It’s Still Day One: Lessons from Jeff Bezos’ Letters to Shareholders

In our VIA Investor Insights section, recently we started asking interviewees about their favourite business person (apart from Buffett and Munger). The last two people who we interviewed (Saurabh Madaan and Jana Vembunarayanan) unanimously agreed on their choice. Here’s what they said –

Jana: “Jeff Bezos. He’s extremely focused, super-rational, and contrarian (right more often). Some examples of being a contrarian and right are free shipping for prime, kindle, and AWS. There were times he was wrong. For example, he didn’t like the idea of launching Amazon Studios. Even though Bezos disagreed, he committed to the plan. Writing about it openly requires a lot of humility, and Bezos scores full marks on that.”

Saurabh: “By far my favourite is Mr. Bezos. If you read his annual letters, they are also just like Mr. Buffett’s letters. They have a lot of lessons about life and thinking in life in general. When he says long term, he really means long term. It’s not even five or ten years. It’s really long term.”

In fact, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger are also big fans of Jeff Bezos. They have acknowledged that they failed to see Bezos’ genius early on. Buffett called the

Amazon CEO as the most remarkable business person of our age. Munger, in his trademark style, said, “Jeff Bezos is a different species.”

So, I pulled out all the letters that Bezos has written for his shareholders (for 1997-2016), printed them and sat down with a marker.

In 1997, Amazon did $147 million in sales and Jeff Bezos opened his letter to shareholders with: “This is Day 1 for the Internet.” At the end of 2017, Amazon closed the books with a revenue figure of $ 177 billion and Bezos his annual letter with – “It remains Day 1.”

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