7 Jeff Bezos Frameworks That Will Supercharge Your Growth

Today we are going to talk about 7 Jeff Bezos frameworks that will supercharge your growth. These are frameworks that not a lot of people talk about, but when you think about business growth, when you think about long-term business, Amazon is the perfect example of that. No matter how much crap people talk about Amazon, I remember, uh, 1999 when I was still in, I think middle school, um, people were like, oh, Amazon is not a real business, blah, blah, blah. You know, they're not profitable. And you know, oh man, Jeff Bezos really proved people wrong. So the first thing I'm going to say is he talks about the concept of 2 pizza teams. This is number one. So the whole idea is this, you don't want to have a team that is bigger than what 2 pizzas can feed, right? So when you think about 2 pizzas, um, 2 large pizzas or 2 mediums or whatever, that chooses like 8 slices or so. So 16 slices of pizza, you figure out, um, each person will eat 2 slices or so. Sometimes I eat 3 or 4. That's generally maybe 6 to 8 people on a team. That's how you can kind of move quickly and be agile even within a large organization. So 2 pizza teams. Um, I really liked that because you can't— when someone tells me they, you know, 25 people report to them, you're so full of it. There's no way you can have 25 people reporting to you. Um, but you can have, you know, probably max ideally 8 people max reporting to you. 10 people is like really pushing it, but 2 pizza teams are really good. The second thing I really like is I think about his interviewing framework when he's looking at someone he's interviewing. I actually just interviewed, um, you know, someone the other day. You look at the person and you ask, do I think this person is smarter than me? Not only that, you ask, would you admire that person? If you think that person is smarter than you and you admire them, that's a huge— there's a reason why you feel that way, right? Because if you're the person that's interviewing, you've achieved a couple of things, right? You're probably a decently smart person. And you know what you think has merit. So if you think this person's smart and you think you would admire this person, Well, that goes a long way too, right? The other thing I'll say is that the second question that he thinks about in his head is, would I work for this person? So sure, this person's smart, maybe you admire them, but maybe 5 to 10 years out, if you're— let's say you're interviewing someone that's junior, do you think you would work for this person? That goes a long way too, because if you would work for that person, you think this person's respectable, you think this person has some leadership skills, you think this person has vision, right? Would I work for this person? That's, that's what I really like as well. And then the third question, do I think this person is a bar raiser for the organization? Sometimes a lot of people will make it to me because I'm typically the last kind of, um, the last person they have to interview. A lot of people make it to me and generally they're not asking themselves, like they're not asking these questions. Do I think this person is a bar raiser? Because usually inevitably I get to this question. I'm like, man, this person can do the job, but they're not, they're not a bar raiser. They're not going to lift the average performance, like the average rating of each and every one of our team members, they're not gonna lift it up. So if I think they're gonna keep it even or bring it down a little bit, it's still a no. 'Cause you want people that are gonna continually lift up the company, lift up the organization. And you know, the number one thing that's gonna ultimately lead to your success, um, you know, helping a business grow or running a business is people. If you start to make exceptions, if you're like, oh well, I think this person's like a 7 out of 10 or 8 out of 10, you don't wanna let that happen. And if you're the leader of the company, You don't want, if you have a hiring process, you don't ever want to let your team compromise, rest on its laurels just to solve a problem in the meantime. You want to think long-term. And that actually brings me up to my next point, which is thinking long-term. You think about Jeff Bezos. He really enjoyed watching Star Trek growing up and he's really fascinated by outer space. So he has a space company, right? That's very long-term thinking, right? How do we go explore space? That's the, that's the next level. Um, you know, Star Trek says the final frontier, right? For the longest time they forego profits. And you know, people were just, you know, Wall Street was just kind of tearing them down and everything, but they just kept reinvesting in growth. Long-term thinking, right? Long-term decisions, long-term thinking. And what he says is, you know, a lot of stuff that you see in their stock price today, that's from, you know, work that was done 3 years ago. And the stuff he's thinking about now is for the next 3 years. So he's constantly thinking about the long term. You think about how, um, you know, originally they started out as a bookstore and now they became the everything store. Um, they have AWS, you know, the Amazon Web Services. They bought Whole Foods and now they have a bunch of grocery chains for distribution. They actually even have Amazon Go now too, which is basically you can go into a grocery store and just walk out without having to, um, you know, um, you know, go wait in line or, you know, kind of pay a cashier. You just walk right out, you know, a camera sensor knows everything that you have and boom, you're done. Um, but that's long-term thinking. He's constantly thinking about, you know, what he can do to make an impact on the world. And so, um, everything they do, is thinking about, okay, what can I do not for the short term, but how can I be successful? How can I help my customers be successful for the long term? They're insanely customer success focused, and that's what's led to their, their, you know, them building the empire that they've built. I mean, they're probably one of the few companies I would invest in in stock market probably for the long term, just because it's just every single year they're growing constantly. And I find myself using Amazon all the time. And the service gets better and better and better. Um, they have Amazon streaming as well, Amazon Music. I think by now you can say they kind of know what they're doing. The next thing I would say is each and every year Jeff Bezos does an annual letter and he does a good job of communicating how he's thinking about things, what he's done over the years, how his different business units are doing. And he always includes a day one philosophy on the bottom. Um, or I think maybe day zero, but the whole idea is they constantly think about, you know, they're, they're starting from scratch and they think about they have to be scrappy, they have to be frugal. Um, and then, you know, they have to, they're really just starting their journey out, right? And that's how he always puts it at the end of his annual letter. And I really liked that consistency in there. So he talks about what's going on right now, what's going on for perhaps the near future. And then also he brings everything back, ties everything back to, hey, we're just starting our journey out right now. Again, tying it back to the long-term thinking. Now, number 7, memos. Memos are awesome. So memos, the whole way this works is if you have an idea and it involves multiple people and it involves multiple resources, it's going to take time. Um, what you're forced to do is you have to write a memo and a memo might take you a couple hours to write or sometimes it might take you a week to write. But the whole idea is you have to write an overview of what you're looking to achieve. You have to write a press release even before that. You have to write, you know, kind of the frequently asked questions. You have to write kind of the resources that you need and what the idea is. And the whole idea behind the memo is you get all involved parties into a room, they all read it, they annotate it, and then, you know, after they annotate it, then maybe they read it for, I don't know, 10 to 30 minutes or so. Um, Q&A happens, right? And then maybe a lively debate happens and then a decision is made. The good thing about the memo is it stops stupid meetings. So meeting, a lot of people like to call meetings to act like they're doing something, but if you actually want to get something done and you have to write a memo and it's going to take you a couple hours to a week, you're going to, you're going to think, you're going to think twice about actually wanting to call a meeting because it requires you to do the bulk of the work, you to be very thoughtful, you to articulate it. And it's also on you if you don't articulate it and you make it a stupid meeting and you bring in all these people that are, that are in the meeting, you're just gonna piss them off because they're there to help you make the decision and to, you know, um, they're there to ultimately help you. So memos are great. Um, I highly recommend just Googling Hacker News, um, Amazon memo and you can read the whole thing there. Um, we might actually even hire one of the guys that used to help with the Amazon memos, um, to kind of, you know, audit our process. But you know, we've been experimenting with it and, um, you know, on the big projects that we've been trying to push forward, um, we, we, we've been getting a lot of good feedback on the memo stuff. Um, so we're still figuring it out right now, but, um, I love the fact that they've been doing it the whole time and it really shows the discipline and the rigor that, um, you know, Jeff Bezos and Amazon has. So let me know what you think I missed in the comments, um, in terms of, you know, secret Jeff Bezos frameworks that will help you grow. And don't forget to check out the next video over there if you're watching. And don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe because it helps us grow, and we'll see you tomorrow. Bye.