





Exploring Amazon's march from bookstore to near-trillion-dollar company through 20 years of shareholders letters from founder Jeff Bezos.

Over the past 23 years, Amazon.com has upended dozens of industries, created the world's wealthiest person, and sent city leaders scrambling to bend over backwards in pursuit of Amazon jobs. The one-time bookseller has a fleet of jets, maintains military contracts, and recently spent a billion dollars on televsion rights to the 'Lord of the Rings'. Their cloud computing arm powers a considerable fraction of the interet and a new venture aims to reconfigure the health care industry. They already claim 40% of U.S. online spending, and according to some, aim to take a slice off of all commerce . While future dominance is not assured, the companies willingness to plow profits back into a global network of distribution centers and artificial intelligence platforms means that they will be a force for some time. While Amazon suceeds in being ubiquitious, it operates out of the public eye.

In 1998's letter, Bezos put the customer in front:"We intend to build the world’s most customer-centric company." And across two decades of letters, Bezos conistently writes much more about Amazon's relationship with customers than it does with shareholders (or as he calls them from -on, "shareowners." (a Yellow indicates a mention of customer)





High-level Amazon meetings start heads-down as managers silently read multi-page memos. Termed the



To that end, what do twenty years of shareholders letters reveal about the evolution of the company? What what drives its leader? This essay utilizes text analysis and natural language processing techniques to take a structured look at the information. For a company consumed with perfecting minute details of mail delivery and mastering cloud computing, Amazon takes the written word seriously. It started as a bookstore, after all.High-level Amazon meetings start heads-down as managers silently read multi-page memos. Termed the "silent start" , Bezos' method gives serious weight to the written word. "There is no way to write a six-page, narratively structured memo and not have clear thinking,” Bezos told Forbes in 2012.To that end, what do twenty years of shareholders letters reveal about the evolution of the company? What what drives its leader? This essay utilizes text analysis and natural language processing techniques to take a structured look at the information.

From Books to Platforms and Data

Book Kindle Amazon's Fire phone went down Phone 100 million people pay Amazon every year for fast shipping and a mishmash of other benefits as part of Amazon Prime. It's only become more prominent in Bezos' letters. Prime Amazon has been slowly but aggressively testing and honing a grocery delivery service, Fresh. But Bezos has not been making statements over the years, that is, until the company spent $13 billion last year to acquire Whole Foods. Fresh Amazon's cloud computing business, Amazon Web Services powers a mind-boggling portion of the internet, and it does it with a 25% profit. AWS subsidizes the enormously expensive retail operations and gives the larger company an unparalled ability scale and leverage their own data: customers' browsing history, past purchases, and 20 years of global sales give Amazon an unprecedentded granularity and depth of knowledge of how people buy things, Data AWS You have to go back a decade to hear an honest reference to selling books. In recent years, Bezos compares the company's current efforts to it's past.Amazon's Fire phone went down in flames. The company wrote off $170 million and ceded the mobile hardware market to its rivals.100 million people pay Amazon every year for fast shipping and a mishmash of other benefits as part of Amazon Prime. It's only become more prominent in Bezos' letters.Amazon has been slowly but aggressively testing and honing a grocery delivery service, Fresh. But Bezos has not been making statements over the years, that is, until the company spent $13 billion last year to acquire Whole Foods.Amazon's cloud computing business, Amazon Web Services powers a mind-boggling portion of the internet, and it does it with a 25% profit. AWS subsidizes the enormously expensive retail operations and gives the larger company an unparalled ability scale and leverage their own data: customers' browsing history, past purchases, and 20 years of global sales give Amazon an unprecedentded granularity and depth of knowledge of how people buy things, The term "power vest," does not appear in the letters.