Brad Stone's biography begins with the childhood and youth of Jeff Bezos and his work on Wall Street, which inspired him to found Amazon.com in 1994. Starting in a garage – with doors from hardware stores as tables – Amazon has become one of the world's most valuable companies. The company's crises and how many stages of development were necessary to make it happen are something that the average Amazon customer today is no longer aware of.
With products like AWS, Amazon has virtually invented cloud computing. With the Kindle, Amazon has stirred up the book market just as Apple had shortly before stirred up the music industry with the iPad and iTunes.
Logistics centers spread across the entire country, which did not exist in this form before, have made next-day deliveries – and now even same-day deliveries – possible. And they paved the way to opening up Amazon as a trading platform for other companies.
Bezos' unwavering determination to grow and to always offer his customers the best possible service – as well as his long-term vision (Bezos planned from the very beginning that one day you could buy everything at Amazon) – were at all times more important to him than inflating Amazon's share price with short-term strategies.
It is impressive how Amazon first stood up to the publishing industry's giants and later to companies like Wallmart, who realized the relevance of online commerce too late. Those competitors who saw themselves as winners during Amazon's crisis at the beginning of the 2000s have been proven wrong by Bezos.
All in all, it's a great book that tells excitingly and entertainingly what outstanding achievements and sacrifices not only Bezos but all of its employees have made. And how they have turned existing business models upside down and created new business models to make Amazon what it is today: an "Everything Store."
🎧 Suitable as an audiobook? Yes, absolutely.
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