I always love when Amazon’s Jeff Bezos puts out his annual shareholder letter.
2015 Letter to Amazon Shareholders
Amazon has been an incredible growth story, and while their treatment of employees has come under fire, they have some very interesting things to learn from.
In this year’s letter, Bezos writes about the core similarity between their e-commerce business and the cloud business, AWS (which reached $10B in revenue faster than Amazon did itself):
“They share a distinctive organizational culture that cares deeply about and acts with conviction on a small number of principles. I’m talking about customer obsession rather than competitor obsession, eagerness to invent and pioneer, willingness to fail, the patience to think long-term, and the taking of professional pride in operational excellence.”
We try to emulate many of these philosophies at RunSignup. Of all of them, I think a focus on the long term is the key. If you focus on the long term, then you begin to realize the value of all the other things – focus ing on customer needs, willingness to fail, and a need to have operational excellence.
Bezos does this by ignoring conventional wisdom of Wall Street and a quarterly focus. If you follow Amazon stock you will see it goes up and down a lot because of quarterly misses or overachievements. Bezos does not care anything about the quarterly report and has a singular focus on the long term.
As he wrote in his first Annual Letter:
“But this is Day 1 for the Internet and, if we execute well, for Amazon.com.”
We feel the same way about RunSignUp and the technology we can bring to the endurance community. We can’t wait for the future!
P.S. We also loved seeing mention of AWS Aurora being the fastest growing service ever for AWS. As we have learned, it is amazing!