What Happened to Amazon. How Founders Become Day Two, Take Company with Them

I am very interested in understanding what happened at Amazon, partially because I worked there and I loved many aspects of my first years. But I'm not convinced Mark is correct about the causes. I joined amazon devices (under the group that is now the consumer robotics org) in 2020, before Bezos had left, and I have two contrasting feelings about it. First, it was exciting, and seemed like a place you could do great things. But second, it was obvious to me that we had made many many clearly bad business decisions, even while Bezos was still at the wheel. At great expense, we made Astro, which was basically Wall-E without arms, or if you prefer, a robot dog. It wasn't useful. I would complain to coworkers that it wasn't useful, and they'd say "nobody thought the iphone was useful at launch either". I think this betrays/betrayed a damning lack of understanding about the product and the problem space. I was not involved in the market research, but I cannot believe that the failure was unforeseeable.

I don't have great on the ground knowledge of all of Amazon's endeavors, but at least in my experience on the consumer robotics org, I feel the failure was _not_ a risk averse attitude, but rather a cavalier attitude towards business ("of course we'll succeed, because robots!"). And it wasn't the absence of Bezos that led to the fall -- the fall was already beginning before he left. Personally I suspect Bezos stepped away because he could feel the trajectory tilting downwards, rather than the downward trend happening because of Bezos leaving. What caused that trajectory to tilt downwards? I really feel I don't know.

Rather than picking at the examples like other commenters, I very much agree with the diagnosis, which is that you do not want to pick someone who will protect your baby. That is a babysitter. You want someone who will become a parent of their own.

Ownership is one of the leadership principles. That doesn't just mean owing the things that exist, it means owning the conceptual direction of the company.

The opening paragraphs seem like they'd fit the Apple transition of Steve Jobs to Tim Cook pretty well too.

Meh, I would have killed the drone ATC project, too.

Drones are cool and very capable but the opportunity is only a parallel to AWS if you mold it a specific way.

I think Amazon has probably seen from first hand experience that drone traffic isn’t actually going to explode like they thought it might, and it’s probably not going to be a popular mode of package delivery.

The rest of the article was pretty good though.

I see a lot of parallels to Tim Cook. Still, Apple gets away with it because their hardware groups and overall execution are just so damn good in many cases. Making the next HBO or the best laptop with a chassis that hasn’t been touched in a half a decade isn’t really innovative, but it’s good business.