** Everything Store -> Everything Platform **

It’s easy to get caught up in the impact that Amazon as a company has had on American politics. Lina Khan is now the FTC advisor, candidates like Bernie Sanders use Amazon as a punching bag for all that is wrong with tech and American inequality. Yet in the last 5 years, the impact of Amazon as a business has been far greater. Perhaps unique among FAANG businesses, Amazon has reinvented itself, growing by leaps and bounds in the process. Stone describes the differences between his first book and today succinctly:

Amazon was a 100 billion company in 2012, now it is 1 trillion. It had 150,000 employees, and now employs over 1.3 million employees. It was the Kindle company, now it’s the AWS company, alexa company, grocer company etc.

Amazon has gone from the everything store to the everything platform, by using its 22.6 billion dollars of annual R&D to take massive bets, and cash in on enough of those bets to rival the volume of success achieved by nearly all of the silicon valley ecosystem. Two things that stood out to me were the massive success of AWS, perhaps the most important technology since the iPhone, and the focus on company mechanisms (see: Working Backwards) , allowing the sort of scaling that has plagued companies like Facebook and Google. This has created successes like Alexa, the Amazon platform, singlehandedly introducing Chinese suppliers directly to American consumers, and of course the acquisition of whole foods and grocery delivery.

Sadly Amazon deserves a better chronicler than Brad Stone. His focus follows the headlines of any given year, and the book fails to provide insight beyond what could be achievable in a series of Bloomberg articles. In Stone’s retelling, Bezos is * “brilliant, and rather cruel”* and ends up overly focused on the glamour of holywood before retirement. A 30 second conversation yesterday with one of many Amazonion friends gets more insight: “They’re scaling too fast to establish rigorous processes… The organizational structure is really wonky and not super functional, which is probably part of the reason they haven’t actually had a successful game yet”. After two books, Stone fails to get beyond any buzzwords of what makes Amazon or Bezos successful beyond ‘ruthlessness’.

** 55th book of 2021 **