Book · How it actually went
The Everything Store
Brad Stone · 2013
A reported history of Amazon's first two decades, written by a journalist rather than a participant.
Why it is here
The value here is that it is reported rather than authorised. Company histories written with the company's cooperation tend toward the tidy narrative; this one includes the decisions that looked wrong at the time, the ones that were wrong, and the internal cost of the ones that worked.
For an angel the useful thread is the sustained tolerance for low margins and long payback in service of a position that would only become obvious much later. It is a study in what a genuinely long time horizon looks like operationally, as opposed to rhetorically.
Read it alongside Working Backwards, which describes the same company's internal mechanics from the inside, and note where the two accounts do not agree.
Read it if
You want an independently reported account of how a very large company was actually built.
Skip it if
You have limited time and would rather read about companies at the stage you invest in.