Today’s mood:
Anyway, C’mere to me…
Interesting
Invention ✈💻
Bezos Stepped Down
As I’m sure you’ve heard, last week Jeff Bezos stepped down as Amazon’s CEO, with Andy Jassy, the current boss of AWS, the company’s booming cloud services business, set to take over.
Bezos will still remain very involved though, particularly in big picture decisions, as he moves into the role of executive chairman.
On announcing this, Jeff wrote an email to all his employees and I thought this was an interesting excerpt:
“Invention. Invention is the root of our success. We’ve done crazy things together, and then made them normal. We pioneered customer reviews, 1-Click, personalized recommendations, Prime’s insanely-fast shipping, Just Walk Out shopping, the Climate Pledge, Kindle, Alexa, marketplace, infrastructure cloud computing, Career Choice, and much more. If you get it right, a few years after a surprising invention, the new thing has become normal. People yawn. And that yawn is the greatest compliment an inventor can receive.”
(read the full email)
Image: Amazon
I think he’s right in saying that, like it or not they are inventors whose products and services have been so successful you can’t imagine a world without them.
Most people aren’t even aware of how much there is to Amazon and how big their product set is, and by ‘products’ I mean the company’s product offering of which the entire online retail experience is just one piece of the puzzle.
In that list above, for example, Jeff didn’t even get to mention products like Prime Video, Amazon Music, Audible and retail chains like Wholefoods & Amazon Fresh.
I thought this Forbes article on the scale of Marketplace was really interesting. Amazon’s income and profits have skyrocketed, but still the majority of revenue from sales on the site actually goes to third-party sellers & brands, and Amazon just takes seller fees and fulfillment fees.
“Analysts have done the calculations and estimate Amazon’s GMV is about $490 billion in total and about $300 billion of that is from third-party sellers.”
(read the full piece here - Forbes)
The move will allow Bezos a little more time to focus on his other massive projects - as the founder & owner of Blue Origin, a SpaceX competitor, and the owner of The Washington Post.
Just for fun, this was the original Amazon.com page, after it opened in July 1995.
This picture is from 1997, when Jeff Bezos flew to Japan to deliver a package to Amazon's millionth customer.
This was the first Amazon office.
Images: Amazon
Smile 😊
Watch 📺
In 2019, Josh Reid flew to Shanghai (on the east coast of China), got a bike from the manufacturer Giant, whose factory is there, and then cycled all the way home to the UK…
He cycled 15,000km through 19 countries and it took him 4 months.
Josh recently posted this beautifully simple compilation of his trip, completely self-filmed. If you want to just relax for 30mins, I highly recommend giving this a watch, even if that means coming back to this email later.
Saved 📷
Think 🌊
Independence from Britain is one of the most internationally celebrated holidays around the world.
That’s all 🤙🏽
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Guy