Sublime

Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com, envisioned a company that made money by delivering value to rather than extracting value from its customers. In order to do that, he wanted to be both the price leader and customer service leader for the long run.

Amazon is famously ruthless when it tries to expand its e-commerce empire. In 2009, Amazon noticed an up-and-coming online retail startup called Quidsi, which sold baby products on Diapers.com. Amazon sent an executive to have lunch with the Quidsi founders and offered to buy the company. The founders said no.[1440] But then Amazon started aggressi

When the 1999 holiday season ended, employees and executives of Amazon could finally take a breather. Sales were up 95 percent over the previous year, and the company had attracted three million new customers, exceeding twenty million registered accounts. Jeff Bezos was named Time’s Person of the Year, one of the youngest ever, and credited as “the

Bezos was getting annoyed as well. The company had improved on its pick-to-light system in the FCs, and its infrastructure had been successfully recast into component services, but the provisioning of computer resources remained a bottleneck.

Now the Lovefilm board members would witness the same ruthless tactics observed by the founders of Zappos and Quidsi.

One early challenge was that the book distributors required retailers to order ten books at a time. Amazon didn’t yet have that kind of sales volume, and Bezos later enjoyed telling the story of how he got around it. “We found a loophole,” he said. “Their systems were programmed in such a way that you didn’t have to receive ten books, you only had