Amazon founder Bezos invests in the long-term: only looking at immediate benefits can not maintain leadership

Jeff Bezos (Jeff Bezos) established the online retail business Amazon (Amazon ) in 1994 , the United States every year after the Thanksgiving Day peak period of retail industry "Black Friday" (Black Friday), is the world of e-commerce. Bezos, who owns Amazon, has become the richest person in the world, but his pace of progress has not stopped.

JUST LOOKING AT THE IMMEDIATE INTERESTS CANNOT MAINTAIN LEADERSHIP

Amazon has gone through 23 years, Bezos adheres to a set of values-look at the long-term. When Amazon went public in 1997, Bezos explained in a letter to shareholders that Amazon is not a short-term investment company, but is to become a market leader in the long run.

This can be seen from Amazon's achievement report: Although the company's revenue has continued to rise in the past years, the money earned has been invested heavily in research and development and the company's long-term development.

The fundamental reason why Bezos can persist in the predicament is that he has always upheld the concept of "long-term benefit".

He mentioned long-term value more than once in his letter to shareholders. If he only looks at the immediate benefits, the company cannot maintain market leadership for a long time.

SHOWCASING TALENT AT A YOUNG AGE 3 YEARS OLD TO TEAR DOWN HIS CRIB

When Bezos was born, his parents were still young. He was raised by his mother and stepfather. Bezos showed interest in the field of engineering and science very early. When he was 3 years old, he used a screwdriver to dismantle his crib. In his high school graduation speech, he also portrayed his vision of going to outer space to establish a colony. After graduating from Princeton University in engineering and computer science, Bezos worked in several financial companies in New York.

During his work, he found that the number of people using the Internet has been growing at a rapid rate of 2,300% every year. He spawned the idea of ​​using the Internet to create an online bookstore covering millions of books, and chose to resign and start a business when he was 30 years old.

THE RISE OF THE KING OF E-COMMERCE

At that time, the company he founded was called Cadabra, and later changed its name to Amazon, the longest river in the world, hoping that his company would be the strongest in terms of scale and content in the future, and unabashedly expressed its business ambitions.

More importantly, the name starts with "A", which puts Amazon at the top of the major search engines.

Within one month after Amazon went live in 1995, it could already deliver goods to all 50 US states and 45 other countries. In the five years since the establishment of Amazon, registered accounts have surged from 180,000 to 17 million, and sales have increased from $ 510,000 to more than $ 1.6 billion. Coinciding with the rise of the Kewang boom, the growing Amazon has won the favor of big-name investors. In 1997, it raised US $ 54 million in listings. Bezos became one of the richest people under 35 in the world. In 1999, Time magazine selected him as the "person of the year" and called him "the king of e-commerce."

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AFTER THE INVESTMENT FAILED, THE QUICK REFLECTION IS NO LONGER THE PURSUIT OF "INTEREST FIRST"

When the dot-com bubble burst, the company became one of the few startups that survived the dot-com bubble. However, Amazon has also gone through detours in the early days. The invested websites such as pets.com and gear.com have failed, resulting in huge losses. This led Bezos to reflect on the mistakes he made in the company's operations, and he no longer pursued the principle of "interest first" and turned to "expansion first."

He is not afraid of fighting price wars and constantly exploring products and services that are valuable to customers. Only then did he have the industry-leading products or services such as the secret laboratory Lab126, Prime member business, AWS cloud computing service, and Kindle e-book reader.

Whether Amazon is in trouble, or in the stage of rapid expansion, Bezos remains calm and knows what is needed next. Therefore, the company continuously improves its own logistics, warehousing, information systems and procurement systems. These forward-looking operations have put Amazon at the forefront of the times. The introduction of the concept of "user experience" and the birth of Kindle fully embodies Bezos' vision.

"Some people commented: "When we were making pirated e-book copybook readers, Bezos and his Amazon are rebuilding the publishing industry, and this is the difference between us and him."

It stands to reason that Bezos created the prestigious Amazon empire in one hand, and his vision and pattern should be quite grand. But in fact, Bezos is an out-and-out "micro-manager" and has strict control over the details.

He tried every means to provide users with high-quality goods and services at the lowest price. Therefore, Amazon is willing to invest in places that can create profits. Sometimes it will cut prices and free shipping to give up profits. It will also spend years developing new devices such as e-book reader Kindle. But in terms of cost savings, there is no ambiguity: the company's office building will charge employees for parking fees, and the company will fight with suppliers to prevent employees in their warehouses from organizing labor unions and find various opportunities to avoid taxes.

CONTINUE TO WRITE A LEGEND IN THE FIELD OF AI

Amazon provides logistics, inventory, loans and sales platforms for thousands of third-party merchants. At the same time, its cloud computing department uses data servers to provide services to a large number of enterprises, and has become a global leader in this field. But Amazon didn't stop there. Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a very important market for cloud service giants.

Amazon also took the opportunity to launch Echo, open Alexa to build AI layout. The first Echo speaker was released in November 2014. The initial publicity focused on voice functions, voice-controlled music, encyclopedias, weather check, and alarm clock ... But people think it's just a talking speaker. At that time, Bezos was criticized and ridiculed by the industry for this product. However, under his insistence, people slowly began to accept and like this product.