From Brad Stone’s 2013 book, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon:
Amazon’s founder repeatedly suggested he had little reverence for the old “gatekeepers” of the media, whose business models were forged during the analogue age and whose function it was to review content and then subjectively decide what the public got to consume.
This was to be a new age of creative surplus, where it was easy for anyone to create something, find an audience, and allow the market to determine the proper economic reward.
“Even well meaning gatekeepers slow innovation,” Bezos wrote in his 2011 letter to shareholders.
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On the same page of the book, an Amazon executive tells book publishers:
“The iceman was a really important part of weekly American culture for years and his purpose was to keep your food from spoiling,” says Donald Katz, the founder and chief executive of Amazon’s Audible subsidiary. “But when refrigerators were invented, it was not about what the iceman thought, nor did anyone spend a lot of time writing about it.”
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And a quote about Bezos from an Amazon executive:
“If you’re not good, Jeff will chew you up and spit you out. And if you’re good, he will jump on your back and ride you into the ground.”
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