How do you build a billion dollar company from scratch? The successful Amazon founder Jeff Bezos reveals his tactics and only needs a few keywords. The most important is "Day 1".
For Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, there's only one way to run a business properly: you have to be obsessed. Obsessed with speed, with the cause, but above all: obsessed with the customers. In just three pages, written in a style somewhere between a sermon and a management handbook, he summarizes programmatic wisdom in the 2017 letter to shareholders.
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The most important keyword is “Day 1”. Successful companies should never lose the founding spirit. Otherwise, a prospect threatens with thoroughly hellish features: “Day 2 means stagnation. Then follows insignificance. Then follows an unbearable, agonizing decline. Then death follows. That’s why it always has to be about day 1.”
Nobody can wipe Bezos' confessions off the table. He's far too successful for that. Whole industries tremble when Amazon begins to conquer new markets - currently, for example, the German food trade.
Dynamism not impossible for corporations
Personally, Jeff Bezos has become the second richest person on the planet after Microsoft founder Bill Gates. The Bloomberg billionaire list recently estimated his fortune at $ 75.6 billion, which is difficult to imagine.
Keeping drive and momentum is easy for startups and hard for corporations, but not impossible, says Bezos. The 53-year-old seems wildly determined to have Amazon measured against it in the 22nd year of the company's existence. We can have the shape and abilities of a large company, and it still has the passion and heart of a small company. They write to make us a great choice in our life.
Bezos' hymn to the customer sounds like this: "Customers are always wonderfully and wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report that they are happy and that everything is great." Often they don't even know that they wanted something better, and then entrepreneurs just have to get in invent something new to their name.
"No client asked to create a Amazon high program, but it was his passion, aim and purpose I could name many such examples,” said the Amazon founder .
It's the result that counts
Then follows – another principle – an urgent reminder to concentrate on the essentials. Results are more important than adhering to planned management processes. Bezos shows skepticism about market research and surveys. There is a risk that they will become a kind of artificial substitute for authentic customers in the minds of decision-makers.
Good product developers rely on gut feeling or anecdotal evidence rather than averages, which are necessarily reflected in surveys. He is not fundamentally against surveys, they could uncover gaps. But a remarkable experience of the client begins with the heart, suspicion, curiosity, sports, courage, excellent taste. You don't find any of that in polls” — it's Bezos' plea for authenticity.
It is also important to pick up on the major trends of the time . The CEO singles out artificial intelligence as an example. Amazon is turning them into practical projects, including autonomous drones, an experimental cashless store in Seattle (“Go Convenience”) and the voice-controlled internet connection called Alexa.
Such megatrends are not difficult to recognize, a lot is written and talked about. still, you are presumably fighting the future," If you fight it. Pick them up and you'll feel a tailwind," recommends the Amazon boss.
Borrowing from Henry Ford
After all, it is important to make decisions quickly - and, in case of doubt, to revise them quickly if they turn out to be wrong. For most decisions, you have to be satisfied with 70 percent of the information you actually want. still, you are presumably going to be too slow," warns Bezos," If you stay until 90 percent is available. In order to be fast, you also have to be able to stand behind a decision if you don't agree with it. "I do it myself all the time," writes the multi-billionaire.
He recently gave the green light for a production by the film and TV production division Amazon Studios, although he was not convinced - simply because it would have taken too long if the team had to convince him. After all, some speak for the fact that his people are mostly right – including eleven Emmys and three Oscars.
Of course, not all of Bezos' findings are brand new. Henry Ford (1863 to 1947) recognized that good product developers should not rely on surveys or even on explicit customer requests, but on their intuition. still, they would have said' briskly nags,'" he formerly explained," If I had asked people what they wanted. Instead, he had the car built for the masses.
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