#388 Jeff Bezos's Shareholder Letters: All of Them!

**David Senra** (0:00)
I will be in New York City on May 27th. I'm doing a live show. I will be interviewed by my friend, Patrick O'Shaughnessy at Ramps Headquarters. This event is free to attend. I'll leave the link down below if you want to register. The link will be down in the show notes. I'm going to be doing several live events at Ramps Headquarters over the next 12 to 24 months. So even if you can't make this one, make sure you register so you get notified for the next one. The event, this event isn't reserved just for Ramp customers, but future events will be because space is limited. So if you aren't already running your business on Ramp, highly recommend that you do so. I run my business on Ramp, most of the top founders and CEOs that I know do so as well. There's actually an idea from Jeff Bezos' shareholder letters that I think is related to this and really just good advice for anyone in business. It's Jeff's idea on the importance of heavily investing into new introductions for new customers. As you're about to hear, Jeff was very adamant, very clear from day one that he was going to build an enduring, long lasting business. He was not interested at all in building an undifferentiated commodity business. He wanted to build something that delivered more value to customers than anyone else in the world. And he believed that he could succeed at that goal better than anyone else. And you'll hear in this episode that if you believed what Jeff believed, then you would do what Jeff was doing. And because Jeff believed he was building a winning system. This is the way I think about it. And if you're doing that, it makes a lot of sense to say this. This is what Jeff wrote in one of his shareholders. We will continue to invest heavily in introductions to new customers. These are the early days of category formation where many customers are forming relationships for the first time. We must work hard to grow the number of customers who shop with us.
He saw, what Jeff saw, was that people who started to use Amazon tended to stick around because of the value that they received from Amazon. I was one of those people that he was trying to introduce Amazon to, and I've been a customer of his for 21 straight years. The lesson here is like, if you believe that you have the best product, then you should do everything you can to get more people into your winning system. Ramp is doing the exact same thing today, and I have a mind blowing stat that will demonstrate their right to believe that they've built a product that delivers more value to their customers than anyone else in the world is capable of, just like Jeff did with Amazon. Last year, 12,059 businesses signed up to use the Ramp corporate card. Only eight of those 12,059 businesses decided Ramp wasn't for them. That is a success rate of 99.9334%.
If you have not yet started running your business on Ramp, go to ramp.com today to learn how they can help your business save time and money. I hope to see you in New York and I hope you enjoy this episode. So this is the fourth or fifth time that I've read Jeff Bezos' shareholder letters. Every single time I read them, they're full of such great ideas, such clear thinking, such great strategy. I always think, hey, I should probably reread these every year and make another episode about them. And in case you haven't read them yet, this is the best thing, the best description I've ever heard of why they're so important. It says, to read Bezos' 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. So what I want to do is I'm going to go in order by year. I'm just going to pull out a bunch of what I think are the best ideas. And I think one of the main ideas that you learn from Bezos and his shareholder letters is that if you want to be the best at what you're doing, if the people that survive and thrive for decades, usually what you'll find, and you see this in the biographies as well, is they just identify a handful of principles. They repeat these principles year after year, and they organize their entire company and orient the company and the mission around these principles. And one of the things that jumps out about Jeff that he was very adamant about from day one is the title of his very first shareholder letter. That title is It's All About the Long Term. This letter is the most important letter that Jeff writes, and he tells you that because he appends it, the 1997 shareholder letter, to every single shareholder letter he's going to write over the next 23 years. So it says, it is day one for the internet, and if we execute well for amazon.com. Today, online commerce saves customers money and precious time. Tomorrow, through personalization, online commerce will accelerate the very process of discovery.