The Everything Store summary

Perhaps this slogan doesn’t seem appropriate for the billion-dollar company that Amazon is today, but it fits a company that started in a garage and has had to struggle on the commercial battlefield with minimal profit margins. To this day, Amazon is characterized by a frugality that some might perceive as excessive. However, Jeff Bezos is convinced that limitations provoke innovation and frugality helps the company concentrate on the most important things, e.g., customer satisfaction.

Amazon’s employees have to pay for their parking permits themselves; there are no free snacks at work; on business trips, they have to sleep in double rooms and managers even have to pay for their own flights. In general, the corporate culture at Amazon is harsh and has a fiercely competitive structure. The motto is: “You can work long, you can work hard, you can work smart, but at Amazon you can't choose two out of three.”

Amazon’s corporate culture is unique: for example, nobody gives presentations at internal meetings. Instead, employees have to write a six-page paper explaining their ideas, which all the meeting participants, including Bezos himself, have to read in complete silence – a task that can last up to 30 minutes. Bezos believes that his employees are thus forced to contemplate their ideas critically, which helps them present the ideas more persuasively.

Another Amazon quirk is the two-pizza rule. No team in the company should have so many members that it can’t be fed with two pizzas. Bezos considers meetings of big groups unproductive, which is why the whole company is organized in autonomous units with fewer than ten employees per unit. And these groups compete with one another for resources. They all have the task of solving the biggest problems that stop consumers from being a tad happier.

In Bezos’ words, Amazon’s greatest strength is its willingness to not be understood by others.

To a certain extent, this also applies to its business model. Many outsiders talk about the fact that Amazon makes frequent short-term losses. What they don’t take into account is that the company is thinking in the long term and is happy to accept short-term losses if they end up helping the company achieve its future goals.

Jeff Bezos’ private and non-Amazon projects are also a testament to his long-term thinking.

He’s currently financing the construction of an underground clock in Texas that is designed to run for 10,000 years with hardly any maintenance. Danny Hills, the inventor of the clock, says that the Clock of the Long Now will only tick once per year. The “century hand” moves once every 100 years and, after every millennium, a cuckoo comes out of the clock and sings.

During the dot-com boom in the late 1990s, Amazon lost hundreds of millions of dollars buying start-ups on the verge of bursting. Amazon took a rough fall, but the company learned its lesson – it became much more careful when acquiring companies and developed a do-it-yourself culture. It started to make its own products rather than acquiring them from others.

The company has a very bold approach: it’s not afraid to jump into things before analyzing them down to the last detail. Even if that approach results in mistakes, Bezos prefers it to overanalyzing everything first, which often means losing lots of opportunities to try something new that might work.

Once Bezos managed to establish Amazon as an online book retailer, it started to sell music, films, electronic devices and toys. Then he offered third parties an opportunity to sell their own goods, both used and new, on Amazon. Finally, thanks to the Kindle, Amazon also became a central figure in the world of e-books.

What most people don’t know is that Amazon offers a number of additional services, such as the cloud computing service Amazon Web Services (AWS), which turned Amazon from being a purely commercial enterprise into a mix of a store and a tech company. Many businesses, the US government, NASA and the CIA buy storage space and computational power via AWS. The service is the backbone of many online start-ups and provides servers for companies like Instagram and Netflix.

After almost 20 years of constant growth since its launch in Jeff Bezos’ garage, Amazon is coming closer to achieving its original vision of creating an Everything Store.

Still, Bezos doesn’t see that as a justification to sit back and rest on his laurels. As far as he’s concerned, there are still many challenges that need to be addressed before his long-term vision can be fulfilled. He would like to see Amazon provide same-day delivery, and have its own vehicle fleet (with trucks) and grocery business (Amazon Fresh); he also wants to turn Amazon itself into a publisher and media company, to build an Amazon film studio, to produce Amazon smartphones and televisions and, finally, to expand to new countries and maybe even offer a 3D printing service.

The main message of this book:

Strong customer orientation, long-term thinking and the drive to evolve and improve are the qualities that make Amazon what it is. The company’s unequaled success can undoubtedly be traced back to the way of thinking promoted by its founder, Jeff Bezos. He stands out in particular for his willingness to take risks and try new things, as well as for his future-oriented thinking, which is also exemplified by his other projects, such as a private space program and a 10,000-year clock.