Jeff Bezos quit his Wall Street job using a regret minimization framework: he imagined himself at 80 and asked which choice he'd regret least. He built Amazon on extreme customer focus, hired for passion, and priced hardware at break-even to profit from services instead.
He left a high-paying job to bet on himself and start a dot-com company when everyone thought he was crazy. He built it up to build the largest retailer in the world and prove his doubters wrong. He's now worth over $30 billion and is one of the richest 15 people in the world. He's Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, and here are his 10 rules for success.
When I decided to do this, I first talked to my wife who is sitting here in the audience. And she had married a relatively stable, goofy, but still relatively stable person working at a Wall Street firm. I worked at a quantitative hedge fund. And this was a hard decision. And I was looking for the right framework in which to make that kind of important decision. And the right framework I found is a regret minimization framework. And that's just a nerdy way of saying that you wanna project yourself to age 80 and then think back over your life. And if you're 80, you wanna minimize the number of regrets you have throughout that period of time. I think this is something a lot of people do maybe subconsciously. Very few people probably name it regret minimization framework because most people are healthier than that. But it was a very clear way for me to think about making that kind of life decision. And the way it helped was I thought, OK, if I go do this thing and participate in this thing called the internet that I genuinely believe is going to be a big deal, and if I fail, am I going to regret having tried and failed? And I knew the answer to that was no. But I also knew that if I— if I didn't try, that I would always regret that. I would always wonder, and it would haunt me until that mythical day, which I actually hope will come. Many, many kids and many grown-ups do figure out over time what their passions are. And sometimes we let our— I don't think it's that hard. I think what happens though sometimes is that we let our intellectual selves overrule those passions. And so that's what needs to be guarded against. I'm going to put the vast majority of my energy, attention, and dollars into building a great product or service and put a smaller amount into shouting about it, marketing it. Because I know if I build a great product or service, my customers will tell each other. You have to mix in some patience with that. Almost 7 years ago now, I started this most incredible journey called Amazon.com. Actually, at that time, it wasn't even called Amazon.com. It was called Cadabra Inc., as in abracadabra. That was the original name of the company. And I had phoned a lawyer on the way to Seattle from a cell phone. And he said, well, what do you— to incorporate the company. He said, what do you want the company to be called? And I said, Cadabra. And he said, cadaver? And I knew that was a bad name. We changed it a few months later. What we have always wanted to do is raise the standard for what it means to be customer-centric to such a degree that other organizations, whether they be other companies or whether they be hospitals or government agencies, whatever the organization is, they should look at Amazon as a role model and say, how can we be as customer-centric as Amazon? Even competitors, I imagine, right? Hopefully competitors as well. But if we could make, you know, if that could be our legacy, that we kind of raised the general idea of what it means to be customer-centric, that would be a huge accomplishment. It would be accomplishing a mission that's much bigger than ourselves. We know customers like low prices. We know customers like big selection. And we know that customers like fast delivery. And those things are going to be true 10 years from now. They're going to be true 20 years from now. So we can count on those things and we can put energy into them. We know customers like their products fast. And so we work on things that we know customers like. What has worked at Amazon is focusing on the customer, being very— putting the customer first, which is easy to say but difficult to do. If you really are customer-centric, it's like being the host of a party. You're holding the party for your guests. Sometimes the host of the party is holding the party for the host of the party. And that leads to a different kind of party. My advice would be the same for any kind of entrepreneur, and that is make sure that you are focused on something you're passionate about. So if you look at the early internet companies, they were started and focused on doing something that they thought was very interesting long before the internet was fashionable in any way. We are currently an underdog once again. We've been in business for 6 years, and there was exactly 1 year where we were not the underdog, and that was 1999. I like the underdog years because it makes— I liked it when all the people we hired, their parents told them they were crazy. That was kind of the good era. Fortunately, it's back. In 1999, all the parents were like, you know, giving their brothers and sisters high fives. You know, my son is working at Amazon.com. So that's a very— you can't follow the fashion when you're trying to do a startup company, or I think really anything in life. But you have to, as an entrepreneur, if you're gonna build a company, pick something you think is interesting that has the intersection of genuinely creating real customer value. And then just stay right there and let the wave catch you. So you can hold a ballet and that can be successful, and you can hold a rock concert and that can be successful. Just don't hold a ballet and advertise it as a rock concert. And so you need to be clear with all of your stakeholders with, you know, are you holding a ballet or are you holding a rock concert? And then people get to self-select in. You know, we hire people who are really motivated by building new customer experiences. They like to pioneer. They like the rate of change. They wake up in the shower motivated by thinking about customers. Occasionally somebody joins Amazon who their primary motivation comes from thinking about competition or competitors. Those people can find Amazon a little dull. Again, it's not about right or wrong. It's just that different people are motivated by different things. And what happens with corporate corporate cultures is that over time, people collect themselves in a way where they like that culture and then it becomes self-sustaining. One of the things you've done so well at Amazon is you've undercut all of your rivals by keeping the prices low. Does that same strategy apply to tablets? Yes, our approach is premium products at non-premium prices. So we sell the hardware at break-even, so we don't try to make any money when we sell this hardware. And we hope to make money when people use the devices, not when they buy the devices. And so that's a very different approach from most companies. Most companies are building quite a bit of profit into the sale of these devices. Whatever it is that you want to do, there's going to be risk in your life, and risk is a necessary component of progress. You can make any pioneering movements in the world of any kind, whether they be the whether it be geographical, physical exploration that I've just been talking about, or whether it be a more cerebral exploration of a scientific field, or I bet you could ask that question of every speaker here, and I bet that every speaker here has taken substantial risks, whether it be intellectual or otherwise, to achieve what they've done.
Thank you guys so much for watching. I made this video because NoLeafClover830 asked me to. So if there's somebody that you want to see me make a top 10 video of, leave it in the comments below. I'd also love to know in the comments which of the 10 rules really stuck with you the most and had the biggest impact on you. I'm going to join in the discussion, so I look forward to seeing you there. Thank you so much for watching. Continue to believe and go have a great day.
