nickshanagher

I don’t fear Amazon, it’s One Stop, a senior wholesale executive told me recently. But a flick through The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age ofAmazon by Brad Stone might make him rethink. I am sure that Jeff Bezos will write a better book about his business ideas 20 years from now and while Stone’s book has been slated by some insiders, it is a great read. For anyone involved in distribution it is a must read. Famously frugal with company funds, the Amazon attitude to burning up money buying companies that failed during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s will dazzle you. Even more impressive is Bezos pursuit of the best brains from Walmart. He started his career in a New York hedge fund run by David E Shaw, whose mastery of maths and computing made him a billion dollars exploiting inefficiencies in the way Wall Street worked. DESCO had a policy of hiring the best brains and Bezos was a prodigy. He left this well paid job to set up an internet business that had a 70 ...