Buffett’s annual letters are the gold standard, but close behind is Jeff Bezos.
In typical Jeff Bezos style, the annual letter is brief, to the point and packs a punch.
A must read for any business minded person or Amazon investor.
Bezos is undoubtedly one of the elite minds in business and he provides a glimpse into how he thinks and what he sees with Amazon.
Fiscal 2015 is an important year for Amazon as they have hit the $100B annual revenue milestone, but they are the fastest company to have reached this goal.
Growing the top line may not sound as exciting, but when you look at the steps the company took to get there, it’s an astounding feat.
I’ve taken the best parts from the letter and categorized it for you.
Why and How Amazon Has Grown like a Weed
Reflecting on how Amazon has gotten to where they are, Bezos attributes it to being eager to fail and having focused on the customer and taking bold action to what the customer wants.
Not what competitors are doing.
I’m talking about customer obsession rather than competitor obsession, eagerness to invent and pioneer, willingness to fail, the patience to think long-term, and the taking of professional pride in operational excellence
To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment. Most large organizations embrace the idea of invention, but are not willing to suffer the string of failed experiments necessary to get there. Outsized returns often come from betting against conventional wisdom, and conventional wisdom is usually right.
Think Big and Be Bold
Given a ten percent chance of a 100 times payoff, you should take that bet every time.
The difference between an investor and a businessman like Bezos is that we’ll never take the 10% odds for a 100x payoff. There is a higher probability that no money will remain to make another bet. As an investor, we fail plenty of times and aim to learn from the mistakes, but purposely testing and trying our new ideas to make outsized returns goes against the definition of investing.
In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs.
This long-tailed distribution of returns is why it’s important to be bold. Big winners pay for so many experiments.
Our scale enables us to build services for customers that we could otherwise never even contemplate.
Prime Day Will be a Tradition and Prime Continues to Thrive
The entire Prime membership concept was a huge gamble for Amazon as nobody in the industry was even thinking of doing it. However, Prime continues to grow, Amazon continues to add features and benefits for Prime members and the future is bright.
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