Notes

"This is Day 1 for the Internet"
"It's All About the Long Term
- We believe that a fundamental measure of our success will be the shareholder value we create over the long term."
"The stronger our market leadership, the more powerful our economic model. Market leadership can translate directly to higher revenue, higher profitability, greater capital velocity, and correspondingly stronger returns on invested capital."
"We first measure ourselves in terms of the metrics most indicative of our market leadership:
- customer and revenue growth,
- the degree to which our customers continue to purchase from us on a repeat basis, and
- the strength of our brand."
"We will continue to focus relentlessly on our customers.
- We will continue to make investment decisions in light of long-term market leadership considerations rather than short-term profitability considerations or short-term Wall Street reactions.
- We will continue to measure our programs and the effectiveness of our investments analytically, to jettison those that do not provide acceptable returns, and to step up our investment in those that work best.
- We will continue to learn from both our successes and our failures.
- We will continue to focus on hiring and retaining versatile and talented employees, and continue to weight their compensation to stock options rather than cash.
  - We know our success will be largely affected by our ability to attract and retain a motivated employee base
  - Each employee must think like, and therefore must actually be, an owner.
"Obsess over customers
- We realized that the Web was, and still is, the World Wide Wait. Therefore, we set out to offer customers something they simply could not get any other way, and began serving them with books
- We brought them much more selection than was possible in a physical store (our store would now occupy 6 football fields), and presented it in a useful, easy-to-search, and easy-to-browse format in a store open 365 days a year, 24 hours a day.
- Word of mouth remains the most powerful customer acquisition tool we have. Repeat purchases and word of mouth have combined to make Amazon.com the market leader in online bookselling
"Our employees:
- Setting the bar high in our approach to hiring has been, and will continue to be, the single most important element of Amazon.com's success.
- It's not easy to work here (when I interview people I tell them, “You can work long, hard, or smart, but at Amazon.com you can't choose two out of three”), but
  - we are working to build something important,
  - something that matters to our customers,
  - something that we can all tell our grandchildren about."
In 1997:
- Sales grew: $15.7M → $147.8M (+838%)
- Cumulative customer accounts: 180K → 1.5M (+738%)
- Employee base grew: 158 → 614 (+289% increase), with significant strengthening of the management team