Jeff Bezos Warns Employees "One Day, Amazon Will Fail"
Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, had to address and answer a question that is related to employees days before the online retail store announced the big winners of its HQ2 sweepstakes.
One of the employees of Jeff Bezos asked him a difficult question during an all-hands meeting on Thursday in Seattle. The question raised by the employee was about the lessons Bezos learned from the recent bankruptcies of Sears and other online retail stores.
Bezos replied: "Amazon is not too big to fail. 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." This is based on recordings by the CNBC News.
The Amazon CEO added that the key to avoiding the death of the company is to be obsessed with the customers and not to worry about one's self or just simply avoid looking inward. He said: "If we start to focus on ourselves, instead of focusing on our customers, that will be the beginning of the end. We have to try and delay that day for as long as possible."
Bezos owns the biggest online retail store in the world. He is also the richest immigrant in the U.S. and in the world. He has accumulated most of his wealth in diverse businesses. However, his main source of wealth is Amazon. At present, the company is winning the massive-cloud computing market and has introduced a more upgraded and developed technology by adopting Alexa, voice command for smart homes, that controls devices through audible commands.
However, employees at Amazon are expressing concern about the rapid pace of the company's expansion. In the last eight years, the company's workforce has grown more than 20 times, or more than 600,000 employees. In addition, the price of the stock has quadrupled since 2013.
The company announced this week that will have expansion and will be opening offices in New York's Long Island City and the Virginia suburbs in Washington, D.C.. They also plan to add 25,000 jobs in each location.
Meanwhile, this is not the first time that Bezos was asked about the company's scale and employees. In March of last year, he was asked during their all-hands meeting if whether or not Amazon and other tech companies needed to be regulated because of their sizable market and influence.
Bezos said during the meeting in March that, "It's a fact that we're a large company. It's reasonable for large institutions of any kind, whether it be companies or governments, to be scrutinized."
According to eMarketer, Amazon is expected to capture around 48 percent of the country's online sales this year and that is up from 43 percent in 2017.
In another report by the Synergy Research Group, Amazon is the leader by far when it comes to cloud computing infrastructure that has captured an estimated 34 percent of the total U.S. market.
Bezos also said that Amazon has its own story of success and that it should not get bundled with other tech companies. He said that an example of this is the story about how Amazon helped to improve the lives of its customers as well as its different business model compared to other tech companies.
Bezos said: "Facebook is not the same as Google, and Apple is not the same as Amazon. I don't want to fight this kind of big tech impression - I want to just talk about Amazon."
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