March 2022 - Invent and Wander by Jeff Bezos

This month we go back to tech giant Amazon and review all of Jeff Bezos’s letters to shareholders. This book describes Amazon’s journey from e-commerce to cloud to everything in a quick and fascinating read!

Tech Themes

The Customer Focus. These shareholder letters clearly show that Amazon fell in love with its customer and then sought to hammer out traditional operational challenges like cycle times, fulfillment times, and distribution capacity. In the 2008 letter, Bezos calls out: "We have strong conviction that customers value low prices, vast selection, and fast, convenient delivery and that these needs will remain stable over time. It is difficult for us to imagine that ten years from now, customers will want higher prices, less selection, or slower delivery." When a business is so clearly focused on delivering the best customer experience, with completely obvious drivers, its no wonder they succeeded. The entirety of the 2003 letter, entitled "What's good for customers is good for shareholders" is devoted to this idea. The customer is "divinely discontented" and will be very loyal until there is a slightly better service. If you continue to offer lower prices on items, more selection of things to buy, and faster delivery - customers will continue to be happy. Those tenants are not static - you can continually lower prices, add more items, and build more fulfillment centers (while getting faster) to keep customers happy. This learning curve continues in your favor - higher volumes mean cheaper to buy, lower prices means more customers, more items mean more new customers, higher volumes and more selection force the service operations to adjust to ship more. The flywheel continues all for the customer!
Power of Invention. Throughout the shareholder letters, Bezos refers to the power of invention. From the 2018 letter: "We wanted to create a culture of builders - people who are curious, explorers. They like to invent. Even when they're experts, they are "fresh" with a beginner's mind. They see the way we do things as just the way we do things now. A builder's mentality helps us approach big, hard-to-solve opportunities with a humble conviction that success can come through iteration: invent, launch, reinvent, relaunch, start over, rinse, repeat, again and again." Bezos sees invention as the ruthless process of trying and failing repeatedly. The importance of invention was also highlighted in our January book 7 Powers, with Hamilton Helmer calling the idea critical to building more and future S curves. Invention is preceded by wandering and taking big bets - the hunch and the boldness. Bezos understands that the stakes for invention have to grow, too: "As a company grows, everything needs to scale, including the size of your failed experiments. If the size of your failures isn't growing, you're not going to be inventing at a size that can actually move the needle." Once you make these decisions, you have to be ready to watch the business scale, which sounds easy but requires constant attention to customer demand and value. Amazon's penchant for bold bets may inform Andy Jassy's recent decision to spend $10B making a competitor to Elon Musk/SpaceX's Starlink internet service. This decision is a big, bold bet on the future - we'll see if he is right in time.
Long-Term Focus. Bezos always preached trading off the short-term gain for the long-term relationship. This mindset shows up everywhere at Amazon - selling an item below cost to drive more volumes and give consumers better prices, allowing negative reviews on sites when it means that Amazon may sell fewer products, and providing Prime with ever-faster and free delivery shipments. The list goes on and on - all aspects focused on building a long-term moat and relationship with the customer. However it's important to note that not every decision pans out, and it's critical to recognize when things are going sideways; sometimes, you get an unmistakable punch in the mouth to figure that out. Bezos's 2000 shareholder letter started with, "Ouch. It's been a brutal year for many in the capital markets and certainly for Amazon.com shareholders. As of this writing, our shares are down more than 80 percent from when I wrote you last year." It then went on to highlight something that I didn't see in any other shareholder letter, a mistake: "In retrospect, we significantly underestimated how much time would be available to enter these categories and underestimated how difficult it would be for a single category e-commerce companies to achieve the scale necessary to succeed…With a long enough financing runway, pets.com and living.com may have been able to acquire enough customers to achieve the needed scale. But when the capital markets closed the door on financing internet companies, these companies simply had no choice but to close their doors. As painful as that was, the alternative - investing more of our own capital in these companies to keep them afloat- would have been an even bigger mistake." During the mid to late 90s, Amazon was on an M&A and investment tear, and it wasn't until the bubble crashed that they looked back and realized their mistake. Still, optimizing for the long term means admitting those mistakes and changing Amazon's behavior to improve the business. When thinking long-term, the company continued to operate amazingly well.

Business Themes

Free Cash Flow per Share. Despite historical rhetoric that Bezos forewent profits in favor of growth, his annual shareholder letters continually reinforce the value of upfront cash flows to Amazon's business model. If Amazon could receive cash upfront and manage its working capital cycle (days in inventory + days AR - days AP), it could scale its operations without requiring tons of cash. He valued the free cash flow per share metric so intensely that he spent an entire shareholder letter (2004) walking through an example of how earnings can differ from cash flow in businesses that invest in infrastructure. This maniacal focus on a financial metric is an excellent reminder that Bezos was a hedge fund portfolio manager before starting Amazon. These multiple personas: the hedge fund manager, the operator, the inventor, the engineer - all make Bezos a different type of character and CEO. He clearly understood financials and modeling, something that can seem notoriously absent from public technology CEOs today.
A 1,000 run home-run. Odds and sports have always captivated Warren Buffett, and he frequently liked to use Ted Williams's approach to hitting as a metaphor for investing. Bezos elaborates on this idea in his 2014 Letter (3 Big Ideas): "We all know that if you swing for the fences, you're going to strike out a lot, but you're also going to hit some home runs. The difference between baseball and business, however, is that baseball has a truncated outcome distribution. When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score one thousand runs. This long-tailed distribution of returns is why its important to be bold. Big winners pay for so many experiments." AWS is certainly a case of a 1,000 run home-run. The company incubated the business and first wrote about it in 2006 when they had 240,000 registered developers. By 2015, AWS had 1,000,000 customers, and is now at a $74B+ run-rate. This idea also calls to mind Monish Pabrai's Spawners idea - or the idea that great companies can spawn entirely new massive drivers for their business - Google with Waymo, Amazon with AWS, Apple with the iPhone. These new businesses require a lot of care and experimentation to get right, but they are 1,000 home runs, and taking bold bets is important to realizing them.
High Standards. How does Amazon achieve all that it does? While its culture has been called into question a few times, it's clear that Amazon has high expectations for its employees. The 2017 letter addresses this idea, diving into whether high standards are intrinsic/teachable and universal/domain-specific. Bezos believes that standards are teachable and driven by the environment while high standards tend to be domain-specific - high standards in one area do not mean you have high standards in another. This discussion of standards also calls back to Amazon's 2012 letter entitled "Internally Driven," where Bezos argues that he wants proactive employees. To identify and build a high standards culture, you need to recognize what high standards look like; then, you must have realistic expectations for how hard it should be or how long it will take. He illustrates this with a simple vignette on perfect handstands: "She decided to start her journey by taking a handstand workshop at her yoga studio. She then practiced for a while but wasn't getting the results she wanted. So, she hired a handstand coach. Yes, I know what you're thinking, but evidently this is an actual thing that exists. In the very first lesson, the coach gave her some wonderful advice. 'Most people,' he said, 'think that if they work hard, they should be able to master a handstand in about two weeks. The reality is that it takes about six months of daily practice. If you think you should be able to do it in two weeks, you're just going to end up quitting.' Unrealistic beliefs on scope – often hidden and undiscussed – kill high standards." Companies can develop high standards with clear scope and corresponding challenge recognition.

Dig Deeper

January 2022 - Seven Powers by Hamilton Helmer

This month we dove into a classic technology strategy book. The book covers seven major Powers a company can have that offer both a benefit and a barrier to competition. Helmer covers the majority of the book through the lens of different case studies including his favorite company, Netflix.

Tech Themes

Power. After years as a consultant at BCG and decades investing in the public market, Helmer distilled all successful business strategies to seven individual Powers. A Power offers a company a re-inforcing benefit while also providing a barrier to potential competition. This is the epitome of an enduring business model in Helmer's mind. Power describes a company's strength relative to a specific competitor, and Powers focus on a single business unit rather than throughout a business. This makes sense: Apple may have a scale economies Power from its iPhone install base relative to Samsung, but it may not have Power in its AppleTV originals segment relative to Netflix. The seven types of Powers are: Scale Economies, Network Economies, Counter-Positioning, Switching Costs, Branding, Cornered Resources, and Process Power.
Invention. While Powers are somewhat easy to spot (scale economies of Google's search algorithm), creating them is anything but easy. So what underlies every one of the seven Powers? Invention. Helmer pulls invention through the lens of industry Dynamics - external competitive conditions and the forward march of technology create opportunities to pursue new business models, processes, brands, and products. Companies must leverage their resources to craft Powers through trial and error, rather than an upfront conscious decision to pursue something by design. I view this almost as an extension of Clayton Christensen's Resource-Processes-Values (RPV) framework we discussed in July 2020. Companies can find a route to Power through these resources and the crafting process. For Netflix, the route was streaming, but the actual Power came from a strong push into exclusive and original content. The streaming business opened up Netflix's subscriber base, and the content decision provided the ability to amortize great content across its growing subscriber base.
Power Progressions. Powers become available at different points in business progression. This makes sense - what drives a company forward in an unpenetrated market is different from what keeps it going during steady-state - Snowflake's competitive dynamics are different than Nestle's. Helmer defines three stages to a company: Origination, Takeoff, and Stability. These stages mirror the dynamics of S-Curves, which we discussed in our July 2021 book. During the Origination stage, companies can benefit from Cornered Resources and Counter-Positioning. Helmer uses the Pixar management team as an example of Cornered Resources during the Origination phase of 3D animated movies. The company had Steve Jobs (product visionary), John Lasseter (story-teller creative), and Ed Catmull (operations and technology leader). During the early days of the industry, these were the only people that knew how to operate a digital film studio. Another Cornered Resource example might be a company finding a new oil well. Before the company starts drilling, it is the only one that can own that asset. An example of Origination Counter-Positioning might be TSMC when they first launched. At that time, it was standard industry perception that semiconductor companies had to be integrated design manufacturers (IDM) - they had to do everything in-house. TSMC was launched as solely a fabrication facility that companies could use to gain extra manufacturing capacity or try out new designs. This gave them great Counter-Positioning relative to the IDM's and they were dismissed as a non-threat. The Takeoff period offers Network Economies, Scale Economies, and Switching Cost Powers. This phase is the growth phase of businesses. Snowflake currently benefits from Switching Cost dynamics - once you use Snowflake, it's unlikely you'll want to use other data warehouse providers because that process involves data replication and additional costs. Scale economies can be seen in businesses that amortize high costs over their user base, like Amazon. Amazon invests in distribution centers at a significant scale, which improves customer experience, which helps them get more customers - the flywheel repeats, allowing Amazon to continually invest in more distribution centers, further building its scale. Network economies show in social media businesses like Bytedance/TikTok. Users make content that attracts more users; incremental users join the platform because there is so much content to "gain" by joining the platform. Like scale economies, it's almost impossible to go build a competitor because a new company would have to recruit all users from the other platform, which would cost tons of money. The Stability phase offers Branding and Process Power. Branding is hard to generate, but the advantage grows with time. Consider luxury goods providers like LVMH; the older, the more exclusive the brand, the more it's desired, and every day it gets older and becomes more desired. A business can create Process Power by refining and improving operations to such a high degree that it becomes difficult to replicate. Classic examples of Process Power are TSMC's innovative 3-5nm processes today and Toyota's Production System. Toyota has even allowed competitors to tour its factory, but no competitor has replicated its operational efficiency.

Business Themes

Sneak Attack. I've always been surprised by businesses that seemingly "come out of nowhere." In Helmer's eyes, this stems from Counter-Positioning. He tells the story of Vanguard, which was started by Jack Bogle in 1976. "You could charitably describe the reception as enthusiastic: only $11M trickled in from investors. Soon after the launch, [Noble Laureate Paul] Samuelson himself lauded the effort in his column for Newsweek, but with little result: the fund had only reached $17M by mid-1977. Vanguard's operating model depended on others for distribution, and brokers, in particular, were put off by a product that predicated on the notion that they provided no value in helping their clients choose which active funds to select." But Vanguard had something that active managers didn't: low fees and consistency. Vanguard's funds performed like the indices and cost much less than active funds. No longer were individuals underperforming the market and paying advisors to pick actively managed funds. Furthermore, Vanguard continually invested all profits back into its funds, so it looked like it wasn't making money while it grew its assets under management. It's so hard to spot these sneak attacks while they are happening. But one that might be happening right now is Cloudflare relative to AWS. Cloudflare launched its low-cost R2 service (a play on Amazon's famous S3 storage technology). Cloudflare is offering a cheaper product at a much lower cost and is leveraging its large installed base with its CDN product to get people in the door. It's unclear whether this will offer Power over AWS because it's confusing what the barrier might be other than some relating to switching costs. However, there will likely be reluctance on AWS's part to cut prices because of its scale and public company growth targets.
A New Valuation Formula. Helmer offers a very unique take on the traditional DCF valuation approach. Investors have long suggested the value of any business was equal to the present value of its future discounted cash flows. In contrast to the traditional approach of summing up a firm's cash flows and discounting it, Helmer takes a look at all of the cash flows subject to the industry in which firms compete. In this formula (shown above), M0 represents the current market size, g the discounted market growth factor, s the long-term market share of the company, and m the long-term differential margin (net profit margin over that needed to cover the cost of capital). More simply, a company is worth it's Market Scale (Mo x g) x its Power (s x m). This implies that a company is worth the portion of the industry's profits it collects over time. This formula helps consider Power progression relative to industry dynamics and company stage. In the Origination stage, an industry's profits may be small but growing very quickly. If we think that a competitor in the industry can achieve an actual Power, it will likely gain a large portion of the long-term market. Thus, watching market share dynamics unfold can tell us about the potential for a route to Power and the ability for a company to achieve a superior value to its near-term cash flows.
Collateral Damage. If companies are aware of these Powers and how other companies can achieve them, how can companies not take proactive action to avoid being on the losing end of a Power struggle? Helmer lays out what he calls Collateral Damage, or the unwillingness of a competitor to find the right path to navigating the damage caused by a competitor's Power. His point is actually very nuanced - it's not the incumbent's unwillingness to invest in the same type of solution as the competitor (although that happens). The incumbent's business gets trashed as collateral damage by the new entrant. The incumbent can respond to the challenger by investing in the new innovation. But where counter-positioning really takes hold is if the incumbent recognizes the attractiveness of the business model/innovation but is stymied from investing. Why would a business leader choose not to invest in something attractive? In the case of Vanguard competitor Fidelity, any move into passive funds could cause steep cannibalization of their revenue. So in response, a CEO might decide to just keep their existing business and "milk" all of its cash flow. In addition, how could Fidelity invest in a business that completely undermined their actively managed mutual fund business? Often CEOs will have a negative bias toward the competing business model despite the positive NPV of an investment in the new business. Just think how long it took SAP to start selling Cloud subscriptions compared to its on-premise license/maintenance model. Lastly, a CEO might not invest in the promising new business model if they are worried about job security. This is the classic example of the principal-agent problem we discussed in June. Would you invest in a new, unproven business model if you faced a declining stock price and calls for your resignation? In addition, annual CEO compensation is frequently tagged to stock price performance and growth targets. The easiest way to achieve near-term stock price appreciation and growth targets is staying with what has worked in the past (and M&A!). Its the path of least resistance! Counter-positioning and collateral damage are nuanced and difficult to spot, but the complex emotions and issues become obvious over time.