The Bezos Playbook

• Early E-commerce Pioneer — Started Amazon before anyone even started thinking about e-commerce at scale. He is willing to take enormous risks at any cost. He left a high profile Wall Street job to start a company that few believed in. An e-commerce bookstore in ’94? He is a visionary.
• Strategic Category Expansion — Started with books, expanded quickly to nearly everything. The strategic risks continue.
• Smart Acquisitions — Bought Zappos, has left them alone. Is letting Tony continue to work his magic. Wants to bring more of the Zappos culture to the rest of Amazon.
• E-reader Innovation — Saw e-books coming, thanks to Jobs/iPad. Pivoted and developed the Kindle. My wife and I love our Kindles.
• Hardware as Entry Point — Gives the Kindle/Fire away at cost, or next to cost, and makes money on services/goods from using the device.
• Customer-First Economics — Loses money on shipping (Amazon Prime etc), will do anything it takes to win your business (see this article about shipping heavy items for free).
• Supply Chain Mastery — Amazon’s supply chain is incredible. Look at these pictures of their warehouses!
• Robotics Investment — He didn’t just invest in Kiva, he bought the entire company! If you haven’t seen this video of their warehouse robots, it is a must.
• Shopping Psychology — They use psychology to encourage you to make more (and better) purchasing decisions. They are masters. Look at me when I did Christmas shopping. They know people will go shopping for themselves, and used my own data to tempt me.
• Recommendation Engine — Analytics/Algorithms. Amazon has the best recommendation engine. Google has to be worried about this. You don’t go to Google to search for products, you go to Amazon.
• Continuous Innovation — He isn’t done. Amazon is still going strong. He still has more tricks up his sleeve, you can bank on that.