This marked the birth of Amazon, the everything store. Fair-minded, virtually up-to-the-minute history of the retail and technology behemoth and the prodigious brain behind it.

Bezos identified books, as the most viable item to sell online, books were pure commodities ‘a copy of a book in one store was identical to the same book carried in another, so buyers always knew what they were getting’. Instead, Jeff Bezos chose to start out by selling one item, an item that could be easily stored and sold online (clothing could not be stored online for obvious reasons and there was always the problem of having to stock different sizes and colours of the same clothing). Jeff Bezos intention from the beginning was to build an everything store, but he understood that trying to sell everything from the get go was impractical, would exhaust his limited resources, investors patience, and would lead to nothing but failure. According to Bezos, the main objective missionaries set out to achieve is to help as many people as possible, making money for missionaries is a secondary objective (ironically, missionaries like Amazon made the most money.) The Everything Store will be the revealing, definitive biography of the company that placed one of the first and largest bets on the Internet and forever. Mercenaries are not cool.’ These are the value that Jeff Bezos hand wrote for Amazon.

Capturing all the value only for the company is not cool. The Everything Store is a well written book by Brad Stone that describes the growth of Amazon through its trials and tribulations under the disciplined genius of Jeff Bezos. ‘Rudeness is not cool. Defeating tiny guys is not cool. Close-following is not cool. Young is cool. Risk-taking is cool. Winning is cool. Polite is cool. Defeating bigger, unsympathetic guys is cool. Inventing is cool. Explorers are cool. Conquerers are cool. Obsessing over competitors is not cool. Empowering others is cool. Winner of the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award Brad Stones definitive book on Amazon and Bezos The Guardian A.

The everything store book review