Fifteen years ago, when I worked as a product manager at Amazon, Jeff Bezos declared at an all-hands meeting that Amazon was not a retailer — it was a software company. “Our business is not what’s in the brown boxes. It’s the software that sends the brown boxes on their way,” he told us. “Our ability to win is based on our ability to arrange magnetic particles on hard drives better than our competition.” Not long afterward I left Amazon to found my own company, Twilio. But Jeff’s lesson has stuck with me ever since, especially when I visit […]
