Jeff Bezos's Billionaire Secrets to Success - Part 1

Jeff Bezos. Founder of Amazon.com. The 5th richest person in the world. Leader in modern retail. How did he do it? What was the secret to his business strategy?
The book The Everything Store, reveals all. It details Jeff Bezos’s journey as he built Amazon.com into one of the world’s largest, most successful companies. The author interviewed hundreds of Jeff’s closest associates, including the man himself.
In this article, you’ll learn timeless strategies from a man who built an Internet company from nothing to one of the largest companies in the world in under 20  years.
Here are the top lessons I learned from the book:
For an audio version of this article, you can listen to my podcast episodes:
Part 1:
1.Choose The Option That Will Give You Less Regret
Jeff invented what he calls the “regret minimization framework” to decide whether to stay at his safe job or to start his company. He considered what he would regret more on his death bed. He knew he would regret not taking a stab at the Internet (which was changing everything) versus leaving his safe job. It was a tough decision because he was not young and he had a family to support.
In the moment, you can overemphasize the importance of small pleasures and hold onto them. But if you use this framework, everything becomes a lot clearer.

Steve Jobs has a similar quote that he said during a Stanford commencement speech:
“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.
Almost everything–all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure–these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.” -Steve Jobs
2. Niche Down First To Grow
Bezos always had the plan to create a store that sold everything online. However, he did something very smart: He started by only selling books and dominating that category online.
This was very calculated. He mapped out a list of 20 different things he could sell including computers and CD’s. He started with books because they were a commodity that could be sourced from many places and were mainly published by two big publishers.
3. Investor Money Is Sometimes OK
I used to be really against getting investor money for most situations. I think it’s illogical to get that funding unless you need the cash or the business advice from the investor. Most people do this simply because they see everyone else doing it, they want to be on TV, or they think you make it once you get millions in funding.
Having studied the origin stories of Facebook, Apple, Walmart and Amazon.com more closely, I realize that there are situations where investor money is needed. And these companies support the reasons I just mentioned: if you need the money to grow or maintain your business and you need that investor’s mentorship.
In Amazon’s case, they needed the money to sustain and grow.
Note: if there’s no incredible urgency to grow, then you should be less inclined to accept investor money. Walmart took investor money in its early days because they were in a new, growing industry of discount retail and thus needed to take as much marketshare as soon as possible.
At the height of its growth, Walmart exhausted all forms of borrowing from banks and turned to going public as the last option to get...