A relevant quote from Peter Thiel:  “If you focus on near-term growth above all else, you miss the most important question you should be asking: will this business still be around a decade from now?”

The best decisions that Bezos made were intuitive, gut-drive decisions and not math-based decisions

• “I believe high standards are teachable. High standards are contagious.” 


• Both high standards and low standards are contagious


• High standards are domain-specific and must be learned separately in every arena of interest   


• “Leaders have relentlessly high standards. Many people think these standards are unreasonably high.”

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• Wandering in business is not efficient, but it may yield the most asymmetric results for your company Wandering is an essential counterbalance to efficiency 


• Both wandering and efficiency must be employed


• AWS was a result of Amazon wandering 


• Wander, listen to your hunch, follow your curiosity, take the necessary financial risk, iterate, and build

Setting the bar high for hiring has been the single most important element of Amazon’s success

From 2016: “Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by an excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.” 

A lign customer and shareholder interests as much as possible  

• Bezos announced his intention to offer the lowest prices possible while providing a world-leading customer experience


• This combination seemed paradoxical to some 


• Henry Ford’s philosophy for building companies could be distilled into five words: “Maximum service at minimum costs” 


• Henry Ford did not want to make a low-quality, inexpensive product;

Jeff embraced the Japanese business philosophy “Kaizen”, which describes how improvement in productivity is a gradual and methodical process