How to Build a Billionaire Mind in 52 Minutes | Jeff Bezos on Focus and Experimentation

Why did we expand into things like electronics, tools, and kitchen since those businesses are not today profitable? And the answer is that increases our addressable market size so we can ultimately build a much larger company by entering into those new product categories. And, and second, while it's true that those new categories, which are only 3 years old— and by the way, electronics, tools, and kitchen is now a $600 million business at Amazon.com, which makes it probably in the top 4 or 5 e-commerce companies anywhere in the world. So that business is growing and growing very rapidly. And it has— one of the big advantages it has, it has a huge audience of early adopters, which is why companies like Segway choose us as the exclusive launch platform for products like that, because really early adopters are the kind of people who buy stuff like this. But that business ultimately will be— electronics in particular, in my opinion, will be our largest, most profitable business one day. When you start a new business, there are certain fixed costs that come along with starting that business. And then the business has to reach enough scale so that the profit from the business, the variable profit, can cover those fixed costs. There's no sidestepping that. And it's just a simple investment issue.

Most entrepreneurs diversify too quickly. Most entrepreneurs are focused for whatever reason on having 14 different income streams instead of doing what actually matters, which is getting one down that's paying you. So many people who are bragging about their 14 income streams or 15 or 20 or 7, none of them are making money. It's great that you have an income stream that pays you $100 a year, but that's not actually getting you where you want to go. And the challenge is you end up spending so much time trying to set up these different diversified income streams that you're not ever putting enough energy into any of them to get traction and get results. It's unfair to look at What you can do now and compare yourself to Jeff Bezos from Amazon, or even compare yourself to, to what I can do with a team of 37 people compared to what you can do now. The way that all of your heroes built their businesses and their wealth is by focusing on one thing and making it amazing and being world-class at it and great at it and then diversifying. So this really depends on the stage and and cycle that you're at. But most of the people who are watching, you're in the early stage. You're trying to figure out how to make this business go. You want to turn it into a full-time thing and eventually hire a team and build and grow and scale. If that's where you're at now, if you're in the, the build mode and this isn't a full-time business for you yet, then diversification is not the strategy. Focus is the strategy. Pick the one thing you can be great at, give insane value at, get amazing at it, and then go make some money doing it to then build your big vision, which is going to be a lot more diversified. When I look at my business, people ask me, Movement Makers, well, what should I do? Should I, should I have my YouTube channel? And should I be doing Instagram and doing coaching and books and courses? And inside Movement Makers, we're training thought leaders, right? How do you build a business around your ideas, what you've been through, your purpose comes from your pain, you want to serve. How do we turn a business out of that? And for a lot of them, they're just doing way too many things. And as a result, nothing gets done. Well, I want to write a book and I want to be a speaker. I want to have my YouTube channel and I want to have courses and a membership program and of course do coaching. And then as a result, you're so busy trying to set up all these different things that nothing ends up happening. It's insanely slow across the whole board because you feel like you have to have diversification in case one of the streams goes away. But one of the streams— none of the streams are making any money, so who cares if they go away, right? Like, that's what— that's the focus that you need to have at the beginning, is let's set up a sizable, consistent stream of revenue coming in, and then you can worry about Diversifying. Honestly, there's too much time being spent on the wrong things, and it's just a sequence, right? It's like, not that you give up on those things, there's just a timing to it. If you actually want to accomplish them, the better way to accomplish them is with a team, right? If you have 10 things that you want to do, the way to actually accomplish them is to have team help you go and accomplish them. Great. How do I get team? By focusing on one thing and making it give you money so that then you can afford to hire team. So if you look at your list of 10 different things that you can do, you should focus on, okay, out of these 10 things, what is the thing that I love that can bring me some immediate money? That then I can pay myself? That's good. That I can provide for my family? That's good. And then maybe hire somebody part-time to eventually full-time, that then they can ease some of my burden and then I can focus on building this one pipeline stronger or building a second pipeline, right? That should be the focus. And so it's frustrating because there's— you've got so much potential and so much heart and so much talent, so many skills, and just such a desire to serve that it doesn't happen because there's too much diversification going on. So what's the order? So as I'm working through with movement makers, okay, you need to pick between all these things, what's going to make you money? Because making money is important. You know, I think some people feel like money is everything. It's not. And some people feel money is the root of all evil. It's not. Money is a tool and it needs to be important if you're going to have a business. In my world of thought leadership, coaching is a great way to do it because you— people say, well, you're just trading time for money. Yes, but you're, you're making money. Where if you're writing a book, you're not making money. Writing a book, if you're speaking, you're not making money as a speaker early on in your career. Now, if you start building up enough attention and enough momentum and enough history and traction experience, yes, you get paid to do it. But the problem is most people will quit. If it's gonna take you 7 years or 5 years or 3 years to get a paid speaking gig, something that's actually reasonable, not $100 a speak somewhere. Most people will quit on that journey because they're not seeing momentum and traction fast enough, because they're trying to diversify so much and do everything, and then nothing ends up happening and you end up quitting and going back and getting the job. And that's really frustrating, you know, because, because it can work. It's just getting about— it's just about getting the sequence right. So think about your big vision and What do you want to accomplish? What's the world you want to create? We love doing this as entrepreneurs, right? Like, I want to build a world where X happens, right? For me, I want to build the world where people believe in themselves. I want to solve the world's biggest problem. What does that look like? Awesome. Now, inside of that, what's the next step that you can take that can start getting you paid? If you're at the early stages, that's what you have to figure out. What's a problem that you can solve? That is not the— you're not going to be doing this one thing forever, right? Because that sounds boring and like a death sentence for entrepreneurs. We're not going to just do this one thing forever, but it's our first step that we have to not, not see 10 projects through to 50%, but get one really good project through 100%. That's what matters. Most of your projects, you start and stop and start and stop. You're doing 10 different things and you're seeing them through 30% done, 50% done, 70% done, it's never done 100%. And so you never get results. Pick the one thing that can actually start paying you, push it through 100%, get it done, start getting paid, and now you're— now we're on track. Now you're ahead of 95% of business owners who get started because you're actually making money and supporting yourself. It's a big, big, big, big difference. Diversification then becomes fun in the future, right? But if I'm going back, for me, what am I doing now? If I was just getting started now, or if I— if everything went away, you know, I know what I know, but everything goes away. I get asked this question when I'm doing podcasts, like, if you know what you know now, but everything went away, you had to start over from scratch, what would you do? I would not be doing most of the things that I'm doing because I don't have team. I could not be making as many videos as I do because I don't have team. I would not be doing Movement Makers. I would not be doing my gaming channel. I would not be doing so many of the things that I'm doing right now that are fun, that bring me joy, that are part of my big mission, but they're not immediately monetizable at the beginning. So I wouldn't be doing those things yet, but I'd have goals and ambitions to go off and do them. And so I think a lot of entrepreneurs get stuck on that. For whatever reason, we've been been trained that you need to have so many streams of income. You don't, and you shouldn't at the beginning. You don't diversify at the beginning. It's a terrible move. And then two, inside of your big idea, what's the one that will start getting you paid? If you could focus on that this year, just imagine on where that takes you, right? In the next 12 months, you got to the point where you're— if you're just starting out, you get to the point where you're supporting yourself, you don't have to have a job anymore, you're paying your bills and your family's bills, maybe hiring somebody part-time, full-time, what a different world that looks like for you versus doing 10 different projects on the side part-time, never completing any of them. If you're already full-time in your business, even just doubling down on what's working, imagine how much bigger you could be if it's just you or you have one person Now imagine you have 10 people working with you on this thing. Often the path to get there is to not add another thing in, but to double down on what's already working and make it bigger and make it better and improve it. Diversification is fun, don't get me wrong, it's amazing. Diversification is a great risk management strategy ultimately, but it's usually a terrible idea. Especially when you're first getting started in your business. The people who you look up to, look at their early journey, see how they won, see how they got started, they focused. They were hyper-focused. They got amazing at something. They got paid to do it. And then diversification came as they had even more success and more energy and most importantly, more team to help them do it. Also, to make sure you're actually taking action after watching this video, I've designed a special free worksheet just for this video. The worksheet will highlight all of the lessons learned in this video, as well as pull out our 3 favorite learnings and quotes that will inspire you to actually do something. The worksheet will also give you space to write down what your key takeaways are and your specific plan of action to make sure you're getting results. If you want the worksheet designed specifically for this video, absolutely for free, There's a link in the description below. Go click on it and start building the momentum in your life and your business. I'll see you there.

I always tell people, sometimes I get, you know, we'll have a good quarterly conference call or something, and Wall Street will like our quarterly results, and I'll get— people will stop me and say, congratulations on your quarter. And I say, thank you. But what I'm really thinking is that quarter was baked 3 years ago. Right now I'm working working on a quarter that's going to reveal itself in 2021 sometime. And that's what you need to be doing. You need to be out sort of, you know, 2 or 3 years in advance. And if you are— and then why do I need to make 100 decisions today? If I make like 3 good decisions a day, that's enough. And they should just be as high quality as I can make them. Take your choices, not your gifts. This is something that I would— I think is super important for young people to understand and for parents to preach to young people. It's really easy for a talented young person to take pride in their gifts. They can say, you know, I'm really athletic, or I'm really smart, or I'm really good at math. And that's fine, you should celebrate your gifts, you should be happy, but you can't be proud of them because they're gifts after all. They were given to you. What you can be proud of is your choices. How did you decide to use your gifts? Did you study hard? Did you work hard? Did you practice? The people who really excel combine gifts gifts and hard work. And the hard work part is a choice. You get to decide that. And that is something when you're looking back on your life, you'll be very proud of. When you buy over the internet, Amazon, do you ever get the wrong orders? Anything ever wrong? What do you do? You call up and complain, or you don't have any problems? No, I, I, I'm, I'm a customer of Amazon, hopefully like all of you. And this is one person full-time services your account. In this room who's not an Amazon customer, see me right afterwards and I'll walk you through it. It's, um, yeah, I get, I have problems sometimes, um, and I, and I treat them like the same way I treat a problem that I would get from customer. My email address is famous and I keep it and I read it. It's jeff@amazon.com. I don't see every email that I get anymore because I get too many, but I see a lot of them and I use my curiosity to pick out certain emails. I'll get one from a customer and there's a defect, you know, we've done something wrong. That's the Usually people are writing us, not always, but usually they're writing us because we've screwed up their order somehow. And I am, so I'm looking at this and for some reason, something seems a little odd about that one. And so I'll ask the team to do a case study and find real root cause or causes, it's usually causes, real root causes, and then real root fixes. So that when you fix it, you're not fixing it for that one customer, you're fixing it for every customer. And that process is a gigantic part of what we do. So I would treat my, if I have a failed order or some bad customer experience, I would treat it just like that. Amazon has 14 leadership principles, and this is the one that often catches people a little by surprise, because one of our leadership principles is that good leaders are right a lot. And it sounds kind of like, well, great, but, Is there some way that I can practice being right a lot? And you're not gonna be right all the time, but I do think you, with practice, you can be right more often. And I've observed people who are right a lot, and I notice a few things about them. The first is that people who are right a lot, they listen a lot. And people who are right a lot change their mind a lot. And people who are right a lot, they seek to disconfirm their most profoundly held convictions, which is very unnatural for humans. So humans mostly, as we go about life, we're very selective in the evidence that we let seep into us, and we like to observe the evidence that confirms our pre-existing beliefs. And people who are right a lot work very hard to do that unnatural thing of trying to disconfirm their beliefs. When I started Amazon, it was 25 years ago. I started Amazon in 1994. When I went to seek investors, the first question I had to answer is, what is the internet? None of my investors had ever heard of the internet. And the, the, the, the, the idea that I had in mind was to build a bookstore. I realized that we could build a store which would have every book ever printed in any in print or out of print, and we could do that online, it would be impossible in a physical store. That was the founding idea of Amazon. And— but did I expect what would happen today? No. You know, we started— I've been at Amazon when it was 1 person, me, when it was 10 people, when it was 100 people, when it was 1,000 people, and today when it's, you know, more than 700,000 people and approaching 70,000 people just here in India. So no, I did not predict that. And actually, I think if anybody had predicted that, they would have needed to be immediately institutionalized in a mental facility because it's not a normal thing to have happen. My dream when I started Amazon was that one day we might be able to afford a forklift. So it's been a very fun journey for me. And by the way, I still tap dance into to work. I'm having so much fun. One of the reasons we have been able to extend into new business areas and first new product categories, going way back, we just sold books and then we started selling music and DVDs and electronics and toys and so on. And then we've extended into electronic reading with Kindle. The reason customers have been receptive in large part to our new initiatives is because we have worked hard to earn trust with them. Earning trust with customers is, is a valuable business asset. And if you mistreat their data, they will know. They will figure it out. Customers are very smart. You should never underestimate customers. My grandparents would take me every summer, starting at age 4, every summer, kind of to give her a break, really. For the whole summer. So I'd be with my grandparents and on their ranch in Cotulla, Texas, which is halfway between San Antonio and Laredo. We lived in Houston, and so we would make the 5-hour drive out to Cotulla. They dropped me off, spent a couple days there, then they go back to Houston. I'd spend the summer, and I went every day to the ranch with my grandfather to help. Now, a 4-year-old boy on a ranch in South Texas is not a lot of help. But I didn't know that. I thought I was helping. And, and then, as I— by the time I was 16, I actually was helping. So I have, you know, I, I can, I can suture up a prolapsed cow. I can fix windmills. My grandfather was so resourceful, and that he made his own veterinary needles. He would take a little piece of wire and pound it flat with a— with like an oxyacetylene torch and then drill a little hole through it. And then we would do— we did all of our own veterinary work. Some of the cattle even survived. And so we had— but we had great fun out there, you know. We built barns and welded things. And he bought a D6 Caterpillar bulldozer used, it was like 1955 model year, for $5,000. It was completely broken, the gears were stripped, and then we spent, you know, a whole summer repairing that. And the first thing we had to do to repair it was build a crane to take the gears out of the transmission. And so, you know, what I learned from watching him was just how resourceful he he was. He didn't ever call a repairman. He figured it out. This work-life harmony thing is what I try to teach young employees, actually, and senior executives at Amazon too, but especially the people come in. I get— we're asked about work-life balance all the time. And my view is that's a debilitating phrase because it, it implies there's a strict trade-off. And the reality is, if I'm happy at home, I come into the office with tremendous energy. And if I'm happy at work, I come home with tremendous energy. And so it actually is a circle, it's not a balance. And I think that that is worth everybody paying attention to. You never want to be that guy, and we all know, we all have a coworker who is that person who as soon as they come into the meeting, they drain all of the energy out of the room. You can just feel the energy level go, You don't want to be that guy. So you want to come into the office and give everybody a kick in their step. One of the precursors, one of the foundational things to being able to take risk is to have had some kind of support from somebody. You have to have some mentors. You have to have somebody who loves you. These are the kind of things that build up and allow you to kind of, you know, jump off into uncharted terrain and do something new because you know you have a support system of one kind or another. And, and I certainly did. So for me, I just want to point out that I, I feel very strongly that there's a lot— I've won a lot of lotteries. Amazon is one of the lotteries that I've won, but I had a big lottery with my parents. My dad is a Cuban immigrant. He came here when he was 16 years old, didn't speak any English. My— he's a great guy. And my mother had her— had me when she was 17 years old. So she was a pregnant 16-year-old in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in high school, which was not cool. And she made it work. And her parents, my grandparents, helped her with that whole thing and made that all work. And if you don't get that kind of support somehow, at the doesn't have to be your parents. Sometimes people get lucky, it's a grandparent, or it's a friend, or a family friend, or a teacher. It can be somebody, but you need that. Somebody has to step into your life, and that's a lottery that I suspect a lot of people in this room have also won, just like me. You know, you don't choose your passions, your passions choose you. And I would always advise young people, actually anyone, you know, to get in touch with what you're really passionate about. And it's a gift to have a passion. Some Some people are lucky they have more than one passion. They have 2 or 3, and that gives you energy. You can't force the passion on yourself. It just doesn't work. You can try, but it's unlikely to succeed. Your stock at one point I think went to $100, but then it went down to $6 or something like that. At the peak of the internet bubble, our stock peaked somewhere around $113. And then after the internet bubble, you know, busted open, our stock went down to $6. From 113 to 6 in less than a year. So my annual shareholder that year starts with a one-word sentence, and that one-word sentence is the word ouch. So most of those internet companies of the dot-com era are out of business. Yeah, you survived. What was it that made you to survive and virtually the rest of them are gone? I would say that whole period is very interesting because the stock is not the company and the company is not the stock. And so as I watched the stock fall from $113 to $6, I was also watching all of our internal business metrics— number of customers, profit per unit, you know, everything you can imagine, defects, etc. Every single thing about the business was getting better and fast. And so as the stock price was going the wrong way, everything inside the company was going the right way. And I, you know, so I wasn't— we didn't need to go back to the capital markets. We didn't need more money. The only reason, you know, a financial bust like the internet bubble bursting is it makes it really hard to raise money. But, you know, we already had the money we needed, so we just needed to continue to progress. I talk a lot about willingness to be misunderstood. That's a really important thing to have if you're going to do anything new or different. In the world, it is going to be misunderstood sometimes by well-meaning critics, sometimes by self-interested critics. You'll get all kinds. And it's okay. It's all part of the process. The only way to avoid criticism altogether is to be completely conventional in everything you do. And so how do you respond to the criticism? What do you do? What's the right thing to do? Well, I think the first thing you do is you ask, are the critics right? You listen, you ask, are they right? Or even if they're not completely right, is there some piece of it that's right that you can be inspired by? And then if you decide, by the way, that the answer is no, that you believe, you have conviction that what you're doing is the right course, force, then no force in the world should be able to move you. You should have a deep keel. But if you decide that your critics, that there is something, then you should change. And I give you an example from the early days of Amazon of when we refused to change. We were small enough that most people didn't pay much attention to us or care about us. I'm taking you way back to like 1995, 1996. We pioneered this thing called customer reviews. And I got a letter one day from a publisher, a book publisher, that said, hey, you must not understand your business. You're losing sales because you're allowing negative customer reviews on the book detail pages. Why don't you just put positive reviews? And I thought about this, and And I thought, no, he's wrong. We don't make money when we sell things. We make money when we help people make purchase decisions. It was a different framing. And so getting to today's news, you know, we listened to our critics and we decided the framing that we have been using all these years is competitive compensation. We look at what what other job opportunities there are and what the competitive compensation levels are. And we offer competitive compensation and actually non-competitive, world-leading benefits packages, but just competitive compensation. And so in light of this, you know, thinking about this and trying to decide, do we want to change? We realized we just made a decision. Well, you can offer competitive compensation Or you can decide to lead. And as soon as we framed it that way, we're like, let's decide to lead. I think people will follow. What was it the critics said that caught your eye? Basically they were saying, if you read between the lines, because a lot of the specific criticism was not correct, but if you read between the lines, what they really wanted us to do, they said, because you could also say, look, there's so many companies, there's all the fast food food companies, there's, you know, the baristas, and there's, you know, like, wait a second, why are you focusing on us? But what they're really saying is, we're focusing on you because you're a leader, and we want you to lead. That's what they're actually saying. And as soon as you recognize it that way, instead of it feeling like criticism, it feels empowering. They're asking us to lead because we're a symbol of an innovative, iconic company. We're a gold standard for innovation. We should lead. Never chase the hot thing, whatever it is. That's, that's like trying to catch the wave, and you'll never catch it. You need to position yourself and wait for the wave. And the way you do that is you pick something you're passionate about. So that, that's the number one piece of advice that I give to somebody who wants to start a company or start a new endeavor inside of a bigger company, make sure it's something you're interested in, something you're passionate about. Missionaries build better products. And so I would take a missionary over a mercenary any day. Mercenaries want to, you know, flip the company and get rich. Missionaries want to build a great product or service. And, you know, one of those great paradoxes in It's usually the missionaries who end up making more money anyway. There's one reason we have done better than most of our peers in the internet space, you know, over the last 6 years. It is because we have focused like a laser on customer experience, and that really does matter. I think in any business, it certainly matters online where word of mouth is so very, very powerful. You know, if you make a customer unhappy They won't tell 5 friends, they'll tell 5,000 friends. So we are at a point now where we have all the things we need to build an important and lasting company. And if we don't, it will be shame on us. You mentioned that you wanted innovation to inspire this next generation. Why is it important to you?

Why is it so important to you personally to make that happen?

Well, I think, you know, I was a very lucky kid. I was inspired by invention and self-reliance from a number of different people and from, you know, even watching the Apollo program as a little boy. And I think when little kids get inspired, you never know what might happen. It's a big deal. And everything about our society gets better over time. I really do believe that. I'm an optimist. You know, the myth of the good old days is usually just that, a myth. We have better medicine than we've ever had before. For everything, you know, all of that is invention. It's people figuring out antibiotics. It's people figuring out new kinds of biomedicines, biotechnology. It's things that have been figured out with the kind of communication that we have, the freedom of speech we have now with the internet. There's so many things that are getting better, and a lot of that is powered by invention. How do we get young people reengaged with government service? Well, I think one thing, and I, I, I look at this at Amazon too, so I, I don't think it's just government service. I think a lot of these government organizations are large organizations and large organizations have a set of problems. And I worry about this at Amazon. I want us to have this, the scope and capabilities of a large organization, but the spirit and heart of a small organization. Small startup company. And, and, and I, and I think that so large organizations, one of the things that happens is that the rate of the decision-making velocity goes down and it gets hard for large organizations to make decisions quickly. It's trivial for a 50-person startup, they make decisions like this, but a 500,000-person company like Amazon or a giant government agency, there's a lot of levels of review and different things, and it can really slow. And by the way, that young people don't want to work at a company with a slow decision-making process. It's just not as fun as working at a startup company or somewhere else where— so I think you can do that. And even in a large organization, I think if you— if the leadership— this is all about leadership— if the leadership focuses on increasing the decision-making velocity of the organization, you will get— everybody will be happier. It's more fun. Everybody will be happier at work, and you'll get younger people because that's what they want. You can also do— every single person who works in a large company, you get to decide, are you going to help increase the decision-making velocity? Are you going to bring energy to the room? We all know, we all have those people, we work with them. As soon as they walk in the room, the whole room, the energy level goes up. Somehow they bring energy to that conference room. And we also all work with people who are the opposite. Like, the second they walk in the room, the whole room deflates. And you don't want to be that second guy. You want to be that first guy. And we all get to choose that. We all get to decide that. So anyway, I think you can do it in big organizations, and I think one of the things that makes big organizations less attractive to young people is just sometimes we're slow, and you can fight that and you can fix it. If you look over, over long periods of time, you know, look over hundreds of years and look at the average sort of life cycle of a new technology, what you find is is that it's getting compressed and compressed and compressed, so the rate of change is getting faster and faster. Every decade that goes by, there are sort of more important discoveries per unit time than there were in the previous decade. And a lot of these discoveries tend to, you know, have two uses. I mean, technologies, you know, tend to be agnostic with respect to whether they could be used for good or used for evil. And I think that, you know, over the next 50 years, we are gonna face a lot of very tough decisions as a society in how we make sure that we are harnessing those technologies for good purposes. I think liberty, giving people the freedom to, you know, as long as they're not hurting somebody else, do what they want, is super important. I think it's the core essence of the American dream, and I think at times we as a people get confused about it. I mean, I think one of the things that you see come up in various places, and people talk about it under different labels. Sometimes they talk about it as a lack of personal responsibility and other kinds of labels, but what it really is, is I think people should, you know, carefully reread the first part of the Declaration of Independence. Because I think sometimes we as a society start to get confused and think that we have a right to happiness. But if you read the Declaration of Independence, it talks about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Nobody has a right to happiness. You should have a right to pursue it, and I think the core of that is liberty. I think it's the very rare idea that can be done by a single individual. Almost everything that is going to change the world, solve a problem, improve something, these are usually big efforts and they require, you know, teams, a team working together to really get something important done. And that has been the story of Amazon.com. Every step along the way, we've had a team here that is making this work. I mean, I don't know, even at the smallest scale, you have to figure out how to get get help from your friends, from your family members, from people that you can hire in those early days. I think without that, it would never work. You need people who— and this is very tricky— you need people who are experts in a certain domain area, because the world is so complex today, it's really hard to invent something if you're, if you're not an expert, if you don't have the underlying tools at your disposal. Without having the tools at your disposal and know what's going on. You can't invent something in neurosurgery without knowing something about neurosurgery. It's just going to be very difficult because we're very advanced. And that's true in every field of endeavor. But to really be an inventor, you have to combine that expertise with the beginner's mind. You have to have a certain childlike ability to not be trapped by your expertise. And that fresh look, that beginner's mind, once you're an expert, is unbelievably hard to maintain. But great inventors are always looking. They have a certain divine discontent, and they may have seen something 1,000 times, and still it occurs to them that that thing, even though they're accustomed to it, could be improved. And that's, you know, you have to look for people like that. And I also think culture support that. You know, you can't, even if you're that kind of person, if you're in a culture that doesn't support failure, you know, willingness to fail is critical for invention, willingness to be misunderstood for long periods of time. You know, most inventions don't really work that well in the beginning. They're clumsy, they're little toddlers, they're always falling and tripping. And so you have to have a culture in your organization that supports supports this kind of stumbling and wandering. You know, just because you're wandering doesn't mean you're lost. And that's a really important thing to keep in mind when you're trying to invent. I very frequently get the question, what's going to change in the next 10 years? And that is an interesting question. It's a very common one. I almost never get the question, what's not going to change in the 10 years? And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two, because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time. And so as you pointed out, in our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that's going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery. They want vast selection. It's impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up to me and says, Jeff, I love Amazon. I just wish the prices were a little higher. You know how you— I love Amazon. I just wish you delivered a little more slowly. Impossible. And so the effort that we put into those things, spinning those things up, we know the energy we put into it today will will still be paying dividends for our customers 10 years from now. And so those— when you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it. On AWS, the big ideas are also pretty straightforward. It's impossible for me to imagine that 10 years from now somebody is going to say, I love AWS, I just wish it were a little less reliable. Or, I love AWS, I just wish you would raise prices. It should be a little more expensive. Or, I love AWS and I wish you would innovate and improve the APIs at a slightly slower rate. None of those things you can imagine. And so the big ideas in business are often very obvious, but it's very hard to maintain a focus a firm grasp of the obvious at all times. But if you can do that and continue to spin up those flywheels and put energy into those things, as we're doing with AWS, over time you build a better and better service for your customers on the things that genuinely matter to them. From the very beginning, um, in 1994, when I came across this fact that the web was growing at 2,300% a year, I was working on Wall Street, very specialized kind of investment bank called a quantitative hedge fund, in a company called D.E. Shaw. And when I decided I was going to do this crazy thing, I went and told my boss, and he said, "Well, hmm, let's go for a walk." So we went on a 2-hour walk in Central Park, and he actually thought it was a good idea. Very smart guy. His name is David Shaw. He's one of the few people I know who has a fully developed left brain, a fully developed right brain, just a super smart guy. And he said, "This is a great idea, but it would be a better idea for somebody who didn't already have a good job." And that was actually a compelling argument to me. And so I went away. He convinced me to think about it for 2 more more days. And it was very hard to make that decision. And until I found the right framework in which to make the decision, I think because I know there are a lot of people who are interested in entrepreneurial activities out there, I think this could be useful. It's the right framework for me anyway to make the kind of decision was a regret minimization framework. So I projected myself into the future and I'm 80 years and I'm looking back on my life, what do I want to have done at that point? I want to have minimized all the regrets that I have. And I knew that when I was 80, there was no chance that I would regret having walked away from my 1994 Wall Street bonus or any of that kind of thing. I wouldn't even remember that. But I did think there was a chance that I might regret not having participated somehow in this thing that I thought was going to be very exciting called the Internet. And I also knew that if I tried and failed, I wouldn't regret that. So once I thought about it that way, it became incredibly easy to make that decision. There are a couple of other things that are essential for innovation and invention that are not as fun. One of them is you have to have a willingness to fail. You have to have a willingness to be misunderstood for long periods of time. If you do something in a new way, and I don't care what it is, people are initially going to misunderstand it relative to the traditional way. And they will— there'll be well-meaning critics who, you know, genuinely want the best outcome, but they're worried about this new way. And there'll also be, of course, self-interested critics who have a vested interest in the traditional they have some profit stream tied to the traditional way. But, but doing things— and if you want to, if you never want to be criticized, for goodness' sake, don't do anything new. So it's, it's, it's okay though if you have a willingness to be misunderstood for long periods of time. If you have a willingness to fail, then what you can do is you can ramp up your rate of experimentation. So successful invention— successful invention is inventions that customers care about. It's actually relatively easy to invent new things that customers don't care about. But successful invention, if you want to do a lot of that, you basically have to increase your rate of experimentation. And that you can think of as a process. How do you go about organizing your systems and your people, all of your assets, your own daily life and how you spend time. How do you organize those things to increase your rate of experimentation? Because not all of your experiments are going to work. Just find something that you're passionate about. I would definitely— on the career advice side, the most important thing about your first job out of school is to pick a place where you think you're going— where your learning per unit time is going to be very high. You can optimize for a bunch of variables and it can get very confusing, you know, where is the location, you know, what's the salary going to be, and all those things are worth considering, they're all important. But make sure you pull back after you've done your analysis and say, "Am I also picking the place that I believe my learning per unit time is going to be the fastest?" And you learn much more from a best practices company than you do— you learn no matter where you go. So if you go work for somebody, you're like, "God, these people all crazy. This is insane. You'll learn a lot of negative lessons that you can use later and you cannot do those things. But that process of elimination method takes a long time. So it's better to try and find a place that has really high hiring standards. Some of the basics especially, you know, a place that's trying to recruit only the, you know, the, you know, A's hire A's and B's hire C's and C's hire D's. So you've got to hire only A's and you need to pick a company that's doing those kinds of fundamental practices well because 'cause then you'll learn so much, it'll set you up to do other things. So I would say that's probably the best career advice I can give. I would definitely advise a small startup company to be as narrow and as focused as is possible to be. If you look at the original Amazon business plan, there was no hint of anything other than books in it, and it was not on my radar. I was thinking I wanted to build an online bookstore, that was it. And it worked way better than I thought it would, and we launched music, and that worked better than I thought it would, and we launched videos. I think, it's so long ago I can't really remember, I think it was actually VHS tapes, is that possible? And that worked better than we thought it would, and then I sent email to customers, so I picked about 1,000 customers, and I said, besides the things we sell today, books, music, and video, what would you like to see us sell? And the list came back incredibly long-tailed. It was almost like whatever was on their mind at the moment. It was like, I wish you sold windshield wipers for my car. And I was like, really? Windshield wipers? That wasn't in the business plan, but that's an interesting idea. And so today, basically, if you're buying your windshield wipers anywhere else, you're probably getting ripped off. And so it's been kind of one foot in front of the other. Invention is not disruptive. Only customer adoption is disruptive. At Amazon, we've invented a lot of things that customers did not care about at all, and believe me, they were not disruptive to anyone. So it's only when customers like the new way that anything becomes disruptive. And so really, it's just saying that you want to You know, if somebody comes to you with a business plan that they claim is disruptive, you should ask them to explain it to you in simpler language. And the simpler language is, why are customers going to adopt this? Why are they going to like it? Why is it better than the traditional way? It's about definitely about leaning into the future. And so when you look at the kinds of things that you want to be able to do with your voice, you know, it changes for For those of you who have used an Echo, the fact that it's always on, that you never have to charge it, it's always sitting there ready in your kitchen or your bedroom or wherever you put it, the fact that you can talk to it in a natural way removes a lot of barriers, a lot of friction, a lot of little tiny pieces of friction to be able to do things, to ask what the weather is. It's easier than taking your phone out of your pocket. And what people people have found over and over again is that by removing the tiniest amounts of friction from ordinary activities, really, people appreciate that and it improves customers' lives. One of the key things about lean, you know, defect reduction, being efficient, not letting defects travel downstream in any process, if you're going to eliminate waste, or as the Japanese call it, Buddha, you have to have information. And the data center has historically been an information-free zone as far as application developers are concerned. You would write code and you have no idea how it's consuming resources. You're too insulated because you're in a pool of resources, and you can't meter it. One of the biggest still unappreciated benefits of AWS is that application developers get a real sense of which inner loop is driving all the cost. Yeah, and that's a big deal. So that— and that's just starting to— that's one of the ways that, that this approach to infrastructure dramatically reduces costs. In our, in our data center, I mean, in our fulfillment centers and in our customer service centers, we have— we're always seeking to keep defects from moving downstream. So this is a, you know, a principle that was probably best applied in the early— or best, first best applied by Toyota. Um, and they had this idea of what they call the Andon cord, which basically any factory worker could pull the cord and stop the whole automobile manufacturing line. And for old school auto manufacturing companies, that was considered crazy, absolutely insane. In fact, the opposite principle was typically at work, which is you did everything possible to keep that line running. And here Toyota flipped that on its head and they said, look, anytime there's a defect, no matter how small, we want you to pull the cord and stop the whole line. And stopping things And, you know, if you do that in a line that has a lot of defects, initially you get a lot of andon cord pulls and it's very expensive. But over time, if you use that approach, you eliminate the defects closer and closer to the source. And the people who are fans of lean manufacturing and these kinds of techniques take almost as an article of faith, although there's a lot of evidence to support this in very diverse industries, that the further a defect travels downstream, the more expensive it becomes to fix. And so you want to stop those things. You don't want them to repeat and happen over and over. Sometimes, you know, we expand into new areas in two ways. One is kind of, you know, from a customer need. We will work from a customer need to the skills that we need. And the other one is skills forward, from a skill set we have to a new set of customers. So Kindle is an example of a customer need, and, you know, so we don't have any hardware skills. This is 10— we're doing this for 10 years now, but we'll go back and we'll go— if you go back and have 10 years, we had no hardware team. We had to hire somebody to lead our hardware group and then build a hardware team and build some some institutional competence at it, and so on. That, that's a customer need backwards approach. And then skills forward, a great example of that is Amazon Web Services. We had the skills to do AWS. We had probably more distributed computing expertise than anybody else in the world because of the transactions. Transaction systems are so complicated and hard to build, and we had a service-oriented architecture of great complexity probably before anybody else. And so we saw we could kind of— because we were doing that, we could kind of see the future a little bit and decided to build AWS, which has turned into, you know, a huge business in its own right. And that is, you know, you— if you were always— business is very situational. And so rules of thumb are good, but they have to be applied to the right situation. So sometimes the old maxim that you should stick to the knitting is correct, but sometimes the adage that you should stick to the knitting is wrong. And, you know, a senior leader's job is to figure out in which situation are you.

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