Jeff Bezos has said that one of his greatest achievements during his 27 years as Amazon chief executive was making people yawn.
Routinely turning a surprising invention, such as “insanely fast” shipping or accessible cloud computing, into something commonplace enough to provoke a yawn had been the secret of his company’s success. “That yawn is the greatest compliment an inventor can receive,” Bezos wrote last week in an email to Amazon’s 1.3m employees.
Rather than yawning, Amazon’s shareholders have been cheering him after Bezos said he would step down as chief executive this summer. Some were quick to declare the entrepreneur, who built a start-up online bookseller into a multinational machine with a stock market valuation of $1.7tn, as arguably the greatest chief executive in tech history.