Steve Blank The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free

Part is cultural norms within a company: the ability to use lean startup methods, try stuff, get it out there, get feedback from customers, an iterate aggressively. That’s not the way large companies work. It’s not the way a planning cycle works, it’s not the way to get budget dollars, it’s not the way you deal with colleagues who don’t want you to

When we started, we wanted to build a company that we would like to work at and we kept applying that criterion. I remember, when we first hired people in the original days, John and I would take turns hand-delivering a dozen roses to the spouse if it was woman, a bottle of cognac if the spouse was a man, and then champagne to the employee. We did

was a calcifying American corporate culture. Levy described the IBM of the era, for example, as “a clumsy, hulking company that did not understand the hacking impulse.”

It was a distilled version of the dissatisfaction felt by many early Amazon employees. With his convincing gospel, Bezos had persuaded them all to have faith, and they were richly rewarded as a result. Then the steely-eyed founder replaced them with a new and more experienced group of believers. Watching the company move on without them gave these