A good survey of Jeff Bezos over the 2010-2021 and his various companies. I was surprised how many missteps he's made -- Blue Origin, the many grocery attempts, debatable Hollywood productions, his affair, India, China. There were also trends that don't bode well for Amazon -- 3rd party sellers are unhappy, poor product quality from Chinese fraudsters. ( )

See my review of Amazon Unbound on YouTube Here.

Nearly ten years have passed since Brad Stone wrote the book The Everything Store. For many, it was the first glimpse into the life of Jeff Bezos and the company he founded in the late 1990s.

A lot has happened since the book was published in 2013. Jeff Bezos’ personal wealth ballooned, and he became the richest man in the world. Bezos’s personal life was on full display, after a lengthy article in the National Enquirer about an affair he was having. Amazon became one of the first companies to ever be valued at over 1 trillion dollars.

Brad Stone wrote Amazon Unbound to continue the story of Amazon after 2013. Stone focuses on the projects and initiatives that have transformed Amazon, and what role Bezos played in each of them.

The book highlights the following projects:

-The development of the Amazon Echo
-The Amazon Go Store
-Amazon’s growth in India and China
-The growth of Amazon Web Services
-Jeff Bezos’ purchase of The Washington Post
-Jeff Bezos’ affair and subsequent divorce

This list represents only a handful of the projects that are discussed in Amazon Unbound. If you like books that talk about big projects and learning about innovative companies, then this book is for you. Stone brings insider-like knowledge to these projects. Often he quotes from internal documents and emails. He knows the company very well and puts all of the projects in perspective.

I very much enjoyed this book and recommend it! ( )

Updates Stone’s previous book from the last ten years or so, including a bit on the acceleration of Amazon’s dominance wrought by the pandemic. Some interesting tidbits, including about Bezos’s apparently genuine commitment to the independence of the Washington Post. He did have some ideas: he wondered whether the paper would need so many editors if it hired great writers. In order to get him off this tack, some editors took to sending them their highest-profile reporters’ unedited copy, and eventually he stopped pushing the idea, though Amazon denied that Bezos read the emails. Consistent with his hostility to unions, Bezos did ditch the perfectly stable pension fund for new employees, replacing it with 401(k)s. Stone also reports on Amazon’s struggles with video as it made deals with Woody Allen and Harvey Weinstein, while the video business was headed by a guy who also allegedly mistreated women.

Stone provides further confirmation that Amazon employees did peek at third-party sellers’ data to give their house brands competitive advantages, despite Amazon’s official denials that this occurred. Some of this seems like a good idea. “For example, customer reviews in the all-important category of dog poop bags indicated regular confusion about which end of the bag opened. So the Amazon Basics version included a blue arrow and the words ‘open this end.’” Amazon defends this kind of data analysis as being open to anyone who cared to do it, and many of the house brands don’t seem to be harming established brands, but several house brand managers admitted to exploiting something a lot harder to compete with: access to prominence in Amazon search results. When they introduced a new brand, Amazon brand managers could give it an initial “relevancy score” matched to that of an established product, making it appear at the top of search results instead of “starting on the unseen last page with other new brands.” Amazon officially denies this, but I have no doubt that Stone’s anonymous informants told the truth.

Amazon’s reputation for predation certainly doesn’t get better from this book overall. One telling story involves a high level employee departing for Target. “Here was one of the more naked hypocrisies at Amazon, which aggressively poached employees from competitors but considered it an act of absolute treachery when an executive left for a rival.” Only expensive lawyers eventually eased the executive’s slowed-down transition. ( )