Lessons from Amazon's Early Shareholder Letters

I was reading Amazon's shareholder letters from their initial years (we're talking 1997). A company not just doubling or tripling, but growing 10x every single year!

And, in every letter, the one thing that was common was Amazon's commitment to "Customer Focus"- simple as that.

Reading these letters was like peeking into the mind of a CEO when they were nobody. When they were at 1% of what they are today. When there was buzz about everything "Internet" (sounds familiar? cough AI in 2025).

They were only talking about their business, growth and improvement. Their numbers spoke their truth.

Then came the 2000 dot-com crash.

Amazon's stock? Down by a crazy 80%!

But here's the plot twist -

While their stock took a massive hit, their sales? Still going up by 70%! What changed? Not the business - just the noise.

Here's when something important about the correlation between business and investing hit me.

It is the underlying business that matters. You have to understand it and believe in it, to really know what to buy. Because, that is what you're actually buying. A live running business. The numbers should make sense to you.

Quoting my favourite part from that year's shareholder letter:

"In the short term, the stock market is a voting machine; in the long term, it's a weighing machine.

Clearly there was a lot of voting going on in the boom year of '99—and much less weighing. We're a company that wants to be weighed, and over time, we will be—over the long term. In the meantime, we have our heads down working to build a heavier and heavier company."

You should be focusing on investing in companies building long term value for their customers. If not that, you're just buying share prices chasing some fluctuations.

And there I was, thinking "Man, I should've bought Amazon back then!" But, what could I have done - I was just 3 years old.