Folded Corners: The Everything Store
Folded Corners
First thing’s first, I’m not a book reviewer, don’t know about the intricacies of book reviewing, and rarely read book reviews. So why the f**k am I starting to write a series of book reviews? That’s a fair question.
I read a decent amount of non-fiction, mostly biographies. We can learn a lot through the narratives that others have lived through, using their lessons and sometimes applying them to our own situations. By doing so we can place ourselves in a better position, simply because we perused a book about someone or something and applied strategic takeaways. Information is power, after all.
Whenever I make my way through a book, I highlight passages of value and fold the bottom corners of interesting pages. These Medium articles are not going to be full-scale reviews. They will simply tell you what the book is about, and then I’ll refer to the folded corners to tell you what I personally found noteworthy whilst reading them. That’s why this is a series tentatively called Folded Corners. I enjoy discussing books with friends and colleagues, so this series is a way of scaling up those conversations and providing summary notes for whoever wants to see them but doesn’t want to commit to the full book.
What currently fascinates me are stories of ambitious founders or the early, scrappy, often cut-throat roots of a company’s birth. So the first Folded Corners will revolve around these.
OK, that’s the brief. Now on to the first book.
The Everything Store by Brad Stone
This book is about the tumultuous path of Amazon.com, the online marketplace that founder Jeff Bezos always envisaged as a place customers can go to buy anything. Anything!
Amazon today is a behemoth, common place among most internet users. But at the start it wasn’t always destined to be so. There were times of near bust - a rollercoaster ride of crippling stock prices, the dot com bubble burst, key executives burning out or getting thrown out.
Yet it seemed that any rough sailing was a non-issue for Bezos, never taking away from his long term vision. This book is a lesson in long term thinking and never letting the short term hurdles get in the way.
There are many tangible tactics hidden in the lessons of Amazon that all organisations can employ, if they’re brave, willing, and can see the advantages in the counterintuitive. One example is — Bezos believes coordination among employees wastes time, and that “the people closest to problems [are] usually in the best position to solve them.” He believes that adding manpower to a project delays progress — one reason being that time and money spent on communication and coordination increases in proportion to the number of people on a project. We’ve all experienced this. It might be worth keeping it lean, folks.
‘Even well-meaning gatekeepers slow innovation. When a platform is self-service, even the improbable ideas can get tried, because there’s no expert gate-keeper ready to say “that will never work!” And guess what — many of those improbable ideas do work, and society is the beneficiary of that diversity.
As you can see in Bezos’ quote above, another philosophy of Amazon is that of eliminating gatekeepers. We live in a world now, because of the internet, of meritocracy. The best rises to the top. That’s quite wonderful. Quality is filtered by the people. It used to be that certain industry gatekeepers (looking at you, publishing industry) chose what did well. No longer. We the people choose. That’s one of the reasons Amazon are so laser-focused on customers, whilst being irreverent and almost intentionally insulting of established industries.
Missionary vs Mercenary is another simple yet revealing insight into Amazon’s viewpoint. In Bezos’ mind, missionary organisations are ones that revolve around a central mission, which staff and customers all buy in to. A missionary does something not for quick wins, but to fulfil an ambitious vision. Mercenary organisations on the other hand are opportunistic, quick-win seekers. It’s ironic, then, that often the organisations and individuals who come out on top do so because they place the mission over everything else. That’s a real takeaway that every individual can use — do you do what you do for the right reasons? Do you believe in the mission?
Bezos would make a great war strategist. He’s not afraid of employing dirty business tactics to get the deal he wants, for example undercutting Zappos.com with free shipping — applying crippling pressure on their operations until they gave in and sold their company to Amazon. This is just one of many examples in the book of Bezos knowing exactly how to play dirty when he wants to win.
In many ways, he comes across as having similar character traits to Steve Jobs, being fiery in the boardroom, temperamental, and not afraid to say what he thinks — but it is his war-general-esque moves of the chess pieces which make him come across as perhaps more deviant.
Jeff has an intense, harsh personality. He shows loyalty on occasion but it is growth, efficiency, frugality, and long term vision which drives him as a leader. Anything he sees as taking away from those values becomes the focus of his wrath. And to be on the receiving end of his wrath doesn’t sound at all pleasant. But perhaps that kind of character is simply what it takes to create something which ultimately navigates hyper-growth successfully and makes a mark on hundreds of millions of people? It would be a shame if that was true, but not completely surprising.
What fascinates me about Bezos the most though, is not how he kept true to his vision when only he believed in it, or how he navigated emerging technologies to create thriving monopolies. What really fascinates me is a question that is touched upon and written between the lines, although never really answered. The question is whether building Amazon is only step one, a springboard perhaps?
According to a passage in the book, Bezos recently started proactively keeping himself in shape. He takes big risks and places big bets. As a child growing up, he had a fascination for all things space. He started a secret development company years ago that is now better known as the company that’s behind the reusable space rocket Blue Origin. Phil Libin, founder of Evernote recently said that in a conversation with Bezos, the Amazon founder spoke about how building habitats on other planets was the wrong way of diversifying where humanity lived, and that the smart thing to do would be to build habitats that float in space, unattached from Mars or the Moon and not reliant on anything other than itself. Funnily enough, that seems like a very Bezos way of doing things. Remove the gatekeepers — in this case, planets.
Maybe Amazon is only a minor cog in his overall wheel. I wonder whether the long term vision is for Bezos himself to go to, and live in, space. A self-created space mission. One of Amazon’s core principles is thinking big, and that’s truly thinking big.
There’s a good chance he’s built a $249 Billion and rising company, just so he can see out a vision first formulated in childhood. Perhaps that really is the sign of a missionary founder.
