It’s always inspiring to read about the early days of an idea. About the doubt, the pushback, the impossibilities, the models telling you it’ll be too expensive, the “but, but, but…”, the breakthroughs, the vision, and the drive when you just have a hunch. The knowing that there’s no way to know until you try. These moments are often wrapped with unusual combination of vulnerability and confidence. I find them fascinating. Here’s an oral history of how Amazon Prime came to be.
How Amazon Prime came to be
Working 120 hours per week and feeling that the delivery is never fast enough is not in the culture of Basecamp I guess but nice story though.
Agree, but I think there’s plenty of other interesting insights and observations in the piece to focus on. To me, the implementation isn’t the interesting part – it’s the genesis of the idea, and the effort it takes to shepherd it through the opposition, that I find fascinating.
I get that it’s about pushing through the “buts” and maybe one of the buts was the people cost; that’s my issue. But it’s a very inspiring story about ignoring buts and spearheading development which, probably, won’t happen again (internally) due to their culture.
It’s funny that there’s literally ZERO thoughts about Prime from warehouse or delivery workers. As Buckslip’s recent newsletter put it: “They [workers] must have had nothing to do with it at all! So inspiring that executive leadership can pull off such consequence-free disruption.”