Bezos broke all the rules when he built Amazon. In doing so he carved out a unique way of looking at the world, at companies, and at tech in general.

And nowhere is Bezos philosophy of business, technology, and leadership better articulated than in his annual shareholder letters, which he has written every year since the company's IPO in 1997.

To read Bezo's shareholder letters is to get a

crash course in running a high-growth internet business from someone who

mastered it before any of the playbooks were written.

Okay, so that is an excerpt from the CB Insight's newsletter.

And this week,, if you're regular

listeners to this podcast, you know that every week I'd normally read a biography

or an autobiography of an entrepreneur, and then I pull out ideas that you can use in your life

and work from there.

This week's going to be different. At the same time I was reading the book

The Dow of Capital, which I covered on last week's podcast, I was also reading this CB Insight's

newsletter. So I spent last week reading every single shareholder letter. I'm just going to jump right into

the shareholder letters. I did, I read them just like I read just like I read the books and I'm just

going to share the highlights of each one. I'll tell you which year I'm in. I'm going to go through

all of them. I think there's like 21 of them. And I'll tell you all the notes and the highlights

that I left.

OK, so let's start with 1997.

This isn't a really important Amazon shareholder letter

because every single year from 1998 on Jeff

Attaches this shareholder letter to the bottom of the other one. And he wants to remind the people that are

thinking about investing in Amazon what they can actually expect. That he

...