Bezos Letters: 14 Principles to Grow Your Business Like Amazon by Steve & Karen Anderson

The Bezos Letters is one of those books that reminds you success rarely comes from a “big bang” moment. It usually comes from a long list of small, sensible decisions made consistently over time — most of which look unremarkable in the moment but obvious in hindsight.

What the authors have done is simple: take two decades’ worth of Amazon’s shareholder letters, a treasure trove of insights for investors, and extract the principles that actually drove the business. Not the mythology. Not the headlines. The real operating system that sat underneath one of the most important companies of the past 30 years.

It’s very readable, and at times, a good reminder of how powerful clarity can be when paired with obsessive execution. The book lays out 14 principles. None of them are revolutionary on their own, which is probably the point. They’re simple… but simple doesn’t mean easy. A few standout principles include:

• Obsess over the customer

This principle shows up everywhere — pricing, logistics, culture, incentives. It has become a very important part of the deep and wide moat the business has developed over the years.

• High-velocity decisions

Bezos’ point that decision-making speed compounds is underrated. Companies don’t usually die from bad decisions; they die from slow ones, especially with respect to two-way door decisions (explained in the book). The concept of disagree and commit is a notion that everyone can have their say but if a decision is made, you jump on the bus and you push ahead.

• A Day One mentality

This is arguably the most important idea in the whole book. “Day Two is stasis,” Bezos writes. “Followed by irrelevance, followed by death.” It’s confronting, but accurate. Day One is a mindset — paranoia paired with optimism. Bezos was famous for attaching his first annual letter from 1997 as an appendix to every annual shareholder letter he subsequently wrote as a reminder of the focus on this principle.

When thinking about the world’s best businesses, Amazon is certainly within that top category. Hallmarks of Amazon which can be true across many of the world’s best include:

• Reinvestment done well is a superpower that compounds over a very long period of time;

• Optionality has real value;

• Innovation is key, don’t be afraid to make mistakes but learn from them;

• Culture compounds exactly the same way capital does; and

• Simplicity tends to beat complexity over long periods.

Link to Book

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