Amazon Letter to Shareholders 25 years ago (MUST READ!)

Why is this letter so important?

(This is probably the shortest blog post I've ever written - because I don't want to summarize the content that inspired it, I'm simply bringing it to your attention)

There are few companies in the world today that have had as big an impact (positive & negative) on the world as Amazon. But was that luck or by design?

If you read this letter - and I would strongly encourage you to - it's clear that Amazon's success is entirely by design. Jeff Bezos laid out a strategy that would steer the business for 25 years and we can still see that strategy in action today.

I'm not going to rewrite or summarize the letter - it's only 3 pages. But here are a couple of takeaways for me.

1. Playing a long game: Jeff clearly explains that Amazon will prioritize growth and market leadership over short-term profits. They did and they continue to do so. And it's worked, much to the frustration of Wall Street - but the growth speaks for itself.

2. Obsessing over customers: People are fickle with little or no loyalty toward brands. Why should they be loyal? Brands are there to serve them. Amazon understood this from Day 1 and set out to always impress customers so they would come back over and over again. And we do.

3. Infrastructure to support growth: 25 years ago Jeff talked about the need to have infrastructure in place to support their already epic growth. That infrastructure was primarily people and real estate. In the last 25 years, the definition of Infrastructure for Amazon has changed and obviously now includes AWS. Which was built out of an internal need for speed and simplicity of spinning up server infrastructure to support dev and production solutions. The core capability of "Infrastructure" is still a key focus for Amazon - but its definition is different showing business agility.

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I hope you enjoy reading this 25 year old 3 page letter.

amzn_shareholder-letter-20072.pdf

Download PDF • 39KB