Eugenewei.com Website Review

> It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you > will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your > enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you > do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in My first job at Amazon was as the first an*lyst in strategic planning, the forward-looking counterpart to accounting, which records what already happened. We maintained several time horizons for our forward forecasts, from granular monthly forecasts to quarterly and annual forecasts to even five and ten year forecasts for the purposes of fund-raising and, well, strategic planning. One of the most difficult things to forecast was our adoption rate. We were a public company, though, and while Jeff would say, publicly, that in the short run, the stock market is a voting machine, in the long run, it's a scale, that doesn't provide any air cover for strategic planning. It's your job to know what's going to happen in the future as best as possible, and every CFO of a public company will tell you that they take the forward guidance portion of their job seriously. Because of information asymmetry, an*lysts who cover your company depend quite a bit on guidance on quarterly earnings calls to shape their forecasts and coverage for their clients. It's not just that giving the wrong guidance might lead to a correction in your stock price but that it might indicate that you really have no idea where your business is headed, a far more damaging long-run reveal. It didn't take long for me to see that our visibility out a few months, quarters, and even a year was really accurate (and precise!). What was more of a puzzle, though, was the long-term outlook. Every successful business goes through the famous S-curve, and most companies, and their investors, spend a lot of time looking for that inflection point towards hockey-stick growth. But just as important,