Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
All right. Well, the first thing I know is that you need to obsess over customers. That's Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon and the richest person on Earth. And I'm Jason Del Rey.
As a reporter who's covered Amazon for the last six years, I've noticed that when I talk to Amazon employees, they all start to sound a lot like Bezos. There's this obsession with obsession. Obsessive, compulsive focus on the customer. And delight. Customer delight. Delight the customer. It's Amazon speak. It's their way of saying their number one mission is to make customers' lives better.
But is that intense focus always a good thing? Or does it come at a cost? This is Land of the Giants, a podcast about the biggest tech companies of our time, how they got their power, what they're doing with it, and how they're changing our lives in the process. Our first season is called The Rise of Amazon.
We find out from Amazon executives exactly how much they know about us. So what we find is that customers who watch a movie that they love, they buy more Tide. They just do. We talk to CEOs with strong feelings about the way Amazon does business. It's rope-a-dope. They're playing with you until the time they come in with the knockout punch. And if I'm with them, oh my God, are they a retailer? They're a data management company.
We learn about Amazon's impact on small communities when they move in and when they leave. You know, when they told me they were closing, you know, all I could think of was, oh my God, driving home, I'm thinking, so what am I going to do in January when they close? And we ask the question of our time. Is Amazon too powerful, too big? You know, and we just don't want to be the United States of Amazon. We just really don't.
And that...
is why it is always day one.