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Stack Overflow founder Joel Spolsky breaks down what made Amazon “the best company in the world”

June 25, 2024

In this 2013 interview, Joel breaks down Jeff Bezos’s process for inventing new companies:

“The Amazon strategy is to constantly try to find the moving parts in the business and break them apart.”

He continues:

“They have 37 businesses and everybody looks at them and says, ‘These are unrelated businesses.’… But this is the new business model: I’ll start with a bookstore, and I’ll just break off every little single piece that I can find, and I’ll make them all compete as if they were independent businesses… This is Jeff Bezos’s mitosis - his system for inventing new companies.”

It is through this process that Amazon has created AWS, Mechanical Turk, Fulfillment, and dozens of other businesses. AWS alone generated almost $100 billion of revenue last year and comprises 17% of Amazon’s total revenue.

Joel contrasts this to the strategies of other tech giants:

“What’s Yahoo’s system for inventing new companies? I don’t know, I’ll buy something really popular - that’s all I can figure out. What’s Microsoft’s? I don’t even know. Google was like, let’s make 20% time and people will do random stuff.”