Jeff Bezos on the first thing to do before starting a startup

That blank sheet of paper stage is one of the hardest stages. And one of the reasons it's hard is because at that stage, there's nobody counting on you but yourself. One of the things that is very motivating today, it's easy because we've got millions of customers counting on us and thousands of investors counting on us, and then thousands of employees all counting on each other. But in that beginning stage, it's really just you. And you can quit anytime. Nobody's going to care. And so you set about doing the simple things first. So you want to start a company. Well, the first thing you do is you should write a business plan. So I did that. I wrote about a 30 page business plan. I wrote a first draft. In fact, I wrote the first draft on the car trip from the east coast to the west coast. And that is very helpful. The business plan won't survive its first encounters with reality. It will always be different. The reality will never be the plan. But the discipline of writing the plan forces you to think through some of the issues and to get sort of mentally comfortable in the space. I mean, then you start to understand if you push on this knob, this will move over here and so on. So that's the first step.