Lessons from Jeff Bezos

What's up, everyone? Welcome back to another episode of Founders Journal, my personal diary made public for the world. I'm Alex Lieberman, co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew. And today I am trying a new format. I'm taking the best piece of content that I have consumed recently, and I'm going to share my favorite moments and share my thoughts on those moments. If you like this style of episode and want more like it, please let me know at alex@morningbrew.com. On this episode, I'll be sharing the best moments from Lex Fridman's recent conversation with Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos, as well as my own analysis on these moments. These moments range from having deep self-awareness to the difference between an inventor and an entrepreneur to how to run great meetings. Let's hop right into the first moment.

You were at Princeton with aspirations to be a theoretical physicist.

Yeah.

What attracted you to physics and why did you change your mind and not become— why are you not Jeff Bezos, the famous theoretical physicist?

So I loved physics and I studied physics and computer science, and I was proceeding along the physics path. I was planning to major in physics and I wanted to be a theoretical physicist. And I was, and the computer science was sort of something I was doing for fun. I really loved it. Um, and I, and I was very good at the programming and doing those things, and I enjoyed all my computer science classes immensely. But I really was determined to be a theoretical physicist. It's why I went to Princeton in the first place. It was definitely, and then I realized I was going to be a mediocre theoretical physicist.

Hmm.

And there were, um, uh, there were a few people in my classes, like in quantum mechanics and so on, who they could effortlessly do things that were so difficult for me. And I realized, like, you know, there are a thousand ways to be smart and to be a really, you know, theoretical physics is not one of those fields where the, uh, you know, only the top few percent actually move the state of the art forward. It's one of those things where you, you have to be really, uh, just your brain has to be wired in a certain way. And there was a guy named, um, one of these people who was, uh, convinced me. He didn't mean to convince me, but just by observing him, he convinced me that I should not try to be a theoretical physicist. His name was Yosanta. And Yosanta, um, was from Sri Lanka and he's, he was one of the most brilliant people I'd ever met. My, uh, My friend Joe and I were working on a very difficult partial differential equations problem set one night, and there was one problem that we worked on for 3 hours, and we made no headway whatsoever. And we looked up at each other at the same time and we said, Yosanta. So we went to Yosanta's dorm room.

Yeah.

And he was there. He was almost always there. And we said, Yosanta, we're having trouble. solving this partial differential equation. Would you mind taking a look? And he said, of course. By the way, he was the most humble, most kind person. And so he took our— he looked at our problem and he stared at it for just a few seconds, maybe 10 seconds. And he said, cosine. And I said, what do you mean, Yosanto? What do you mean cosine? He said, that's the answer.

Mm-hmm.

And I said, no, no, no, come on. And he said, let me show you. And he took out some paper. And he wrote down 3 pages of equations. Everything canceled out, and the answer was cosine. And I said, Yosanta, did you do that in your head?

Yeah.

And he said, oh no, that would be impossible. A few years ago, I solved a similar problem, and I could map this problem onto that problem, and then it was immediately obvious that the answer was cosine. I had a few, you know, you have an experience like that, you realize, maybe being a theoretical physicist isn't sure— isn't what you're— you're— you're— what the universe wants you to be. And so I switched to computer science. And, and, you know, that worked out really well for me. I enjoy it. I still enjoy it today.

First of all, Yosanta sounds like an absolute baller. I want to collect Yosantas in areas of life where I'm not the best, but I want to know what the best looks like. Second, something I've noticed in the greatest entrepreneurs I know or listen to is their level of self-awareness of their skills and stacking the deck in their favor. At the end of the day, I think there are one or two skill sets that everyone has in their own life that if identified early enough and worked on tirelessly for long enough, can lead to asymmetric ceilings that will put them in the top 1% of that thing. I think most people aren't self-aware of what those one to two things are. And then I think most of the people that are self-aware won't commit themselves to those 1 or 2 skills for a variety of reasons. Either they're not financially practical to go all in on, or it requires a level of risk-taking that doesn't feel palatable, or there's societal pressure that forces them into a certain lane. This story about Jeff Bezos is the perfect illustration of someone reaching asymmetric upside by having the self-awareness of an asymmetric skill set and saying no to the things outside of that skill set. Time for the next moment on being an inventor.

I'm an inventor. If you, if you want to boil down what I am, I'm really an inventor. And I look at things and I can come up with atypical solutions. And, you know, and then I can create 100 such atypical solutions for something. 99 of them may not survive, you know, scrutiny, but one of those 100 is like, hmm, maybe there is Maybe that might work, and then you can keep going from there. So that kind of lateral thinking, that kind of inventiveness in a high-dimensionality space where the search space is very large, that's where my inventive skills come. That's the thing I'm— if I self-identify as an inventor more than anything else.

It was really cool to hear Jeff say this because it made me feel like I had the permission to call myself an inventor as well. I've always thought of myself as a builder or a creator or an inventor, even more than an entrepreneur or an operator. But I've felt some level of shame or embarrassment identifying in this way. Even as I think back to my earliest entrepreneurial memory, it's less like the hustle that a lot of people describe, whether it was a friend who was a high school DJ or someone else I know who was selling Cutco knives door to door. My earliest memory is in kindergarten in Ms. Gullo's class, cutting a pen and cutting a highlighter in half. and then taping both ends together to make a 2-in-1 solution, half pen, half highlighter. I love the invention and creation of entrepreneurship more than anything, and I want to start embracing that part of the profession more. I think some of this fear of identifying as inventor maybe comes from a feeling of FOMO that because I don't think I'm the world's greatest operator, those are the things I want more of. Or maybe part of it is when I think of an inventor, I think of someone who created like infomercial products, and that doesn't feel— important or valuable to me. Whatever it is, I think I have to get over this story. This next moment shows the promise of exploring space and Jeff Bezos's crazy intellectual range.

Rockets love to be big. Everything works better.

What do you mean by that? You've told me that before. It sounds epic, but what's it mean?

I mean, when you look at the kind of the physics of rocket engines, uh, and also when you look at parasitic mass, It doesn't. If you have, let's say you have an avionics system, so you have a guidance and control system, that is going to be about the same mass and size for a giant rocket as it is going to be for a tiny rocket. And so that's just parasitic mass that is very consequential if you're building a very small rocket, but is trivial if you're building a very large rocket. So you have the parasitic mass thing. And then If you look at, for example, rocket engines have turbopumps. They have to pressurize the fuel and the oxidizer up to a very high pressure level in order to inject it into the thrust chamber where it burns. And those pumps, all rotating machines in fact, get more efficient as they get larger. So really tiny turbopumps are very challenging to manufacture, And any kind of gaps, you know, are like between the housing, for example, and the rotating impeller that pressurizes the fuel. There has to be some gap there. You can't have those parts scraping against one another.

Mm-hmm.

And those gaps drive inefficiencies. And so, you know, if you have a very large turbopump, those gaps in percentage terms end up being very small. And so there's a bunch of things that you end up loving about having a large rocket and that you end up hating for a small rocket.

So for context, this was part of the discussion where Jeff and Lex are talking about Blue Origin, which is Bezos's aerospace company dedicated to making humanity an interplanetary species. I really never fully understood the desire for what I call fuck-you money people starting space companies, but from hearing Bezos talk about it, I think it's starting to make sense. His perspective is that today is the best time in history to be living in terms of basically every measure, whether it's education, infant mortality rates, technology, etc. The only thing that has regressed over human history is the state of our planet. Bezos's vision for Blue Origin is a world in which there are literally a trillion living humans. And from his point of view, that means there are going to be dozens of Mozarts, Einsteins, Steve Jobs. And his view is also that there's no way to get there solely on Earth, given the resources we have on Earth. But the other remarkable thing about this part of the conversation is the extent to which Jeff Bezos can go really deep on a topic really quickly. In about 60 seconds, he was able to clearly articulate to Lex why rockets love to be big. And this is an attribute that I've noticed about great entrepreneurs in general. They're able to go from the most zoomed-out conversation about some unanswerable meta topic to the most micro discussion about their business, showing they understand it At the most fundamental level, great founders have this way of building infrastructure around them so they don't need to be in the weeds of their business. They can work on their business versus in their business, but they still are able to go deep enough to continue to be able to be an engine for new and potentially huge ideas that pushes their business forward once their current business reaches some level of plateau. The next moment is about a necessary mental contradiction that all founders need to hold on to.

What was it like? What was going through your mind at that time? You left a good job in New York and took this leap. Were you excited? Were you scared?

So excited and scared, anxious, you know, thought the odds of success were low. Uh, told all of our early investors that I thought there was a 30% chance of success, by which I just meant getting your money back, not like, not what actually happened, because that's the truth. Every startup company is unlikely to work. It's helpful to be in reality about that. Um, but that doesn't mean you can't be optimistic. So you kind of have to have this duality in your head. Like, you, on the one hand, you're, you know what the baseline statistics say about startup companies. On the other hand, you have to ignore all of that and just be 100% sure it's going to work.

Mm-hmm.

And you're doing both things at the same time. You're holding that contradiction in your head.

This idea of being both idealistic and realistic as you build a business is spot on. On one hand, it takes irrational optimism and naivety to build a great business. In the early days of a company, there are not only so many ways to fail, but there are also so many very good reasons to talk yourself out of starting the business in the first place. But if you're perfectly practical and focus on every hole in your business idea, you'll just never start a company to begin with. As I think about 2 of the most important mindsets that drove me to build Morning Brew into a successful business, the first is naivety. Having no media experience and no jadedness about the difficulty of the media business or how things have always been done, it forced my co-founder and I to build from first principles rather than build based on the perspectives of others in the industry. And then the second mindset is from the moment I told my dad on his deathbed that I was going to take care of my family, Morning Brew succeeding was a foregone conclusion. I knew Morning Brew was going to succeed. It was just a matter of when. But then to Jeff's other point, you can't be day-to-day idealistic or else you'll never think critically enough to evolve your business based on what the world is telling you. I also think looking at the statistics behind startup failures takes pressure off of being a second-time founder. I create a lot of self-induced pressure by saying to myself that whatever I do after Morning Brew, it has to succeed given that I'm already quote unquote successful. But that's entirely my ego speaking and not the reality of the situation. Sure, I have some tools and a network that will help me increase the odds of success with whatever I build. But also, every business is different. If I take bigger swings, the odds of success are going to be even lower. And every business has its own set of challenges. And there are just so many uncontrollables in any business that you build. The next moment is about the importance but discomfort of finding truth, sometimes at the expense of looking good or being popular.

We humans are not really truth-seeking animals. We are social animals.

Yeah, we are.

And, you know, take you back in time 10,000 years and you're in a small village. If you go along to get along, you can survive. You can procreate. If you're the village truth teller, you might get clubbed to death in the middle of the night. Truths are often They don't want to be heard because important truths can be uncomfortable. They can be awkward. They can be exhausting.

Impolite.

Yes.

All that kind of stuff.

Challenging. They can make people defensive, even if that's not the intent. But any high-performing organization, whether it's a sports team, a business, you know, a political organization, activist group, I don't care what it is, any high-performing organization has to have mechanisms and a culture that supports truth-telling. One of the things you have to do is you have to talk about that. You have to talk about the fact that it takes energy to do that. You have to talk to people. You have to remind people it's okay that it's uncomfortable. You have to literally tell people it's not what we're designed to do as humans. It's not really It's kind of a side effect, you know, we can do that, but it's not how we survive. We mostly survive by being social animals and being cordial and cooperative. And that's really important. And so there's a, you know, science is all about truth-telling. It's actually a very formal mechanism for trying to tell the truth. And even in science, you find that it's hard to tell the truth, right? Uh, even, you know, you're supposed to have a hypothesis and test it and find data and reject the hypothesis and so on. It's not easy.

But even in science, there's like the senior scientists and the junior scientists, and then there's a hierarchy of humans where the seniority— somehow seniority matters in the scientific process, which is—

And that's true inside companies too. And so You want to set up your culture so that the most junior person can overrule the most senior person if they have data. Um, and, and, and that really is about trying to, you know, there are little things you can do. So for example, in every meeting that I attend, I always speak last. And I know from experience That, you know, if I speak first, even very strong-willed, highly intelligent, high-judgment participants in that meeting will wonder, well, if Jeff thinks that, I came in this meeting thinking one thing, but maybe I'm not right. And so you can do little things like If you're the most senior person in the room, go last. Let everybody else go first. In fact, ideally, let's try to have the most junior person go first, and the second, and try to go in order of seniority, um, so that you can hear everyone's opinion in a kind of unfiltered way. Because we really do, we actually literally change our opinions if somebody who you really respect says something, makes you change your mind a little.

So you're saying implicitly or explicitly give permission for people to have a strong opinion that as long as it's backed by data.

Yes. And sometimes it can even— by the way, a lot of our most powerful truths turn out to be hunches. They turn out to be based on anecdotes. They're intuition-based. And sometimes you don't even have strong data. But you may know the person well enough to trust their judgment. You may feel yourself leaning in. It may resonate with a set of anecdotes you have. And then you may be able to say, you know, something about that feels right. Let's go collect some data on that. Let's try to see if we can actually know whether it's right. But for now, let's not disregard it because it feels right. You can also fight inherent bias. There's an optimism bias. Like, if there are 2 interpretations of a new set of data, and one of them is happy, and one of them is unhappy, it's a little dangerous to jump to the conclusion that the happy interpretation is right.

Mm-hmm.

You may want to sort of compensate for that human bias of looking for, you know, trying to find the silver lining and say, look, this, that might be good, but I'm going to go with it's bad for now until we're sure.

There's not much more to add to this, so I'll just summarize by saying that the best organizations are run on cultures of truth-seeking, which is counter to how we are biologically wired to behave, which means leaders need to do things very intentionally to reward truth-seeking from people at every level of their organization. And the final moment is about having great meetings.

My perfect meeting starts with a crisp document. So the document should be written with such clarity that it's like angels singing from on high. I like a crisp document and a messy meeting. And so the meeting is about asking questions that nobody knows the answer to and trying to wander your way to a solution. And when that happens just right, it makes all the other meetings worthwhile. It feels good. It has a kind of beauty to it.

It has.

an aesthetic beauty to it. And, and you get real breakthroughs in meetings like that.

Can you actually describe the, the crisp document? Like, this is one of the legendary aspects of Amazon, uh, of the way you approach meetings. Is this the 6-page memo? Maybe first describe the process of, of running a meeting with memos.

And meetings at Amazon and Blue Origin are unusual. When we, when we get new, when new people come in, like a new executive joins, uh, they're a little taken aback sometimes because the typical meeting We'll start with a 6-page narratively structured memo, and we do study hall. We, for 30 minutes, we sit there silently together in the meeting and read.

I love this.

Take notes in the margins, and then we, then we discuss. And the reason, by the way, we do study, you could say, I would like everybody to read these memos in advance, but the problem is People don't have time to do that, and they end up coming to the meeting having only skimmed the memo or maybe not read it at all, and they're trying to catch up. And they're also bluffing like they were in college, having pretended to do the reading.

Yeah, exactly.

It's better just to carve out the time for people.

And do it.

So now we're all on the same page, we've all read the memo, and now we can have a really elevated discussion. And this is so much better from having a slideshow presentation, you know, a PowerPoint presentation of some kind where That has so many difficulties, but one of the problems is PowerPoint is really designed to persuade. It's kind of a sales tool. And internally, the last thing you want to do is sell. You want to, again, you're truth-seeking. You're trying to find truth. And the other problem with PowerPoint is it's easy for the author and hard for the audience.

Mm-hmm.

And a memo is the opposite. It's hard to write a 6-page memo. A good 6-page memo might take 2 weeks to write. You have to write it, you have to rewrite it, you have to edit it, You have to talk to people about it. They have to poke holes in it for you. You write it again. It may take 2 weeks. So the author, it's really a very difficult job, but for the audience, it's much better. So you can read a half hour and, you know, there are little problems with PowerPoint presentations too. You know, senior executives interrupt with questions halfway through the presentation. That question's gonna be answered on the next slide, but you never got there. Whereas if you read the whole memo in advance, you, you know, I often write lots of questions that I have in the margins of these memos, and then I go cross them all out because by the time I get to the end of the memo, they've been answered.

Answered.

That's why I save all that time. You also get, you know, if the person who's preparing the memo, we talked earlier about, um, you know, groupthink and, you know, the fact that I go last in meetings and that you don't want, you know, to your ideas to kind of pollute the meeting prematurely. You know, the author of the memos is— has kind of got to be very vulnerable. They've got to put all their thoughts out there and they've got to go first. But that's great because it makes them really good. And so— and you get to see their real ideas and you're not tromping on them accidentally in a big PowerPoint presentation.

I love this idea of a crisp document and a messy meeting. The meeting is about wrestling hard problems together and wandering to find a solution. Inefficiency is actually not a bad bad thing. The document and the preamble to the meeting is all about the necessary preparation to get everyone on the same page and clear about why the meeting actually matters. This is why I like the idea of study hall where they read for 30 minutes in the beginning, because you'd rather use that time for that than just start a discussion with people being unprepared. I also love this point that PowerPoint by nature is meant for persuasion and selling, whereas memos are meant to be hard for the author and easy for the audience to ultimately find truth. So those are some of my favorite moments from the 2-hour discussion between Lex Fridman and Jeff Bezos, as well as my analysis of these moments. If you want to listen to the full conversation, which I highly recommend, we've linked to it in the show notes. And also let me know if you liked this style of episode where I react and analyze some of the best content that I've consumed in my week. Shoot me an email to alex@morningbrew.com. Let me know. And as always, thank you so much for listening and I'll Catch you next episode.