I always love when Amazon’s Jeff Bezos puts out his annual shareholder letter.
2015 Letter to Amazon Shareholders
Amazon has been an incredible growth story, and while their treatment of employees has come under fire, they have some very interesting things to learn from.
In this year’s letter, Bezos writes about the core similarity between their e-commerce business and the cloud business, AWS (which reached $10B in revenue faster than Amazon did itself):
“They share a distinctive organizational culture that cares deeply about and acts with conviction on a small number of principles. I’m talking about customer obsession rather than competitor obsession, eagerness to invent and pioneer, willingness to fail, the patience to think long-term, and the taking of professional pride in operational excellence.”
We try to emulate many of these philosophies at RunSignup. Of all of them, I think a focus on the long term is the key. If you focus on the long term, then you begin to realize the value of all the other things – focus ing on customer needs, willingness to fail, and a need to have operational excellence.
Bezos does this by ignoring conventional wisdom of Wall Street and a quarterly focus. If you follow Amazon stock you will see it goes up and down a lot because of quarterly misses or overachievements. Bezos does not care anything about the quarterly report and has a singular focus on the long term.
As he wrote in his first Annual Letter:
“But this is Day 1 for the Internet and, if we execute well, for Amazon.com.”
We feel the same way about RunSignUp and the technology we can bring to the endurance community. We can’t wait for the future!
P.S. We also loved seeing mention of AWS Aurora being the fastest growing service ever for AWS. As we have learned, it is amazing!
Amazon is a great company to emulate. I worked for 20 years at Fedex. It has a longer term approach than most companies as well. Fred Smith would always say that if you take care of the customer, your business will survive long term. He also said that profits are the lifeblood of a company, and you have to have them to survice, but supporting the needs and requirements of the customer is always the number one objective.
Yes, FedEx is another great long term company that understands the investments needed to make customers successful.
To your point about profits, it is a very important part of the equation. We talk a lot about the “three legged stool” where employees, customers and owners are equal partners. We think if we offer a good enough service we should be able to pay our employees really well and I (Bob) should earn money on my investment of money and time.