The Four

The next retail age will be coined the “multichannel era”—a time when integration across web, social, and brick and mortar is crucial to success.

The truth is that the death of physical stores has been vastly overstated. In fact, it’s not stores that are dying, but the middle class—and, in turn, the businesses that serve that once-great cohort and its neighborhoods.

So, stores are here to stay—if we are careful what stores we’re talking about. But so is e-commerce. Ultimately, the real winners will be those retailers who understand how to integrate both. Amazon aims to be that company

By achieving a paradoxical goal in business—a low-cost product that sells for a premium price—Apple has become the most profitable company in history.

industry—book reviewing—emerged to identify what books were worth eating/reading, bypassing the diligence of curation offered by a store. Bezos realized reviews could do the hard work of retailing for him. Amazon could call on the internet’s less lame attributes: s

Failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment.”

In Q4 of 2016, Apple registered twice the net profits Amazon has produced, in total, since its founding twenty-three years ago.7,8,9 Apple’s cash on hand is nearly the GDP of Denmark.10,11

I don’t have the skills—maturity, discipline, humility, respect for institutions—to work in a big firm (that is, someone else), so I became an entrepreneur

This kind of experimentation and aggression is what the military calls the OODA loop: “observe, orient, decide, and act.”

Scale is power, and Amazon was able to offer prices no brick-and-mortar retailer could afford.