👉How to seek advice from a busy person ( Kaufman ) And to distinguish the right time from the wrong time is to be smartly frugal. This does not mean that you should never spend your time, on the contrary! It is sometimes important to do so.
8 people spending an hour in a room costs almost a person’s day of work!
#TEAMPAPER SNAP DRIVERS#
Frugality with time is one of the drivers behind our no-meeting policy. And we hate wasting money where there is little upside for us. We spend money when it allows us to be more efficient. In addition to selected articles, I share one of Alan's leadership principles every week - the same one that I share internally every Wednesday. Over time the company developed more velocity with its experiments. One of Amazon's great strengths is its willingness to try new things and tolerate failure. We should push ourselves to always take a stepback. It is very hard to get away from details or deals, even if they become meaningless. I thought we didn't have a choice - HP owed us $10M, I didn't want to lose money on stale inventory, etc. My failure wasn't missing our plan by 90%, it was spending over a year on complex integrations before knowing if we had a winning approach. We leaned into Macs and became one of Apple's largest retailers. In our first annual review with Bezos, he said "the problem with your computer store is there aren't any computers in it." He approved a new plan to start carrying more inventory, and slowly we started to grow. And on a revenue plan of $100M, we did $10M. In our first year of business, 80% of our sales were Macs. We had drop-ship from Ingram Micro with virtually no selection. So we had an HP configuration tool which barely worked. I even pitched him on paying us a coop fee for being a launch partner, and he threw us a small bone.
#TEAMPAPER SNAP MAC#
I had traveled to Cupertino to meet Tim Cook who agreed to make us an authorized Mac retailer.
#TEAMPAPER SNAP HOW TO#
How to quickly test MVPs whatever the size of the problem?ÄŻortunately our svp of retail had come from Apple and insisted we carry Macs. And it turned out Ingram Micro didn't have a lot of inventory to choose from - they didn't want the risk! If you wanted to configure a computer online, it was much easier to go to Dell.
We finally launched the store in 2002, a year late. Now I was managing 2 complex technical integrations in parallel But it was complicated and took a lot of time to build. We built the plumbing that would eventually power this model for many product lines. My deal with Ingram Micro was Amazon's first experiment with drop-shipping. So I signed a drop-ship agreement with Ingram Micro. I wanted to carry other brands in the store, but everyone told me PCs were like bananas: if you don't sell them right away they go rotten quickly. The HP integration was hard, but at least I didn't have to predict inventory. Sometimes, it seems scary but you need to build the things yourselves. Integrations are always harder than we think. Months into the project we were already delayed, HP admitted they were in over their heads. This was new ground for them, and for us. But integrating their configuration engine proved harder than we thought. They would plug their yet-to-be-developed configuration engine into our front-end.ÄŞs head of merchandising, I was responsible for executing this HP deal. HP thought they could fight back by leveraging retail distribution. HP's consumer business was getting disrupted by Dell who had invented configurable on-line ordering + on-demand manufacturing. Amzn had driven a hard bargain, and when HP couldn't go any lower on server prices they offered to pay us $10M to be our anchor tenant in a new computer store. Our store was predicated on a deal w/ HP that had been part of their earlier bid to win our datacenter biz. I felt like I was at a start-up inside of a start-up. It was exciting to be thrown into the deep end. I was forecasting inventory turns and gross margins.
#TEAMPAPER SNAP PRO#
Two weeks after joining the retail team, I was in a meeting presenting our pro forma P&L for our computer store launch. I spent 18 months shipping a product that should have taken a few months, delaying the opportunity to learn and adjust to our initial failure. I learned an important lesson in business when I launched a new retail category early in my career at Amazon: Fail Fast! 👉 Dan Rose on why you should “Fail Fast” ( Dan Rose )
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