times of their relatively small online businesses down from two days to
one. Consumers love it, and competitors stand flaccid on the sidelines.
In 2015, Amazon spent $7 billion on shipping fees, a net shipping
loss of $5 billion, and overall profits of $2.4 billion.^52 Crazy, no? No.
Amazon is going underwater with the world’s largest oxygen tank,
forcing other retailers to follow it, match its prices, and deal with
changed customer delivery expectations. The difference is other
retailers have just the air in their lungs and are drowning. Amazon will
surface and have the ocean of retail largely to itself.
Making Type 2 investments also desensitizes Amazon’s
shareholders to failure. All of the Four share this—look at Apple and
Google with their not-so-secret autonomous vehicle projects, and
Facebook with its regular introduction of new features to further
monetize its users, which it then pulls back when the experiments
don’t pan out. Remember Lighthouse? As Bezos also wrote in that first
annual letter: “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.”^53
Red, White, and Blue
The Four are all disciplined about getting out in front of their skis,
taking big, bold, smart bets, and tolerating failure. This failure gene is
at the heart of Amazon’s and, more broadly, the U.S. economy’s
success. I’ve founded or cofounded nine firms and I’m, generously, 3-
4-2 (win-loss-tie). No other society would tolerate, much less reward,
me. America is the land of second chances, and even if Jeff Bezos is
predictably globalist, the culture at Amazon is distinctly red, white,
and blue.
Most uber-wealthy people have one thing in common: failure.
They’ve experienced it, usually in spades, as the path to wealth is
fraught with risks, and often those risks end up being... well, risky. A
society that encourages you to get up after being beaned in the head,
dust off your pants, step back into the batter’s box, and swing harder
the next time is the secret sauce for printing billionaires. The
correlation is clear. America has the most lenient bankruptcy laws,