One of the great advantages of identifying and codifying first principles is how little maintenance they need. Write once, remember forever. As testament to that, ever year, Bezos ends his Letter to Shareholders the same way.

As always, I attach a copy of our original 1997 letter. It remains Day 1.

Fe fi fo fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman.

Jeff didn’t want lossy compression or lazy thinking, he wanted the raw feed in a structured form, and so we all shifted to writing our arguments out as essays that he’d read silently in meetings. Written language is a lossy format, too, but it has the advantage of being less forgiving of broken logic flows than slide decks.

Ironically, Jeff employs the reverse of this for his own information inflows

Here’s a good test of how strategically aligned a company is. Walk up to anyone in the company in the hallway and ask them if they know what their current top priority or mission is. Can they recite it from memory?

Get Big Fast Baby.“ You can argue whether the "baby” at the end was necessary, but I think it’s more memorable with it than without. Much easier to remember than “Grow revenues 80%” or “achieve economies of scale” or something like that.

resist proxies

As companies get larger and more complex, there’s a tendency to manage to proxies. This comes in many shapes and sizes, and it’s dangerous, subtle, and very Day 2. A common example is process as proxy. Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing.

There are many ways to center a business. You can be competitor focused, you can be product focused, you can be technology focused, you can be business model focused, and there are more. But in my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of Day 1 vitality. Why? There are many advantages to a customer-centric approach, but here’s the big one: customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. Even when they don’t yet know it, customers want something better, and your desire to delight customers will drive you to invent on their behalf. No customer ever asked Amazon to create the Prime membership program, but it sure turns out they wanted it, and I could give you many such examples.

Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.

One of these is to encode you message in a very distinctive format. There are many rhetorical tricks that have stood the test of time, like alliteration or anadiplosis. Perhaps supreme among these rhetorical forms is verse, especially when it rhymes.

So she’s controlled. She doesn’t rant and rave, she’s careful. And then that’s read as inauthentic; it means that she doesn’t understand how upset people are, or the pain people are in, because she’s not angry in the way those guys are angry. So she must be okay with the status quo because she’s not angry.

Well, this is the joke,” she says. “You gotta be authentic! So you go out and try to be as effective as you can in presenting yourself and demonstrating the qualifications you have for the job, but you’re always walking a line about what will find approval from the general population and what won’t. It’s trial and error.

When I covered Kasparov-Deep Blue match, I thought the drama came from a battle between computer and human. But it was really a story of people, with brutal capitalist impulse, teaming up with AI to destroy the confidence and dignity of the greatest champion the world had seen. That leads me to believe it’s not Skynet that should worry us about AI, but rather the homo sapiens who build, implement, and employ those systems.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m still on board with the scientists who believe that advances in AI will make life better for all of us. Ultimately, using the power of computation for cognition is a great and historic human enterprise. But may I add a codicil to that declaration?

Always check the printouts.