#388 Jeff Bezos's Shareholder Letters: All of Them!

(I fixed the audio and uploaded a new episode!)  "To read Jeff Bezos’s shareholder letters is to get a crash course in running a high-growth internet business from someone who mastered it before any of the playbooks were written." That is the best description of Bezos's letters I have ever read. I just finished rereading these letters for the 4th or 5th time. With clear thinking and ferocious intelligence, Bezos provides a masterclass in building a customer-obsessed, enduring franchise. With relentless repetition Bezos teaches us about the importance of invention, risk-taking, wandering, differentiation, technology, judgement, high-standards, customer obsession, long-term orientation, and why value trumps everything.  Read the letters on Amazon's website here. Or in the book Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos Register for the live event in New York at Ramp!  Ramp gives you everything you need to control spend, watch your costs, and optimize your financial operations —all on a single platform. Make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud by going to Ramp and learning how they can help your business control your costs and save time and money. Join my free email newsletter to get my top 10 highlights from every book ( 15:00 ) Setting the bar high in our approach to hiring has been, and will continue to be, the single most important element of Amazon success. It's not easy to work here but we are working to build something important, something that matters to our customers, something that we can all tell our grandchildren about. Such things aren't meant to be easy. ( 24:00 ) We believe we have reached a "tipping point," where this platform allows us to launch new ecommerce businesses faster, with a higher quality of customer experience, a lower incremental cost, a higher chance of success, and a faster path to scale and profitability than any other company. ( 27:00 ) We will continue to invest heavily in introductions to new customers. Though it's so