Jeff Bezos, CEO and Founder, Amazon

Key ideas

Asked by Rubenstein how Amazon got here, Bezos credits focus on customers over competitors, long time horizons, a few good decisions, intuition and a willingness to fail.

From a machine transcript of the audio. Quotes link to the moment they are said.

1. 1

   Watch customers, not competitors

   Bezos names obsessive focus on the customer rather than the competitor as by far the main reason for Amazon's success, and says many founders who talk about customers are really watching competitors. He adds that you must first decide who the customer is: the reader at the Washington Post rather than the advertiser, and the child at his planned preschools rather than parents or teachers.

2. 2

   Separate the company from its stock

   Bezos says he tells staff not to read their own worth into share price moves, and that he spends no time on the daily price. He recalls the stock falling from about $113 to $6 after the internet bubble while customer numbers, profit per unit and defects were all improving. He says Amazon already had the money it needed, and that its metrics showed it would cover fixed costs at a certain volume.

3. 3

   Make few decisions, and make them well

   Bezos says he protects eight hours of sleep and holds his hardest meetings at 10 a.m., arguing extra waking hours are not worth it if tired decisions get worse. He says a few good decisions a day is enough, and that his senior executives should work two or three years ahead of the current quarter. He notes this differs for a startup, and that Amazon at 100 people was a different story.

4. 4

   Use analysis first, then intuition

   Bezos says to use analysis when it can decide, but that the most important decisions come down to instinct and heart, such as leaving his job, which he framed as minimizing regrets at age 80. He describes Prime as modeling badly and costing a lot at first. He says getting things wrong is not that bad, because large wins can cover thousands of failed experiments.

5. 5

   Pioneer instead of copying

   Bezos says Amazon tends to lose when it offers a me-too service, so it waited for a differentiated idea before opening physical stores. He says a pioneer should expect about a two-year head start at best, and calls AWS's seven years without like-minded competition a piece of luck. When buying companies, he tries to tell whether a founder is a missionary who loves the product and customer or a mercenary, and says missionaries usually make more money.

In Jeff’s words

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