews are still horribly broken and have been for years. Also counterfeit products and books are everywhere on the site.
Amazon is going to have to fix those hugely important things before I'll buy the Kool-Aid that they're "firing on all cylinders", which is just CEO pep talk.
Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
#565Earlier 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.
No, most families at Princeton are not typical working class families. The median family income of a student's family is about $180,000.
Yes, if you're accepted, you really don't have to worry about the price tag because of their financial aid. But poorer families are more likely to go to lower quality schools that may not even offer AP courses and do very little test prep. Families are also unable to afford top-tier test prep services either. On average, if you come from a poor family you've probably had to work harder, or be smarter, to get into Princeton.
I'm not saying this is a problem for Princeton to solve. I'm just saying that it's really not an institution highly accessible to middle/lower class. Just take for example the fact that they favor children of past alumni heavily: something like 30% of the class comes from "legacy" students whose parents(s) attended as well.
Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
#566Earlier quoted context omitted.
Incidentally, books.com was taken early on (say 1990) by an outfit in Ohio. Pre-web, they had a telnet interface.
There are a couple of institutions in the Seattle area that have pretty good generic domain names, presumably because of the tech connections in the area. For instance, the Washington State Fair has the domain thefair.com.
Local zoo is zoo.org!
Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
#567Earlier quoted context omitted.
Listening to cbell rip someone apart in the weekly ops meeting while watching the #wtf peanut gallery whilst sipping my coffee are probably my fondest memories of working at AWS
Thing is, cbell doesn't make it personal (in any of the calls I've seen). It's about raising the bar. He demands quality, and he gets it. His weekly ops meetings have been imitated by other orgs, terribly, because they don't understand the point. They think ripping into people is the goal. I've got a project this year that I'm told is on his radar. I'm not terrified. I'm excited, because it means I have to deliver th…
"ripping into people" was famous Bezos/Amazon culture from the start.
Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
#568Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
#569> 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…
>> 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".
This seems like nitpicking. Lots of projects start out with long forgotten names. I'm involved in one that's pretty successful, but you can see from the code base the name evolved over time (~15 years). Codenames and attempts at product placing in the market evolve, stuff becomes myth or forgotten. I can absolve Bezos (this once) of not remembering exactly what that embryonic Amazon was to begin with, or was called, because it was ~25 years ago, probably during a period of great turmoil.
And the tone of this comment feels like someone who checked out of the company too early and feels a bit sour at doing so. I say this as a single digit employee who could have made a small fortune a couple of times but either bottled it, or the gig wasn't right for me. I missed out on some nice payouts, but I'm not that sour about it. It was my choice.
Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
#570Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The median family income of a student from Princeton is $186,100, and 72% come from the top 20 percent. About 1.3% of students at Princeton came from a poor family but became a rich adult. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobilit...
$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 that the average family meets it is close to the median is really a bad comparison. Most of the country doesn't live in those areas. It would only be an appropriate comparison if Princeton received most if their students from those areas, and they don't.