The book tells a new store around Amazon Go's origin–it was originally supposed to replace grocery stores rather than convenience stores.īut Bezos had a different version (and in my opinion, great taste in describing the problem): "I should be able to just walk out!". If you've ever tried out the Amazon Go stores, you can probably attest that the experience of leaving the store feels magical. While other natural language products struggle to get enough training data, Alexa is constantly collecting data that then enhances other AWS offerings like Polly. In a similar manner to Google's search product, Alexa also gets better the more that its used. The Alexa serves as Amazon's "gateway to the home", and Bezos saw the future of Amazon's orders coming directly via Alexa.
Prior to the book, I don't think I'd considered the strategic importance of Alexa. When launching the Alexa, Bezos asked all teams to consider "how would they support Alexa?". The first efforts were downright atrocious. There were a few competing efforts to get Alexa to be really good at understanding the human voice. He had the idea that the future of computing would all take place over voice. I didn't know this, but Bezos designed the first version of the Alexa in his office. It's truly remarkable how many times the company has reinvented itself. In it, he tells the story of everything that's happened in the last 10 years. In the 10 years since, Amazon has grown to be an unstoppable force.Īmazon Unbound is the sequel (also by Brad Stone). AWS was only a nascent business, there was no mention of Alexa, Kindle, Whole Foods, or Amazon Go. Hearing the stories, anecdotes, and leadership principles gave me a lot of ideas for how we might function at Segment.īut, the story wasn't done there. It provided an incredible window into Amazon, one of the most enduring companies in the world. As he charts the company’s meteoric rise, Stone probes the evolution of Jeff Bezos - who started as a geeky entrepreneur but who transformed to become a fit, famed, disciplined billionaire, a man who runs Amazon with an iron fist but finds his personal life splashed over the tabloids.ĭefinitive, timely and revelatory, Stone has provided an unvarnished portrait of a man and company that we couldn’t imagine modern life without.I read The Everything Store by Brad Stone three years ago, and I loved it. He shows the acquisitions and innovations that have propelled Amazon’s unprecedented growth, and the turn in public sentiment that criticises Amazon’s monopolistic practices. In Amazon Unbound, Stone offers the must-read follow-up to his bestseller The Everything Store, detailing the seismic changes that have taken place at Amazon over the past decade as it became one of the most powerful and feared companies in the global economy, led by one of the most powerful and feared leaders in business. We live in a world run, supplied and controlled by Amazon. Amazon provides us opportunities to shop, entertain, inform, communicate, store and, one day, maybe even travel to the moon.
Between Amazon’s forty subsidiaries - like Whole Foods Market, Amazon Studios in Hollywood, websites like Goodreads and IMDb, and Amazon Web Services cloud software unit, plus Bezos’s purchase of the Washington Post - it’s almost impossible to go a day without encountering their goods. Whereas Amazon used to sell only books, there is now little they don’t sell, becoming the world’s largest online retailer and pushing into other markets at warp speed. In less than ten years, Amazon has quintupled the size of its workforce and increased its valuation to well over a trillion dollars. Since then, its founder has led Amazon to explosive growth in both size and wealth. With the publication of The Everything Store in 2013, Bloomberg journalist Brad Stone revealed how the unlikely Seattle start-up Amazon became an unexpected king of ecommerce. From the bestselling author of The Everything Store, an unvarnished picture of Amazon’s unprecedented growth and its billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos, revealing the most important business story of our time.