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In 2018, Amazon became the third-most valuable company at the bourses, forging ahead of Microsoft, and just behind Apple and Alphabet. This is remarkable, given that the company only started earning profits in 2002 – eight years after its inception. Throughout the first several years of its existence, Amazon pursued a strategy of aggressive growth by broadening its business portfolio (from being an online retailer of books to a retailer of “everything”) and through multiple acquisitions. During this time, even though financial analysts raised questions about Amazon’s high-risk growth strategy, the company sustained investor and customer interest, with investor sentiments fluctuating from “investor patience” to an “investor recklessness” to hold on to the company stock even when Amazon’s performance suggested they should do otherwise (Cengage, 2017). Clearly, customers and investors loved Amazon’s daring experiments with radical innovation in redefining the very concept of online retail. The question then arises: how were Amazon and, notably, its CEO and Chief Founder Jeff Bezos able to create a highly enabling entrepreneurial culture such that the organization remained customer-focused, inventive, and “patient”? For a business firm, what constitutes entrepreneurial culture? More importantly, as the organization progresses through its lifecycle and becomes large, and therefore, bureaucratic – with established processes, structures, routines and norms – how does it continue to maintain an entrepreneurial culture? This is the focus of the present study. Using a qualitative approach anchored on a study of historical documents, notably Amazon’s Letters to Shareholders (LTS) over a twentyyear timeframe (1997–2016), this study aims to identify the attributes or discerning characteristics of what constitutes an innovating firm’s entrepreneurial culture.

In Competition with Oneself: A Qualitative Inquiry into Amazon’s Entrepreneurial Culture