Amazon

From a Seattle online bookstore in 1994 to one of the largest companies on earth, Amazon built its identity around relentless customer focus, low margins by design, and willingness to invest through long stretches of unprofitability. Marketplace, Prime, AWS, Kindle, and the logistics network were each multi-year bets that compounded into separate businesses in their own right. The shareholder letters track that arc year by year - what was tried, what worked, what was abandoned, and what the company chose to optimize for instead of quarterly earnings.