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Jeff Bezos To Employees: 'One Day, Amazon Will Fail' But Our Job is To Delay it as Long as Possible (cnbc.com)
Days before Amazon announced the cities it had picked for its HQ2, CEO Jeff Bezos had to address a separate but related concern among employees: Where is all this headed? At an all-hands meeting last Thursday in Seattle, an employee asked Bezos about Amazon's future. Specifically, the questioner wanted to know what lessons Bezos has learned from the recent bankruptcies of Sears and other big retailers. From a report: "Amazon is not too big to fail," Bezos said, in a recording of the meeting that CNBC has heard. "In fact, I predict one day Amazon will fail. Amazon will go bankrupt. If you look at large companies, their lifespans tend to be 30-plus years, not a hundred-plus years." The key to prolonging that demise, Bezos continued, is for the company to "obsess over customers" and to avoid looking inward, worrying about itself. "If we start to focus on ourselves, instead of focusing on our customers, that will be the beginning of the end," he said. "We have to try and delay that day for as long as possible." Bezos' comments come at a time of unprecedented success at Amazon, with its core retail business continuing to grow while the company is winning the massive cloud-computing market and gaining rapid adoption of its Alexa voice assistant in the home.
The people who care are the evangelists. Either the old style religious evangelists and the new breed of nature, vegetarianism, environmentalism evangelists.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
If you look at large companies, their lifespans tend to be 30-plus years, not a hundred-plus years.
That's not quite true unless you are using a rather narrow definition of corporate lifespan. They might only be at the top of their game for 20-30 years but once they get to a certain size they rarely actually die completely in the sense of bankruptcy. They just tend to get absorbed into other companies or shift to a less prominent place in the market. Go look at any company in the Fortune 500. Most of them have been around a LOT longer than 30 years. Apple and Microsoft are already older than 30 years and are unlikely to go away any time soon. Yahoo is/was close to 25 years old as a standalone company but it isn't actually gone, it just got absorbed into another company and that's fairly normal. Amazon has reached sufficient scale that they'd have to do something remarkably stupid to go bankrupt or there would have to be some sort of techtonic shift in the marketplace. Also please recall that Amazon was founded in 1994 so it's already 25 years old and most of that time could properly be described as a large company.
You have to remember that large companies are the ones that survived. The companies that go away before 30 years are the ones that didn't so there is something of a surviviorship bias in play here. It's entirely plausible that Amazon won't be a standalone company 20 years from now but it's pretty unlikely the company will disappear completely.
Most I know generally try to make the world a better place...
Minor correction: ... so long as the steps needed to do that don't interfere with their personal life styles or personal business interests.
Most I know generally try to make the world a better place...
Different companies in different lines of business, but all of their bankruptcies have the same cause:
Massive debt, resulting from leveraged buyouts. Most of them led by Bain Capital (you may remember their former CEO, Mitt Romney).
Mitt Romney stopped being involved in day-to-day operations of Bain Capital in February 1999 so he could work on the SLC Winter Olympics. He officially left Bain Capital in early 2002.
Bain Capital's relationship with Toys-R-Us began in 2004 - 2 years after Mitt Romney left.
"On 20 July 2008, iHeartRadio "announced the completion of a merger with an indirect wholly owned subsidiary of CC Media holdings, Inc., a corporation formed by a private equity group co-lead by Bain Capital Partners, LLC and Thomas H. Lee Partners, L.P." source. Roughly 6 years after Romney officially left Bain.
In 2005 Vornado Realty Trust bought 7.5 million shares of Sears Canada. Vornado was also involved with Bain Capital in taking over Toys “R” Us, which took over KB Toys resulting in 3,400 jobs lost." source. Note this source is extremely anti-Romney and places the date of acquisition as 2005 - years after Romny left Bain.
The June 2008 issue of SF Guitar Tech includes the sentence: "Bain Capital, an equity fund that was founded by 3 people, including Mitt Romney (take that in whatever way you want), recently bought Guitar Center for 2.1 Billion dollars." Again, years after Romney left Bain.