Visit Dear Shareholders website to get updates and vote on what shareholder letters come next. Show Notes: Amazon's customer satisfaction and expectations. 0:00 Amazon ranked #1 in customer satisfaction surveys for 8th year in a row. Customers' expectations are constantly evolving, driving companies to innovate and improve. High Standards in Organizations. 3:11 Speaker 2 discusses the importance of high standards in organizations, highlighting the distinction between intrinsic and teachable standards. Speaker 2 argues that high standards are domain-specific and must be learned separately in each area of interest, rather than being universal across all areas. Speaker 2 shares a personal story about a friend's handstand journey, highlighting the importance of realistic expectations and high standards. The quality of memos written for meetings at Amazon varies widely, with great memos being difficult to define but easily recognizable, and poorly written memos often due to unrealistic expectations on scope. Teachable elements of high standards include recognizing and explicitly coaching realistic scope, and doing so at all levels of detail (memos to whole new initiatives). Leaders with relentlessly high standards have served Amazon well, with recent milestones representing the fruition of collective effort. Amazon's growth, Alexa, and hardware sales. 11:17 Amazon exceeded 100 million paid Prime members globally, with over 5 billion items shipped in 2017. AWS announced over 1000 significant services and features in 2017, including Amazon SageMaker, which made machine learning more accessible to developers. Alexa adoption and skills surpass 30,000, with improved speech recognition and language understanding. Amazon's growth in various areas, including Kindle, Prime Video, music, fashion, and grocery. 16:24 Amazon Prime Video expands offerings with new originals, channels, and licensing deals. Amazon expands into fashion, grocery, and more with Whole Foods acquisition and Prime benefits. Amazon expands offerings with Prime benefits at Whole Foods, walk-out shopping at Amazon Go, and Treasure Truck donations. Amazon's sustainability initiatives and job creation. 22:57 Amazon has expanded its renewable energy projects, now producing enough clean energy to power over 330,000 homes annually. Amazon has invested over $150 billion worldwide in fulfillment networks, transportation capabilities, and technology infrastructure, creating over 1.7 million direct and indirect jobs. Amazon's Career Choice program pre-pays 95% of tuition fees and textbooks for high-demand occupations, with over 16,000 associates participating globally. Amazon's core values and approach remain unchanged, with a focus on being the most customer-centric company, despite the many challenges and opportunities ahead.
