I've read all of Jeff Bezos's 23 years of Amazon shareholder letters twice now.

It's an MBA of its own.

Here's what I learned about startups, entrepreneurship, investing and more:

Your customers are loyal to you right up until the second that someone else offers them a better service.

Listen to customers, but don't just listen
to customers also invent on their behalf.

Here's Jeff Bezos on coming up with the Amazon Kindle:

We set ourselves the incredibly audacious goal of improving upon the physical book.

So don't be afraid to set big goals.

And remember that if you don't execute well, it will be done by someone else.

Many of the problems you'll face will have no textbook solutions, and so you should happily invent new approaches.

Ring - Amazon's surveillance doorbell division - has 4,000 "partnerships" with US police ("public safety") orgs. The company has lied about how these work for years, but the basic deal is that they give cops free stuff to buzz-market their products.

https://t.co/716iaXUXWR

1/

Ring tells its customers that they get to choose whether to share the footage from their street-facing cameras with cops, but that's a lie, too. If you say no, the cops still get to look through your

That's why cops debase themselves to serve as buzz-marketers for Ring - in exchange, they get an off-the-books, free-to-use, warrantless, city-scale, video surveillance grid.

3/

It's an investment that pays off. Back in July, @EFF documented how the @SFPD was able to commandeer 200 Ring cameras to produce surveillance data on #BLM

And in a new blockbuster report, EFF's @maassive and @mguariglia document how @LAPDHQ did the same thing, fraudulently using "unusual occurance" protocols to gain access to last summer's BLM

1/ An ode to @JeffBezos

Jeff is stepping down from CEO and moving on to Executive Chairman

He's one of the greatest owner/operators of all time

$10,000 invested in $AMZN at IPO is currently worth

$17.3 million!

Here's a list of my favorite Bezos facts and quotes 👇

2/ "We don’t celebrate a 10% increase in the stock price like

we celebrate excellent customer experience.

We aren’t 10% smarter when that happens

and conversely

aren’t 10% dumber when the stock goes the other way."

3/ Bezos invested $250,000 in Google in 1998

That's worth several BILLION dollars today

4/ "Your margin is my opportunity"

5/ "There are two kinds of companies,

those that work to try to charge more

and those that work to try to charge less.

We will be the second."

Total case study in expectation-setting by @JeffBezos.

If you want to understand how to communicate directly & candidly with employees, customers, partners, just read this...

1997 shareholder letter for those wondering