Bezos: A CEO Who Can Write (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Bezos: A CEO Who Can Write (2018)

mondaynote.com

112 pointstapanjk41 comments

“The diversity of products demands that we employ modern regression techniques like trained random forests of decision trees to flexibly incorporate thousands of product attributes at rank time….Now, if the eyes of some shareowners dutifully reading this letter are by this point glazing over, I will awaken you by pointing out that, in my opinion, these techniques are not idly pursued — they lead directly to free cash flow.”

I often myself hating Amazon for what I see as a potentially cancerous machine of economic consolidation. Still, can't help but appreciate this mans vision. Very prescient of him. I find stepping back to get a systematic view of things extremely difficult. The box really does trap you. Bezos should be praised for his ability to do this with a company and product as large and deep as Amazon. His attention to detail and his ability to synthesize has clearly paid off big for Amazon.

It always shocked me how bad most people were at writing having completed a university degree. Just a simple ability to state a claim and then explain why it is true is often out of reach.

I agree -- it seems like it's easy to get a degree without being challenged in writing. I remember 3 writing teachers that challenged me, giving me mediocre/bad grades, and in retrospect I appreciate that.

But I think good writing requires a bit of empathy, and that's something that's hard to teach.

Most bad technical writing I see fails to define the terms it uses (or uses them sloppily). That's a failure of empathy -- I know this word so I assume everyone else does. I know what I mean by "design" so I assume everyone else does.

Another way to phrase it is the "curse of knowledge". Once people have some knowledge, it's hard for them to imagine that somebody else doesn't have it. Without that imagination, you can't write about clearly.

And a lot of the times people don't believe a claim is true because of "reasoning". They believe it because they heard someone they trust say it, or it was repeated on TV or online until it stuck. (I don't claim to be exempt from that, but I can reflect on whether I have direct experience or it’s hearsay.)

Likewise. I do grant writing for nonprofits, public agencies, and some R&D-based businesses, and I've been talking about this post: http://seliger.com/2019/04/29/how-jeff-bezos-turned-narrativ... with some clients, as it addresses another one of those Amazon-as-writing-machine essays. Reading and writing skills remain strangely underrated.

Writing was never part of my physics/CS degree, and I wouldn't have expected it to be.

I did learn to write later by participating in internet forums like this one.

Was there no labs / project component that you needed to do lab reports or academic paper-style writeups for? I did joint Maths-Physics which was mostly theoretical and still had a fair amount of (technical) writing to do as part of my degree.

There was the occasional one. I stumbled through them. There was very little focus on that side.

As a former instructor of a composition class that was a basic requirement of the university where I taught, I'd claim that this perhaps more than anything is what distinguishes (or should) a university education from a vocation school or other certification.

(The explaining why part is left as an exercise for the reader.)

I wish one of Amazon's "Principles" were openness/transparency, because I think it'd be great to see some of the internal memos Bezos writes to colleagues and how they debate their thinking in writing. Amazon has always been a "skate where the puck is going" kind of company, unrivaled for customer obsession, and I think it'd be great to see their thinking on things like the Whole Foods acquisition, the Fire flop, the surprising growth of AWS, the future of UPS/FedEx, Kindles in a multi-device world, last mile drone delivery, surprising stickiness of Prime, entry into display ad server market, among any number of other topics. I imagine internal Amazon mailing lists for execs are like a rich archive of Stratechery posts but written by hundreds of smart thinkers/writers (and perhaps moderated by Bezos himself!)

Agree! Also add any other meaningful company to that list

What I miss the most about not being in big tech anymore are these great conversations

People on the outside don’t appreciate how challenging the problems are and how the compromise they land on and ship is remarkably good!

I'm told that Amazon meetings are focused around a prepared white paper on the subject at hand with 10 minutes of document reading at the start of the meeting. I find this idea fairly provocative and I'd love to see some of the documents in question.

Works good :)

>There was no centralized repository of all the letters, so I decided to collect all of them here. I’ll keep updating this list every year. Let me know your feedback/ideas regarding this collection.

This is bullshit, there are many sites hosting the letters. Literally the first google hit [1].

[1] https://www.cbinsights.com/research/bezos-amazon-shareholder...

There's also a Kindle book compilation of many of them.

One thing Tim Ferriss likes to talk about is how a difficult writing class he took lead to improved grades in all of his other classes, and he think it's attributed to the clarity in which he cultivated, and evaluated thoughts.

Did he ever mention the name of the class?

I don't remember the name, but the teacher for the class was a famous nonfiction author John McPhee[0], and I believe you needed to apply, or win a lottery to get in the class.

John McPhee wrote "Levels of the Game"

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McPhee

...clear directives to upper management that workers' attempts to secure living wages and humane workplaces will not be tolerated, and that Rule of Acquisition number 211 must be rigorously adhered to at all times.

Thanks. I had not heard of these before. For anyone else interested: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Rules_of_Acquisition

> Amazon Prime subscriptions have topped 100M

I'm not surprised. I had trouble stopping them giving me free subscriptions for a week or a month at a time. The kicker is it automatically rolls over into a paid subscription so I need to keep my wits about me in case I've been signed up.

I wrote to them many times saying I don't want to be signed up to Prime. They always apologise and cancel my subscription but then it happens again. The only thing that seems to have worked is removing my credit card.

> The kicker is it automatically rolls over into a paid subscription

This is how I wound up an Audible subscriber for two years without knowing. I only found out when the card I had on file with Audible (& Amazon) expired and they charged my sister's card that she had used once on my Amazon Prime account and had since been deleted as a payment method.

I happened to be in the middle of a year-long backpacking trip at the time otherwise I'm sure I would have needed to update my card info with Amazon for one reason or another and then I wonder if I ever would have noticed the Audible charges at all.

Links to all letters: https://medium.com/@hooda/every-jeff-bezos-letter-to-shareho...

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16955035

Wish I hadn’t read that Prime is going to $119 from $99. Maybe I’ll start doing the free shipping thing instead.

It already has. This article came out last August.

How can you make sure its not ghostwriting

and many proof readings

You can, by using the benefit of the doubt.

This is Jeff Bezos

Hi Jeff, how you doing?

I'm great Rohan.

I guess I have been spotted.

In 1997? when he was still riding his old battered Toyota?

Yeah, don't believe the hype. He studied at Princeton, worked for years at fintech, became Project Manager at a bank, and then V.P of a hedge fund, and he also got $300,000 from his parents to invest in his new company.

This wasn't a rags to riches story...

300k -> 125b is still staggering growth. All though, Andrew Carnegie still has him beat (in terms of inflation-adkusted wealth and starting position).

I think its likely that his professional writer wife will have had some input.

The article was written by the founder of BeBOX and BeOS

It may seem surprising that a corporate executive is able to read and write, but research shows that literacy among CEOs is rapidly increasing. According to the IMF, executive literacy rates are on target to pass 50% by as early as 2022. Of course, there are still many challenges to overcome, but I think we can agree that Jeff's story here is an inspiration to many around the world.

What the.... Wow. This is really really crazy...

Just £5 can provide a Fortune 500 CEO with a months’ supply of writing materials. Text WORD to 089343 to donate today.

You joke, but the thing we call literacy is a pretty low bar.

i think it is best not to idolise anyone, especially a figurehead like the subject of this article. This company's behaviour towards its employees is notorious, how did the style of writing help those people?

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