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FORBES ASIA
JEFF BEZOS
answer was succinct, political and incon- ment without some failure,” says Jef Wilke, Sears Roebuck’s Julius Rosenwald.
ceivable. “No,” says this advocate for corpo- the longtime Bezos lieutenant who runs his is where the story should have
rate learning, pausing for a few seconds to Amazon’s consumer and retail operations. ended. But as the Western world’s domi-
underscore that he wasn’t going there. Ditto “hose we sort of celebrate. In fact, we want nant online retailer, Amazon was also solv-
questions about becoming a data company. them to occur all over the place. Jef doesn’t ing huge technological and logistical prob-
“I’ve never really thought of Amazon in that need to review those. I don’t need to review lems, and rather than view those skills
way,” says the man who runs as data-driv- those.” merely as accretive to the core business,
en a company as any, before reverting to his But regarding the larger ideas and verti- Bezos saw them as businesses unto them-
stump speech. When it’s suggested that it’s cals—a.k.a. “one-way doors”—that change selves. An internal need for part-time de-
at least a tool, Bezos quickly interjects: “One the direction of the company, Bezos prides velopers led to Mechanical Turk, one of
of many tools.” himself on playing “chief slowdown of- the world’s irst crowdsourcing gig market-
Nevertheless, during the morning he icer.” He’s looking for three things. First, places. Building a staggeringly eicient de-
spent with Forbes outlining how he chan- originality. “We have to have a diferenti- livery infrastructure led to the Fulillment
nels innovation and chooses where to ex- ated idea. It can’t be a ‘me too’ ofering,” he by Amazon service, and mastering how to
pand, a road map for Amazon’s future says. Second, scale. “We’re gited with some take money for each purchase led to Ama-
emerged. Given Amazon’s size, it moves very large businesses we’ve built over time, zon Pay. Most important, as Amazon began
both vertically and horizontally, each direc- and we can’t af ord to put our energies into building enormous capabilities to store its
tion portending a lot more disruption. Even something that if it works, it’s still going to data in the cloud, Bezos igured out that
ive years ago, Bezos seemed content mere- be small.” And, inally, a Silicon Valley-wor- other businesses might want to store their
ly to try to sell everything to everybody, be- thy ROI. “Even at substantial scale, it has to data there as well. In 2017, AWS had $17.5
coming the bane mostly of retailers and have good returns on capital.” billion in revenue.
wholesalers. But this master innovation art- Ultimately, the ideas that hit that troika, Even those customer-driven concepts
ist now has the ultimate palette: any indus- Bezos says, emanate from one of two mod- create skills-based dividends. Take the Kin-
try he chooses. els. Either by looking backward at custom- dle reader, Amazon’s irst foray into hard-
er needs—as in we’ve noticed people act a ware, back in 2007. Wilke, who came from
FOR THIS UNCONSTRAINED era, the certain way, so let’s try to serve them with AlliedSignal, remembers protesting to the
most important word at Amazon is yes. a product. Or peering forward—we know board. “I spoke up and said, ‘I don’t agree.
Bezos explains, correctly, the traditional how to do something valuable, so let’s ind I think we’re likely to miss our planned de-
corporate hierarchy: “Let’s say a junior ex- customers. livery date. Our yields are gonna be too low.
ecutive comes up with a new idea that they he Amazon juggernaut ultimately We’re gonna underproduce. We’re gonna
want to try. hey have to convince their stems from the latter. Originally a niche frustrate customers. Hardware’s hard. We’re
boss, their boss’s boss, their boss’s boss’s player, Bezos could have easily focused just a sotware company.’
boss and so on—any ‘no’ in that chain can on becoming the world’s digital bookstore, “Jef said, ‘Well, I’m willing to concede
kill the whole idea.” hat’s why nimble start- the way crats belong to Etsy and shoes to that all those things will happen, and I still
ups so easily slaughter hidebound dino- Zappos (now owned by Amazon, natural- think that the right vision for our compa-
saurs: Even if 19 venture capitalists say no, ly). But in mastering selling books, Bezos ny is to be really good at building hardware,
it just takes a 20th to say yes to get a disrup- saw that he could use those tools—from so we need to get started learning.” And so
tive idea into business. inventory management to recommenda- they did. Kindle is a romanticized product
Accordingly, Bezos has structured Am- tion engines—to move adjacently: irst into at Amazon, both because of the hardware
azon around what he calls “multiple paths music and DVDs, then toys and electronics, breakthrough and because it harks back
to yes,” particularly regarding “two-way then pretty much anything that can be sold to the company’s roots in books. It didn’t
doors”: decisions that are oten at retail. And he again leveraged transform the company, though, and other
based on incremental im- that knowledge audaciously (and hardware failures, like the disastrous Fire
provements and can be re- successfully) in opening up Ama- smartphone, followed. But Bezos’ decision
versed if they prove unwise. zon as a platform for independent also eventually led to the Amazon Echo
Hundreds of executives can sellers, who were formerly com- smart speaker, a true game-changer.
green-light an idea, which em- petitors—cementing his legacy as a “We have a lot of hardware experience
ployees can shop around inter- transformative retailer, in the pan- today, but back then we didn’t have those
nally. “He knows and we know theon with the likes of Sam Wal- skills,” says Bezos, laughing. “You have to be
that you can’t invent or experi- ton, Aaron Montgomery Ward and patient. It’s not going to be just time to
$7.8 $8.7
Billion Billion
$4.7 $5.1 $4.3 $4.8 $3.6
Billion Billion Billion
$1.6 $1.2 $1.8 Billion Billion
Billion Billion Billion
YEAR 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007
Forbes 400 Rank 102 18 48 189 100 32 38 42 70 35
30 | FORBES ASIA SEPTEMBER 2018
