The founder of Amazon, wearing a shirt with a white collar and gray jeans, laughed in his characteristic explosive way and said: "I know the answer to this question. The second day is (he paused for a long moment) stagnation." Then, after another long pause, he continued: "And then comes the lack of contact with the market (pause) and after that, a painful, anxious decline (pause), and then death." Bezos smiled, the audience burst into laughter and applause as he left the stage. Their leader had clearly expressed what employees instinctively knew: that Amazon may be a giant technology company, but it is a very different kind of company, a place where everyone is expected to operate with intensity and momentum, and complacency is strictly forbidden.

In 2018, Amazon had a market capitalization of 1 trillion dollars, larger than any other company in the world, but despite its tremendous success so far, Bezos indeed manages his company as if it were a small business threatened daily by its very existence. At another meeting with all employees in November 2018, responding to a worker’s question about large companies like Sears going bankrupt, Bezos shocked the audience by saying: "Amazon is not too big to go bankrupt. Honestly, I foresee that one day Amazon will go bankrupt. If you look at large companies, you'll see that their lifespan is usually a little over thirty years, not a little over a hundred." When he made this comment, Amazon was twenty-four years old.

Why does Bezos talk to his employees about the end of Amazon? Perhaps he didn’t want to "jinx" the company's good progress and good fortune by speaking arrogantly, as if he were invulnerable. Maybe he was worried that a huge competitor like Walmart or Alibaba would find Amazon’s secret formula and catch them off guard. There is some truth to both possibilities, but deep down, what Bezos fears most is that Amazon will succumb to the so-called disease of large companies, where employees focus on each other instead of customers, where navigating a complex bureaucracy becomes more important than solving problems.