BC BUSINESS
Saved by @Mollyycolllinss

I just read all of Jeff Bezos's 23 letters to Amazon shareholders. And here's a thread with just one key-takeaway from each of these letters.

So if you're an artist or an entrepreneur looking to get some insight into the mind of this genius, read this right now.

 1997: Focus relentlessly on your customers and long-term growth.
1998: Here are the 3 criteria Bezos wants managers to consider when hiring (to set the bar high):

1. Will you admire this person?

2. Will they raise the average level of effectiveness of the group?

3. Along what dimension might this person be a superstar?
1999: How to think long-term? Think: it's good enough today, but it will get so much better.
2000: "In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.” - Benjamin Graham

We aren’t 10% smarter when the share goes 10% up, nor 10% dumber when it goes down. We want to be weighed, & we're always working to build a heavier company.
2001: Find the real root cause or causes of a problem—and do real root fixes.

So then, when you fix it, you’re not just fixing it for one customer. You’re fixing it for every customer.
2002: What’s good for customers is good for shareholders.
2003: Long-term thinking is both a requirement and an outcome of true ownership.

Owners are different from tenants: many investors are effectively short-term tenants, turning their portfolios so quickly that they are really just renting the stocks that they temporarily “own.”
2004: Cash flows do the best job of explaining a company’s stock price over the long term.

Amazon has a cash generative operating cycle because it turns its inventory quickly, collecting payments from customers way before payments are due to suppliers.
2005: Two type of business decisions:

1. Made with data, where it's easy to tell right from wrong.

2. Based on judgement, risky.

If you want to play it safe, limit yourself to number 1, but remember it would also limit innovation and long-term value creation.
2006: A checklist before investing money in a new business:

✓ it generates expected ROI
✓ can grow to a scale
✓ the opportunity is currently underserved
✓ you've the capabilities that are needed to bring strong customer-facing differentiation to the marketplace
2007: As an inventor, are you a missionary or a mercenary?

The mercenaries try to flip their stock. The missionaries love their product/service, and their customers, and are trying to build a great service.

Pradoxically, it’s usually the missionaries who make more money.
2008: Seek instant gratification and you'll find a crowd there ahead of you.

On the other hand, long-term thinking
• levers existing abilities,
• supports the failure and iteration required for invention,
• and frees us to pioneer in unexplored spaces.
2009: Listen to customers, but don’t just listen to customers—also invent on their behalf.
2010: Invention is the fundamental tool to evolve and improve every aspect of the customer experience.

The latest and the grestest technologies aren't always sufficient to solve all problems, so it's important to advance research and invent new approaches.
2011: Even well-meaning gatekeepers slow innovation. Whereas, with self-service platforms, even the improbable ideas can get tried.

So the most radical & transformative of inventions are often those that empower others to unleash their creativity—to pursue their dreams.
2012: The customer-centric way, rather than a competition-focused way, is a defining element of Amazon's culture.

Rather than waiting for external pressures, the brand is internally-driven to improve services before it has to, and to invent, before it has to.
2013: Once a year, Amazon literally offers to pay its associates to quit.

While the headline says “Please Don’t Take This Offer.” It's meant to make them rethink their priorities. An employee staying somewhere they don’t want to be isn’t healthy for the employee or the company.
2014: When you find a dream business opportunity, don’t just swipe right, get married.

Check for these 4 attributes:

1. customers love it,
2. can grow to very large size,
3. has strong returns on capital,
4. is durable in time—with the potential to endure for decades.
2015: Big winners pay for so many experiments.

Outsized returns come from betting against conventional wisdom, which is usually right. Given a 10% chance of a 100X payoff, you should take that bet every time. But you’re still going to be wrong nine times out of ten.
2016: It's always Day 1.

Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance, and decline, and, eventually, death.

Here's how to fend off Day 2:

• customer obsession
• a skeptical view of (overusing) proxies
• adoption of powerful trends
• high-velocity decision making
2017: How to achieve high standards?

1. You have to be able to recognize what good looks like in a particular domain.

2. You must have realistic expectations for how hard it should be (how much work it will take) to achieve that result – the scope.
2018: The path to success isn't straight.

At times you know where you’re going & you can be efficient. But the outsized “nonlinear” discoveries are likely to require wandering (intuition, curiousity), and it’s worth being a little messy & tangential to find your way there.
2019: Reflecting on the COVID-19 crisis, Bezos leaves us with a quote from Theodor Seuss Geisel:

“When something bad happens you have three choices. You can either let it define you, let it destroy you, or you can let it strengthen you.”

In the end, it remains Day 1.

More from Sumit Grrg

sumitgarg.eth
sumitgarg.eth
@sumitupgarg
I read two-and-a-half decades worth of Jeff Bezos’s Amazon shareholder letters.

It’s like a mini MBA.

Here I’ve pulled out a free guide for startups, investing, marketing, and “web3”🧵

(It’s a thread, not an ebook)


First, why the focus on web3?

It’s the mid 90’s. A 30-year-old Jeff Bezos is trying to raise money for Amazon. And investors are wondering,

“What’s this internet thing?”

Fast forward, the year is 2022, and folks today are wondering,

“What’s web3?”

Now, a little background…

In 1994, Bezos quit a well paying job to start Amazon.

It wasn’t an easy decision. But Bezos used his famous “regret minimization framework.”

In other words, he didn’t want to be 80 and regret not doing what he really wanted to do.

But what did he want?

Bezos didn’t set out to disrupt retail from the outset.

He simply wanted to come up with a business idea based on the internet and then let the internet grow around it while he kept working on it.

Today, that idea is worth $1.7 trillion and counting.

Moving on to the lessons…

Each year since 1997, Bezos has written an annual letter to Amazon shareholders.

These letters reveal a great deal of lessons and secrets behind his massive success.

So what are they?
STARTUP , TECH
Sumit Grrg
Sumit Grrg
@sumitgrrg
How to think about your career:

Phil Knight is the co-founder of Nike.

I found this advice in the last few pages of Phil's memoir about creating Nike.

It's some of the best I've ever received:

1/6

Hit pause.

Think long and hard about how you want to spend your time.

And with whom you want to spend it for the next forty years.

2/6

Don't settle for a job or a profession or even a career.

Seek a calling, even if you don’t know what that means.

If you’re following your calling, the fatigue will be easier to bear, the disappointments will be fuel, the highs will be like nothing you’ve ever felt.

3/6

Here's a warning:

The best of you, the iconoclasts, the innovators, the rebels, you will always have a bull’s-eye on your back.

The better you get, the bigger the bull’s-eye.

It’s a law of nature.
ALL
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Sumit Grrg
Sumit Grrg
@sumitgrrg
Five valuable mental models

1. Gates' Law
2. Parkinson’s Law
3. The Paradox of Choice
4. Hanlon's Razor
5. Leverage

On startups, business, finance, investing, career, life and whatnot.

Here's a quick guide/refresher:

Law.

We overestimate what we can do in a year and underestimate what we can do in ten years.

It's the classic instant gratification versus long term mindset.

A ten year timeline will set you free.

Parkinson’s Law.

Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

"How can you achieve your 10 year plan in the next 6 months?" — Peter Thiel

Forgive me for putting it right after Gates' Law. But why not?

The Paradox of Choice.

More choices make decisions hard.

Your friends can't decide what to eat? Don't pass the parcel. Ask them to pick between two options. Same for Netflix. And so on. Saves time!

Eliminate indecision by reduction.

Hanlon's Razor.

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

Not everyone's out there to get you.

There can be honest mistakes.
ALL
Sumit Grrg
Sumit Grrg
@sumitgrrg
These 10 threads will teach you more than reading 100 books

Five billionaires share their top lessons on startups, life and entrepreneurship (1/10)


10 competitive advantages that will trump talent (2/10)


Some harsh truths you probably don’t want to hear (3/10)


10 significant lies you’re told about the world (4/10)
ALL , MOTIVATION , BOOKS
Sumit Grrg
Sumit Grrg
@sumitgrrg
I've read all of Jeff Bezos's 23 years of Amazon shareholder letters twice now.

It's an MBA of its own.

Here's what I learned about startups, entrepreneurship, investing and more:

Your customers are loyal to you right up until the second that someone else offers them a better service.

Listen to customers, but don't just listen
to customers also invent on their behalf.

Here's Jeff Bezos on coming up with the Amazon Kindle:

We set ourselves the incredibly audacious goal of improving upon the physical book.

So don't be afraid to set big goals.

And remember that if you don't execute well, it will be done by someone else.

Many of the problems you'll face will have no textbook solutions, and so you should happily invent new approaches.
STARTUP , COMPANY STUFF , AMAZON

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Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
While many Amazon warehouse workers in Europe have unionized, its brutalized, underpaid, routinely maimed US workforce remains tragically unorganized, thanks to the US's weak labor laws that make forming a union far harder than at any time since the Gilded Age.

1/


But all that may be about to change: 6000 warehouse workers in #BHM1, the massive Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, AL, will vote next month on a push to unionize under the

Amazon, like other tech giants, is absolutely reliant on building and maintaining a competitive advantage by exploiting technology to drive wages ever downward while ducking responsibility for harming workers.

3/

Big Tech is pants-wettingly afraid of unionization, and that goes double for any solidarity between high-paid tech workers and misclassified/outsourced warehouse workers and other "unskilled" laborers.

4/

Amazon has gone so far as to hire the Pinkertons, renowned as some of history's most violent anti-worker terrorists, to bust unionization drives in its
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Chris Herd
Chris Herd
@chris_herd
I spoke to 5 global enterprises about remote work last week

Here’s what they told me about their plans for the future

[ a thread ] 💻🏠🌎

💰 Office space: All of them have $Billion real estate portfolios

All of them plan to cut it by atleast 50% and as much as 70%

📍 Talent Access: The thing they are most interested in is access to talent

Rather than hiring the best person in a 30-mile radius of the office, they’ll hire the best person on the planet

📈 Efficiency: Their concern about remote work post-pandemic was that productivity would slip

It’s increased. They now know remote work works

🤔 Remote Dilemma: A big concern is losing their best people through not giving their teams what they want

Each company plans to let people work from home 60-100% of the time
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Pat Oshaw
Pat Oshaw
@ptoshee
This is a GREAT argument to pull up when talking to people about minimum wage. Some others nested below


A large number of new jobs being created are minimum to low wage, so looking for a new job generally won’t increase pay.

Raising minimum wage helps things not directly related.

Helps Infant mortality? Yup.

Lowers Suicide? Yup.

Reduce smoking rates? You bet.

It also boosts the local economy! Minimum to low wage earners spend more % of their money, so an increase means more is spent, often in community!

Low paying jobs are often in sectors which would gain from this. More people spending money in your shop makes your business more money! Now you have more profits and increased labor costs are covered.
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Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
2018 was almost the year we won the #RightToRepair.

Instead, 2018 turned out to be the year we lost #R2R: 20 bills defeated in 20 state houses, and it was mostly @apple's fault.

1/


Apple has a problem. As CEO Tim Cook warned his investors at the conclusion of his company's repair-killing lobbying spree, Apple's profits depend on people throwing away their devices, not fixing them.

By monopolizing repairs, Apple doesn't just get to gouge you on parts and service - the real action is in pronouncing your device DOA, beyond repair. Then you have to buy another one.

3/

Other companies lobbied hard against R2R: John Deere, GM, and other monopolists backed Apple's play. But Apple wrote the playbook, coming up with risible bullshit like claims that blocking independent repair is essential to protecting

Apple's anti-repair FUD got picked up and amplified by Big Car in 2020, when they spent millions fighting an automotive R2R ballot initiative in Massachusetts, claiming that letting independent mechanics at your car would lead to your actual MURDER.
BUSINESS
Travis
Travis
@coloradotravis
It's endlessly fascinating how economic datapoints get interpreted.

When I was in charge of a P&L, the guy who ran Finance for us and I had what we called the 'shelf plan.'

There were maybe 3-4 of us who knew it existed.

What's a shelf plan?
1/

Well it's a plan you keep on the shelf (full FP&A model), that you hope you never have to use.

It reduces forward hires, cuts back various line items (typically ad spend, travel, that sort of thing).

Oh, it also has a big fat RIF in there.

That's why we don't talk about it.
2/

Why have a plan instead of winging it?

Because this is where companies (particularly young companies) sometimes err. They do little cuts - 2-3% here and there, preserving as much headcount as they can, that sort of thing.

This is incorrect.
3/

If you're at the point where you need to make material changes to your forward P&L, at 2-3% RIF will be followed by another.

And another.

And this series of progressive cuts will cripple morale, incrementally reducing the productivity of the staff you retain to survive.
4/

And so the shelf plan cuts deep.

Your goal is to go from being a peacetime machine to a wartime machine, so you gotta lean out quick. Can't do that without a plan, hence the need to have one.

~30% cut is what you need.

And then you need to tell everyone left they're safe.
5/
BUSINESS

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I made a website because this shouldn’t

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