Introduction
by Walter Isaacson 1
A Note on Sourcing 27
Part 1 The Shareholder Letters
It's All About the Long Term (1997) 31
Obsessions (1998) 37
Building for the Long Term (1999) 44
Taking the Long View (2000) 51
The Customer Franchise Is Our Most Valuable Asset (2001) 55
What's Good for Customers Is Good for Shareholders (2002) 60
Long-Term Thinking (2003) 64
Thinking About Finance (2004) 67
Making Decisions (2005) 72
Growing New Businesses (2006) 76
A Team of Missionaries (2007) 80
Working Backward (2008) 84
Setting Goals (2009) 88
Fundamental Tools (2010) 92
The Power of Invention (2011) 96
Internally Driven (2012) 102
"Wow" (2013) 107
Three Big Ideas (2014) 122
Big Winners Pay for Many Experiments (2015) 133
Fending Off Day 2 (2016) 146
Building a Culture of High Standards (2017) 153
Intuition, Curiosity, and the Power of Wandering (2018) 167
Scale for Good (2019) 176
Part 2 Life of Work
My Gift in Life 189
A Crucial Moment at Princeton 191
"We Are What We Choose": Address to the Princeton Graduating Class of 2010 193
Resourcefulness 197
Why I Went from a Hedge Fund to Selling Books 200
Finding the Root Cause 204
Creating Wealth 205
The Idea for Prime 206
Thinking Three Years Out 208
Where the Idea of Amazon Web Services Came From 210
Alexa, AI, and Machine Learning 212
Physical Stores and Whole Foods 216
Buying the Washington Post 218
Trust 221
Work-Life Harmony 223
Recruiting Talent: Do You Want Mercenaries or Missionaries? 225
Decisions 227
Competition 230
Government Scrutiny and Big Companies 232
The Climate Pledge 234
The Bezos Day One Fund 239
The Purpose of Going into Space 244
It's Still Day One for America 257