11 ms·

What I Learned from Reading Every Amazon Shareholders Letter

228 points by vinnyglennon 9y ago

ggambetta 9y ago
It's a very interesting read, and I can't help the feeling that lately Jeff Bezos is taking the place of Steve Jobs as the superhuman CEO (deservedly, it seems!).
- OtterCoder 9y ago
  Then you haven't been an Amazon supplier dangling at the end of a rope as Bezos tries to wring blood from a stone.
  - dizzystar 9y ago
    So true... the universe of selling on Amazon and buying on Amazon couldn't be more separate.
    - notyourwork 9y ago
      The universe of buying and selling clothing at the mall, food at the grocery store, goods at Walmart have the same level of separation in most cases.
      - dizzystar 9y ago
        Not quite what I mean. The difference between the costomer-facing section of Amazon and the seller-facing section is worlds apart. Selling on Walmart, eBay, etc., are very different platforms with their own unique rules. Amazon is an entirely different level.
        notyourwork 9y ago
        And the common denominator with all of these is majority of customers are ignorant to all of this. They are more concerned with the price tag and their wallet than they are about the supply chain.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    Well, yeah, Amazon is more the new WalMart than the new Apple.
  - mrich 9y ago
    That sounds a bit familiar to how Apple dealt with their suppliers.
    - Aloha 9y ago
      Any big company, apple, wallmart, ford.. and on and on.
      - eru 9y ago
        To give a contrast, Aldi has an excellent reputation with suppliers. That German hard discounter pays like clockwork.
        protomyth 9y ago
        I gotta admit that I can forgive a multiple of sins when I'm paid on time.
  - Bromskloss 9y ago
    Would that contradict the point?
  - ActsJuvenile 9y ago
    Tell us more. I am not familiar with this side of Amazon.
    - OtterCoder 9y ago
      I used to work for a publishing company. No other platform or vendor made us bend over backwards like Amazon. We had to give them the usual non-competitive list pricing that other vendors demand, but we also had to give them a massive, absolutely disproportional cut of the sale price, regardless of profit margin. There were launch date rights they demanded, massive periods of exclusivity for audiobooks in order not to be a second class citizen, total refusal to negotiate terms, etc. We were not a small publishing house, top 10% by volume nationwide, and (mostly) not paperback trash either. You've probably seen our cookbooks. Didn't matter. They treated us exactly the same as they would an amateur author writing unedited self-pub romance novels. No regard for quality, rating, volume, or any other metric, all must bow before Bezos. Amazon takes such a chunk out of the publishing industry, it actually has a bit of a chilling effect, because you can't afford risk a flop with the tight margins Amazon affords, and you probably need Amazon.
falcolas 9y ago
It’s funny. I’ve heard the “Disagree but commit” from a lot of managers lately; usually used to shut peons up. Ironic that it’s original usage (at least where these managers heard it from) speaks to the opposite direction: leadership should trust their teams.
- brad0 9y ago
  I thought it was more along the lines of “if you’re in the minority and you aren’t convincing people then don’t invest energy into it and go with the flow”.
  - falcolas 9y ago
    It’s that too; the advantage of a 3 word maxim: it means what you want it to mean. My managers want the peons to follow the directions from on high. Bezos wanted to trust the people he hired to do the right thing, even if he disagreed. I, an employee, tend to go with your interpretation.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - brad0 9y ago
      You’re right, I like your breakdown of the issue. The “mantra” should be a reminder of the cultural value. ie: you learn the value by seeing it in interactions between people first. The mantra then orients you toward the cultural value. Instead some people are taking the mantra and twisting it to create a culture that is useful to them. Haha, it kind of reminds me of religion. :S
- daveFNbuck 9y ago
  When leadership trusts their teams, they're trusting the manager. Combining these uses means that the manager has support from above and below to execute their projects.
- whipoodle 9y ago
  Ugh, that phrase is so grim. I kinda wish people in this industry would just tell each other to “shut up and deal with it” if that’s what they effectively mean.
jondubois 9y ago
>> If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat. Just get on. I believe this is from Eric Schmidt. It's probably the single most important principle that you have to follow if you want to have a successful career. Especially if you're an engineer. Most fast growing tech companies are founded by random dumb kids in their garages. Don't try to build the rocket yourself (that's a gamble that practically never ends well); let someone else do it and try to hitch a ride. That is the safest way by far. It's much easier to identify a good rocket ship than to build it yourself.
- adventured 9y ago
  > Most fast growing tech companies are founded by random dumb kids in their garages. Most fast growing tech companies were in fact founded by people between the ages of ~28 and ~50 (and not in a garage), not by kids in garages. The kid in the garage founding a major tech company is a very rare exception. I can add a lot more names to this list: Paul Graham (31, Viaweb), Jan Koum (33, WhatsApp), Brian Acton (37, WhatsApp), Ev Williams (34, Twitter), Jack Dorsey (33, Square), Elon Musk (32, Tesla), Garrett Camp (30, Uber), Travis Kalanick (32, Uber), Brian Chesky (27, Airbnb), Adam Neumann (31, WeWork), Reed Hastings (37, Netflix), Reid Hoffman (36, LinkedIn), Jack Ma (35, Alibaba), Jeff Bezos (30, Amazon), Jerry Sanders (33, AMD), Marc Benioff (35, Salesforce), Ross Perot (32, EDS), Peter Norton (39, Norton), Larry Ellison (33, Oracle), Mitch Kapor (32, Lotus), Leonard Bosack (32, Cisco), Sandy Lerner (29, Cisco), Gordon Moore (39, Intel), Mark Cuban (37, Broadcast.com), Scott Cook (31, Intuit), Nolan Bushnell (29, Atari), Paul Galvin (33, Motorola), Irwin Jacobs (52, Qualcomm), David Duffield (46, PeopleSoft; 64 Workday), Aneel Bhusri (39, Workday), Thomas Siebel (41, Siebel Systems), John McAfee (42, McAfee), Gary Hendrix (32, Symantec), Scott McNealy (28, Sun), Pierre Omidyar (28, eBay), Rich Barton (29 for Expedia, 38 for Zillow), Jim Clark (38 for SGI, and 49 for Netscape), Charles Wang (32, CA), David Packard (27, HP), John Warnock (42, Adobe), Robert Noyce (30 at Fairchild, 41 for Intel), Rod Canion (37, Compaq), Jen-Hsun Huang (30, nVidia), Eli Harari (41, SanDisk), Sanjay Mehrotra (28, SanDisk), Al Shugart (48, Seagate), Finis Conner (34, Seagate), Henry Samueli (37, Broadcom), Henry Nicholas (32, Broadcom), Charles Brewer (36, Mindspring), William Shockley (45, Shockley), Ron Rivest (35, RSA), Adi Shamir (30, RSA), John Walker (32, Autodesk), Halsey Minor (30, CNet), David Filo (28, Yahoo), Jeremy Stoppelman (27, Yelp), Eric Lefkofsky (39, Groupon), Andrew Mason (29, Groupon), David Hitz (28, NetApp), Brian Lee (28, Legalzoom), Demis Hassabis (34, DeepMind), Tim Westergren (35, Pandora), Martin Lorentzon (37, Spotify), Ashar Aziz (44, FireEye), Kevin O'Connor (36, DoubleClick), Ben Silbermann (28, Pinterest), Evan Sharp (28, Pinterest), Steve Kirsch (38, Infoseek), Stephen Kaufer (36, TripAdvisor), Michael McNeilly (28, Applied Materials), Eugene McDermott (52, Texas Instruments), Richard Egan (43, EMC), Gary Kildall (32, Digital Research), Hasso Plattner (28, SAP), Robert Glaser (32, Real Networks), Patrick Byrne (37, Overstock.com), Marc Lore (33, Diapers.com), Ed Iacobucci (36, Citrix Systems), Ray Noorda (55, Novell), Tom Leighton (42, Akamai), Daniel Lewin (28, Akamai), Michael Mauldin (35, Lycos), Tom Anderson (33, MySpace), Chris DeWolfe (37, MySpace), Mark Pincus (41, Zynga), Nir Zuk (30, Palo Alto Networks), Caterina Fake (34, Flickr), Stewart Butterfield (31, Flickr), Kevin Systrom (27, Instagram), Adi Tatarko (37, Houzz), Brian Armstrong (29, Coinbase), Pradeep Sindhu (43, Juniper), Peter Thiel (31, PayPal; 37, Palantir), Jay Walker (42, priceline.com), Pony Ma (27, Tencent), Robin Li (32, Baidu), Liu Qiangdong (29, JD.com), Lei Jun (40, Xiaomi), Ren Zhengfei (38, Huawei), Arkady Volozh (36, Yandex), Hiroshi Mikitani (34, Rakuten), Morris Chang (56, Taiwan Semi), Cheng Wei (29, Didi Chuxing), James Liang (29, Ctrip)
baybal2 9y ago
Too abstract. Amazon businesses outside of North America get steamrolled by Alibaba one after another, yet people laud their "innovative business model," when it isn't (sell web hosting, and stuff over internet, something a gazillion other companies do)
- HatchedLake721 9y ago
  Sell web hosting, ha. You mean the one that is 10x bigger than its next 14 competitors combined? (2015)
  - toomuchtodo 9y ago
    If the profit margin is so high, be prepared for hungry competitors. Your margin my opportunity sort of thing :) My current org builds all infrastructure to run in multiple cloud providers, and we spend over a million a month on cloud services.
    - petra 9y ago
      The services will be the lock-in. and sucsessful software businesses usually have high margins, that's the nature of the beast.
- grogenaut 9y ago
  Links or examples for those of us who arent familiar and to back you your statement.
- yuvalmer 9y ago
  That's nonsense. It's only true for China (for obvious reasons). Amazon is more successful in India, UK, Germany, France, Japan, and the list goes on.
  - baybal2 9y ago
    See, they are in the business of selling fancy trinkets from China as it is what 9 out of 10 consumer goods are. No mater what they do, a Chinese company will be having an edge over them no matter what they will do.
tootie 9y ago
It's still amazing to me that an online book store is now the #1 seller of server infrastructure.
- leereeves 9y ago
  Many people were selling things online when Amazon was just a book store. Amazon was the best of them all. To me, it doesn't sound so strange that the #1 online store grew to be a strong competitor in other online businesses as well.
- pstuart 9y ago
  My recollection is that he started with books because that would be easiest, but the goal was to be all-encompassing from the start.
FussyZeus 9y ago
Is it safe in this thread to bring up the human cost of Amazon's (and likely by extension Bezo's) almost sociopathic pursuit of success? I wouldn't deny Amazon is a successful company, but how many horror stories from employees being ground to dust under their management have crossed HN's front page? How many companies are now refusing to do business with Amazon because of the iron-fisted requirements enforcement on their suppliers? How many sales on Amazon are of shit quality, ripoff products no better than you'd find on the streets of Hong Kong? I mean eschewing any and all corporate, social, and ethical responsibility will definitely make you a truck load of money, but I wouldn't call it exactly a net gain for all involved.
- dizzystar 9y ago
  I had a roommate who worked in the Amazon warehouse. He said it was very chill and easy work. Mind that he was someone who was a day-laborer, worked in filthy factories, and so on, so it's possible contrast principals are at play here. As for the quality of the products, there are many 3rd party sellers on Amazon who are selling garbage. This is unfortunate, but that's a tough battle for Amazon or the competing sellers to lock down. I'm not sure why you'd defend the suppliers who refuse to sell due to iron fisted policies, yet complain about the quality of the products sold. Amazon had / has to do something to clean up the mess. Hopefully it will be beneficial to the buying experience on Amazon.
  - krapp 9y ago
    In my experience working in an Amazon warehouse (albeit only one,) it depends. I could barely walk for two months after I started, just because I wasn't physically prepared to stand or do repetitive movements for ten hours a day - and I work in one of the biggest FC's in the network so it was a six or seven minute struggle across the building and down two flights of stairs to get to the car sometimes. I don't blame Amazon for that, though. I do blame them for complaining about the cost of providing us with aspirin, then simply deciding not to provide it anymore. The work is tedious and exploitative, and it's very apparent working there that Amazon considers you little more than a meat machine there to run an algorithm, despite the lip service otherwise, and often your job depends on metrics you're not even allowed to see, and the pay is terrible. But, some people don't mind it. Some people actually like it. Others have to be carted off in an ambulance because they worked themselves into heat exhaustion.
Lon7 9y ago
Amazon shareholder letters seem to be becoming the new Berkshire shareholder letters [0]. They are friendly, engaging, and most importantly, written by an author who steadfastly holds by principles that haven't changed in decades. If you haven't read any of the berkshire letters you really should. http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/letters.html http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/letters.html

228 points by vinnyglennon 9y ago

It's a very interesting read, and I can't help the feeling that lately Jeff Bezos is taking the place of Steve Jobs as the superhuman CEO (deservedly, it seems!).

OtterCoder 9y ago
Then you haven't been an Amazon supplier dangling at the end of a rope as Bezos tries to wring blood from a stone.
- dizzystar 9y ago
  So true... the universe of selling on Amazon and buying on Amazon couldn't be more separate.
  - notyourwork 9y ago
    The universe of buying and selling clothing at the mall, food at the grocery store, goods at Walmart have the same level of separation in most cases.
    - dizzystar 9y ago
      Not quite what I mean. The difference between the costomer-facing section of Amazon and the seller-facing section is worlds apart. Selling on Walmart, eBay, etc., are very different platforms with their own unique rules. Amazon is an entirely different level.
      - notyourwork 9y ago
        And the common denominator with all of these is majority of customers are ignorant to all of this. They are more concerned with the price tag and their wallet than they are about the supply chain.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  Well, yeah, Amazon is more the new WalMart than the new Apple.
- mrich 9y ago
  That sounds a bit familiar to how Apple dealt with their suppliers.
  - Aloha 9y ago
    Any big company, apple, wallmart, ford.. and on and on.
    - eru 9y ago
      To give a contrast, Aldi has an excellent reputation with suppliers. That German hard discounter pays like clockwork.
      - protomyth 9y ago
        I gotta admit that I can forgive a multiple of sins when I'm paid on time.
- Bromskloss 9y ago
  Would that contradict the point?
- ActsJuvenile 9y ago
  Tell us more. I am not familiar with this side of Amazon.
  - OtterCoder 9y ago
    I used to work for a publishing company. No other platform or vendor made us bend over backwards like Amazon. We had to give them the usual non-competitive list pricing that other vendors demand, but we also had to give them a massive, absolutely disproportional cut of the sale price, regardless of profit margin. There were launch date rights they demanded, massive periods of exclusivity for audiobooks in order not to be a second class citizen, total refusal to negotiate terms, etc. We were not a small publishing house, top 10% by volume nationwide, and (mostly) not paperback trash either. You've probably seen our cookbooks. Didn't matter. They treated us exactly the same as they would an amateur author writing unedited self-pub romance novels. No regard for quality, rating, volume, or any other metric, all must bow before Bezos. Amazon takes such a chunk out of the publishing industry, it actually has a bit of a chilling effect, because you can't afford risk a flop with the tight margins Amazon affords, and you probably need Amazon.

falcolas 9y ago

It’s funny. I’ve heard the “Disagree but commit” from a lot of managers lately; usually used to shut peons up. Ironic that it’s original usage (at least where these managers heard it from) speaks to the opposite direction: leadership should trust their teams.

brad0 9y ago
I thought it was more along the lines of “if you’re in the minority and you aren’t convincing people then don’t invest energy into it and go with the flow”.
- falcolas 9y ago
  It’s that too; the advantage of a 3 word maxim: it means what you want it to mean. My managers want the peons to follow the directions from on high. Bezos wanted to trust the people he hired to do the right thing, even if he disagreed. I, an employee, tend to go with your interpretation.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - brad0 9y ago
    You’re right, I like your breakdown of the issue. The “mantra” should be a reminder of the cultural value. ie: you learn the value by seeing it in interactions between people first. The mantra then orients you toward the cultural value. Instead some people are taking the mantra and twisting it to create a culture that is useful to them. Haha, it kind of reminds me of religion. :S
daveFNbuck 9y ago
When leadership trusts their teams, they're trusting the manager. Combining these uses means that the manager has support from above and below to execute their projects.
whipoodle 9y ago
Ugh, that phrase is so grim. I kinda wish people in this industry would just tell each other to “shut up and deal with it” if that’s what they effectively mean.

jondubois 9y ago

>> If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat. Just get on. I believe this is from Eric Schmidt. It's probably the single most important principle that you have to follow if you want to have a successful career. Especially if you're an engineer. Most fast growing tech companies are founded by random dumb kids in their garages. Don't try to build the rocket yourself (that's a gamble that practically never ends well); let someone else do it and try to hitch a ride. That is the safest way by far. It's much easier to identify a good rocket ship than to build it yourself.

adventured 9y ago
> Most fast growing tech companies are founded by random dumb kids in their garages. Most fast growing tech companies were in fact founded by people between the ages of ~28 and ~50 (and not in a garage), not by kids in garages. The kid in the garage founding a major tech company is a very rare exception. I can add a lot more names to this list: Paul Graham (31, Viaweb), Jan Koum (33, WhatsApp), Brian Acton (37, WhatsApp), Ev Williams (34, Twitter), Jack Dorsey (33, Square), Elon Musk (32, Tesla), Garrett Camp (30, Uber), Travis Kalanick (32, Uber), Brian Chesky (27, Airbnb), Adam Neumann (31, WeWork), Reed Hastings (37, Netflix), Reid Hoffman (36, LinkedIn), Jack Ma (35, Alibaba), Jeff Bezos (30, Amazon), Jerry Sanders (33, AMD), Marc Benioff (35, Salesforce), Ross Perot (32, EDS), Peter Norton (39, Norton), Larry Ellison (33, Oracle), Mitch Kapor (32, Lotus), Leonard Bosack (32, Cisco), Sandy Lerner (29, Cisco), Gordon Moore (39, Intel), Mark Cuban (37, Broadcast.com), Scott Cook (31, Intuit), Nolan Bushnell (29, Atari), Paul Galvin (33, Motorola), Irwin Jacobs (52, Qualcomm), David Duffield (46, PeopleSoft; 64 Workday), Aneel Bhusri (39, Workday), Thomas Siebel (41, Siebel Systems), John McAfee (42, McAfee), Gary Hendrix (32, Symantec), Scott McNealy (28, Sun), Pierre Omidyar (28, eBay), Rich Barton (29 for Expedia, 38 for Zillow), Jim Clark (38 for SGI, and 49 for Netscape), Charles Wang (32, CA), David Packard (27, HP), John Warnock (42, Adobe), Robert Noyce (30 at Fairchild, 41 for Intel), Rod Canion (37, Compaq), Jen-Hsun Huang (30, nVidia), Eli Harari (41, SanDisk), Sanjay Mehrotra (28, SanDisk), Al Shugart (48, Seagate), Finis Conner (34, Seagate), Henry Samueli (37, Broadcom), Henry Nicholas (32, Broadcom), Charles Brewer (36, Mindspring), William Shockley (45, Shockley), Ron Rivest (35, RSA), Adi Shamir (30, RSA), John Walker (32, Autodesk), Halsey Minor (30, CNet), David Filo (28, Yahoo), Jeremy Stoppelman (27, Yelp), Eric Lefkofsky (39, Groupon), Andrew Mason (29, Groupon), David Hitz (28, NetApp), Brian Lee (28, Legalzoom), Demis Hassabis (34, DeepMind), Tim Westergren (35, Pandora), Martin Lorentzon (37, Spotify), Ashar Aziz (44, FireEye), Kevin O'Connor (36, DoubleClick), Ben Silbermann (28, Pinterest), Evan Sharp (28, Pinterest), Steve Kirsch (38, Infoseek), Stephen Kaufer (36, TripAdvisor), Michael McNeilly (28, Applied Materials), Eugene McDermott (52, Texas Instruments), Richard Egan (43, EMC), Gary Kildall (32, Digital Research), Hasso Plattner (28, SAP), Robert Glaser (32, Real Networks), Patrick Byrne (37, Overstock.com), Marc Lore (33, Diapers.com), Ed Iacobucci (36, Citrix Systems), Ray Noorda (55, Novell), Tom Leighton (42, Akamai), Daniel Lewin (28, Akamai), Michael Mauldin (35, Lycos), Tom Anderson (33, MySpace), Chris DeWolfe (37, MySpace), Mark Pincus (41, Zynga), Nir Zuk (30, Palo Alto Networks), Caterina Fake (34, Flickr), Stewart Butterfield (31, Flickr), Kevin Systrom (27, Instagram), Adi Tatarko (37, Houzz), Brian Armstrong (29, Coinbase), Pradeep Sindhu (43, Juniper), Peter Thiel (31, PayPal; 37, Palantir), Jay Walker (42, priceline.com), Pony Ma (27, Tencent), Robin Li (32, Baidu), Liu Qiangdong (29, JD.com), Lei Jun (40, Xiaomi), Ren Zhengfei (38, Huawei), Arkady Volozh (36, Yandex), Hiroshi Mikitani (34, Rakuten), Morris Chang (56, Taiwan Semi), Cheng Wei (29, Didi Chuxing), James Liang (29, Ctrip)

baybal2 9y ago

Too abstract. Amazon businesses outside of North America get steamrolled by Alibaba one after another, yet people laud their "innovative business model," when it isn't (sell web hosting, and stuff over internet, something a gazillion other companies do)

HatchedLake721 9y ago
Sell web hosting, ha. You mean the one that is 10x bigger than its next 14 competitors combined? (2015)
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  If the profit margin is so high, be prepared for hungry competitors. Your margin my opportunity sort of thing :) My current org builds all infrastructure to run in multiple cloud providers, and we spend over a million a month on cloud services.
  - petra 9y ago
    The services will be the lock-in. and sucsessful software businesses usually have high margins, that's the nature of the beast.
grogenaut 9y ago
Links or examples for those of us who arent familiar and to back you your statement.
yuvalmer 9y ago
That's nonsense. It's only true for China (for obvious reasons). Amazon is more successful in India, UK, Germany, France, Japan, and the list goes on.
- baybal2 9y ago
  See, they are in the business of selling fancy trinkets from China as it is what 9 out of 10 consumer goods are. No mater what they do, a Chinese company will be having an edge over them no matter what they will do.

tootie 9y ago

It's still amazing to me that an online book store is now the #1 seller of server infrastructure.

leereeves 9y ago
Many people were selling things online when Amazon was just a book store. Amazon was the best of them all. To me, it doesn't sound so strange that the #1 online store grew to be a strong competitor in other online businesses as well.
pstuart 9y ago
My recollection is that he started with books because that would be easiest, but the goal was to be all-encompassing from the start.

FussyZeus 9y ago

Is it safe in this thread to bring up the human cost of Amazon's (and likely by extension Bezo's) almost sociopathic pursuit of success? I wouldn't deny Amazon is a successful company, but how many horror stories from employees being ground to dust under their management have crossed HN's front page? How many companies are now refusing to do business with Amazon because of the iron-fisted requirements enforcement on their suppliers? How many sales on Amazon are of shit quality, ripoff products no better than you'd find on the streets of Hong Kong? I mean eschewing any and all corporate, social, and ethical responsibility will definitely make you a truck load of money, but I wouldn't call it exactly a net gain for all involved.

dizzystar 9y ago
I had a roommate who worked in the Amazon warehouse. He said it was very chill and easy work. Mind that he was someone who was a day-laborer, worked in filthy factories, and so on, so it's possible contrast principals are at play here. As for the quality of the products, there are many 3rd party sellers on Amazon who are selling garbage. This is unfortunate, but that's a tough battle for Amazon or the competing sellers to lock down. I'm not sure why you'd defend the suppliers who refuse to sell due to iron fisted policies, yet complain about the quality of the products sold. Amazon had / has to do something to clean up the mess. Hopefully it will be beneficial to the buying experience on Amazon.
- krapp 9y ago
  In my experience working in an Amazon warehouse (albeit only one,) it depends. I could barely walk for two months after I started, just because I wasn't physically prepared to stand or do repetitive movements for ten hours a day - and I work in one of the biggest FC's in the network so it was a six or seven minute struggle across the building and down two flights of stairs to get to the car sometimes. I don't blame Amazon for that, though. I do blame them for complaining about the cost of providing us with aspirin, then simply deciding not to provide it anymore. The work is tedious and exploitative, and it's very apparent working there that Amazon considers you little more than a meat machine there to run an algorithm, despite the lip service otherwise, and often your job depends on metrics you're not even allowed to see, and the pay is terrible. But, some people don't mind it. Some people actually like it. Others have to be carted off in an ambulance because they worked themselves into heat exhaustion.

Lon7 9y ago

Amazon shareholder letters seem to be becoming the new Berkshire shareholder letters [0]. They are friendly, engaging, and most importantly, written by an author who steadfastly holds by principles that haven't changed in decades. If you haven't read any of the berkshire letters you really should. http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/letters.html http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/letters.html