I think for Amazon's customers, it offers a kind of addictive service - the ability to shop without leaving your house, the ability to read without going to a bookstore or a library.
I don't think value to the customer is achieved at the expense of employees' welfare.
There are lots of lessons to learn from Amazon. Never stop innovating or questioning the fundamentals of your business. Disrupt yourself before others do. Continually motivate employees so that they never get too complacent - see Yahoo, AOL and many other Internet companies for evidence of what happens when they do.
I think the idealism has always been marketing. Even back in the early days of Apple and the 'pirate' mentality, they were building a computer that they wanted to differentiate from IBM and Microsoft.
There are lots of retailers that are now scrambling to emulate the Amazon model, so Amazon does not have a monopoly on same-day distribution or broad selection or low prices. All that said, there are advantages that accrue to the largest player, so I don't see much in the way of Amazon slowing down.
The one thing that Airbnb had was, Brian and Joe were designers, and they did a great job. They also had Nate Blecharczyk, who was the CTO, who I describe his history as a high schooler and at Harvard as really a creator of tools for spammers.
Uber, and Airbnb to a different extent, implemented the same battle plan. Bezos is an investor in both companies and, to some degree, has relationships with both CEOs. It is not a surprise that they are heirs to Amazon.
A lot of the drawbacks, a lot of the difficulties that Uber has had, have been completely predictable, and they handled them poorly, so by their own standards they made a lot of mistakes, and I think that they would admit that.
Amazon is famously run by studying and responding to its own data; yet when it comes to promotions, decisions are often subjective and guided by human emotions and petty political dynamics.
Ultimately, Amazon is a weather pattern that disturbs everything around it.
Amazon may be the most beguiling company that ever existed, and it is just getting started. It is both missionary and mercenary... That has always been a potent combination.
No matter how hard we strive for objectivity, writers are biased toward tension - those moments in which character is forged and revealed.
We see Google experimenting in so many places outside of its core search and advertising business, whether that's bringing broadband Internet to the world or funding an entirely separate company to pursue solutions to disease and mortality. Amazon's one of the few other companies that thinks as big as Google does.
I think it's a competitive advantage that both Amazon and Google and other tech companies have over a lot of their counterparts. They take big risks and are pioneering new markets with the promise of big rewards. It's why Amazon is kind of reliably starting new businesses and opening kind of new frontiers.
Donald Trump won, or he got the majority of the electoral votes, a large majority. I think it would be patronizing to say that the majorities of people in Florida and Ohio, smaller majorities in Wisconsin and Michigan, that they voted for him because they were misled by something on Facebook.
I don't think we yet know - because it's probably not big enough - what exactly Amazon does to our cities, but whatever it is, I don't anticipate retail wastelands. If anything, it's maybe a wake-up call to retailers that they just have to offer something meaningful to customers.
As we have seen again and again, when Amazon doesn't get the economic conditions from suppliers that it seeks, it simply goes its own way. In the book business, that has meant publishing its own titles under the various Kindle imprints. Now it's making diapers.
Life inside successful Web startups - especially the really successful ones - can be nasty, brutish, and short. As companies grow exponentially, egos clash, investors jockey for control, and business complexities rapidly exceed the managerial abilities of the founders.
For decades, technology entrepreneurship has been revered, and people like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk were heroes.
There's a new set of transformative technologies such as machine learning, AI, and virtual reality that will spawn another set of big tech franchises. But in terms of cultural impact, perhaps we are at peak Valley.
