Jeff Bezos
Paradigmatic example of the transformative founder Anderson sought — Amazon was Scottish Mortgage's defining holding
Anderson made Amazon one of Scottish Mortgage's largest positions before 2010, when the consensus view was that it was a low-margin retailer in a commodity business. His conviction that Bezos was building an exponential platform — not a retailer — was central to Scottish Mortgage's extraordinary returns over the following decade. Anderson has cited Amazon as the clearest real-world demonstration of how power-law dynamics operate: a company that looked absurdly expensive on every conventional metric became one of the greatest compounders in stock market history.
Jeff Bezos
Biography
Jeffrey Preston Bezos (b. 1964) founded Amazon in 1994 after leaving a vice-presidency at the hedge fund D.E. Shaw, having concluded that the growth of the internet — then compounding at roughly 2,300% per year — made regret-minimization the rational framework for a career. He drove to Seattle, wrote the business plan en route, and built the company from an online bookstore into the defining platform business of the early twenty-first century: e-commerce, Amazon Web Services, Prime, logistics, devices and media. He stepped down as CEO in 2021, remaining executive chairman, and separately founded the space company Blue Origin in 2000.
For James Anderson, Bezos is not merely a successful founder whose company happened to make Scottish Mortgage a great deal of money. He is the paradigmatic case around which Anderson's entire philosophy organized itself: the founder who articulated a complete theory of long-term business building in public, in advance — the 1997 shareholder letter — and then executed it over a quarter century while the investment industry alternately mocked, doubted and capitulated. Anderson made Amazon one of Scottish Mortgage's largest positions before 2010, when the consensus read it as a low-margin retailer in a commodity business; his conviction that Bezos was building an exponential platform rather than a shop was central to the trust's transformation and to its extraordinary returns over the following decade and a half.
Key Stories
Impact on Anderson's Work
The template of the transformative founder. Bezos is the reference standard against which Anderson evaluates every subsequent founder — Elon Musk, Jack Ma, the next generation of unlisted entrepreneurs. The criteria recur verbatim in the essays: open-ended opportunity never to be defined or timed, founder leadership, a philosophy of business derived from first principles. Amazon is where Anderson learned to read the type.
The mathematical education. Bezos's 2015 shareholder letter supplied the sentence Anderson quotes as the license for concentrated, asymmetric betting: "Given a ten percent chance of a 100 times payoff, you should take that bet every time. But you're still going to be wrong nine times out of ten." It appears in the 2017 Annual Report as the justification for portfolio concentration — "In this viewpoint we follow Jeff Bezos."
The rebuke to forecasting. Amazon is Anderson's standing refutation of the prediction business: the most probable outcome, as assessed in advance, was failure — and the forecasters were both rational and wrong. In the 2022 interview he pressed the contrast further: at the height of the dot-com boom, what Bezos was articulating about Amazon bore no resemblance to what "the average telecoms or media company equally sucked up in the whole boom" was saying, and "the articulation given by individuals and companies of their culture and ambitions does enable you to differentiate." Reading such articulation, rather than modelling next quarter, is the experiential root of his refusal to forecast.
The institutional education. Amazon's history taught Anderson why markets undervalue transformation: the quarterly machinery punishes exactly the investments (Prime, AWS) that create the most long-run value. The lesson flows directly into his critiques of the earnings ritual — "the near pornographic allure" — and into the design of patient capital structures that would let other companies make Bezos-scale investments without being forced to justify them every ninety days.
The closing instruction. Appropriately, Anderson's valedictory essay ends with Bezos — the final CEO letter's plea against conformity: "We all know that distinctiveness — originality — is valuable... The world wants you to be typical — in a thousand ways, it pulls at you. Don't let it happen." Anderson redirects it at his own successors: "I don't think Tom and Lawrence need this advice, or would neglect the views of Mr Bezos."
Key Passages
"Now, possibly of all the many brilliant things that Jeff Bezos has said and done, I think it was one of his initial comments that there was this witness about his business that everything he and Amazon used got better and cheaper usually by around 50 percent per annum. And then he paused and probably gave a characteristic laugh and said, which I think is really important, 'I don't know where this is going to take me, but I think it is going to be very exciting.'"
"To read the initial shareholder letter of 1997 was to know that this was the ambitious, patient creation of a very special mind. To be frank our failure to recognise this was because of our own limitations not an absence of clues. We were simply too aware of market movements and too preoccupied with the terrible combination of short-term performance and fear of downside to be able to be committed owners."
"One of the best and bluntest pieces of advice comes from the 2015 Letter to Shareholders which stressed the virtues of risk-taking: 'Given a ten percent chance of a 100 times payoff, you should take that bet every time. But you're still going to be wrong nine times out of ten.'"
"We need to give up the excessive arrogance implicit in forecasts if we are to maximise returns. After all the most likely forecast a dozen years ago was clearly that Amazon would fail. That was rational analysis. But it wasn't a very good assessment of the probability adjusted pay-offs."
"A CEO should always live in the future, never in the present."
— Jeff Bezos, described by Anderson as "our favourite Jeff Bezos quote of 2017," in Aberration or Premonition? (2018)
Referenced In
- Aberration or Premonition? (2018)
- Graham or Growth (2018)
- Stay on the Road Less Travelled (2021)
- Scottish Mortgage Annual Report 2016
- Scottish Mortgage Annual Report 2017
- Masters in Business Interview (2022)
Scottish Mortgage Annual Report 2011
The global economy has seldom been stronger. The pace of economic change has never been greater. We suspect that this will for investors. Preoccupation with unpredictable short term oscillations in economies and markets has opened upa deep gulf between the crucial determinants of economicprogress and speculative behoviour.It seemsmost unlikely that thefuture of theglobol economy and of intelligent siock selection lies in on obility to ponlificate about Greek,lrishcndPortuguese debt.One of the virtues of a global investment trust with access to long term
Scottish Mortgage Annual Report 2012
Each year the Amazon Annual Report incorporates the original Mortgage are more distant and our thoughts are far less profound than thoseof Jeff Bezos we think thisis an admirablediscipline. What follows is therefore a summary of how our investment approach has evolved over the last decode. We should be prepared to be judged by it in the years ahead. ssas sa ji jo y pas oi w sa py the competitive advantage of companies they are notoriously sandomness and mean-reverting characteristics of most such data.
Scottish Mortgage Annual Report 2017
It may seem self-evident that our objective is to provide an attractive total return after costs for our investors. But this is far less a strategy than a desirable outcome. We have an investment process (described on page 17). Yet this is more about the method than the objective. Ultimately we endeavour to generate returns for savers and shareholders by helping to build and sustain excellent businesses over long periods. We prefer to focus on this task than on the daily gyrations of markets.
Aberration or Premonition?
Back in the mists of time, otherwise known as the 20th century, it was believed that markets provided a useful indication as to the future. Their genius lay in revealing needs and opportunities that individuals could not glean for themselves in isolation. Now we believe in no such lead indication. Mean reversion is all that matters. This applies to both markets and fund managers. If stocks rise it must be a bubble. If managers outperform it must be the time to remove assets. Corporate success is suspect. Fund manager alpha is inconceivable.
IC Interview: Tesla's Rise Is a Symbol of a Revolution in Energy
A lot of what's happened, a lot of the companies that we've owned have been powered by progress in Moore's law. We think that progress in Moore's law is underwritten for at least the next 10 to 15 years. A lot of our insights come from ASML, which is in itself a large holding, but that will end up in giving us something like a 60-fold increase in computing power. If you get that, then it's natural that more sectors will be impacted, that we haven't even started thinking about as yet in terms of most commentaries on the world.
Stay on the Road Less Travelled
After many years of anodyne reviews perhaps some bluntness is permissible in this final and twenty second version. There's much that I have misunderstood and misjudged over the two decades but my ever-growing conviction is that my greatest failing has been to be insufficiently radical. To be blunt: the world of conventional investment management is irretrievably broken. It demands far in excess of the canonical 'six impossible things before breakfast' that Alice in Wonderland propounds.
Masters in Business: James Anderson on Long-Term Investing
RITHOLTZ: This week on the podcast, man, strap yourself in. I love finding these people, just rock star fund managers who — who just blow everybody else’s doors off, but have somehow managed to maintain a relatively low profile over the decades they’ve been in — in the business, and today’s guest is absolutely an example of that.