Founders: #321 Working with Jeff Bezos

29 days from now, I'm doing a live show in New York City on October 19th with Patrick

O'Shaughnessy from Invest Like the Best. Some of the best interviews and conversations I've had

have been on Patrick's show, Invest Like the Best. I just recorded a new episode with him. It is

episode 343. You can find it on the Invest Like the Best feed. It is episode 343, David Senra

in Service of Founders. If you live in New York City or you're looking for an excuse to travel to

New York City, highly recommend coming out to the show. It's guaranteed to be a fun and entertaining

conversation. If you're interested in that, I will leave a link so you can grab your tickets.

You can also get your tickets at founderspodcast.com. Second thing that I want to tell you about,

you're about to listen to an episode full of great ideas from Jeff Bezos. One of my favorite things

that I don't think I talk about in the episode that I heard Jeff Bezos say that changed my

perspective on the importance of high quality sleep was he was giving an interview and he said

that he makes sure he gets eight hours of sleep a night. As a result, his mood, energy, and decision

making is improved. And his point was that you get paid to make high quality decisions and you

can't do that if you are sleeping terribly. The only thing that I have found that has improved my

sleep has been getting an eight sleep. Eight sleep comes with a ton of useful and helpful

features. The best feature, the one that's most important to me is the ability to change the

temperature of my bed, not only before, so I make it ice cold before I jump into bed,

but it stays cold the entire night, so I wake up less. And because you control the temperature

of your bed with your phone, my bed's cold before I get in it, so I fall asleep faster. In my opinion,

that feature is worth 10 times the price. My wife and I were just at a wedding for a weekend away

in Canada. And now we have the same ritual every time we come home, where you say the same thing,

I cannot wait to get back to our eight sleep. There are very few no brainer investments in life,

but taking care of sleep and getting an eight sleep is one of them. You can get $150 off on

your eight sleep by going to eightsleep.com, four slash founders. Again, you get $150 off

by going to eightsleep.com, four slash founders, and that link will be down below as well.

And finally, I want to tell you about another product that several of my founder friends are

using, and that is Vesto. You can check them out at Vesto.com. Vesto makes it easy for you to invest

your business's idle cash. Vesto helps businesses of all sizes invest their cash in US treasuries.

When your business owns treasuries, that cash is backed by the US government,

and you earn interest while it sits there. I have one founder friend who raised a bunch of venture

capital, and he uses Vesto as a way to extend his runway. I have another founder friend who

bootstrapped his company, and he uses Vesto to get a better rate of return than if his money

was just sitting in his bank account. If this sounds interesting to you, I highly recommend

that you go to Vesto.com and check out what they have to offer. I know the founder, Ben,

I've spent a bunch of time with him. If you schedule a demo, if you go to Vesto.com and schedule

a demo, you actually speak directly to the founder, Ben, I think he's incredibly impressive. And I

think if you speak to him, you'll be impressed to make sure that you tell him that David from

founders sent you. And with that, let's get into the genius mind of Jeff Bezos.

Not long after the launch, my boss, Steve, took me aside. He told me that he had

an interesting meeting with Jeff, who made it very clear that setting and insisting on

high standards was an essential part of Steve's job. To make his point, Jeff asked Steve if he

had ever seen the movie The Aviator, the story of Howard Hughes, the business tycoon, aviator,

and film director. Jeff described a scene in which Hughes, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, visits one

of his aircraft manufacturing facilities to check on the progress of his latest project,

the Hughes H1 Racer, which is a sleek single passenger plane designed to set new speed records.

Hughes examines the plane closely, running his fingers along the surface of the fuselage.

His team watches anxiously. Hughes is not satisfied. Not enough, he says. Not enough.

These rivets have to be completely flush. I want no air resistance on the fuselage.

She's got to be cleaner. Cleaner? Do you understand? The team leader nods back to the drawing board.

Jeff had told Steve that it was his job to be like Howard Hughes. From then on, Steve had to run

his fingers over each new Amazon product, checking for anything that might reduce the quality and

insisting that his team maintain the highest standards. Steve was telling me the story for two

reasons. First, it was a heads up. He wanted me to know, as one of his senior team members,

that he would be sending me and my team back to the drawing board if our product didn't measure up.

Second, he was telling me that I, too, was responsible for setting high standards for our

products. He was telling me that I had to be more like Howard Hughes. That was an excerpt from the

book I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Working Backwards, Insights, Stories,

and Secrets from Inside Amazon. It was written by Colin Breyer and Bill Carr. This is the second

time I've read this book. I think this book is actually perfect to giving you an idea of what

it was like working with Jeff Bezos. The two co-authors actually worked with Jeff for a combined

27 years. One of the co-authors, Colin, was actually Jeff's shadow, went everywhere with him

every single meeting for two straight years. The purpose of this episode is going to mirror

the purpose of the book, where they said, this book is primarily about showing you

some of the unique principles and processes that Amazon, with enough detail, that you'll be able

to implement them if you choose to. Most of my notes and highlights are ideas directly from Jeff.

What makes this book so special and what I really want to focus on today, obviously Jeff's brilliant.

He's going to have a lot of fascinating and genius-level insights, but he also explains the

reason behind his insights. He says, when I write about what led Jeff to making key decisions in

this book, I can do so because I often directly asked him for his specific thinking behind his

insights. The reasoning behind them was often more illuminating than the insights themselves.

As that be like Howard Hughes' story illustrates, Jeff is a masterful communicator. He's able to

identify a handful of principles that are important to him in the building of his company, and then

he finds ways to teach those principles and to repeat those principles for everybody inside

the company. They make the point at the very beginning of a company, the founder is the culture,

the founder is the one that's teaching everybody the principles. It says Amazon open for business

in July 1995, staffed by a handful of people handpicked by Jeff Bezos. He decided that getting

in on the growth of the internet was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, so he gave up his lucrative and

promising career. He wanted to create a new and compelling experience for customers, so there's

just a few things to get started, few traits to get started. One, handpick core, two, try to find

and pursue a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and then the third thing that he's going to repeat over

and over again for the next 20 years is that a company can be a fast follower, they can copy,

they can imitate, or they can innovate. He repeats over and over again, Amazon is here to innovate.

We are here to create new and compelling experiences that did not yet exist. The hands-on

nature of Jeff Bezos at the beginning and really throughout the entire book cannot be understated.

In the very early days of the company, when it consisted of a handful of people working

in three small rooms, there was no formal leadership principles because Jeff was the

leadership principles. He wrote the job descriptions, he interviewed the candidates,

he packed in ship boxes and read every email that went out to customers. Taking part in

every aspect of the business allowed him to communicate the Amazon philosophy informally

to the relatively small group of employees. Jeff was never shy about how he wanted things done,

and he began to instill guiding principles like customer obsession and unrelentingly

high standards into every small step his team took. Jeff had one simple rule, it has to be

perfect. He'd remind his team that one bad customer experience would undo the goodwill of hundreds

of perfect ones. So if you've ever read Jeff's shareholder letters, you already know these principles,

he identified them from the very beginning and repeats them over and over again. I made,

I think three episodes now on Jeff's shareholder letters, I'll leave them all linked in the

show notes if you haven't listened to them. But the principles he would repeat are customer

obsession, innovation, frugality, personal ownership, bias for action, high standards,

under promising and over delivering. In fact, talks about in the book that the fact he would

prove read all the customer service emails. And so one thing that he wanted to do at the very

beginning speaking of under promising and over delivering is when you go to buy something on

the website, they'd say, hey, we're going to send this US postal first class mail, you might get

it in about a week. Then once you place the order, you would get an email from Amazon saying, hey,

we upgraded you for free. And you should have your item within two to three business days.

People love this under promise over deliver. This is one response from a customer that Jeff

particularly liked. This was called out as a complimentary upgrade in the shipment confirmation

email. Thank you emails for the upgrade included one that read quote, you guys are going to make

a billion dollars when Jeff saw that he roared with laughter and then printed out a copy to take

back to his office. There's so many people that work with Jeff that actually describe him the

same way. They say he's relentless, he has unreasonably high standards, and he prioritizes

speed. And so he has a genius idea on organizing groups within your company. But I think it could

be traced back actually to the very first job description, the very first ad he ran for Amazon

employees. And so it says the job description that he wrote for the very first employee said,

you must have experience designing and building large and complex systems. And you should be able

to do it in about one third of the time that most competent people think possible. And so that idea

that he repeats over and over again is the fact that speed matters in business. And so he's constantly

looking for ways to remove blocks that slow down the speed at which his company can move. And so

he comes up with this idea, which I'll get to in one minute, which is called single threaded

leadership. So he says, the organization that moves faster will innovate more simply because

it's able to conduct a higher number of experiments per unit of time. Yet many companies find themselves

struggling against their own bureaucratic drag, which appears in the form of layer upon layer of

permission, ownership, and accountability, all working against fast, decisive forward progress.

So that is the problem that Amazon's encountering and that almost every other company's going to

encounter. And so this is the solution they come up with this, the answer lies in an Amazon innovation

called single threaded leadership. So let me define single threaded leadership. They say it's

been one of Amazon's most useful inventions. The basic premise is that for each project, there

is a single leader whose focus is that project and that project alone. And that leader oversees teams

of people whose attention is similarly focused on that one project. And so this is a main point

that they're going to come back to over and over and over again, that everyone in your company

should work on one thing only full time. I saw a very similar idea in Peter Till's book, Zero to

One, I want to read from that book right now. Peter wrote, the best thing I did as a manager at PayPal

was to make every person in the company responsible for doing just one thing. Every employee's one

thing was unique. And everyone knew I would evaluate him only on that one thing. I had started

doing this just to simplify the task of managing people, but then I noticed a deeper result,

defining roles reduced conflict. Jeff and his team at Amazon are going to realize that,

but they also realize that if you can avoid dependencies, you actually move faster and

spend less. So let's jump into what they figured out or what the more about the problem they were

trying to solve and why they came up with this idea of single threaded leadership. We were spending

more time coordinating and less time building. And so what they do is they identify and then try to

avoid dependencies. So anytime two teams within a company have to speak to one another or have

to coordinate with one another to accomplish something that slows the entire company down.

Each overlap created a dependency, and they define dependency as something one team needs,

but can't supply for itself. And so the more dependencies you have, the more bureaucratic

drag you have, why is that because managing dependencies requires coordination, meaning

we have to talk to each other, people sitting down and hashing out a solution and coordination

takes time. We were spending too much time coordinating and not enough time building.

And so that leads directly into one of Jeff's best known ideas. And this idea that he says

that communication, internal company communication is actually a sign of dysfunction. He is not

trying. Most companies, Jeff's point is most companies try to get better at communicating

to Jeff. That means you're encouraging. He doesn't want to encourage communication. He

wants to eliminate communication. And so this is more about why and then Jeff's solution to this.

When your dependencies keep growing, it's only natural to spark dry speeding things up

by improving your communication. We finally realized that all of this cross team communication

didn't really need refinement at all. It needed to be eliminated. It wasn't just that we had the

wrong solution in mind. Rather, we've been trying to solve the wrong problem altogether. We finally

grasped the true identity of our problem, the ever expanding cost of coordination among teams.

This change in our thinking was nudged along by Jeff. I heard him say many times that if we

wanted Amazon to be a place where builders can build, we need to eliminate communication,

not encourage it. When you view communication across groups as a defect, which Jeff does,

the solution to your problems start to look quite different than traditional ones.

He suggested that each software team should build and clearly document a set of application

program interfaces. So API is what everybody calls API is right for all the services that

they offer an API is a set of routines protocols and tools for building software applications

and defining how software components should interact. Jeff's vision was that we needed to

focus on loosely coupled interaction via machines through well defined APIs, rather than via humans

through emails and meetings. This would free each team to act autonomously and move faster.

Okay, so two things. One, you got to stick with me because it's remarkable how all of Jeff's ideas

fit together and how the logic is cohesive and everything relates. One thing relates to another.

But the second thing is if you don't already own this book, I'm going to highly recommend that

you buy it. It's a no brainer. I think I paid like 20 bucks for it. But now he's going to go

into why this is so important a few pages later. Jeff insisted that instead of finding new and

better ways to manage our dependencies, we figure out how to remove them. Why? These largely

independent teams could now do their work in parallel. Before you had two teams waiting on

each other. Now you have two teams working continuously, right? These largely independent

teams can now do their work in parallel instead of coordinating better, they could coordinate

less and build more. Now, why is that? Why is fixing this so important, right? And this is an

entire chapter dedicated to this. And if you really think about what they're saying here, it's like

the reason that fixing this is so important is because less coordination means more building.

More building means more experimenting. More experimenting leads to more unpredictable,

but lucrative products. There's a sentence a couple pages earlier that I think relates to

everything time and time again. Think about how many freaking project products are inside Amazon,

right? What they're about to tell us is very valuable. Time and time again, we learned that

customers would behave in waves we hadn't imagined, especially for brand new features or products,

getting to the building of those brand new features and products faster is unbelievably

important. And one way to do that is through this Amazon innovation called single threaded

leadership. autonomous teams are built for speed, we must move faster. Then he ties this to everything.

This is one of my favorite things he's ever said, this is Jeff on decision making speed.

And once you hear the way he thinks about this, you understand why he keeps

emphasizing prioritizing and repeating the need for speed. And this is from his 2016 shareholder

letter. Jeff suggested that most decisions should probably made with somewhere around 70% of the

information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, he said, in most cases, you're probably being

slow. Plus, either way, you need to be good at quickly recognizing and correcting bad decisions.

If you're good at course correcting being wrong, maybe less costly than you think,

whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure. And what's fascinating is once you apply

this idea to your company, realize the bottleneck goes from being too much communication and too

much waiting around for other people, which delays your ability to build new products,

to actually the limiting factor is going to be great leaders. We were able to identify

some brilliant managers, they turned out to be notoriously difficult to find in sufficient

numbers, even at Amazon, great team leaders proved to be rarities. Another way to think

about that is great. Anything is rare. The limiting factor here is great leadership.

And then the second part of that is they have to work on this full time. They cannot do anything

else. This is just a fantastic line on why the best way to fail and inventing something

is by making it somebody's part time job. And so the problem that they were trying to solve and

the vision they had was how to move faster, remove, remove dependencies. But what they also

realized once this was in place that ownership and accountability are much easier to establish

under the single threaded leader model. And why? Because Jeff Bezos, just like Peter Teal,

are only evaluating that person on one thing and one thing only.

Another unique idea in the way to build and run Amazon that Jeff came up with, he actually found

this idea in a paper and then decided to use it. So it's something I'm going to repeat over and over

again. You've heard me say it on past podcasts, but if you're paying attention, the whole world is

a classroom. You'll be shocked. If you go through this book, you'll be shocked at how many ideas

Jeff got from reading a paper, reading a book, having a conversation that he used inside of

Amazon. If you're paying attention, the whole world is a classroom. So says if you were asked

recently hired Amazon employees, what is surprising most in their time at the company so far, one

response would certainly top the list, the eerie silence in the first 20 minutes of many meetings,

the reason for the silence, a six page document that everyone must read before a discussion begins.

Amazon relies far more on the written word to develop and communicate ideas than most companies.

And this difference makes for a huge competitive advantage. And so this is when they kick out

PowerPoint and they switch to these narratives. So Colin is Jeff shadow at this time.

Remember, he goes everywhere Jeff goes, sits on every single meeting, this the insights that he

has in this book are remarkable. And so a long time ago, way before Wi Fi on planes, he would take

a lot of flights with Jeff. And so one thing that I love that I've learned about Jeff from the very

first book I read on him, and it's really important, I think a lot of people already know to use this

in the company, the importance of a shared base of knowledge. If Jeff thinks there's a book that's

valuable to read, he doesn't it's not that he reads by himself, his entire he makes this entire

executive team read this. And so on this flight, they're both reading the same essay, the idea was

like, we're going to read and then discuss this essay, this is way before the narrative structure

of the meetings, right, they're still using PowerPoint, and it's not going well, and so they're

looking for solutions. So again, if you're paying attention, the whole world is a classroom.

After a particularly difficult presentation in early 2004, we had some downtime on a flight.

And so we read and discussed an essay called the cognitive style of PowerPoint pitching out

corrupt within written by Edward Tuft, Tuft identified in one sentence, the problem that we'd

been experiencing, as analysis becomes more causal, multivariate comparative evidence based and

resolution intense, the more damaging the bullet list PowerPoint becomes. Tuft proposed a solution

in the essay for serious presentations, it would be useful to replace PowerPoint slides with paper

handouts with words, high resolution handouts allow viewers to contextualize, compare, narrate,

and recast evidence. He offered wise advice on how to get started, make this transition in large

organization, making this transition in large organizations requires a straightforward executive

order. From now on, your presentation software is Microsoft Word, not PowerPoint, get used to it,

that is Tuft's words, and that is essentially what we did. And so Jeff sends an email because this

can only come from him, the S team received an email with the following subject like no PowerPoint

presentations from now on, the message was simple and direct, S team members would be required to

write short narratives describing their ideas. Jeff was the only person in the company who could

mandate such a change. And he offered a short explanation for the reason behind the change.

The reason writing a four page memo is harder than writing a 20 page PowerPoint is because the

narrative structure of a good memo forces better thought and better understanding of what's more

important than what and how things are related PowerPoint style presentations somehow give

permission to gloss over ideas to flatten out any sense of relative importance and to ignore the

interconnectedness of ideas. And then they describe why spending the first, you know, 20 minutes of

an hour long meeting in silence reading these narratives together is so valuable is one of

my favorite sentences are paragraphs in the entire book to why books have lasted for 5000 years.

In fact, I got a text from a founder friend the other day, he was asking me why, why, if I've

noticed that why billionaires read so much, I'll get to that minute. The silence can be unsettling

at first, but it becomes routine. Even though you cannot hear it with a well written narrative,

there is a massive amount of useful information that is being transferred in those 20 minutes,

there is a massive amount of useful information that is being transferred in those 20 minutes.

So a friend texted me the other day him and his brother are co founders of a company doing

really, really well. They're both relentless learners. And they've raised a bunch of money

for their startup from several billionaires, many of which are world famous. If I had mentioned

them, you'd know who they are. And in many cases, they get to spend time with them. They,

they'd go to their houses, they'd see their libraries. And I got a text from the other day

said something like, I know a bunch of middling entrepreneurs, companies aren't that successful,

they don't read at all. And then yet I spend time with all these billionaires. And he's,

and they read all the time is like, why do billionaires read so much. And I think this

sentence right here describes that even though you cannot hear it, there's a massive amount

of useful information that is being transferred in those 20 minutes, that useful information,

that knowledge can then obviously be turned into profit. It can make their companies better,

it can make them more money. That is why you see, and I talked about this on the, I had

lunch with Sam's episode, I think it's episode 297. And, you know, I've seen this over and over again

too, I had the same realization that my friend had. But I just remember after spending two hours

with Sam's out talking about all, I mean, you knew everything about, you knew way more about

business history and read way more biographies than I have. And I remember on the drive back,

it just hit me. It's like, yeah, of course, you don't go and, you don't go and sell a company

for $38 billion and then read and learn all this stuff. He'd been doing that since he was 20.

By the time I met him, he was an entrepreneur for over 61 years, and he was still up until the day

he died, still reading books, still listening to podcasts, still being curious about the world

around him, still treating the world like a classroom. And so not only do they read a lot,

but they also are able to produce unique insights. This is a simple tip from Jeff Bezos on how to

produce unique insights in what you're reading. Jeff has an uncanny ability to read a narrative

and consistently arrive at insights that no one else did, even though we're all reading the same

thing. After one meeting, I asked him how he was able to do that. He responded with a simple and

useful tip that I have not forgotten. He assumes each sentence he reads is wrong until he can prove

otherwise. He's challenging the content of the sentence, not the motive of the writer, and I love

this part. Jeff, by the way, was usually among the last to finish reading. Okay, so they realize

the narrative structure is superior to run their meetings. What they wind up also realizing is that

it's superior for building products. For meetings, it's called a six page narrative for product design

or new product creation. It's called the PR FAQ. The Kindle is actually the first product. And we'll

get into more detail about how the Kindle came to be, including this very important meeting that

Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs had in 2003. And so this idea of working backwards is so ingrained in the

Amazon culture. They thought it was so important that they named the book out after it. And really,

it's just you start with the desired customer experience. So it says most of Amazon's major

products since 2004 have one thing in common. They were created through a process called working

backwards. It is so central to the company's success that we use it as the title for this book.

Working backwards is a systematic way to vet ideas and create new products. It is a key tenant, or

assuming it's key tenant, is to start by defining the customer experience, then iteratively work

backwards from that point until a team achieves clarity of thought around what to build its

principle tool is a second form of written narrative called the PR FAQ short for press release,

frequently asked questions. And so you start from the customer's perspective, you literally write a

press release for a product that does not exist yet, right? The press release that literally

announces the product as if it were ready to launch and an FAQ anticipating the tough questions

and then work backwards from that. And so once again, we see Jeff come up with unique insights

because they weren't doing this originally, right? So they would come up with new ideas

and they'd pitch them to Jeff. And in the book, it says, listen, we just tried, we used like MBA

style methods, we would gather data about the size of a market, we would construct financial models

that project annual sales, we would calculate gross margins, assuming a certain cost of goods

from our suppliers, we project operating margins, we would outline deals that we could make with

other media companies. And Jeff did not find that this was a good use of their time. We had

several meetings with Jeff to present our ideas, he never seemed satisfied or convinced. He found

our proposals light on the details as to how the service will work for customers. He finally asked,

where are the mockups? Jeff was referring to the visual representations that would show exactly how

the new service would look on the Amazon website. We didn't have any mockups, we just wanted to

sell Jeff on the opportunity. We would deal with the customer experience and other details once

we got his go ahead. But if Jeff wants to see mockups, you had better make a mockup a few weeks

later, we were back with mockups. Jeff listened carefully to our presentation yet again, and

then began asking detailed questions. There's so many sentences in the book just like that.

You're talking to him, you're presenting to him, and he gets right to the heart of the matter of

read that in other books as well. And so he just goes straight down the details. He would ask questions

about every button, every word, every link, every color. For music, he asked how our service would

be better than iTunes. For ebooks, he wanted to know how much the ebooks would cost. He asked

that people would be able to read their ebooks on a tablet or a phone as well as their PC. We

answered as we had before, we had not figured out the stuff yet. That answer did not go over well

at all. Jeff wanted to know exactly what we were going to build and how would be better for customers.

To Jeff, a half baked mockup was evidence of half baked thinking. And he was quick to say so,

often using strong language to make his point. And so this is the first time I wrote in the book

on my notes, but it's over and over again. Founders force the issue. Founders are forcing

functions, a forcing function, an event that forces one to take action and produce a specific

result. Remember this for later. It is mentioned over and over again, the fact that this is the

role that Jeff is playing inside of Amazon. Jeff suggested a different approach for the next meeting.

Write a narrative document in it, describe your best idea for a device or service for the digital

media business. He even offered to do it with them. This is incredible. So the next time they

meet, they bring their ideas and it looks like a press release announcing what their idea does

for the customer. And they're going to work backwards from that. This is the birth of this

idea. One person proposed an ebook reader that would use new ink screen technology. Another

described a new take on the MP3 player. Jeff wrote his own narrative about a device he called the

Amazon Puck. When I'm about to, this is crazy. When I'm about to read to you, he wrote in 2004,

he is going to describe the Amazon Echo, which is going to sell hundreds of millions of these things.

The Amazon Puck would sit on your countertop and could respond to voice commands like Puck,

please order a gallon of milk and the Puck would then place the order with Amazon.

Why is Jeff forcing the issue? Why is he insisting that we're doing this?

Because writing required us to be thorough and precise. We had to describe features, pricing,

how the service would work, why customers would want it. Half-baked thinking was harder to disguise

on the written page than in PowerPoint slides. Jeff then pushed the idea further. He is the

forcing function. What if we thought of the product concept narrative as a press release?

Usually in a conventional organization, a press release is written at the end

of the product development process. In this standard process, that company works forward.

And really, what they're telling you is Amazon inverted this process.

And so the Kindle is going to be the first product in which they used and they created

using this press release approach. And this is part of one of the reasons why it's so important.

Previously, they were working forward like every other company, now they're working backwards.

When we were working forward, we were trying to invent a product that would be good for Amazon,

the company, not the customer. When we wrote a Kindle press release and started working backwards,

everything changed. We focused instead on what would be great for customers,

an excellent screen for a great reading experience, an ordering process that would

make buying and downloading books easy, a huge selection of books, low prices. We would never

have had the breakthrough necessary to achieve that customer experience were not for the press

release process, which forced the team to invent multiple solutions to customers' problems.

And in the Kindle chapter, there's an entire chapter dedicated to describing the product

development. They go into why working backwards helps your company develop new skills. You develop

new skills over a long period of time, your company obviously becomes more valuable.

Another thing that Jeff insisted on, you have to have constraints. The press release portion

of these documents has to be one page or less. And then I think they limit it to about five pages,

five pages or less for the FAQ section. And then this is why I just use the word forcing function

as the founder. That's the term they actually use here. Restricting the length of the document

is a forcing function. We have seen that it develops better thinkers and communicators,

founders develop better teammates, which in turn, develop better products. It's the same idea.

So I want to spend a lot of time on the development of the Kindle before I get there.

I want to go back to this idea that the whole world is a classroom. And you can't help but

notice how many times Jeff is just using ideas from other companies or from things that he's

reading and he's using them inside of Amazon, right? He's using them as a metaphor to use it

to help his company perform better. But I was also struck by this idea while I was reading this book

that you could think of the belief system of the founder as the language of the company. That is

why it's usually written down and repeated over and over again. And it definitely is the case

in Amazon. But you also see the belief system of the founder expressed through their actions.

And so this idea that Jeff identified with from day one that we're going to obsess over customers,

he'd make every single person in the company, including himself, work customer service,

actually take calls. And so I love this. And there's a lot of good ideas here, including the

importance of combining data and anecdotes data and anecdotes make a powerful combination when

they're in sync. And they're a valuable check on one another when they're not the most powerful

anecdote in this regard features Jeff himself. Amazon has a program called customer connection,

which is mandatory for corporate employees. Every two years, the corporate employee is

required to become a customer service agent for a few days. They have to listen in on calls,

watch email and chat interactions and then handle some customer contacts directly.

Jeff is not exempted from this program. While I was working as his shadow, it came

time for his customer connection recertification. Jeff was particularly good with customers over

the phone. No, he was sometimes overly generous. He gave one customer a full product refund when

the policy was to refund the shipping cost only is one example. But this is fascinating, he's

going to use an idea from Toyota and realize oh, Toyota has an idea and implements an idea in their

company that we're lacking here. And it's because of this again, he's showing with his actions how

important customer service is on the first day of training, we listen to the CS to CS agents handle

a few calls. On one call, the customer complained that her lawn furniture had arrived damage.

The CS agent asked for the product number. As the customer was looking for it, the CS agent

muted the call and said to us, I bet she's referring to this lawn chair and pointed to

the product on the Amazon site. Sure enough, when the customer read out the number from

the package slip, it was the one that the CS agent had predicted it would be.

After the call was ended, Jeff asked, how did you know the customer is going to say that?

The CS agent responded that it happened quite often with this newly listed product.

The packaging was inadequate, and the furniture got banged up in transit.

Jeff had recently been learning about how Toyota approached quality control

and continuous improvement. He mentions this over and over again in his shareholder letters,

by the way, this this idea of continuous improvement that he learned from the Japanese.

One technique they use in their automobile assembly line was the and encored and encored.

When any worker notices a quality problem, they are authorized to pull a cord that stops

the entire assembly line. A team of specialists swarms to the cord puller station, they troubleshoot

the issue and they develop a fix so the error never happens again. Here was a similar situation

at Amazon, except without the and encored. Jeff yelled out, we need an and encored for customer

service. And so they wind up instituting one. It turns out that the Amazon version of the

and encored empowered the right people, those on the front lines who were talking directly to

customers, it surface serious issues as soon as they were noticed. Okay, so then we're going to

go into why working backwards are so important and the development of the Kindle. Before we go

to that, they quote heavily from Jeff shareholder letters to really explain, remember, the belief

system of the founder is the language of the company. Jeff's belief systems were written down

in the shareholder letters and then repeated over and over again inside the company. And so this is

Jeff writing in his shareholder letters sharing his belief, right? We want to be a large company

that's also an invention machine. We want to combine the extraordinary customer serving

capabilities that are enabled by size with the speed of movement, nimbleness and risk acceptance

mentality normally associated with entrepreneurial startups. I believe we are the best place in

the world to fail. And we have plenty of practice and failure and he's not failing just for failure

sake, he doesn't want to fail, right? This guy's super competitive. But this is his main point,

failure and invention are inseparable twins. He just said Amazon will be a place, the best

place in the world to invent. So failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent,

you have to experiment. And if you know in advance, it's going to work. It's not an experiment. They

did not know in advance, the Kindle is going to work. Most large organizations embrace the idea

of invention, but are not willing to suffer the string of failed experiments necessary to get

there. And so one competitive advantage advantage does Jeff Bezos sees it that Amazon has is they're

willing to fail for a longer period of time. Long term thinking levers are existing abilities,

unless it's do new things we couldn't otherwise contemplate. Long term orientation interacts

well with customer obsession. If we can identify a customer need and if we can further develop

conviction that the need is meaningful and durable, our approach permits us to work patiently

for multiple years to deliver a solution. The key word here is patiently, many companies will give

up on an initiative if it does not produce the kind of returns they're looking for within a handful

of years. Amazon will stick with it. Patience and carefully manage investment over many years

can pay off greatly. And so you might be thinking, okay, that's great, David, what does this have

to do with working backwards? And they're about to get into that working backwards exposes skill

sets that your company needs, but does not yet have. So the longer your company works backwards,

the more skills it develops, and the more valuable valuable it becomes, the more things it can invent.

And his whole key for inventing is he only wants to invent where and when differentiation matters

invention works well, where differentiation matters. In the company's early days, the hardware

that powered Amazon's data centers was not the point of differentiation that changes with time,

which we'll get to in a little bit, was not a point of differential differentiation with the

customer creating a compelling book buying online experience was, whereas with the Kindle, which

we're about to go into, others were selling ebooks. So there was a real value in owning and controlling

the creation for an outstanding device for our customers to read the ebooks on differentiation

with customers is often one of the key reasons to invent. And so they're constantly talking about

the way, hey, normal companies, they build things with a skills forward approach. What does that

mean? They look inside the company, like what are the assets that we have? What are the skills we

have? What can we build with that? Working backwards forces you to master new skills. Again,

working backwards, exposed skillsets that your company needs, but does not have yet. So the

longer that your company works backwards, the more skills it develops, and the more skills

it develops, the more valuable it becomes over time. Amazon's working backwards process,

starting with customers needs and not corporate needs or competencies often demands that in

Jeff's words, we exercise new muscles, never mind how uncomfortable and awkward feeling

those first steps might be. And so I say all that to set this up a meeting with Steve Jobs

led to the invention of the Kindle. So you can really think about what's about to take place

here is how the iPod and iTunes influenced the development of the Kindle. This meeting is going

to happen in 2003. At this time, I think 77% of Amazon 70 or 77% somewhere around there of Amazon's

revenue came from like physical books, books, CDs, music, that kind of thing, right? And they

clearly see that this wasn't going to last forever. So it says in 2003, Jeff and a bunch of people

from Amazon traveled to the Apple campus in Cupertino to meet Steve Jobs, who had invited us

down for a visit. Jobs got to the real purpose of the meeting and announced that Apple had just

finished building their first Windows application. He calmly and this is why I love jobs. I love

his confidence. He calmly and confidently told us that even though it was Apple's first attempt to

build for Windows, he thought it was the best Windows application anyone had ever built. He then

personally gave us a demo of the soon to be launched iTunes for Windows. During the demo,

Jobs talked about how this would transform the music industry up until this point, if you wanted

to buy digital music from Apple, you needed a Mac, which at this time comprised less than 10%

of all the home computer market. Apple's first foray into building software on the competing

Windows platform showed how serious they were about the digital music market. Now anyone with

a computer would be able to purchase digital music from Apple. And then Jobs immediately attacks

Amazon's business. Jobs said that CDs would go the way of other outdated music formats like the

cassette tape, and their importance and portion of overall music sales would drop quickly. His next

comment could be construed as either a matter of fact statement or an attempt to go Jeff into

making a bad business decision by acting impulsively. He said Amazon has a decent chance of being the

last place to buy CDs. The business will be high margin but small. You'll be able to charge your

premium for CDs since they'll be hard to find. Jeff did not take the bait. Only Jeff can speak to

how the meeting impacted his thinking. What we can say is what Jeff did and did not do afterward.

What he didn't do and what many companies would have done is to kick off an all hands on deck

project to combat this competitive threat and race to build a copycat digital music service.

Over and over again Jeff says I do not want to be a copycat. I don't want to follow. I don't want

to be a fast follower. I want to lead and I want to invent. Instead Jeff took time to process what

he learned from the meeting and formed a plan. He appointed a single threaded leader which is the

guy Steve from the Howard Hughes story at the very beginning. So you have a single threaded

leader named Steve to run digital who would report directly to Jeff so that they could work

together to formulate a vision and a plan for digital media. And I love the explanation of this.

I'm going to read the whole paragraph to you because I think it's so great. In other words his

first action was not at what decision. It was a who and a how decision. This is an incredibly

important difference. Jeff did not jump straight to focusing on what product to build which seems

like the straightest line from A to B. Instead the choices he made suggest that he believed

that the scale of the opportunity was large and the scope of the work required to achieve success

was equally large and complex. He focused first on how to organize the team and who was the right

leader to achieve the right result. At that time Amazon did not have billions of dollars to spend

on digital media or anything else for that matter. So we would need to lean heavily on the frugality

principle to stay in the game with the bigger players. Jeff was a student of history and regularly

reminded us that if a company didn't or couldn't change and adapt to meet shifting consumer needs

it was doomed. Remember he's got to transition his business from 70% physical goods to essentially

all digital. And he used the example of Kodak's failure to do so as a warning sign. You don't

want to become Kodak he would say referring to the once mighty photography giant that had missed

a turn from film to digital. We were not going to sit back and wait for this to happen to Amazon.

So let's pause here before we move on. Again it goes back to this main idea in the book.

You need to have single threaded leadership on every single important initiative or project

inside your company. Why? Jeff felt that if we tried to manage digital media as a part of the

physical media business it would never be a priority. The bigger business carried the company

after all and would always get the most attention. Getting digital right was highly important to Jeff

and he wanted Steve to focus on nothing else. In other words Jeff is disrupting himself.

Then we go back again you can think of the belief system of the founder as the language of the company.

What is he going to repeat? You can invent or copy we choose to invent. We had many meetings

with Jeff I would present our ideas for a music product or a company we might acquire. Each time

we had these meetings Jeff would reject what he saw as copycat thinking emphasizing again and again

and again that whatever music product we built it had to offer a truly unique value prop for the

customer. Let me repeat that. Any product we build has to offer a truly unique value proposition

for the customer. He would frequently describe the two fundamental approaches that each company

must choose between when developing new products and services. We could be a fast follower and make

a close copy of successful products. We just make another iTunes right? We could go that route.

We could make a close copy of a successful product that other company had built or we

could invent a new product on behalf of our customers. He wanted Amazon to be a company that

invents. He would immediately force this. He recognized that building a copycat version

of the iPod and iTunes was a non-starter. He chose the path of invention by looking beyond

the music category. This is so important because every other big company is essentially at this

time just copying or attempting to copy Apple. They want to go into this conference where these

music executives are speaking. They know Jeff's in the audience. They encourage him because

these are just more revenue for the music industry. They're like, yeah, Amazon should build this.

And this would be more revenue for Amazon and more revenue for universal music. And Jeff's like,

you're not controlling what I'm thinking. You don't get to dictate the products that my company

makes. There is no differentiation. We cannot beat. We can't out Apple Apple. So you don't try.

What did Warren Buffett say? How do you beat Bobby Fisher? The answer is you play him in any game

except chess. Back to this. He chose the path of invention by looking beyond the music category,

which led him to begin Amazon's foray into digital by focusing on e-books and an e-book

reader device. In doing so, Jeff demonstrated his belief that true invention leads to greater

long-term value for customers and shareholders. Jeff is so good. This guy is so good. Look how he

takes what Apple did to the music industry, what they use for iPod and iTunes and how it influenced

the development of the Kindle. There's a reason why I keep making podcasts after podcasts and

reading book after book of Jeff Bezos. In fact, there's a line I read years ago in the CB Insights

newsletter that really hits home how special this guy is. And it says to read Jeff Bezos'

shareholder letters is to get a crash course and running a high growth internet business from someone

who mastered it before any of the playbooks were written. Listen to what he does here. Jeff zeroed

in on the fundamental difference between the digital media retail business and our existing

physical media retail business. Our competitive advantage in physical media was based on having

the broadest selection of items available on a single website. But this could not be a competitive

advantage in digital media where the barrier to entry was low any other company could match our

offering. Any other company could build an e-book store where they offer the same breadth and depth

of books and songs as any other digital venue. They just had to be willing to undertake the tedious

work of aggregating the digital files together into a single online catalog. So we knew we couldn't

meet Jeff's requirement that our digital business have a distinct and differentiated offering just

on selection and aggregation. Remember, he's the forcing function. He's saying our digital business

must have a distinct and differentiated offering. And so Jeff tells Steve, right, the guy with a

single threaded leader on here, we have to move out of the middle and venture to either side of

the value chain in digital that meant focusing on applications and devices consumers used to read,

watch or listen to content. As Apple had already done with iTunes and the iPod, we all took note

of what Apple had achieved in digital music in a short period of time and sought to apply those

learnings to our long term product vision, our long term product vision in books, not music.

We believe that customers would want the e-book equivalent of the iTunes iPod experience,

an app paired with a mobile device that offered customers any book ever written.

The content available at a low price that they could buy, download and start reading in seconds,

but we would need to invent the device ourselves. The idea, this is so crazy. Remember,

now we know how successful it is. I had the first Kindle, by the way, which is like this big bulky

white, it's like 400 bucks too. It was crazy. But anyways, this is like, now this makes sense. But

back then, this is how this is why he's so special. The idea that Amazon, a pure e-commerce

distributor of retail products made by others, which is what they were at this time,

the idea that Amazon, a pure e-commerce distributor of retail products made by others

would become a hardware company and sell its own reader device was controversial.

The Kindle chapter in this book is incredible. I'm still in it. Not enough myself. I wrote in

the margin actually outsourced and your company doesn't acquire the skills. Amazon wants the

skills. What does that mean? Our decision to become a hardware device manufacturer would inform

a number of decisions down the road. Many companies that decide to enter a business

area in which they have little internal expertise are capability, which is what Amazon doesn't

have a description of Amazon at this time, right? They choose to outsource. This can sometimes

be a mistake. And they use an example in the early days of e-commerce, brick and mortar retailers

created their first online retail sites, they brought in third party developers, this approach

enabled them to move quickly, but it deprived them of the flexibility to innovate and differentiate.

And that's a big problem because who had that ability to differentiate and innovate and who are

now these brick and mortar retailers going online and competing directly against Amazon.

We know how that ends. Retailers who outsource e-commerce lack the ability to ideate and test

new products. And so they list a bunch of products that Amazon was able to test way faster because

they had this ability. They could only pick from a menu of options from their outsource provider.

At best, they would be fast followers of what the innovators built, the innovators being Amazon.

So like, okay, we're going to, we're going to take that same idea and go out and acquire the

skills necessary to become, to transform from a pure e-commerce distributor of retail products

made by others to hardware makers. And this directly leads to an idea that you and I have

been talking about over and over again today. Founders force the issue. Not outsourcing means

it's going to be more expensive. We're going to spend a lot more money. It's going to take

longer to get a product out there. But at the end of that, if we are successful, we have a set of

skills that we lacked beforehand, then we can go out and do this over and over again. Again,

founders force the issue. We'd known that the Kindle would take time and money to develop,

but by the middle of 2005, it became clear that it was taking much longer and consuming

more money than we had anticipated. What was Jeff Bezos' reaction to this? There was a heated

discussion about the surprising ramp up in expenses. At some point in the debate,

someone asked Jeff point blank, how much more money are you willing to invest in Kindle?

Jeff calmly turned to our CFO, shrugged his shoulders and asked, how much money do we have?

That was Jeff's way of signaling the strategic importance of Kindle. Another example of the

whole world is the classroom and Jeff taking an idea from another company. Jeff went through many

blackberry devices. This was hilarious. A few of which had been fried by sweat dripping on them

during his workouts. This sounds really intense. The feature that really attracted him to the

blackberry was constant connectivity. Jeff loved that his phone was always connected

and automatically refreshed itself to display every new email. In those early days of digital

media, this was a first and the blackberry did this without having to connect to a computer.

And so he has this idea like, what's the idea, the principle behind that idea that we can apply

to the Kindle? He wanted the Kindle to be like the blackberry. No wires, never need to connect to

your PC. He talked over and over again about the ability to be patient, to have long-term thinking

and to want to invent and invest in that invention. That meeting with Steve Jobs happened in 2003.

The Kindle goes on sale for the first time all the way in November of 2007. It retails for $399

and would hold 200 books. It sold out in less than six hours. And so another example of being

influenced by another company, if you ever read the Everything Store, it's talked about a bunch

in there, the fact that Jeff met with Costco founder Jim Senegal and the meeting changed the

trajectory of Amazon. He implemented a bunch of ideas in that meeting into Amazon. One of those

led directly to this membership program that now over 100 million people are members of,

myself included, which is Amazon Prime. What's fascinating is how fast they built Prime.

Jeff sends an email in October 2004 saying, we need to do this. And by February of next year,

it is live and a product that actually exists. This is what the email read. We should not be

satisfied. Remember, back to the founder is a forcing function, right? We should not be satisfied

with the growth of our retail business. This is a house on fire issue. And we need to dramatically

improve the customer experience around shipping. We need a shipping membership program. Let's

build and launch it by the end of the year. And so their thinking was, let's not do what people

expect now, but where is this going? Before you had to drive to the store to get something,

then you order on Amazon, maybe comes a week, 10 days later, then five days later than three days

later. Now today, it comes in a few hours, right? And they knew this all the way back in 2004. So

let's start building for that future today. Two day shipping and eventually one day sipping,

and same day shipping will become the norm. Therefore, while what we've built is good,

it is not good enough. We should do this now. We have an unshakable conviction that long-term

interests of shareholders are perfectly aligned with the interests of customers. This is clearly

in the interest of our customers. So we will do it now. And again, there is many such

sentences like this one in the book, Jeff insisted on this path, which resulted in Amazon Prime.

Now it was fascinating as they developed Prime, we see that Jeff is just very uncomfortable with

mediocrity. And he still wants to make sure that his company is not going with the skills

forward approach that most companies have. Let's start with the optimal customer experience and

work backwards from that. And you're like, Jeff, well, we don't have the skills exactly. So we're

going to go out and acquire those skills. And over time, that's going to make our company more

valuable. Now the customers have gotten a taste of free shipping, they no longer wanted to be

forced to choose between slow and free and fast and expensive. Jeff exhibits discomfort when

presented with an either or proposition in which both results are mediocre viewed through his

customer obsession lens. The only answer to the question, which would you rather have,

slow and free or fast and expensive is fast and free. So the catch was that fast and free

was where Amazon needed to go next, but our fulfillment capabilities were not yet up to the

task. If you had read the book up until this point, this what about tell you is not in the book,

but you would draw derive this conclusion at the end of that says the fast and free was where

Amazon need to go next, but our fulfillment capabilities were not up to the task period.

Most skills forward companies would stop there. That's not where Amazon stopped. It's where they

started. Another great idea. Walk your store. Walk your store again goes back to the founders as

the forcing function. More most retail CEOs walk the store when they have a chance and Jeff is no

exception. The typical physical retail CEO can pay a visit to his outlet when they're in the area

and they'll do a bit of browsing and observe what's going on. An online retail CEO like Jeff

can walk the store anytime and Jeff's preferred walking the store time was early Saturday and

Sunday mornings. It was not unusual for me to wake up at 7am on a weekend and read five or six

messages from Jeff to the relevant teams on issues that he had found while walking his store

that morning. This is what he expects when he emails you when he sent a team an idea. It did

not need to be implemented, but it definitely needed to be evaluated and that evaluation needed

to be communicated back to him. Again, he's showing with his actions this is important to him.

They're supposed to have a meeting on prime that Jeff scheduled the meeting on Friday.

Forcing Amazon had this. They had a like a site wide outage. There was their experiencing technical

issues. So this guy named VJ, he actually had to cancel the meeting, which is the right thing to do

and then reschedule for another time. Jeff took in his stride and said, okay, we can reschedule

the meeting. How about tomorrow morning at my house? And this idea that Jeff says that the

meeting is genius. That's when Jeff and all these other people met at his house to go over

what would come Amazon Prime. Jeff said this is his main directive. This is genius. Jeff said he

wanted to build a moat around his best customers. He wanted to build a moat around his best customers.

So prime starts with the free two day shipping that everybody knows. They now have added a

bunch of different benefits at no additional cost. Although I think I think I started out paying like

$79 a year and I think it paid like $129 a year. So I guess there is a cost. But at this time,

it was the same price. And what was fascinating is I didn't know. So obviously know that, you know,

every Prime member has access to Prime video. But I didn't know or I didn't remember rather

that they had started it out like trying to compete with other streaming services.

And so they went from one bad idea to the next. And again, remember how you said that Jeff can

read the same document as everybody else and get different insights. Jeff actually comes up with

another idea that no one was thinking of based on an idea that worked for another company in a

different context. And that company was Netflix. So it says Jeff came up with a simple idea.

Let's make videos free for Prime members. They were trying to make it a separate standalone

subscription product. It was not succeeding. So anyway, let's just add it to Prime. Because again,

his whole thing is however we're going to be differentiated. Now listen to this.

This had not been on anybody's list of ideas. Jeff reminded us of how Netflix got started off

by offering watch now streaming videos to its DVD subscription service. So I need to back up.

They go into more detail. You may remember this. I've been a subscriber to Netflix forever. When

I first subscribed, I would get DVDs in the mail. That was all Netflix offered. Then eventually,

they said, Oh, now you can stream. But their streaming offerings was like really, really,

it wasn't good. So instead of trying to sell it, they just gave it to existing members for free.

So now you have Amazon Prime video that's not really good. So why don't we just take the idea

from Netflix and just add it as a benefit for our existing subscribers. So this is Jeff remind

us how Netflix got started off by offering watch now streaming videos to its DVD subscription

service. It's an Oh, by the way, offering, he said, when Netflix started, they didn't have

a great selection of movies and TV shows either, not good enough that customers would pay extra

for them. Instead, Netflix gave their customers additional value as part of their existing

subscription. Netflix was essentially saying the service you pay for is great. And Oh, by the way,

here is something extra for you to watch. And then he says why he wants to do this. Jeff argued

that Prime with streaming video would be a unique offering and a competitive differentiator. Any

competitor might launch a prime prime shopping clone, he said, or they could potentially build

a new Netflix type service. But it was unlikely that any one of them would be able to do both.

And then over time, obviously, further differentiation is hey, we're bidding against

Netflix and Hulu and all these other, especially like studio and the content creators have the

supply, then all these streaming service coming over the top and say, Hey, how much you want for

that? And another streaming service says, Oh, you, you'll pay a billion, I'll pay two billion.

And so they realized like, we don't want to be in this never ending cycle of bidding against

Netflix and Hulu. We don't want to keep paying studios more additional fees for every country

that they enter. And there's all these like issues that they go into detail. And so again,

they're like, well, if you wanted to be truly differentiated, what would you do? And once

they asked themselves that question, it says that led to a start in the conclusion, we had to create

our own content. It was time to make our own movies and TV shows.

And I just want to share one more idea that I think ties a lot of these ideas that you and I've

been talking about today together. The world is a classroom, we're going to differentiate,

we're not going to copy, we're going to work backwards from the optimal customer experience,

and we're going to use a written narrative to guide product development. Jeff and I attended

an O'Reilly emerging technology conference. And we went to a panel featuring Stuart Butterfield,

who co-founded Flickr and later Slack. Someone asked Stuart to describe a typical day at Flickr.

His answer was surprising. He said that about half the day was probably the same as it was for

many of the people in the audience, scrambling to keep their technology platform one step ahead

of the rapid growth of their business. They worked on scaling their databases, web servers,

software, and hardware half the day, right? Stuart said they did not spend as much time

as he would like on innovating things that were unique to Flickr. After the panel,

Jeff and I had a brief chat about Stuart's comments. We both noticed the same thing,

a phenomenon that Amazon would later refer to as undifferentiated heavy lifting. That is,

the tasks that we could do for the companies that would enable them to focus on what made them unique.

This was an opportunity, the kernel for the opportunity for AWS, obviously.

In building and operating one of the world's largest websites,

we had acquired a core competency only a few other companies could match.

Working backwards documents for the early AWS products, the PRFAQ stated that we wanted the

student in a dorm room to have access to the same world-class computing infrastructure

as any Amazon software engineer. That powerful metaphor in the PRFAQ document

really helped crystallize the thoughts and ideas of the AWS product development teams.

And that is where I'll leave it. No brainer. Absolutely no brainer to buy this book. I'd buy

this book for yourself for a bunch of people on your team. If you buy the book using the link

that's in the show that's in your podcast player, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time.

This is definitely a book I will reread and revisit into the future. If you want more episodes

that are like this, one, I did an episode very similar to this, but it's about Steve Jobs.

It's called Working with Steve Jobs. It's number 281. By my count, this is the eighth

Jeff Bezos episode that I have made. If you want to listen to them, Episode 282, Jeff Bezos

to shareholder letters. Episode 180, Jeff Bezos invention of a global empire that is a sequel

to the everything store. Episode 179, Jeff Bezos, the everything store. Episode 155,

Jeff Bezos, Invent and Wander. Episode 71, Jeff Bezos to shareholder letters. Episode 38,

Space Barrens, which goes into the difference between the way Jeff is building his rocket

company and Elon is building his. That would be an interesting book to revisit because I was

probably five or six years ago that I did a book. And Episode 17, Jeff Bezos the first time I did

an episode in him. As always, everything I mentioned will be linked down in the show notes and

available at FoundersPodcast.com. That is 321. I think that's 321 books down 1,000 to go and I'll

talk to you again soon. I'm glad you made it to the end. Founders listeners are not quitters. If you

have not already signed up for the Founders AMA private feed, I highly recommend doing that right

now. I will leave a link down below, but it's also always available at FoundersPodcast.com

because the insane amount of research that I have done over the last seven years

for this podcast, I have a very unique set data set that's available nowhere else.

There's over 20,000, I've read over 100,000 pages where like 300, what 15 books, something like that.

I have somewhere between like 20 and 21,000 highlights and notes from this project. 90%

probably over 90% of my highlights and notes never make it onto the podcast. Yet the information

contained in them is excessively valuable. So what I did is like I'm constantly getting questions

all the time, right? And I look at them like they're unique prompts to try to get some of this

information out of my head and out into the world. So it's actually useful to you. And one way to do

this. So everybody benefits is by actually making a private AMA feed. So if you become a member,

you'll be able to ask me questions directly. There's a private email address that you get in

the confirmation email after you sign up. Do not share that email address because I read every

single one of these emails myself. I don't have an assistant doing it. I'm the only one that has

access to that email. So I read every single one myself. Now the questions that I get from these

emails I turn I answer and I turn them into short AMA episodes. So that allows other members to

learn from the questions of other members. You can also add a name and link to your website with

your question so that other members can check out what you're working on. I've already got I've already

heard from subscribers to the AMA feed that they've actually got new paying customers from people

that discovered their business from an AMA question. I plan on making several new episodes

every week. If you are an enthusiast of Founders Podcast, I highly recommend that you become

a member. You can join by using the link that's in the show notes on your podcast player or we're

going to founderspodcast.com.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.