Finished reading the book “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon” by Brad Stone. Actually I finished the book a week back but just got back into writing after traveling in India. It was interesting to read the book and also to see Amazon.in store advertisments all over chennai while I was in India. Jeff Bezos, just committed to invest $2billion in Amazon.in the Amazon store in India. Coming back to the book, it was inspiring to see the long term vision and execution of Jeff Bezos in action. Amazon is one of those companies that was shining during the dot com boom and through all the critics, has continued to reinvent itself to be relevant after almost 20 years in operation.
Jeff Bezos, sounds like the typical startup founders, quirky, brilliant, laser focused, extremely self motivated, thick skinned and idiosyncratic. Many people who worked for Amazon do not have many flattering things to say about the place, but what is fascinating is that everyone who was working there gave it their best. Jeff Bezos must have done something right to get that going for him and Amazon. It was also interesting for me to see how Jeff surrounded himself with a team of super smart operationally driven people to execute on the idea. I really liked the book, the stories and the overall vision of Amazon. I would say it is a must read for all those startup founders who are on their vision building journey to see what it takes. It is obvious that founders need to be thick skinned to ignore all the nay sayers to focus on their vision to execute. I think Jeff Bezos has done that incredibly well. In addition to that I sense a shrewd sense of business deal making which is also apparent when you read about all the other successful startup founders like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or Larry Page. I believe most visionary founders have the capacity to distort the reality around them and I think Jeff Bezos falls into that category. There are so many things that Amazon has done well and Jeff in particular has the insight to invest early in companies like Google shows his brilliance. I was inspired reading the book and could not put it down.
I would recommend the book and the learnings from it.
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