Jeff Bezos predicts Amazon’s death – so he wants to delay it as long as possible

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• According to Jeff Bezos, every company has a short lifespan
• Amazon’s demise can be delayed
• Companies and employees must behave like day 1 every day

When searching for countless products – and making a subsequent purchase – looking at the website of the online retailer Amazon should now be a natural part of many households. The convenience of online shopping at Amazon has become so commonplace that it’s hard to believe that one day Amazon will no longer exist. But founder, ex-CEO and chairman Jeff Bezos never tires of reminding himself and his employees that this time will come because he is pursuing an important goal.

Jeff Bezos with swan song on Amazon

In recent years, Bezos has spoken publicly several times about the fact that one day Amazon will no longer exist. “Companies have a short lifespan […]. And Amazon will one day be torn apart,” Bezos said in an interview with CBS around 2013. He’s not worried because he knows that “it’s inevitable,” for all companies. “You wait a few decades and they’re gone,” said the former Amazon boss soberly. However, he would be happy if that weren’t the case at Amazon until after his death.

“For Amazon, it always has to be ‘Day 1′”

In a letter to Amazon shareholders in 2017, Bezos outlined how companies and employees would have to behave to ensure the company’s survival for as long as possible: just like in the beginning, on Day 1 of the company. The billionaire listed what is essential for this using four central key points.

The already mentioned obsession with the customer is Jeff Bezos’ top priority. Even if customers don’t know it themselves, they are “always happily and wonderfully dissatisfied” and it’s up to Amazon to find out what would make them happier – before they even know it themselves. The ex-company boss named the Amazon Prime program as a successful example of this.

Another key point, which ties in with the obsession with the customer, is Bezos’ skepticism about any form of proxying for a cause. For example, he warns against relying on the results of market research or customer surveys as a proxy for customers. “Good inventors and developers have a deep understanding of their customers,” wrote the Amazon founder. “They study and understand a lot of anecdotes instead of just focusing on averages from a survey.”

Bezos also believes that the willingness to eagerly absorb strong, external trends and make decisions at high speed are key points when it comes to postponing Amazon’s demise as far into the future as possible. He devoted himself in detail to the last point in particular. “Speed ​​is what counts in the corporate world – and it’s also more fun in an environment where decisions are made at high speed,” said the then Amazon boss. In the letter to shareholders, he advised, among other things, to make decisions that can be reversed without worrying about them, and to come to a conclusion with others when 70 percent of the required information is available. Because waiting for 90 percent or more would take too long. But the most important thing, according to Bezos, is the willingness, while not necessarily agreeing with an idea, to support it fully – at all hierarchical levels of the company. He himself regularly has a different opinion, but would still completely devote himself to the contentious matter.

If you pay attention to these points, you can ensure that it is always “Day 1” for Amazon, according to Bezos in the shareholder letter from 2017. Because if this were no longer the case, Amazon’s demise would be initiated. “Day 2 is stagnation. This is followed by irrelevance. This is followed by the excruciating, painful descent. This is followed by death,” was the ex-company boss’s grim prediction. While an established company could continue to generate earnings for decades if it were on Day 2, the ultimate outcome, the company’s demise, would still come.

Amazon bankruptcy inevitable – but postponeable

Also in November 2018, Jeff Bezos emphasized at a company-wide meeting that Amazon is not “too big to fail”. “In fact, I assume that Amazon will fail one day. Amazon will go bankrupt,” said Bezos, according to a report by the US news channel “CNBC”, which has a recording of the meeting. If you look at large companies, their life expectancy is usually more than 30 years but no more than 100 years, according to the self-made billionaire who founded Amazon in 1994.

But Jeff Bezos also reminded his staff that there is a way to postpone the inevitable demise as much as possible. The company’s focus must remain on the customer and not on the competition or Amazon itself. “If we start focusing on ourselves instead of on the customers, then that will be the beginning of the end,” he predicted then CEO.

Although there are companies that have escaped this fate for centuries, as Bezos admitted according to “CNBC” at the 2018 employee meeting, Amazon will – according to the current status – probably not belong to this group. “Most companies that are hundreds of years old are breweries,” Jeff Bezos said, probably with a wink. “That’s very interesting – and I’m not sure what that says about our society.”

Bezos bid farewell to CEO position with somber metaphor

In February 2021, Bezos announced as part of the fiscal year-end presentation that he was handing over the company’s leadership position to Andy Jassy, ​​who previously ran Amazon’s AWS cloud division, for the third quarter. However, in his letter to shareholders in April 2021, Bezos insisted on again referring to the tech giant’s impending demise. The Amazon founder quoted from the non-fiction book “The Blind Watchmaker” by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, in which he deals with Darwinism. “Fending off death is something you have to work on. Left to its own devices – and it is when it dies – the body tends to return to a state of equilibrium with its surroundings,” read among other things. Although the passage quoted by Dawkins was not intended as a metaphor, it is perfect for Amazon, as Bezos wrote. “In what ways does the world pull on you to make you normal? How much work does it take to keep your uniqueness? To keep the thing or things alive that make you special?” -Boss.

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