Startup is not just working hard and being inventive/resourceful..

It is also being one of the original employees of something big that can bring huge payoff ...

You know the boss, you are getting a share - small one but still...

Sorry - but this is not really possible in a huge company like Amazon... someone else will reap off the profits...

> "... largest startup" ...

You need to work as a slave for 70 hours a week to satisfy both your boss and your inhuman tool-chain, in the vain delusion that the profits will be shared with you. Amazon's day of sharing its immense wealth are over, it wants employees that can be ignored. Don't listen to this "work harder, win the rat-race" propaganda: Decades of history prove it's a lie.

The vigor of a start-up is in building a new company. Once it's built, you can never go back to the early days. It's like the Marxist idea of permanent revolution - unworkable. The exciting times of building something are over and it's time to do the less exciting work of running it. You'll end up with a lot of paper-pushers because you'll keep finding there's more paper that needs pushing. You've grown up, gotten big and slowed down. This is as inevitable for a corporation as it is for each person wh

Fuck you Jassy.

Fuck you Bezos (aka "Bozo")

> "It's moving faster than almost anything technology has ever seen."

Yeah, that's what technology does. Changes come faster and faster until the collapse, which at this point is obviously a whole lot more likely than the singularity.

Speaking of which, what's the ecological impact of implementing AI everywhere for everything all at once? Oh yeah, now I remember, it's devastating .

> Amazon has to operate like the "world's largest startup"

This is what happens when a company becomes organizationally stratified. Lacking any idea of how to fix their own bureaucracy, management instead tells the rank and file to change their attitude , and everything will get better.

What doesn't change, of course, is that management still calls all the shots. The "startup" mentality hits a brick wall the moment an employee even thinks about acting independently without express permission from two levels of management.

When I was at IBM back in the 80's, they told the employees that we needed to become empowered . Management still told the engineers exactly what projects to work on, and still swapped us from one department to another like interchangeable nuts and bolts, but hey - we were empowered .

Cool comparison but startups actually have the potential to grow. Amazon geometrically, legally and economically cannot grow. Not only is it impossible to Amazon for grow their marketshare, they are under threat from almost every regulatory agency in the country and likely to lose some of the market share they already consumed.

The CEO of Amazon can stand up there and urge Ninja Turtle mentality but it doesn't mean they're gonna grow a shell. This statement is completely delusional and entirely unhinged and

They're clearly in "monopoly abuse and nonstop acquisitions stage" which is basically the exact opposite. You don't need to be "good" at what you do if you bought up your competition illegally and bribed politicians to allow it. Just look at Google and all their trash products since Google Glass and Stadia and everything else since. This is a well known cycle in Silicon Valley

Step 1 to becoming like a startup: Cut the CEO's salary to a pittance.

> It's moving faster than almost anything technology has ever seen.

Toward what–a cliff? What revolutionary breakthrough does Mr. Jassy think AI is going to bring to the table to offset $100B in capex investments? A slightly more sophisticated chatbot that can now correctly guess how many R's are in "strawberry" more than 80% of the time? ChatGPT has been around for several years now, and its "improvements" are both underwhelming and being delivered at a snail's pace with quite literally no promise of anything new other than a vague, undefined notion of "AGI" being ri

Note this is a letter to shareholders, not to employees. But yeah, we could discuss a lot around "mentalities" of various parties affected by Amazon; and those of the shareholders and upper management are not really IMHO something to aspire to.

As a once-off would-be customer(*), what always amazes me is how difficult it is to find the exact item you intend, without having all sorts of "sponsored" and more expensive and irrelevant items fostered on you, or otherwise having to wade through reams of offers fo

Startups allow the group who build something to sell it or go public and make a huge profit to those entry slave like workers. That's why you live at work, for reward. Secondly, start ups have the ability to change quickly or pivot products, platform, or goals. Amazon is already set in management, stock and is too large to pivot. Nobody is fooled here. Ownership just wants it's slaves to work harder to make them more money.

So, they are going to be giving massive incentives to employees in the forms of cheap options and stock?

And expect their employees to work 80 hours a week for peanuts?

Yeah, sure. That'll happen.

When Saint Joe said "We will teach our twisted speech to the young believers" (LC, Clampdown - 9:10) surely the prophecy referred to Andy Jassy's brilliant corporate-speak utterance: "If your customer experiences aren't planning to leverage these intelligent models, their ability to query giant corpuses of data and quickly find your needle in the haystack, their ability to keep getting smarter with more feedback and data, and their future agentic capabilities, you will not be competitive" Whoa! Try to diag

Expect ideas to fail 80% of the time yet keep your investor's money?

This is just Asshole Management. Using some model where you only bring the stick and leave the carrot behind. Only an asshole CEO would do stuff like this.