Amazon didn't create one business. It consistently reinvented itself, one S curve after another.
It knew how to identify invisible asymptotes and how to pre-empt them.
The 1st S curve was an online bookstore.
Now in retrospect it sounds trivial that they would move beyond that. But it wasn't.
How many online bookstores do you know that moved on from doing just that?
Bezos picked books because they benefitted from having millions of SKUs, ppl didn't need them immediately, and they weren't perishable. Internet had an advantage over physical locations for them.
If it had stopped there, it would have met an invisible asymptote to its business. It would have stopped growing.
So what did he do? Expand into other verticals.
Music, movies, magazines...
That exposed them to another invisible asymptote: the limits of the US market. Internationalization was another S curve to build.
The next one was shipping costs. We know the answer to that now, but again, it wasn't obvious.
They tried explaining the savings from shipping, making shipping free above a certain price... But they didn't work.
The fact that free 2-day shipping worked through Amazon Prime is crazy: "I don't want to pay $4 for shipping. But ask me to pay $100 upfront? TAKE MY MONEY!"
That was another S curve of growth.
And then AWS.
And the marketplace.
And one-day shipping...
Every time a new invisible asymptote loomed in the horizon, Amazon would beat it with yet another S curve.
I made this video and thread inspired by @eugenewei 's amazing article, "Invisible Asymptotes".
If you haven't read it, or aren't subscribed to his newsletter, do yourself a favor and go do that right now.
S curves are everywhere. Learning to identify them is a superpower
They're how epidemics evolve
How memes spread
How investment unfold
How businesses grow
How muscles contract
How technology us adopted
How animation flows
How popcorn explodes
How ice melts
How water evaporates
How countries are formed
How magnets snap
How atoms spin
How transistors change their charge
How ppl get promoted
How they succeed
How they're fired
How they're born
How they die
We don't always recognize them because, depending on where we are on an S curve, it might not look like one.
It might look line a horizontal line
Or a vertical one
Or an oblique one
Or an exponential
Or a noisy surve
Why are some Caribbean countries richer than others?Why do some islands speak one language, and others another?
Why are there still colonies there?
Why are there difference races in each?
Why is the Caribbean the way it is?
Thread 🧵
When the Spaniards arrived at the end of the 1400s, they were looking for riches. There were few in the Caribbean islands. So they didn't pay too much attention.
Eventually, they found silver on the Continent: in Mexico (Zacatecas) and Bolivia (Potosí).
They needed a way to transport all of that silver back to Spain. They transported the Mexican riches to Veracruz, and the Bolivian ones to Cartagena de Indias.
Why is Mexico so mountainous, and yet so populous?!
Why is it poorer than the US?
How was that influenced by Spanish colonization?
Why is Mexico the way it is today?
A thread 🧵
Ok what are those lights in the south, Mexico?
Isn't it impossible to have a big population in the smack middle of the mountains?
Mexico: Hold my beer
Mountains have 2 things: elevation and slope.
Slope is bad: it makes cultivating crops impossible because water runs. It makes movement hard, so both communication and trade suffer.
But elevation per se is not that bad.
These cities are in flat, high plateaus
The only regret I have is that I couldn't do more. Ppl reached out from Kenya, South Africa, Netherlands, Argentina, Peru, and so many other countries. I wish I could have done more. If you reached out and I didn't help as much as you needed, I'm sorry.
And if you hear more messages like these from NL but for your country, please forward them to me or simply reply here. These really make it all worthwhile to me.
Also, books pack hundreds of hours of thought, while news articles pack maybe 1-2h. So the intensity of thought per minute of your time is much higher in books.
And ppl love news so much that the valuable ones will reach you no matter what. No news to waste your time going to a news portal every day.