Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
Businesses

Amazon CEO Urges 'Startup' Mentality in Shareholder Letter (msn.com) 62

Posted by msmash from the still-day-one dept.
Amazon has to operate like the "world's largest startup" as it works to meet demand for AI and cut bureaucracy in its ranks, Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy said in his annual letter to shareholders. From a report: "If your customer experiences aren't planning to leverage these intelligent models, their ability to query giant corpuses of data and quickly find your needle in the haystack, their ability to keep getting smarter with more feedback and data, and their future agentic capabilities, you will not be competitive," Jassy wrote in the letter on Thursday. "It's moving faster than almost anything technology has ever seen."

Amazon, like most of the largest technology companies, has bet heavily on artificial intelligence, committing much of its $100 billion in planned capital expenditures this year to AI-related projects.

Amazon CEO Urges 'Startup' Mentality in Shareholder Letter More | Reply

Amazon CEO Urges 'Startup' Mentality in Shareholder Letter

Comments Filter:

  • LOL - work like in startup, get paid like in Amazo (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Lavandera ( 7308312 ) on Thursday April 10, 2025 @07:57AM (#65294461)

    Startup is not just working hard and being inventive/resourceful..

    It is also being one of the original employees of something big that can bring huge payoff ...
    You know the boss, you are getting a share - small one but still...

    Sorry - but this is not really possible in a huge company like Amazon... someone else will reap off the profits...

    • Telling Shareholders what they want to hear. Bezos played Caesar with fear. Most need to work to make ends meet.
    • I'm happy to work very hard, long hours.

      But I expect some compensation in return. I don't work for free. (Actually I do work for free, but on my things.)

      “Nothing is as heady as the wine of possibility” Soren Kierkegaard, but I still want pay.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dvice ( 6309704 )

      45% of startups fail within the first 5 years.
      From AI startups, 85% fails within the first 3 years.

      So what do they exactly want to be, if they want to be a startup?

      • a big company - with cheap labour no workers rights and no legislation stopping htem fucking up the environment and a free hand to offload the externals to the tax payer,

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by DarkOx ( 621550 )

      The real reason you can't have a startup mentality in a larger organization is that startups run on trust and fully shared mutual interests.

      Everyone knows each other, on a personal level. Everyone's stock options only become valuable if the founder is successful. There are not a lot of meetings and process to get this and that approved, there isn't stop and file the expense reports, go find someone in AP to generate a PO... its just pull out the company CC and execute! There is not company conduct policy an

      • Mythical Man Month talked about it (although not in startup terms). He point was you need to let the employees feel the market pressure. That won't make people work crazy hours, but it will help align incentives properly.

        • Amen! Part of the outrage at layoffs and closures is the presumption that your job is an entitlement, you just have to show up and give it your all, and 'they' will also give their all, do their best, and it all will go on in perpetuity. If you're properly invested in your employer's business, you will look for the threats, take full advantage of the opportunities, exhort your coworkers to likewise perform, and stand a better chance of success and longevity in your role(s).

          If not, you may be reduced to wail

          • >If not, you may be reduced to wailing about the unfairness of it all. It may be unfair, but if you do not feel the real pressures, you risk being blindsided by reality. I do not wish that on you.

            Nice doublespeak. You're saying each person should work his ass off for a company with no loyalty to him for the privilege of probably succeeding. You're wrong on several levels. That kind of effort is often needed to get ahead, but by no means is it sufficient. Often enough the only way to get ahead is to look

            • Short but sweet. If you're being abused or taken advantage of beyond what you're willing to tolerate, move on. If on the other hand you're willing to accept the bargain, then you know what to do. It's not my double speak, it's the difference between taking responsibility for your situation or thinking somehow you deserve. What you deserve is fairness. We don't usually get it, do we. So we look for the best situation, and make the most of it. Or we complain.

            • You're saying each person should work his ass off for a company with no loyalty to him for the privilege of probably succeeding.

              You could try doing that, but it's much more important to work towards the right goals, rather than to work overtime.

      • Almost Perfect [amazon.com] has chapters about the days when Word Perfect became successful. It failed to transition from start-up to regular business. Not pretty.

    • Jassy's letter calls out removing unnecessary bureaucracy. I think that's what he's getting at with operating more like a startup.

      I recently asked a former coworker who is now at Amazon what the work culture is like and he told me they do a lot more writing before a single line of code is written. If every change you make has to go through that process that can slow things down a lot and means that you need more people to review the documentation and writing before you can get things done.

      Big compan

    • The only way to truly return to "start-up" mentality is to create a new corporation--separately managed from the original company. With stock options :-)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      Sorry - but this is not really possible in a huge company like Amazon... someone else will reap off the profits...

      Exactly. People only put up with the BS that startups provide because there is a huge payoff. Unless there's a huge profit sharing or other motivation, people won't put up with the long hours or other crap that happens.

      If there's no huge payoff it's not worth working 24/7 and putting up with the BS.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by mabinogi ( 74033 )

      It's also about not operating with all the guardrails and governance and red tape and arse-covering that a giant corporate entity can't survive without.

      The reason Startups succeed (and the reason they fail), is because they do a whole bunch of very sketchy stuff that they would never get away with in a big corporate.

      You really can't get startup success without startup risk, and I just don't think a company the size of Amazon is actually willing to accept startup risk, no matter what a C-level says.

      Unless th

  • Win the rat-race (Score:5, Insightful)

    by NotEmmanuelGoldstein ( 6423622 ) on Thursday April 10, 2025 @08:24AM (#65294497)

    "... largest startup" ...

    You need to work as a slave for 70 hours a week to satisfy both your boss and your inhuman tool-chain, in the vain delusion that the profits will be shared with you. Amazon's day of sharing its immense wealth are over, it wants employees that can be ignored. Don't listen to this "work harder, win the rat-race" propaganda: Decades of history prove it's a lie.

  • The vigor of a start-up is in building a new company. Once it's built, you can never go back to the early days. It's like the Marxist idea of permanent revolution - unworkable. The exciting times of building something are over and it's time to do the less exciting work of running it. You'll end up with a lot of paper-pushers because you'll keep finding there's more paper that needs pushing. You've grown up, gotten big and slowed down. This is as inevitable for a corporation as it is for each person wh

  • Fuck you Jassy.

    Fuck you Bezos (aka "Bozo")

  • "It's moving faster than almost anything technology has ever seen."

    Yeah, that's what technology does. Changes come faster and faster until the collapse, which at this point is obviously a whole lot more likely than the singularity.

    Speaking of which, what's the ecological impact of implementing AI everywhere for everything all at once? Oh yeah, now I remember, it's devastating.

  • Been there, done that (Score:4, Insightful)

    by timholman ( 71886 ) on Thursday April 10, 2025 @09:20AM (#65294607)

    Amazon has to operate like the "world's largest startup"

    This is what happens when a company becomes organizationally stratified. Lacking any idea of how to fix their own bureaucracy, management instead tells the rank and file to change their attitude, and everything will get better.

    What doesn't change, of course, is that management still calls all the shots. The "startup" mentality hits a brick wall the moment an employee even thinks about acting independently without express permission from two levels of management.

    When I was at IBM back in the 80's, they told the employees that we needed to become empowered. Management still told the engineers exactly what projects to work on, and still swapped us from one department to another like interchangeable nuts and bolts, but hey - we were empowered.

    • When I was at IBM back in the 80's, they told the employees that we needed to become empowered

      I appreciate that, but what did they do to empower you?

      • I appreciate that, but what did they do to empower you?

        They put up these clever little posters showing a bored and unhappy employee crawling through their computer screen, and coming out all happy and involved on the other side. At the time, I wondered if the intention was for the engineers to shove their heads through their CRTs, electrocute themselves, and wind up in the afterlife.

        In the end, I empowered myself by leaving IBM to get my Ph.D. It was a much better choice.

  • Cool comparison but startups actually have the potential to grow. Amazon geometrically, legally and economically cannot grow. Not only is it impossible to Amazon for grow their marketshare, they are under threat from almost every regulatory agency in the country and likely to lose some of the market share they already consumed.

    The CEO of Amazon can stand up there and urge Ninja Turtle mentality but it doesn't mean they're gonna grow a shell. This statement is completely delusional and entirely unhinged and
  • They're clearly in "monopoly abuse and nonstop acquisitions stage" which is basically the exact opposite. You don't need to be "good" at what you do if you bought up your competition illegally and bribed politicians to allow it. Just look at Google and all their trash products since Google Glass and Stadia and everything else since. This is a well known cycle in Silicon Valley

  • Step 1 (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Spinlock_1977 ( 777598 ) <Spinlock_1977.yahoo@com> on Thursday April 10, 2025 @09:59AM (#65294681) Journal

    Step 1 to becoming like a startup: Cut the CEO's salary to a pittance.

  • It's moving faster than almost anything technology has ever seen.

    Toward what–a cliff? What revolutionary breakthrough does Mr. Jassy think AI is going to bring to the table to offset $100B in capex investments? A slightly more sophisticated chatbot that can now correctly guess how many R's are in "strawberry" more than 80% of the time? ChatGPT has been around for several years now, and its "improvements" are both underwhelming and being delivered at a snail's pace with quite literally no promise of anything new other than a vague, undefined notion of "AGI" being ri

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by DarkOx ( 621550 )

      I have to assume amazon is looking for growth in things like AWS and b2b logistics offerings, more than it is looking for growth in putting consumer products in cardboard cartons onto door steps.

      They are probably also looking at growth in entertainment as as they continue to eat the theater movie distribution market and televised sporting events / pay-per-view markets.

  • About mentalities... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Note this is a letter to shareholders, not to employees. But yeah, we could discuss a lot around "mentalities" of various parties affected by Amazon; and those of the shareholders and upper management are not really IMHO something to aspire to.

    As a once-off would-be customer(*), what always amazes me is how difficult it is to find the exact item you intend, without having all sorts of "sponsored" and more expensive and irrelevant items fostered on you, or otherwise having to wade through reams of offers fo

  • Startups allow the group who build something to sell it or go public and make a huge profit to those entry slave like workers. That's why you live at work, for reward. Secondly, start ups have the ability to change quickly or pivot products, platform, or goals. Amazon is already set in management, stock and is too large to pivot. Nobody is fooled here. Ownership just wants it's slaves to work harder to make them more money.

  • So, they are going to be giving massive incentives to employees in the forms of cheap options and stock?

    And expect their employees to work 80 hours a week for peanuts?

    Yeah, sure. That'll happen.

  • When Saint Joe said "We will teach our twisted speech to the young believers" (LC, Clampdown - 9:10) surely the prophecy referred to Andy Jassy's brilliant corporate-speak utterance: "If your customer experiences aren't planning to leverage these intelligent models, their ability to query giant corpuses of data and quickly find your needle in the haystack, their ability to keep getting smarter with more feedback and data, and their future agentic capabilities, you will not be competitive" Whoa! Try to diag
  • Expect ideas to fail 80% of the time yet keep your investor's money?
  • This is just Asshole Management. Using some model where you only bring the stick and leave the carrot behind. Only an asshole CEO would do stuff like this.

  • You can't hire barely-employable drones at minimal market wages and expect "entrepreneurial behavior", that's just stupid.

    Entrepreneurs are typically willing to tolerate starvation wages in their startups (at least, that was the model) *because* they either
    - expected to make it big someday
    and/or
    - loved what they're doing.

    Here's a suggestion: take HALF of the profit (iirc nearly $70bn last year) and use it for employee profit shares. 1.5 million employees, $35bn = on average $20k per employee as an end of

  • I worked for these guys during the time period when Bezos was still in charge but Jassy was calling the shots on the AWS side of things. It was clear from one of the videoconferences I got to attend that Jassy was kind of a "Bezos fanboy", or at least felt the best way forward for him was to echo Bezos with his various quotes, bits of advice, etc.

    Bezos was really big on telling everyone that it was "Always day 1" at Amazon. This idea it needs to act like a perpetual start-up is just a rehash of that same, t

  • Employees must work very long hours at very low salaries. Fuck you, Amazon.
  • "If your customers are not planning to use these intelligent models, which can query large amounts of data to quickly find what you're looking for, learn and improve with more feedback and data, and develop future capabilities, you will not remain competitive."
  • I guess making people pee in bottles isn't saving enough money.

  • They'll use more A.I. chatbots and even fewer humans. Which will be okay if you have a common problem but really suck if you have an edgecase problem.

Slashdot Top Deals

It's not so hard to lift yourself by your bootstraps once you're off the ground. -- Daniel B. Luten

Close