Reading Highlights: "Amazon Unbound" by Brad Stone

(Free on Substack) Reading Materials (AMZN US) (Not Covered)

A version of this was published on my Twitter account.

Introduction: “Amazon Unbound” is a book on Amazon and its founder Jeff Bezos, written by Brad Stone (who wrote another great book on Amazon, “The Everything Store”, back in 2013), and published in May this year. It was a great read, at once fun (I finished it in two days) and informative (if you are long Amazon, but also if you are not). Below are a list of highlights (one per chapter) - buy the book for the full insights.

1/ Relevant data is costly to acquire. To gather data for its speech recognition technology, Amazon rented homes and apartments in Seattle and 10 other cities over 6 months, and paid "thousands" of people to read out scripts inside

2/ Grocery retail is hard. The original Amazon Go concept included meat, seafood, fruit, etc. However, the need to weigh them creates customer queues and conflicts with Amazon Go’s "walking out without waiting" unique selling point. The store size was reduced from that of a mid-sized su…