Amazon R&D

One of the things I’ve always liked about Amazon as a company is their disregard for Wall Street. Their approach has always been, “we’re building a company for the long term and we don’t care about your quarterly estimates”.

Yesterday Amazon announced financials, and they had a big miss from the Wall Street perspective. See their revenues were $360 million more than expected. Yeah, that’s got to be bad.

But seriously, their operating income was $43 million below expected and earnings per share $0.17 below expected (that sounds small but is a big miss). Apparently, among other things, Amazon hired a few thousand extra people. So Wall Street initially freaked out.

Jeff Bezos, their CEO, issued a long commentary. If every CEO on the planet could speak this well about technology we’d be in good shape.

There was one line that everyone should etch into their brains. And ask how any technology company they work with is applying it:

Invention is in our DNA and technology is the fundamental tool we wield to evolve and improve every aspect of the experience we provide our customers

Amen.

His full text is here.

And by the way, the next day Amazon stock was up 14%.