27 ms·

"Bezos achieved" it's never one person that changes the world, it's the conditions being ripe for it along with some bloke having enough seed money and brutal d

"Bezos achieved" it's never one person that changes the world, it's the conditions being ripe for it along with some bloke having enough seed money and brutal determination to make it happen. - Internet was just starting to be a thing in the 90's so right time to capitalize on a new easier way to sell things - Bezos got hundreds of thousands of dollars in money from his parents to start his book empire. It's not like he was a rags to riches story, they never are. - Amazon warehouse workers suffer nearly 2x the numbers of bodily injuries[1] and it's almost like the company expects (and wants) to burn through these workers bodies because they have a ridiculously high turnover rate[2] If he didn't do it someone else would have and for all we know they could have broken less bodies along the way. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/01/study-amazon-workers-injured-at-higher-rates-than-rival-companies.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/01/study-amazon-workers-injured... [2] https://labor411.org/411-blog/warehouse-worker-turnover-rate-is-100-in-counties-that-have-amazon-warehouses/ https://labor411.org/411-blog/warehouse-worker-turnover-rate...

tester756 4y ago
>It's not like he was a rags to riches story, they virtually never are. >Bezos got hundreds of thousands of dollars in money from his parents still, going from e.g 600k (300k in 94) to trillion dollar company is impressive as hell how many startups do receive way, way more than that and fail?
- marricks 4y ago
  I didn't say it wasn't impressive but it's as impressive as... watching someone win the Squid Games by backstabbing everyone else? I don't think it deserves any applause or proves anything.
- nwienert 4y ago
  We don’t really know how impressive it is, a lot of founders made it huge in that golden time period even for terrible ideas that died shortly after, and network effects always crown one or two as massively disproportionate winners in each area. If you acknowledge that timing, connections, background and network effects dominate the equation (if Bezos was 2 years late, is there any doubt there’d be a “different” one?), you realize there’s something gross about how wealth is distributed.
  - sahila 4y ago
    There’s definitely doubt about another Amazon appearing! Sure we might get a dominating e-store that sells goods, that’s easy to imagine. But that same company also creating the largest cloud provider, being the largest distributor, going international, creating the kindle, now property acquisition, and so on. Yeah I do doubt there’d be another Amazon.
    - nwienert 4y ago
      AWS wasn't Bezos, it was a whole squad of Amazon execs and employees and an idea that formed over a long time period through many people, if anything it proves the opposite point that he deserves outsize rewards. The rest of the success makes a ton of sense in context (Kindle and distribution from becoming the network-effect winning e-commerce store/bookstore).
  - AussieWog93 4y ago
    >if Bezos was 2 years late, is there any doubt there’d be a “different” one? Bezos was 25 years late to Australia, and still nobody put together a business like his during that 2-decade gap. Kogan had some of the successful elements, but it's nothing like Amazon US.
    - MichaelZuo 4y ago
      This is a very good point. And Australia is not some tiny market and has what appears to be competent businessmen
- beepbooptheory 4y ago
  Sure, but the impressiveness scales logarithmically here.
- coliveira 4y ago
  > how many startups do receive way, way more than that and fail? There is always the assumption that people failed because they're stupid, and some people succeed because they're genius. This is nonsense. Of course Dr Evil, I mean, Bezos, has a strong work ethic, intelligence, and business drive, but this is not guarantee of anything. He was doing the right thing at the right time, period. He got billions of dollars to apply a business strategy that worked well for the market conditions, but this is not because he is so different from other business people.
  - tester756 4y ago
    >but this is not because he is so different from other business people. What makes you think so?
    - nitwit005 4y ago
      It's possible he's special, but you often see the pattern that someone starts a highly successful company, but then go on to start other companies that don't do well. That they can't replicate their success suggests luck or circumstance was involved. And there is always the possibility that the CEO wasn't the one to make the company successful. A company isn't one person.
    - TapWaterBandit 4y ago
      Mainly because some people loathe the idea that they aren't entitled to a share of what Bezos created so they prefer to view his success as something anyone could have done if only for xyz.
  - criley2 4y ago
    Honestly, I don't know if I buy it. Even today, when I buy online from a small business, it's normal to wait 3-5 business days for the order to be processed and a shipping label to be created, 1-2 days for the product to enter shipping system, and 3-5 more days for delivery. I routinely wait 2-3 weeks for popular stuff from decently big websites that are clearly 10000000X smaller than Amazon. Meanwhile, Amazon hits same day and next day shipping all the time zero issue. Amazon wasn't the right thing at the right time. It imagined a different type of delivery that no one else today gets anywhere near. Amazon is to delivery what Apple is to hardware. It's different and not repeatable no matter who tries. I try to support smaller shops all the time, but it's definitely frustrating to wait 2-3 weeks on a delivery that know Amazon will next day to me. Shout out to local pet foodstore hollywood feed which puts a branded car at each location and does physical deliveries. Y'all beat Amazon with a 30 minute delivery. Can't argue with results.
- selcuka 4y ago
  > how many startups do receive way, way more than that and fail? This is not the right way to look at it. In a competitive market obviously only a few, or one will survive. The point is, how many "rags to riches" startup can you think of? The ones with founders who did not have a safety net. The 600k (or 300k in 94) is immaterial, he could have also done it with zero capital. What matters is he was able to take risks because of his family's safety net. He would never be homeless if he failed. The risks he could take were very different than one who refinanced their home to fund their startup.
  - SnowHill9902 4y ago
    So let him thank his parents. What’s the problem? Are you suggesting that everyone should average down to being poor? Children are an extension of their parents. Genetically and socially.
    - selcuka 4y ago
      I'm suggesting that ignoring the role of their parents is hypocrisy.
tesrx 4y ago
Classic strawman argument. OP didn't accredit all success to Bezos. And yes, Amazon is frighteningly large.
- soSadm4n 4y ago
- marricks 4y ago
  What was his vision? Destroying millions of mom and pop shops and forcing millions of people to work for poor wages and harsh conditions delivering Amazon products? I'm not sure a 2 day delivery window is worth that.
  - tppiotrowski 4y ago
    I believe his original vision was to be the worlds largest book store offering. Something brick and mortar book stores couldn't do because of shelf space limitations.
    - menzoic 4y ago
      Books weren't the end goal. He named it Amazon because he wanted something generic to expand into. I don't think third party sellers were in the initial vision but selling other items was
      - B1FF_PSUVM 4y ago
        > named it Amazon because ... it was "a river of one million books". That was the slogan when it came out to steamroll books.com (the first mover), an outfit from Ohio that sold books on the Internet and shipped without plastic packaging in 1991.
  - social_quotient 4y ago
    By mom and pop shops you mean retail. I don’t think the aspiration of humanity (or a participant) should be to have a retail business. It’s neither the good being sold nor the person utilizing it. The retail shop itself was inefficient and often expensive with little selection and almost no reviewing mechanism. It’s sad sure, but it was replaced with something far better. That replacement also drove costs down, and unlocked tremendous amounts of time spent “doing” retail shopping and as a society it’s our job to put that time and those savings to use. It’s also our job , in a moral sense, to make sure displaced industries/people like “retail” also find a new way of being productive. Let’s not forget the investors that have reaped tons of benefit from this. They too have allocated those funds back to the market either via spend, investment, or tax. Even if the capital is idle, the bank has it which is also giving someone a job.
bergenty 4y ago
Give me a break. A guy that turns a couple of hundred thousand (something a LOT of people qualify for in loans) into hundreds of billions is amazing.
est31 4y ago
> "Bezos achieved" it's never one person that changes the world, it's the conditions being ripe for it along with some bloke having enough seed money and brutal determination to make it happen. IMO Bezos's main achievement was to get through the dot com bubble by keeping enough investors in so that the company wouldn't collapse. Execution probably played a role, but I think what played a bigger role were his extremely good contacts to wall street and the money owning elite in general. Keeping people convinced that your "books.com" remains a fine investment while the "pets.com"s around you are dying like flies is an achievement IMO.
superfrank 4y ago
> If he didn't do it someone else would have and for all we know they could have broken less bodies along the way. That's a bold statement to make and I'm not sure I believe it. Even companies like Sears or Walmart who were better positioned to dominate the space missed the boat. Like you said, it's never one person who changes the world. It's usually one talented person who has the right connections and gets a lot of luck at just the right time. There's no guarantee that someone else would have made the same choices and gotten the same breaks if Bezos didn't exist. Amazon exists because of Bezos, but that doesn't mean he did it all by himself.
- LoveGracePeace 4y ago
  The conspiracy theory that one person can't rise to great wealth on their skill and talent and some luck rather than mostly luck and connections, is a conspiracy theory.
miles 4y ago
> It's not like he was a rags to riches story, they never are. 21 billionaires who grew up poor https://www.businessinsider.com/billionaires-who-came-from-nothing-2013-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/billionaires-who-came-from-n... Sam Walton: Born as a Poor Farmer, Died as The Billionaire CEO and Founder of Wal-Mart https://corporatebytes.in/sam-walton-born-poor-farmer-died-billionaire-ceo-founder-wal-mart/ https://corporatebytes.in/sam-walton-born-poor-farmer-died-b...
- HWR_14 4y ago
  On that list is at least one Russian oligarch, whose friendship with Putin guaranteed him billionaire status.
  - LoveGracePeace 4y ago
    I'm no fan of Russia but I've read Putin moonlighted as a Taxi driver in the 1990's, just saying.
nxmnxm99 4y ago
What a load of politically-charged bollocks. "If he didn't, somebody else would have" - citation? Less than 25% of millionaires were born into money. Your defeatist world-view is entirely wrong.
- marricks 4y ago
  You can have a middle class salary, save well, and become a millionaire in time for retirement. In fact, at retirement age you really need millions nowadays. Not that most people have that. And most of those retirement age millionaires wouldn't have hundreds of thousands to lend. I'm talking about billionaires, and what I contend is most billionaires had parents or family members who were rich which helped them. - Elon Musk's parents owned an emerald mine in S. Africa - Bill Gates not only got seed money from his millionaire parents but one of his parents was on the board of IBM and helped him land early Microsoft deals - Bezos got 300k seed money from his parents - Zuckerberg, is maybe an exception? His parents were only upper middle class. Enough money for good schools and private CS tutors. Seems plausible that if he was lower middle class he wouldn't have made it to Harvard.
  - Chris2048 4y ago
    > - Elon Musk's parents owned an emerald mine in S. Africa Elon disputes this.
    - marricks 4y ago
      He disputed his way into becoming a co-founder of Tesla so I'm not surprised.
    - Cederfjard 4y ago
      https://www.businessinsider.co.za/how-elon-musks-family-came-to-own-an-emerald-mine-2018-2 https://www.businessinsider.co.za/how-elon-musks-family-came... TL;DR: In the 80s, Elon’s father sold a plane for $80k, half in cash, and the rest for 50% of a Zambian emerald mine. He had it for six years and made some good money off it, but probably not a ludicrous amount. One can imagine there being exploitative working conditions in that mine, given the time and place, but I don’t have any real knowledge on the matter.
fnordpiglet 4y ago
Bezos made a company who is really good at scaling to any scale at all functions. He created a ton of process at Amazon to facilitate this. I spent a number of years there as a senior leader. I was profoundly impressed with how his influence is pervasive in how things are done, and they’re generally insightful and work well for operating a highly scaled distributed organization that can try many risky things, fail fast, and succeed fast. He didn’t do it alone, but he did create the environment for it to happen and held pretty tight control over the tenants and way things are done. There are many humanistic ways in which Amazon is a profound failure but I think it’s naive to underestimate how much direct and indirect influence bezos had on what Amazon has achieved and become. I think if Bezos had applied some energy to creating an environment that fosters the humanity of its people it would be a much better company in most respects, but it’s undeniable to my experience that one man did instigate the changes we’ve seen Amazon bring to our world. (N.b., I don’t say these things out of some worship for Bezos or Amazon, you can respect and appreciate something without liking it)

tester756 4y ago

>It's not like he was a rags to riches story, they virtually never are. >Bezos got hundreds of thousands of dollars in money from his parents still, going from e.g 600k (300k in 94) to trillion dollar company is impressive as hell how many startups do receive way, way more than that and fail?

marricks 4y ago
I didn't say it wasn't impressive but it's as impressive as... watching someone win the Squid Games by backstabbing everyone else? I don't think it deserves any applause or proves anything.
nwienert 4y ago
We don’t really know how impressive it is, a lot of founders made it huge in that golden time period even for terrible ideas that died shortly after, and network effects always crown one or two as massively disproportionate winners in each area. If you acknowledge that timing, connections, background and network effects dominate the equation (if Bezos was 2 years late, is there any doubt there’d be a “different” one?), you realize there’s something gross about how wealth is distributed.
- sahila 4y ago
  There’s definitely doubt about another Amazon appearing! Sure we might get a dominating e-store that sells goods, that’s easy to imagine. But that same company also creating the largest cloud provider, being the largest distributor, going international, creating the kindle, now property acquisition, and so on. Yeah I do doubt there’d be another Amazon.
  - nwienert 4y ago
    AWS wasn't Bezos, it was a whole squad of Amazon execs and employees and an idea that formed over a long time period through many people, if anything it proves the opposite point that he deserves outsize rewards. The rest of the success makes a ton of sense in context (Kindle and distribution from becoming the network-effect winning e-commerce store/bookstore).
- AussieWog93 4y ago
  >if Bezos was 2 years late, is there any doubt there’d be a “different” one? Bezos was 25 years late to Australia, and still nobody put together a business like his during that 2-decade gap. Kogan had some of the successful elements, but it's nothing like Amazon US.
  - MichaelZuo 4y ago
    This is a very good point. And Australia is not some tiny market and has what appears to be competent businessmen
beepbooptheory 4y ago
Sure, but the impressiveness scales logarithmically here.
coliveira 4y ago
> how many startups do receive way, way more than that and fail? There is always the assumption that people failed because they're stupid, and some people succeed because they're genius. This is nonsense. Of course Dr Evil, I mean, Bezos, has a strong work ethic, intelligence, and business drive, but this is not guarantee of anything. He was doing the right thing at the right time, period. He got billions of dollars to apply a business strategy that worked well for the market conditions, but this is not because he is so different from other business people.
- tester756 4y ago
  >but this is not because he is so different from other business people. What makes you think so?
  - nitwit005 4y ago
    It's possible he's special, but you often see the pattern that someone starts a highly successful company, but then go on to start other companies that don't do well. That they can't replicate their success suggests luck or circumstance was involved. And there is always the possibility that the CEO wasn't the one to make the company successful. A company isn't one person.
  - TapWaterBandit 4y ago
    Mainly because some people loathe the idea that they aren't entitled to a share of what Bezos created so they prefer to view his success as something anyone could have done if only for xyz.
- criley2 4y ago
  Honestly, I don't know if I buy it. Even today, when I buy online from a small business, it's normal to wait 3-5 business days for the order to be processed and a shipping label to be created, 1-2 days for the product to enter shipping system, and 3-5 more days for delivery. I routinely wait 2-3 weeks for popular stuff from decently big websites that are clearly 10000000X smaller than Amazon. Meanwhile, Amazon hits same day and next day shipping all the time zero issue. Amazon wasn't the right thing at the right time. It imagined a different type of delivery that no one else today gets anywhere near. Amazon is to delivery what Apple is to hardware. It's different and not repeatable no matter who tries. I try to support smaller shops all the time, but it's definitely frustrating to wait 2-3 weeks on a delivery that know Amazon will next day to me. Shout out to local pet foodstore hollywood feed which puts a branded car at each location and does physical deliveries. Y'all beat Amazon with a 30 minute delivery. Can't argue with results.
selcuka 4y ago
> how many startups do receive way, way more than that and fail? This is not the right way to look at it. In a competitive market obviously only a few, or one will survive. The point is, how many "rags to riches" startup can you think of? The ones with founders who did not have a safety net. The 600k (or 300k in 94) is immaterial, he could have also done it with zero capital. What matters is he was able to take risks because of his family's safety net. He would never be homeless if he failed. The risks he could take were very different than one who refinanced their home to fund their startup.
- SnowHill9902 4y ago
  So let him thank his parents. What’s the problem? Are you suggesting that everyone should average down to being poor? Children are an extension of their parents. Genetically and socially.
  - selcuka 4y ago
    I'm suggesting that ignoring the role of their parents is hypocrisy.

tesrx 4y ago

Classic strawman argument. OP didn't accredit all success to Bezos. And yes, Amazon is frighteningly large.

soSadm4n 4y ago
marricks 4y ago
What was his vision? Destroying millions of mom and pop shops and forcing millions of people to work for poor wages and harsh conditions delivering Amazon products? I'm not sure a 2 day delivery window is worth that.
- tppiotrowski 4y ago
  I believe his original vision was to be the worlds largest book store offering. Something brick and mortar book stores couldn't do because of shelf space limitations.
  - menzoic 4y ago
    Books weren't the end goal. He named it Amazon because he wanted something generic to expand into. I don't think third party sellers were in the initial vision but selling other items was
    - B1FF_PSUVM 4y ago
      > named it Amazon because ... it was "a river of one million books". That was the slogan when it came out to steamroll books.com (the first mover), an outfit from Ohio that sold books on the Internet and shipped without plastic packaging in 1991.
- social_quotient 4y ago
  By mom and pop shops you mean retail. I don’t think the aspiration of humanity (or a participant) should be to have a retail business. It’s neither the good being sold nor the person utilizing it. The retail shop itself was inefficient and often expensive with little selection and almost no reviewing mechanism. It’s sad sure, but it was replaced with something far better. That replacement also drove costs down, and unlocked tremendous amounts of time spent “doing” retail shopping and as a society it’s our job to put that time and those savings to use. It’s also our job , in a moral sense, to make sure displaced industries/people like “retail” also find a new way of being productive. Let’s not forget the investors that have reaped tons of benefit from this. They too have allocated those funds back to the market either via spend, investment, or tax. Even if the capital is idle, the bank has it which is also giving someone a job.

bergenty 4y ago

Give me a break. A guy that turns a couple of hundred thousand (something a LOT of people qualify for in loans) into hundreds of billions is amazing.

est31 4y ago

> "Bezos achieved" it's never one person that changes the world, it's the conditions being ripe for it along with some bloke having enough seed money and brutal determination to make it happen. IMO Bezos's main achievement was to get through the dot com bubble by keeping enough investors in so that the company wouldn't collapse. Execution probably played a role, but I think what played a bigger role were his extremely good contacts to wall street and the money owning elite in general. Keeping people convinced that your "books.com" remains a fine investment while the "pets.com"s around you are dying like flies is an achievement IMO.

superfrank 4y ago

> If he didn't do it someone else would have and for all we know they could have broken less bodies along the way. That's a bold statement to make and I'm not sure I believe it. Even companies like Sears or Walmart who were better positioned to dominate the space missed the boat. Like you said, it's never one person who changes the world. It's usually one talented person who has the right connections and gets a lot of luck at just the right time. There's no guarantee that someone else would have made the same choices and gotten the same breaks if Bezos didn't exist. Amazon exists because of Bezos, but that doesn't mean he did it all by himself.

LoveGracePeace 4y ago
The conspiracy theory that one person can't rise to great wealth on their skill and talent and some luck rather than mostly luck and connections, is a conspiracy theory.

miles 4y ago

> It's not like he was a rags to riches story, they never are. 21 billionaires who grew up poor https://www.businessinsider.com/billionaires-who-came-from-nothing-2013-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/billionaires-who-came-from-n... Sam Walton: Born as a Poor Farmer, Died as The Billionaire CEO and Founder of Wal-Mart https://corporatebytes.in/sam-walton-born-poor-farmer-died-billionaire-ceo-founder-wal-mart/ https://corporatebytes.in/sam-walton-born-poor-farmer-died-b...

HWR_14 4y ago
On that list is at least one Russian oligarch, whose friendship with Putin guaranteed him billionaire status.
- LoveGracePeace 4y ago
  I'm no fan of Russia but I've read Putin moonlighted as a Taxi driver in the 1990's, just saying.

nxmnxm99 4y ago

What a load of politically-charged bollocks. "If he didn't, somebody else would have" - citation? Less than 25% of millionaires were born into money. Your defeatist world-view is entirely wrong.

marricks 4y ago
You can have a middle class salary, save well, and become a millionaire in time for retirement. In fact, at retirement age you really need millions nowadays. Not that most people have that. And most of those retirement age millionaires wouldn't have hundreds of thousands to lend. I'm talking about billionaires, and what I contend is most billionaires had parents or family members who were rich which helped them. - Elon Musk's parents owned an emerald mine in S. Africa - Bill Gates not only got seed money from his millionaire parents but one of his parents was on the board of IBM and helped him land early Microsoft deals - Bezos got 300k seed money from his parents - Zuckerberg, is maybe an exception? His parents were only upper middle class. Enough money for good schools and private CS tutors. Seems plausible that if he was lower middle class he wouldn't have made it to Harvard.
- Chris2048 4y ago
  > - Elon Musk's parents owned an emerald mine in S. Africa Elon disputes this.
  - marricks 4y ago
    He disputed his way into becoming a co-founder of Tesla so I'm not surprised.
  - Cederfjard 4y ago
    https://www.businessinsider.co.za/how-elon-musks-family-came-to-own-an-emerald-mine-2018-2 https://www.businessinsider.co.za/how-elon-musks-family-came... TL;DR: In the 80s, Elon’s father sold a plane for $80k, half in cash, and the rest for 50% of a Zambian emerald mine. He had it for six years and made some good money off it, but probably not a ludicrous amount. One can imagine there being exploitative working conditions in that mine, given the time and place, but I don’t have any real knowledge on the matter.

fnordpiglet 4y ago

Bezos made a company who is really good at scaling to any scale at all functions. He created a ton of process at Amazon to facilitate this. I spent a number of years there as a senior leader. I was profoundly impressed with how his influence is pervasive in how things are done, and they’re generally insightful and work well for operating a highly scaled distributed organization that can try many risky things, fail fast, and succeed fast. He didn’t do it alone, but he did create the environment for it to happen and held pretty tight control over the tenants and way things are done. There are many humanistic ways in which Amazon is a profound failure but I think it’s naive to underestimate how much direct and indirect influence bezos had on what Amazon has achieved and become. I think if Bezos had applied some energy to creating an environment that fosters the humanity of its people it would be a much better company in most respects, but it’s undeniable to my experience that one man did instigate the changes we’ve seen Amazon bring to our world. (N.b., I don’t say these things out of some worship for Bezos or Amazon, you can respect and appreciate something without liking it)