If you Bring Jeff Bezos Data He Listened – 99% of the Time with David Selinger

Welcome to this edition of the Million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell.

Talking with David Sellinger. And David, I'm curious about. You went back from this, getting experiences with a bunch of different companies working.

In the real world.

You went back with a vengeance back to Stanford. And what caused you. How long before you were working with Jeff Bezos at Amazon? Because you said you were working about two years for a while, so about two years. And how did that process go? I mean, you finished school and it was just a matter of moving.

I mean, this was an interesting phase of my life because it's kind of entering that second phase where I'm doing a little bit less hopping around and a little bit more focus. And all the experiments that I had done in that earlier phase had built up a pretty significant ego. And so working with Jeff was kind of interesting because he had caught me at the peak, my ego. So I would go into these meetings with him and it was really good, actually turned. I think it turned out to be okay because I would go to these meetings and everyone else would be like on pins and needles because Bezos is about to walk in and no one else would like, push back to him. And they were kind of scared. And now that I'm a CEO, I kind of recognize how much I would value people that will push back when they have data to support them being right.

Yeah.

And I would. And I'd say, no, I think that's wrong because of this, this, this, and this. I would never say, I think that's wrong because I think you're dumb, which I. Which, you know, again, as a CEO, that's. I don't think that's so good. And I think other people in the room, because they were so intimidated, were scared of that. There wasn't a difference between those two things and what I found with Jeff. And thank God it was him and not some, you know, just totally egotistical CEO who would have gotten mad. I found that when I brought Jeff data. Yeah, we debated, but you know what he did? Every single freaking time, he listened to me. And I think that's what ended up making our relationship really good was I never, I never showed up in a meeting with him unprepared. And whenever we would disagree, it would be typically about like, I interpret the data to say this and I would just bring him more information. Here's why I Interpret it to say this, and here's what I think we should do about it. The other thing that I found with him that was really insightful and inspiring for me for the rest of my career was he let me run a bunch of experiments that were. Some of them failed, some of them succeeded. Some of them, we agreed going into them were going to be the highest probability of success, and they still failed. And that created this kind of esprit de corps where we were failing together. Like, we put a bunch of energy into this. We both looked at the data, we both reached this conclusion in this hypothesis. We all tested it, and it failed. And the fact that we would. I don't know. I don't know what the right term, but we'd lick our wounds. We would accept the failure. We'd look at it, we'd analyze it, we try to figure out why, but we wouldn't wallow. Right. There was never kind of. To your earlier point about getting mad, there was never like a six months of just being depressed. That would be like, all right, cool this today, or not cool, this sucks. Today we found out that this experiment failed. I'm really upset about it because we spent a bunch of time on it. Let's look at why. Let's dig into why. And a lot of people, when they're digging into why something failed, are going to feel like, oh, now you're just trying to prove this was my fault. No, what we're trying to do is we're trying to figure out why. Because you know what? We're going to do something next. And when we do something next, I damn well better know why this thing failed. Because I want that thing to succeed. I'm over it. Like, we. We're done. We finished the whole, like, oh, woe is me. It didn't work. We're into the let's analyze the living hell out of that. Because that's now data, and I'm now at tomorrow, and in tomorrow's world, I need to succeed. That was yesterday. And don't get your feelings hurt about yesterday. Get your feelings hurt about tomorrow. Apply your brain to the data that this failure, that emotional experience, is now data, and just do that transition instantly. And I found that his ability to do that as a CEO has really inspired me. Again, I'm not anywhere near as good as him at doing that. But that's what I look at every day when I wake up and I say, who do I want to be as a CEO? I don't say Jeff Bezos. I say, I Want to do that thing, I want to repeat that process where everything turns into data and, and data informs tomorrow and intelligence about that data is what makes those decisions for tomorrow better.

Could you repeat that? Because that's people need. Everything turns into data.

Everything turns into data. Successes and failures. Success only lasts for so long, right? And so the key is to make it. Success only lasts for so long, no matter whether you want it to or not. So the key is make failures only last for so long too. Both of those things are only data. They're informative for what am I going to do tomorrow? Everything turns into data. Use that data as intelligently as possible to make tomorrow as successful as possible.

I'm trying to get this down and that is really well said. I hope people pay attention to that. I was thinking while you were talking another side to that. Why is basically keeping your wits about you when things go and, you know, if you need a temper tantrum, go ahead and have it, but then get back and start taking a look at it. But it's like we work together on a million dollar Ferrari or something for a race car or whatever they call those things. You send it out and the thing is just not performing, you know, it's just the engine, there's problems. And you don't, you bring it back in the garage. You don't just say, put it, you know, where's the dump truck? Let's take this thing to dump, start all over. What they do is they lift the hood because it could be nothing more than something, a speck of something in one of the 12 or something cylinders with a spark plug or something, a little furball or something. And you lift up the hood, you take a deep breath and you start debugging this thing. You know, you have your.

One of the most recent examples would be SpaceX, right? Elon Musk SpaceX, yeah. So for the first, I think it was five years, every one of SpaceX's large rocket launches, you know what they did failed. It blew up. And everybody pointed to him and said, ha, ha, ha ha ha. And, and what Elon Musk said, and he published this, he said, I am going to do this, but what I'm going to do is I'm going to do it cheaper and faster than everyone else. And every one of those failures, I'm going to fully instrument and get all the data for how it failed so that by the time I get to six years into this business, most rocket companies after six years have launched exactly zero rockets and have no information, but they have these great designs and plants, right? He's already had five failed launches that generated terabytes of data for him. So his sixth launch was successful, his seventh launch failed. But by the time you get forward 10 years, every single one of those failures was data. Every one of those failures was data that turned into fuel that became the fuel for every one of his future successes. And now SpaceX launches more satellites than anybody else in the world. As far as I'm aware of now.

You took these lessons and how did you now, when did you get the signal inside yourself that it's time for me to go on my own?

So I'm going to admit a mistake I made in my career here, which is maybe, maybe a mistake. I saw Jeff failing at something that I thought was really important. And it's written about in a lot of books now. There's a project called Gurupa G U R U P A. And it was this platform that he committed to migrating all of Amazon to this platform. And I analyzed it and it was crap. It was really, really bad. And Jeff, despite having the first 10 projects fail on Garopa, continued to insist that we needed to move to Garoupa. So I had a bunch of engineers that reported to me quit. I then watched my peers and they started losing engineers. And so I then went up and I met with the head of, of infrastructure and I said, look, here's the data. We have all these engineers quitting. Here are the quotes from our principal engineers stating, this is a problem and it's not going well. I need to know that you're aware of this and you're going to solve this because it's affecting my ability to meet my goals. We didn't have a good conversation. We had a bad conversation and it didn't go well. And he said, you know, you needed to go do your thing. I said, I'm going to do my thing, but this is slowing me down and I need you to fix it. And I was out of. I was probably considered out of line in making that statement. And. But now it's well documented, like it was a failure. And a year after I left, Jeff went and met with all the engineering leads and said, this was a huge failure. I'm sorry, we're going to change direction. And I had lost faith in Jeff because he refused to see the data. And so while I do give him all this credit, I think that was the one time when he didn't do it. Now, my mistake was I saw him being great. 99.999% of the time. And I bailed because he made one mistake. And yeah, I felt strongly about it and yeah, it impacted me, but I'm pretty sure I would have made a lot more money and stuff like that had I just stayed at Amazon. So that's what I'm going to say I admitted is a mistake. That said, though, I did stick to my guns. Like I stood by him until he did that thing, at which point I lost all faith and I said I need to go find something else where I can go be more effective.

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And so that turned into your own company.

I turned into Redfin. Yeah, so I left and actually I started building Redfin for about six months, eight months while I was still at Amazon. We launched and it just exploded. It was like, it was like the hottest, hot of the hot. And so I had to leave. I, I then I was the CTO and co founder at Redfin. And like I said, that's just transformed the entire real estate world. We built at the time. This is 2003, 2004. We built the very first interactive maps on the Internet. And from a user experience perspective, it was just fun. Everyone could use it and it was fast and it did all these things that the Internet now does that no one had ever done before. We launched and we had 450,000 unique visitors on the day we launched just because it was that cool. It was like one of the first major viral sensations of the Internet.

How did people, how did it, as it went viral, what did people understand they were going to get from it that, you know, compel them to go, no rush to it, you know what I'm saying?

It was just cool, right? So I mean everyone's used Maps, right? And everyone now has used Google Maps. But imagine if you can, it's 2004 and when you go to Google Maps, every time you move the map, you have to click zoom in or zoom out, or you have to click east or west and it takes 20 seconds to reload. So the very first thing we did was we just made it interactive. It was the first click and drag map. And it just, it inspired this way of thinking about computers as being an interactive, a real time interactive device. And we had never thought of data and the Internet as being that way. In fact, if you look at the origins of the iPhone, these types of interactive maps, this was the inspiration for Steve Jobs to build the touch screen on the iPhone. That's how kind of novel this idea was at the time. And so that was the first thing. The second thing we'd done is we took all this data that was all these data that were really hard to access. It was prior sales data, prior listing data, and it was all held behind closed doors. You could get it. You had to go to your county office and you had to sit down at their machine, pick a parcel, download all that stuff onto a floppy disk, and then load it onto your machine at home. What we did is we did that 100,000 times, and then we put it into a single database and then we put it on the Internet. None of those data had ever seen the light a day before until we did this. And so you could go onto our website, type in Bill Gates, see Bill Gates his home, see how much he paid for it, see his property taxes, see who his neighbors were, see how much they paid for their houses. And it was just. It was just enthralling. So I literally woke up at like 8 o' clock or 7 o' clock in the morning. And I started walking to back to Amazon's headquarters. And I stopped and I got my coffee because I'm in Seattle. I probably lifted my nose and was snobby to someone on the way to the coffee shop too, because I was in Seattle. What I did, you know, that's what you're supposed to do.

It's obligatory.

Yeah, Yeah. I mean, you'd have to move if you didn't do it. So I went ahead and did that. And when I get to the coffee shop, I'm still waking up. I ordered a mocha. I always had a kind of this. It was a dark chocolate, not sweetened mocha every morning. And I turned around and I remember this scene. It's like clear as day in my mind still. I was in line and I turned around and I noticed that everyone had their laptop. And that wasn't unusual for some people to have their laptops open. But everyone in the coffee shop had a laptop. And I was like, whoa, that's interesting. And almost everyone. There were two people on, like they were sitting with someone at their laptop. And so again, it wasn't like you would see that, but you never had it. Everyone. And then I, you know, I kind of like looked around. Everyone in the coffee shop had Redfin on it. I just turned the server on six hours ago and it had just become this sensation like, oh my God, can you do this? Where's my house? What's my house worth? Oh my God. What did my neighbor pay for their house? Oh, there's my brother in law. Oh, wow. He must make more money than I thought he did. Who's your best friend? Where do they live? What's their address? And it just blew up. And it was kind of funny. We did see, I want to say like 5% of all people went to Bill Gates that day. But it just. No one had ever done anything like this before. And you could spy on your neighbor from your, from your coffee shop. And it was really this amazing, neat experience. And not only did we get 400,000 visitors, it was up into the right from that. One of the other funny things that happened was again, the Internet wasn't that big at this time. So we all had. You hosted your computer at a data center. There was no Google cloud, there's no aws. So we had an Internet provider and they had never launched a site that had that much traffic with one exception. Do you know what those sites were? It's a whole category of sites.

Search. I would say porn. Oh, porn. Yeah, sir.

So they thought we were a porn site. They're like, dude, look at it. You're serving all these images. People are coming all over the place. You went from zero to 400,000 visitors in six hours. You are definitely a porn site. And so they called us and shut us down. And I was like, no, promise is not. Go look, go look. And they're like, oh my God, it's on the COVID It was on the COVID of a bunch of different news sites and magazines and it was getting posted everywhere and it was on fire. It was an amazing experience.

And so talk, you know, you're talking about hitting your. If you were a baseball player, it would be like you had a whole series for a weekend. And every time you went to the plate, you hit a grand slam home run. I mean, you know, this is like euphoria beyond belief at being the head of this thing. But then what followed that?

Yeah. So then one of the interesting Things at Redfin, that was unique. We had a founder fallout. So it's three founders and we did not work well together. Two of us agreed on things and the other one did not. And so we had a huge falling out of the founding team, and that was a really tough experience. And unfortunately, the reason I'm a CEO today, I don't know. Fortunately or unfortunately, the reason I'm a CEO today is because the guy that was arguably wrong and that we disagreed with was the CEO at the time. And so we had like 16 employees. And all the other employees decided, this guy's crazy. We want one of you two guys to be the CEO, just not him. And so he fired the whole company that day. We went from 16 employees to him. And what I call that, that was the come to Jesus meeting amongst a bunch of Jews that didn't believe in Jesus, and Jesus did not show up. So I'm Jewish, by the way. Sorry if I offended anyone there. But yeah, I mean, that was a huge learning, and we had to lick our wounds again, recover from that. I then worked with him to get the company funded and hire the new CEO. We had to continue to do a bunch of things despite not wanting to work with him. We had to keep it going. He had no employees. The website stayed up for this whole time. None of the customers knew about this. So all of us, actually, we created a ghost culture. So he was still the CEO, but he didn't have the access to the servers. And so we kept the whole business going, even though he didn't know how to do anything. So we kept the business going even though we weren't employees. And then we just helped it get funded and helped bring in a new CEO. And then it. It has grown since then.

It just kind of eased him out, I guess.

Yeah, I mean, it's like we had no authority to do this. Let me just be really clear. But he didn't have the passwords, he didn't have the code, and so we still had to help him. And it was just despite himself, like, he didn't know that we did these things. He wouldn't have let us do them, I don't think either. But he was just like, oh, yeah, the server stayed up. No, they didn't. We did all that work. But, yeah, I mean, that was a great learning for me. And that's why in my next endeavors, I became the CEO. And I. And I also learned that being the CEO is not about power. It's about accepting the responsibility of that power. So every day when I get, if I get into a debate with one of my employees, I always remember, like, number one, at the end of this conversation, I'm going to be the one that makes the decision. And so I need to make sure that that decision is right. My job is not to tell you what's right in this conversation. My job in this conversation is to learn if I'm wrong. Because at the end of the conversation, I still have to make the decision. If all I do is I spend this whole conversation trying to convince you that I'm right, the likelihood is we're going to make the wrong decision. Because I already know what I believe. My most important objective in this is to learn what you believe and why.

Absolutely. Incredibly.

Sa.

Valuable lesson for a CEO to learn. But also, we almost should have that printed on a card on our desk.

Well, it's because, you know, I think a lot of CEOs believe they either have to be this humble servant leader or they have to be this authoritarian leader. And in my belief, you can't get away from being an authoritarian leader. There's a power structure. You own that power. Fricking own it. Right? Don't be a wuss. Don't pretend you're some sort of servant leader where I'm going to go to the meeting and oh, if that's what you think we should do, that's bs. Take accountability for yourself, son. Right? Like, show up. You are the boss. You have to make this decision. Now. You can take everything they say into consideration and you probably should, or you should fire them and you can make a decision that they don't agree with. And those are all good outcomes. The only bad outcome is if you pretend you weren't in charge at that meeting. You failed everyone if you do that.

Fantastic. Fantastic. David, so much to think about there.

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