Conclusion

At the time I am writing my final blog post, I have completed my book. I thoroughly enjoyed reading my book; but more importantly, it managed to answer the main questions that I came up with before starting. The question that my book had the strongest answer to was will Jeff Bezos slow down Amazon’s growth as it becomes a danger to the world economy because of its size?

 
Although the book did not have a specific answer to this questions, such as Bezos stating his plans for the future. It instead followed Bezos through the beginning of Amazon, and his mentality towards building the company. It became obvious that while Bezos was building Amazon, especially in its early stages, he was full steam ahead. He wanted to generate as much money and revenue and sell as much as he possibly could. The scary part about this mentality is that Bezos, in his head, still believes that Amazon is still in its “smaller” developmental stage; therefore, he has no plan of slowing the growth of Amazon down. If Amazon continues to go full steam ahead with its development, it could be very dangerous to the world economy because Amazon could become a monopoly in not only one market, but also several other markets. It will be interesting to see if Amazon ever slows their growth down, or if the United States Government has to step in and force the slowing of their growth.

 
For my final paragraph, I would like to focus on what I learned about Bezos himself. He is an extremely smart and driven man. However, deep down, he is just a big kid. If I had to guess, I would say that Bezos founded Amazon solely because he was bored of working on Wall Street and being in the Banking Industry. Because he was so much smarter than everybody else, he thought that he could do a better job of what he was already doing on his own instead of working for somebody else. Therefore, he decided to found Amazon. And once he made all of his money through his company, he finally got to do what he had always dreamed of – go to space. I believe that everything Bezos did lead up to this one goal of his. He had always wanted to go to space since he was a child. And he was extremely determined to do it any way he could. Therefore, it makes me believe that everything Bezos did and will do is still in his goal to go to space. And this just may be Bezos’s reason for making Amazon as large as it is today.

 

Drawing Conclusions

By this point, I am a majority of the way through my book The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. The book has done an excellent job describing who Bezos is as a person as well as talking about how he went about founding Amazon and the techniques and leadership skills he used while building the company. The main aspect of Bezos from the book that I would like to focus on is how driven Bezos is to succeed at everything he does.

About halfway through the book, there is an entire chapter describing Bezos’s upbringing. One of the pieces of the chapter is an interview with Jeff’s old high school girlfriend. She recounts a story where she and Bezos were talking, and out of the blue, he told her that he wanted to be Valedictorian of his high school. Therefore, he put in many long hours of studying and effort into his studies, and by the end of senior year, Jeff Bezos was valedictorian of his high school class. He then attended Princeton University and ended up graduating with a GPA of 4.2 – not too shabby. After college, he got a job at a hedge fund named D. E. Shaw, where he became the youngest V.P. at age 30. However, after reaching this level of status at such a young age, I believe that he got bored of the Wall Street gig. Although the idea of him getting bored was never directly stated in the book, it seems obvious that from his actions the work that he was doing was not challenging enough for him.

When Bezos got bored towards the end of his tenure at D. E. Shaw, he became fascinated with a thing called the internet. He became enamored with it and quickly realized that the internet was the future of business. Therefore, he wanted to start selling things on it. He decided that books were the best thing to sell because they were relatively expensive and easy to ship. So, he converted his garage into an office and put almost his entire life savings into the company.

To most people, I the idea of taking the majority of their life savings and investing it into a tiny garage startup that is more likely to fail than succeed would strike fear into their heads. For Bezos, there was no doubt in his mind that he was going to succeed because he was so driven to make the company work that he would go through all means necessary to survive. And I believe that this mindset, of needing to survive and ultimately be the best, is what has catapulted Bezos and Amazon to the top of the business world.

 

Emerging Insights

The book I chose to read is titled The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. I chose this book because I have become intrigued by Amazon and their CEO, especially because they have been in the media quite often as of late. The reason for their frequent appearance in the news is because of their size and influence over the world economy. They have driven many competitors out of business because of their power in several different industries. One of these companies includes retail giant Toys R’ Us. I believe this shows their dominance over the markets they are in as well as foreshadowing to what could happen to other companies such as Target if nothing is done to slow down Amazon. Therefore, the central questions that I developed from the ideas above are “is Amazon too powerful now,” and “will Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, slow down their expansion and not drive their competitors out of business causing the loss of several thousand jobs?”

At the time that I am writing my blog post, I am about halfway through the book. Despite not being a majority of the way through it, I have learned a lot about Bezos and Amazon as a company. The book has provided several insights into possible answers to my questions.

The most obvious piece of information that I gathered from my reading was that Jeff Bezos has no plans of slowing down Amazon’s growth. He is an extremely driven man, and he possesses a vision of Amazon being “the everything store” – selling every product imaginable. Therefore, Bezos has been pushing and will continue to push the company into all possible markets it can get into, which includes industries such as prescription drugs and the development of drones. By entering into these industries, Amazon will continue to grow and become more influential and powerful within the world economy while also destroying its competition because these smaller companies will no longer be able to compete with one of the largest companies in the world.

Finally, I want to tell a story that I believe demonstrates how driven and motivated Bezos is to become “the everything store.” Bezos believes that to become what he wants Amazon to become, everybody in the company should hold themselves to the same standard that Bezos holds himself to – extremely high standards, to the point that they are almost not achievable. For example, one year Bezos held a meeting before the busy Christmas times began to discuss the companies strategy to keep up with a large number of orders. In the meeting, Bezos asked one of his executive who was in charge of the Amazon help line what the wait time on the line was. The individual responded with around one minute. Following the response, in the middle of the meeting, Bezos called the help line, and everybody in the meeting sat there in silence for five straight minutes, waiting for somebody to pick up while Bezos was fuming mad at the fact that one of his executives lied to him; this employee resigned a few months later. I am sure that there are many more stories like the one above, demonstrating how demanding of a leader Bezos is. Furthermore, if the company continues with this type of drive for success, there is no doubt in my mind that Amazon will soon achieve its goal of being “the everything store.”

 

Fundamental Thinking and Ideas

Amazon has been in the news recently for several different reasons such as Trump speaking out against the company or the coverage of their search for a second American Headquarters. However, I think the most interesting part of Amazon is not the company, but instead the CEO and founder, Jeff Bezos. Interestingly, unlike Microsoft and Facebook, where most people know the founder and CEO of those companies (Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg respectively), most people do not know Jeff Bezos. And I think the not knowing who was running one of the most powerful companies in the world was what first put the book I wanted to read on the map. I wanted to find a book that detailed who Jeff Bezos really was. Furthermore, and almost more importantly, I wanted to see if from learning about who Bezos is, if we could almost see if we could decipher what his vision is for Amazon. With these ideas in mind, the book I chose to read is called The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, by Brad Stone.

The reason that I look towards his vision of the company is because right now, Amazon is one of the largest companies in the world and finds themselves in several different industries. And because of their size and power, they have driven several companies out of business, including several larger companies such as Toys R’ Us. With each additional company that Amazon drives out of business, hundreds, if not thousands of jobs are lost. Therefore, this raises a question. Is Amazon too large and powerful now? Furthermore, does Bezos care that he is driving companies out of business and causing jobs to be lost? These two questions are driving the thinking of my reading. I want to see if I can decipher from who Bezos is, if he plans to continue to destroy other companies and taking over other industries, or if he will slow down and allow for healthy competition for the industries that he is already in. I hope to have these questions answered from my reading wither from direct statements and quotes that Bezos makes, or from things that he does and decisions that he makes that may sway us to think one or another.