Amazon is Capitalism

amazon capitalism

I am sure there are a million reasons this isn’t true in the absolute, but I have had the thought multiple times recently that Amazon is pure Capitalism. Or pure market.

Essentially, they’re the cleanest example of harnessing multiple capitalist and market-based techniques and building a company around them.

Two Pizza teams is a good example. The idea is to keep a team size down to the size that can be fed by two pizzas in a room. The other thing they do is encourage you to try lots and lots of stuff, and they don’t care that much if it doesn’t work. They’re also huge on metrics to see what does and does not work.

It just seems like a big portion of why they’re so successful is because they’ve personified many pure business concepts into an actual company. So while other companies are companies first and they use some business concepts, Amazon is more like a company-shaped instantiation of the concepts themselves.

Again, I’m not saying this is technically true. I’m saying it might be interesting and/or useful to think of it that way.