Jeff Bezos is founder of Amazon, the first trillion-dollar company.
Amazon sells over 600 million different items, and controls 40% of online sales in the USA.
Yet the company is only 25 years old, what sort of mind makes that happen?
In 1994, Jeff Bezos was one of the first to spot the internet, at the time it was tiny but it was growing at 2,300% per year.
Bezos thought there would soon be lots of money made selling goods over the internet.
So far so good, but what should he sell? This was the real creative leap.
Unlike a conventional retailer, he didn’t need a physical display or storage space.
So what was a single, simple item that he could sell without storing, that a conventional retailer couldn’t?
Bezos found there were 3 million different book titles available around the world, but even the biggest bookshop on the planet couldn’t stock more than 150,000 titles.
So Bezos could offer customers a choice 20 times bigger than the biggest bookshop.
It was a revolutionary vision.
Bezos had an amazing mind, but that doesn’t mean it could think of everything.
He says one of the most amazing ideas he heard was when they just started, in the early days he got down on his knees with the rest of the staff and packed books.
One night his knees were aching, he stood up and rubbed them.
He said to the guy next to him: “My knees are killing me, we need knee pads.”
The guy next to him said: “No we don’t need knee pads Jeff, we need tables.”
Bezos thought that was the most brilliant idea he’d heard: instead of solving the problem of aching knees, buy tables so people don’t have to work on the floor.
Bezos said, efficiency immediately improved at least 200%
Now to us that’s the most obvious thing in the world, because we don’t think like Bezos.
To Bezos, it seemed absolutely brilliant, because he doesn’t think like us.
And that’s why Bezos loves to have people around who don’t think like him.
He said getting new customers was easy compared to getting more business from existing customers.
So they brainstormed, and one his junior software engineers came up with an idea based on restaurants.
Amazon customers love free postage, how about an all-you-can-eat postage deal?
And that was the birth of Amazon Prime: a single yearly payment that means however much you order that year, it’s postage free.
At first it seems like a massive cost, having to pay for all that postage.
But it actually becomes an incentive to purchase more often, since the postage is free.
Amazon Prime now has 100 million members, and on Amazon Prime Day in 2019 it delivered $2 billion in sales.
Bezos doesn’t think like us, but he appreciates the value of that difference.
In 2018 he said: “People come up and congratulate me on my latest set of numbers, but to me that’s ancient history, I worked on those numbers 2 years ago. The numbers I’m thinking about today are for 2 years’ time.”
What frees Bezos to think like that is he has people doing what he isn’t: thinking about now,the day-to-day.
People thinking about the small stuff, without which he wouldn’t be free to think about thebig stuff.
And that has to be the secret of a great entrepreneur.
Spot where you’re strong and do that.
And spot where you’re weak, and get people you trust to do that.