Jeff Bezos

Bezos left a quantitative hedge fund in 1994 with a list of twenty categories that might sell well online and chose books, not out of affection but because print carries more titles than any physical store can stock. The real founding act was the 1997 shareholder letter, in which he told investors he would optimise for long-term free cash flow per share rather than quarterly earnings, and would make decisions that looked bad on the income statement. He then attached that same letter to every annual report for twenty-four years. It reads as sentiment and functions as a contract — it bought Amazon permission to lose money for six years while Walmart and Barnes & Noble were being punished for a single soft quarter.

The two decisions that built the modern company share one shape. In 2000, after the failure of zShops and Auctions, Amazon opened its own product pages to third-party sellers — putting rivals' offers, sometimes cheaper, on the same page as its own. The retail team fought it because it cannibalised first-party margin directly. Third-party sellers are now roughly 60% of units sold and the higher-margin half of retail. In 2006 Amazon took the internal storage and compute layer it had built for its own engineers and rented it to anyone with a credit card. AWS is now roughly 58% of the company's operating income.

Both are the same move: take something built for internal advantage, expose it to outsiders on identical terms, and let outsiders pay for your scale. Very few companies do it, because it requires arming your competitors.