Jeff Bezos: ‘Even Well-Meaning Gatekeepers Slow Innovation’

Jeff Bezos’ annual letter to Amazon shareholders is a timely manifesto, unifying the company’s expansive range of businesses, justifying its approach to established markets, and marking as a target anyone who stands in its way. The letter begins with extensive quotes from customers praising Amazon Web Services, Fulfillment by Amazon and Kindle Direct Publishing. The unifying thread? All three platforms are “self-service.”

“The most radical and transformative of inventions are often those that empower others to unleash their creativity – to pursue their dreams,” writes Bezos. “These innovative, large-scale platforms are not zero-sum – they create win-win situations and create significant value for developers, entrepreneurs, customers, authors, and readers.” The only people and institutions who lose in this scenario, according to Bezos’ logic, are the intermediaries: salespeople, lawyers, publishers. These interests, whether they realize it or not, only stand in the way of the innovation and beneficence Amazon’s inventions help to unlock. At least, that’s how Jeff Bezos sees it. “I am emphasizing the self-service nature of these platforms because it’s important for a reason I think is somewhat non-obvious: even well-meaning gatekeepers slow innovation,” writes Bezos. “When a platform is self-service, even the improbable ideas can get tried, because there’s no expert gatekeeper ready to say ‘that will never work!’ And guess what – many of those improbable ideas do work, and society is the beneficiary of that diversity.”