Ex-Amazon VP tells us what it’s really like working with Jeff Bezos

Sam's database on how long it takes to become a millionaire: https://clickhubspot.com/tewg Episode 877: Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) and Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) talk to Ethan Evans about what it’s really like to work with Jeff Bezos. — Show Notes: (0:00) Intro (3:15) Criticism without praise (5:15) The every-great-man flaw (7:05) Attack mode (11:45) “Sometimes all you need is a B” (19:35) Question mark emails (22:25) Strategically patient, but tactically impatient (24:10) Work hard, long, and smart (25:15) Where high-performers go to feel bad about themselves (28:05) Ethan evaluates Shaan (35:55) Project selection (39:50) Waiting for fat pitches (42:30) Jeff’s security detail (45:50) The story of Amazon Prime (47:55) Amazon's idea tool (50:55) Good design vs. bad design (54:15) The morality of Amazon (56:15) Who Jeff studied (31:35) Post-Amazon (1:04:10) Streaming career advice on Twitch — Links: • https://www.ethanevans.com/about — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton (joinhampton.com): My community for founders. Average member does $25m/year. Many of the guests are members. Get after it...apply: http://joinhampton.com/mfm — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Shaan's weekly email - https://www.shaanpuri.com • Visit https://www.somewhere.com/mfm to hire worldwide talent like Shaan and get $500 off for being an MFM listener. Hire developers, assistants, marketing pros, sales teams and more for 80% less than US equivalents. • Mercury - Shaan uses Mercury across all of his companies. you can too: http://mercury.com/ Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column, N. A., Members FDIC • I run all my newsletters on Beehiiv and you should too + we're giving away $10k to our favorite newsletter, check it out: beehiiv.com/mfm-challenge My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by HubSpot Media // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano /

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You asked me about flaws earlier, like taking your CFO and bitch slapping him in front of a broom. It was a message.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  Ethan Evans is here. Ethan, your former VP over at Amazon Prime, you're there for a long time. You're there, you're at Amazon for what?

• 0:25Speaker 00

  Fifteen years.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  Twenty years, 200 years, maybe.

• 0:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, dog years for sure.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  So Sam, you don't know this, but me and Ethan kind of loosely worked together. When my company got bought by Twitch, I joined what's called the ET team, the executive team. And on that team was Ethan and I was, I, you know, everybody else was somebody at Twitch. Hey, this person, they work on chat. This person works on video. And then I was like, what does that guy do? Oh, he's the parental guardian. He was assigned by Amazon. Amazon bought this company for a billion dollars and they had to put an adult in the room. And so I was told you were the adult in the room and I was like, oh, oh, okay, gotcha. Better say smart things to this guy. Is that true?

• 1:02Speaker 00

  That is largely true. There was in fact, early on, there was a huge overtone that I was just a spy. And that my job there was to like shadow Emmet and then take him out. So there was very much a worry that I, I was the replacement in waiting when they got sick of Emmet. That was never, that was never the actual plan, but you can't convince people of that. Telling them there is no conspiracy is hopeless.

• 1:26Speaker 01

  It only heightens it.

• 1:27Speaker 00

  Right. Oh, yeah. You're right. Denial just makes it worse.

• 1:31Speaker 02

  Do you guys remember when Twitch was acquired? It was the biggest deal ever. And now thinking, like you're saying Twitch was acquired for only $1 billion.

• 1:41Speaker 00

  Yep. Actually 970 million. So yeah, like it didn't even quite make a billion.

• 1:46Speaker 01

  I like the mental win of not paying the full billion because you know, at that point, like, is the deal really going to fall apart over the last 30? I'm not sure, but somebody had to win at the end and it's like, you will feel worse if this falls apart than I will.

• 2:00Speaker 00

  Right.

• 2:01Speaker 01

  Is what I, what I read when I read that price.

• 2:03Speaker 00

  Well, I think the most interesting thing is Twitch definitely had the last laugh because Amazon stock 5Xed in the, in the earn out period for those people. So we had engineers, you know, whose market salary anywhere else was say 200, 250K back then. Vesting out at 2 million a year. And of course, we lost them all at the end. Not because they hated Twitch, but because nobody can stand to go from 2 million to 250K.

• 2:30Speaker 01

  Right. You had to correct the salary.

• 2:32Speaker 00

  Right. Well, and we're not going to pay them 2 million again. So there's this huge vest cliff because of the 5Xing from the big buyout. And we lost a lot of people because there's no way to make that right.

• 2:43Speaker 02

  I'm fascinated. We are fascinated. This podcast on greatness. And that's one of the reasons why we're, we're so into hearing about like the Amazon mafia, Bezos, your career. You're an executive coach now and you've led hundreds of people and you were a hands-on manager. If you were giving Bezos a three, six year review or like trying to say like, here's your weaknesses. What, what would that list look like? Because we know his strengths, which we're going to continue asking about. We know that he's smart.

• 3:11Speaker 01

  We think we know his strengths. What would you say for both? I think both are.

• 3:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, but start with the, start with the weaknesses where you're like, you know, you'd be a little bit better if you fixed blank. Or you tend to be blank and people don't like that.

• 3:24Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I watched Jeff work to turn a weakness into a strength. And it was really funny because I saw a moment where he was obviously working on it, probably a talk. He got an executive coach and it seemed like you could see the coach kind of with the, the puppet strings or the hand up the butt, right? Like, so Jeff was not mean, but very demanding and never said anything good. He just would come in and be like, okay, I see your idea. Here's the three things to fix. Get moving. And for some people who didn't have very thick skin, no matter what results you took to him. They get like a nod and then the three things to improve.

• 4:05Speaker 00

  And that only criticism, only corrective feedback, that was one of his flaws.

• 4:11Speaker 02

  When he gave feedback, would he be correct? Was his taste good?

• 4:14Speaker 00

  His taste was great. It doesn't mean he didn't make mistakes. We know about the Fire Phone, $170 million of write-off just for the hardware that got thrown in a dumpster, let alone all the opportunity cost. But he was generally right. He fought the right battle on Kindle. He fought the right battle on Prime and two-day shipping becoming one-day shipping. He fought a lot of right battles. And in fact, it was annoying because he was so right. We would bust our butts preparing and we would think like, we know our business. We've got it. And he would look at our stuff and like two minutes later be like, what about this? And he'd be like. But, but an flaw of his was being always critical. And I was in a meeting where he more or less, you know, told us everything we had missed for an hour.

• 4:58Speaker 00

  And then stood up to leave and then literally turned back to the table. I said, oh yeah, but good job. You're doing great. And walked back out. And you could just see he was like checking off his list and he's like, oh right, the coach said praise. It was, you know, now he evolved over time, right?

• 5:16Speaker 02

  Okay. So, so he, he didn't compliment enough. What else? What are some other? If, if you're working with them, you're going to say needs to compliment more. What else?

• 5:25Speaker 00

  Well, I'm going to say, you know, give your team some sort of props or support.

• 5:30Speaker 00

  Jeff fell into the flaw of every great man, which I think is having been right a lot. He started to believe his vision was perfect. And that's what led to the Fire Phone disaster. So he's probably learned this lesson, but I would say, realize that being really smart and really right. And having the courage of your convictions can lead you as CEO to eventually drive the company off a cliff. Everyone was trying to tell him the Fire Phone was not a good product. It's like trying to tell a new father, that baby is butt ugly. It's just not something you can do effectively. This is really hard, of course, because he had gotten several products that people had told him weren't, weren't going to work and they did. Now everybody's telling him again, it's not going to work. And it turns out that everybody's right, not Jeff.

• 6:15Speaker 00

  I don't know how to fix that, but that's certainly a growth area. Of course, if we look at modern Jeff, that's a whole other thing. We come all the way to modern Jeff. I have like a list of criticisms. He seems to have changed radically since he left Amazon. He could be very cutting. So we talked about not praising enough. One of his famous ridicules he made of a team that is well documented is too much. There was a team in the room. He didn't like what they had presented and he stopped the meeting and said, um. So is the A team for this project available? Because this is clearly the B team.

• 6:55Speaker 02

  Dude, did he like snap?

• 6:57Speaker 00

  Right.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  Does that just destroys them or what?

• 6:59Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, they had, you know, that's the thing is, uh, I talked to a VP. I saw one VP get torn apart in a meeting. And he went out of the meeting and called his boss and said, uh, the SVP who worked directly for Jeff and said, it was a terrible meeting. This is what happened. You know, no one can deal with them. Jeff would get frustrated and go into attack mode. And what that really was, yes, he was frustrated with the team who screwed up, but he was also frustrated with himself that he let it get that way. But he would just be relentless and it was like beating himself up and you with him. A case of that that I know about is one year we had a, you know, somebody had a great idea, which is we're going to give customers an app where they can

• 7:41Speaker 00

  snap a price, a picture of a price in a store and send it to us to say, hey, we found this in a store at a lower price. So that sounds great. Except the way it plays out in the media is Amazon is using its customers to spy on small town America. You know, to undercut them. And Jeff, in the meeting, I talked to the woman who was in PR sitting across from him. And he came into the meeting and was like, how could we be so stupid? How could anyone screw this up? And she's sitting across from him, kind of feeling like he's saying this to her. But she eventually realized he's just saying it to himself. The bottom line is, I guess he let, he's famous for his laugh. He let his emotions through on both sides.

• 8:22Speaker 00

  If he was unhappy, that unhappiness came out, you know, in, in conduct.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  Do you think that, uh, that thing you said, because the thing you said where you could be working, a team could be working on something for a month or three months. You come in, you present a plan, you think you've thought of everything. And here's a person who they've been in back-to-back-to-back meetings about other things. They opened the piece of paper, they read the thing and they're able to put their finger right on the key point of leverage, maybe the key flaw in the thing or the weakness, or quickly identify why this is good or why this is bad. I saw Emmet do a lot of that too. And it kind of, I didn't know what to make of it. I'm curious what you make of it. Is it just, these people are just smarter. That's why they're at the top. Is it that they have a lot of pattern recognition? Is that a gift or is that a learned behavior? What is that?

• 9:09Speaker 02

  I think the best way to become successful is to see how other people did it, whether you're going to copy them or just use it as inspiration. Because then now you know what's possible. So starting at the age of 24, I did this relentlessly and I was very methodical about it. And I created a spreadsheet where I tracked roughly 50 people who were uber successful. And I looked at the year that they were born, the year that they started their apprenticeship. And then the year that they started the first thing that made them successful, finally the year that they broke through. And I aggregated all this data along with the stories of what they did to be an apprentice and what they did to finally break through. And I put it together in a database and HubSpot went and found this thing that I frankly even forgot about, but it did change my life. And they resurfaced it. They made it even better and they put it into a thing that you can download for free right now.

• 9:55Speaker 02

  So if you click the link in the description or click the QR code right here, you can see this database that I made when I was 24 and it changed my life. And so if you're looking to become successful or you're already successful and just want some more inspiration, check it out.

• 10:07Speaker 00

  Well, Jeff is one of the few people, you know, we're all smart people here. He's one of the few people I sat around and thought, okay, but smarter. Like here's a guy who's clearly smarter. Emmet was somewhat that way as well. You could sit around and be like, I am smart, you are smart, but that guy's really sharp. However, I think it was pattern recognition. He did that all day. Three, four, five of those reviews a day. He did it for years. We've all heard that thing about 10,000 hours to become an expert. He literally spent 10,000 hours reading those documents and giving feedback. So sure, he also had greater context, but it was 10,000 hours of taking a business you don't really know, reading about it for 20 minutes. And then having the ability to turn it into an insight.

• 10:50Speaker 02

  Have you guys ever met someone who's successful and not smart?

• 10:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. I went to a real estate conference. I've met a bunch of them. It was great.

• 10:57Speaker 02

  Like whatever people call it, Jeff, smart. I'm like, did you have any peers who became uber successful, who were average smart?

• 11:07Speaker 00

  Oh boy. Ah, you're putting me on dangerous ground because the peers will see this.

• 11:12Speaker 02

  Bro, didn't you just like LinkedIn post about how like someone tried to seduce your wife? Like you're, you're, you don't mind revealing it all.

• 11:20Speaker 00

  Uh, that post was a while ago, but anyway, it's obviously very memorable. Yes, there were a couple of people at Amazon and I think, what I think is everyone who ends up rich, unless they're just lucky or inherited, has some gift. The person I'm thinking of had a gift of loyalty. If Jeff wanted it done, that guy was gonna run through any wall to get there. He made a ton of money from Amazon, from Jeff rewarding him, not for him being the smartest guy, but for him being the, I will just take on any mess you give me. And I don't think Jeff gave him things expecting brilliant transformative results.

• 12:01Speaker 00

  He expected him to go in and grind away and turn a D into a B. And sometimes, this is an important point you'll like, in a business as big as Amazon, sometimes all you need is a B, because there's some other A product that's gonna drag through the revenue, and a B product on that engine, or a B support system, is completely good enough. And I need a guy who's gonna go take a D or an F and get it to a B, and that's all I need. And that's better than like the high beta leader who's gonna try and make that thing an A, but might not get there.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  We were at a offsite once for Twitch, and this lady presented what she called the trust equation. And she had three parts of the room labeled. So one part of the room was intimacy. So it was like, how close do you feel to each other? Another one was credibility. And she said, this is saying, if you say, I got it, I'll take care of it. That means, that means I got it. I will actually go try to take care of it. And then the third one was integrity. It was like, does somebody have kind of your best interest or the team's best interest at heart?

• 13:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  And she said, walk to the area of the room that you think is most important, the most important variable in the trust equation. I think, let's say there's 20 of us, 18 of us walked to integrity, including myself. One guy, Hubert, if you remember, walked over to intimacy.

• 13:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, of course he did.

• 13:35Speaker 01

  And then Emmett walked over to credibility and sat there. It's like, what is going on? And to me, I couldn't even believe it. I was like, what could possibly be more important in a team, working together or having trust, than the integrity of the person? That's just seemed like, I couldn't, and I guess 18 people agreed. And Emmett, they were like, well, that's interesting. Why are you over there? And he goes, cuz you know how many times in a company, somebody tells me, I got this? And I think, okay, good, they got this. And I go move my attention to something else. And two months later, I come back and find out that that area is a mess, and they in fact did not got this. And he goes, I don't care how smart you are, I don't care how much I like you, I don't even care if you're particularly good person.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  I just care that when you say I got this, that means you got this. And it was like such a, like a wound in the CEO. Is that, what do you make of that?

• 14:26Speaker 00

  That's, that's this guy, who I don't think was the smartest, but he was the I got this guy. And he had Bezos' trust that he would do an above average, very good, but not great job. And that he could, and therefore Jeff could turn his back on some fire and be like, that guy will throw his body on it, roll around and take the burns until the fire's mostly out. And he had a couple of those guys. And they never became top leaders, but they kept getting moved and rewarded. And I get it, because, you know, Sam, you mentioned me leading hundreds of people. I didn't lead on the scale of Jeff himself by any means, but you get to a point where you're like, I just need to be able to get this out of my head.

• 15:10Speaker 00

  I can't worry about this anymore.

• 15:14Speaker 02

  Hey, what was it like working with coworkers who became incredibly wealthy? If I was wealthy and a boss said to me, does the, is the A-team here? I would be like, I'm out. Like, I don't know if I feel like putting up with this. What is the motivating factor for these people? And what's it like working with coworkers who are generationally rich?

• 15:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, great question. You know, I think the guy I'm talking about ended up, the last time I knew, is probably worth about 75 million, so clearly generationally rich.

• 15:47Speaker 01

  By the way, this Amazon stock price 2005, I think is like in the $2 range. It's now 248.

• 15:53Speaker 00

  Oh, I have a number for it if you want it. You'll love this. I calculated at one point, for my first day to my last day, Amazon's stock went up 9,082%. Cuz I know my exact start date, my exact stop date, so I could do the math, 9,082%. It's of course gone up more since then, but yeah, 9,000%. Anyway.

• 16:14Speaker 02

  Had you held the whole time, where would you be at?

• 16:17Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 16:18Speaker 02

  Today, held even until today?

• 16:21Speaker 00

  Oh hell, I don't know, 40 or 50 million, I guess. I try not to think of, I've never done that math. I'm afraid to do that math.

• 16:28Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 16:30Speaker 00

  You know, I don't want, I don't want the pain of that, because I went to Amazon with no real savings. Like, I was 35, I was married, I had my first child, adopted from China. My wife and I were kind of doing the paycheck to paycheck thing. And so I had to live on some of the stock. And, you know, I think Guy Kawasaki talks about the cost of like, you know, he talks about like a $5 million Porsche, and that was like a $50,000 Porsche bought with stock that would have been worth 5 million if only he'd have kept it.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, every diaper you look at now and you're like, oh.

• 17:05Speaker 00

  That's a $1,000 diaper.

• 17:06Speaker 01

  A $180 diaper right there.

• 17:08Speaker 00

  Exactly. The, the most interesting thing was watching people lose touch. With the super wealthy, it wasn't that they took a private jet or that they had three houses. It was watching a guy come in, when we were working on a product once, and suggest that we needed to prioritize automating people's whole home Sonos systems, that that was gonna be a good market. And it was just this reality that like, this guy thinks lots of people have whole home Sonos systems. And that's just, you know, particularly then.

• 17:41Speaker 01

  Is there a soul for that? You know, comedians talk about this, where they, you know, why do comedians retire? They're not like athletes where they're, you know, they don't have the speed anymore. So why do comedians fall off? And the reason is they get rich. And when you get rich, you use money to solve your problems. And problems are the source of all the comedy, the tragedies.

• 18:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  And the irritations of life is what's relatable. And when you're not, when you're not living a relatable life, how do you relate to the audience? How does the executive team that's worth hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars, what are they doing to actually stay in touch and understand the customer?

• 18:15Speaker 00

  Well, they, they do, you know, Jeff's email, probably still, but certainly then, was open to the world. So he read customer emails, cuz anybody on earth could email Jeff at Amazon and get Jeff and complain about shit. And he read a lot of those. Eventually, of course, he had a team that told him which ones to read. But he was reading the direct complaints. I think losing touch happens over time. And I've tried to watch myself lose touch, because I also do it. I have done it. And I've tried to watch, like, what are the decisions in my life? You know, like I have gardeners, I hate mowing, so I don't. Well, everyone else who's like fighting with their lawnmower, you know, different experience.

• 18:56Speaker 00

  I think reading those emails and hearing the complaints of actual people helped a lot. That was a big Jeff trick for a long time.

• 19:06Speaker 02

  Which is, which is pretty crazy, isn't it? That a company as powerful as Amazon, which has, which billions of data points, you can get one, or you could read our email, and you read that same email five times in a week, and you're like, I see a trend. That's A, a magic power, and B, really interesting.

• 19:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, Jeff, Jeff said, between data and anecdotes, trust the anecdotes. His reasoning was, even at Amazon's scale, let's say 99% of packages get to houses on time and right. Well, yeah, but 1% of Amazon's scale still means like 25 million packages a day not getting there right. And so when somebody then calls up to say like, I didn't get my thing and blah, blah, blah, that's a real story from that 1%, which is still huge. And we, there was this whole process you may have heard about, if you haven't, it's fun. He was very, very busy. So what he would do when he got one of those complaints from one of your areas, of course, he knew everybody's area, you'd get an email, and it would be a forward of that complaint with just a single question mark at the top.

• 20:08Speaker 00

  And everybody, we called these question mark mails, emails, and everybody knew what that meant, which is it meant you have 24 hours to get back and explain what's going on. So you'd scramble around and try and figure out what the hell happened to this customer. And then the biggest thing was, could you show it was a weird exception and no big deal? Or, second best, that it was a problem, but you had a solution, and it was implemented or gonna be implemented soon. And then worst was where you're like, yeah, this is, and where it's gonna take a while. So I remember one of these, you like his pithy criticisms, you'll love this. He sent us an email, and we got something worse than a question mark. This is when I ran Amazon's App Store.

• 20:51Speaker 00

  He sent us an email that said, please tell me we're not doing this. And unfortunately, we had to respond and say, yeah, actually we are. And his reply to that was, just euthanize me.

• 21:08Speaker 02

  You just got done watching season one of Entourage and started like implementing some Ari Gold stuff.

• 21:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, just euthanized me. But that's how he scaled that process was you'd send these question, he'd send out these question marks and he'd get back his answers. Everyone from Amazon can tell a question mark email story like I just did. They all have their own version. And that's a way to scale that culture across hundreds of leaders is this standardized process of customers complain to me, I send you question marks, you tell me what's going on, you better damn well fix it. You know, because Sam, Jeff viewed every customer as his customer. Even, you know, he still would say, well, my customer.

• 21:47Speaker 01

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• 22:15Speaker 02

  Amazon Bezos kind of seems like a near perfect entrepreneur. I think Zuck has the, takes the crown right now. One, he hasn't had too many personal scandals and also he's right like all the time. And Jeff was like that. I mean, I've read the everything store, I've read some books about him and now we're talking to you. It seems like he's just mostly nailed it.

• 22:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that's true. And look, if Jeff called me and wanted me to take a job for him tomorrow, I would stop what I'm doing and go do it because I respect him that much and his ability. And he's the only person on earth I would take that call from. And it's, you know, to go to Sean's point in the trust equation, he has a high trust equation with me because I know he's good. I know how he thinks and that I can be successful working for him. I don't want that call in the sense that I have, you know, stuff I like doing. But, you know, he's, he is that good. So you're right about that.

• 23:12Speaker 01

  Can we talk about this idea of strategically patient, but tactically impatient? What does that mean?

• 23:18Speaker 00

  Another Jeff idea. Basically Jeff said, look, important things take a long time. So today he would say like putting people in space takes a long time. You can have the idea, you can have the right vision, but it's still going to take years and years to like design rockets and build a rocket base and, you know, set up or learn and build all the software. So that means you have to be on big strategic ideas, you have to be patient. Another example of that would be Prime. You can have the idea of two day shipping, that's going to be great. But to really realize that and then make it one day shipping and then make it same day shipping, that's decades of work. So his point was to do anything great, you're going to have to be patient for the end result.

• 24:01Speaker 00

  But every day you better be making every tiny bit of progress you can squeeze out. Like the difference between a day that's a nine and a 10 on progress, that's one thing done and three things done. That's what accumulates to ever get you there. So he was always pushing on what can you do more this quarter on this five year project? Because it's, you know, five years is an accumulation of 20 quarters. We can't lose any of those or we won't get there.

• 24:29Speaker 01

  So it's like you have this 10 year, a 10 year view with a 24 hour clock.

• 24:34Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 24:35Speaker 01

  That you're giving yourself every day.

• 24:36Speaker 00

  That's how he saw it.

• 24:37Speaker 01

  10 year view and say, oh, I got 10 years to get there. You'll never get there.

• 24:39Speaker 00

  You'll never get there. Right? That he wanted us busting our ass every day and he was very, you know, Amazon has a lot of euphemisms. I can't say they're all directly from Jeff, but a lot of euphemisms to say, yes, we're a sweatshop in a slightly more acceptable way. They would say things like, well, his biggest one was to say, I don't like the term work, life balance. I prefer work, life harmony. If you enjoy your work, the fact that you're working a lot may mean, still mean that your life is in harmony. So that was a way of saying like, yeah, screw balance, you know, put in a lot. He would say, we work long, hard and smart. Two out of three don't count.

• 25:22Speaker 00

  So it's great that you're working smarter, but we also want harder. So, you know, just because you had a good idea, doesn't mean you can go home at three. We still like, great, write that one down and get me another one by seven and another one by 10. And you can go home at 10. The last one Amazon said was like, your career will have seasons and maybe Amazon isn't the right place in certain seasons. I.e. if you have kids and you don't want to not see them, don't work here. Right? Like, or, you know, do work here and don't see them. That's okay too. Like go home at six, put them to bed, get back on at eight, work till midnight, no problem. And that's how his people worked and he built a company of, another saying you might enjoy, Sam is,

• 26:07Speaker 00

  it was often said, Amazon is a place where high performers go to feel bad about themselves. Because he had this idea of a relentlessly high bar, you know, and so great, you're super smart, you killed it. We're going to up the goal.

• 26:21Speaker 02

  Dude, do you ever get nervous talking trash?

• 26:25Speaker 00

  Now?

• 26:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:26Speaker 00

  No.

• 26:27Speaker 02

  Cause you're, you're very transparent and I dig it. But has it gotten back to you where these guys are like, what the hell? Why are you talking about all of this?

• 26:34Speaker 00

  I know that inside Amazon, like some people will watch this inside Amazon and it'll go around and they'll be like, can you believe he said that? But others will be like, yeah, and well, that's true or it was true. I still think about what I say. It's like when you asked me about, you know, who's, who's not as smart. I was like, oh, what do I actually want to say? Because, you know, some of the people I might've thought that of might hear this and know that I'm thinking of them. I try to be polite, but life's too short for bullshit. Here, I'll be transparent this way. When I got to VP, I looked around at my peers and I did what all of us do, even if we don't admit it, I evaluated.

• 27:13Speaker 00

  Now, Amazon is huge. There were about 300 VPs. And so I kind of stack ranked myself, like where am I in the 300? Because there were only about a dozen SVPs. So if I want to be one of them, like, gonna have to be on top of the pile of 300. And I looked at some of my peers and I thought, I am better than you. But I looked at others and I thought, oh shit. I am not, I'm not punching on his level. Like, so I stack ranked myself and I said, I'm kind of in the middle. And I don't have any problem admitting, I feel I was like a middle VP at Amazon. I can live with that. But that's because I could see the people who were better and I could also see some people that at least in my estimation, I could run circles around.

• 27:55Speaker 00

  So do I worry about it? I don't want to like personally name and insult any of the people I thought I could run circles around. I'm happy to name the ones I thought were better. But, you know, unless you go super dystopia, no one can do anything to me. One of the great things about being retired, what are they going to do? Tell me I'm a bad person? Tell me I'm wrong?

• 28:14Speaker 01

  Sorry for my coaching program?

• 28:16Speaker 00

  Right. Or, or here's, here's the worst thing, you know, this, you know, this from Twitch, no, you know, this from Twitch, Sean. The worst thing anybody can do is respond to this podcast and say, Ethan is so wrong. Do a post or a tweet, what an asshole, he's completely wrong.

• 28:30Speaker 01

  Wow. What did he say?

• 28:31Speaker 00

  Right? Exactly. So I'm not out to insult anyone. But the only thing they could do coming after me is make me more famous, right? Like lend their voice to mine. So that's the old Calvin Klein, there is no such thing as bad publicity.

• 28:49Speaker 01

  Well, Ethan, I'll give you permission to beat me up because I'm curious. You know, I was at Amazon, I was kind of a kid. I was what, 29, 30 years old, maybe? Feel free to beat me up. Well, what did you, what did you think? Was I, maybe there was nothing notable. I'm curious. I'd love to know.

• 29:03Speaker 00

  On the positive side, you taught me about the value of 10 year plans and 10 year lists because you and I had a discussion of you had a 10 year plan and like 10 year goals and we're checking them off. And I remember discussing with you, I dug out my old 10 year plan, which I had written, but done nothing with. And now I pay much more attention to that. The things, if I were to criticize this Sean, I knew then, one is you obviously didn't fit at Twitch, let alone at Amazon. Meaning you were clearly entrepreneurial driven. It was pretty obvious that like you were a round peg in a square hole. And, and you weren't going to be like, oh, I'm in a corporation now. I'll learn how to be corporate.

• 29:45Speaker 00

  So that made you smart, but kind of useless because.

• 29:50Speaker 02

  He kept it too real. Well, keeping it real goes wrong.

• 29:53Speaker 00

  Well, keeping it real is great, but you're inside a machine, you know, a real, like a real rock inside a machine just stops the machine. It doesn't change the machine.

• 30:03Speaker 01

  Are you saying I was a bad boy? All I'm hearing is I was a bad boy. I'm kind of loving it. I'm not going to lie.

• 30:09Speaker 00

  And then of course, the other thing is you quickly learned that at Twitch, it was okay to just mail it in. Right? The like, oh, Twitch had this idea. I guess the weirdest question I was ever asked by legitimately asked by a Twitch leader

• 30:26Speaker 00

  as the Amazon guy was, you guys keep talking to us about money and profit. Why do we have to worry about that? We're owned by Amazon now. Can't you just pay for it?

• 30:38Speaker 00

  And that was like the disconnect. Well, that was the disconnect I was fighting was, oh, well, since Amazon is a big company, we never have to make money. We just have to be Twitch and, and make gamers happy and that is our only job. And the fact that we're burning a billion dollars of cash, because this is another fact, Sam, at times Twitch was burning certainly hundreds of millions and over the first five years burned over a billion dollars of cash with no real sight to profitability. Every year, Emmett and team would prepare a plan that said profitable in three years. And every year, at the end of the year, we would be in the exact same spot and turn in the same plan that said profitable in three years.

• 31:24Speaker 00

  And for about five years, Andy Jassy let that fly. Eventually he did get tired of it and Emmett left and there were layoffs and, you know, now it's maybe somewhat different. But for five consecutive years, it was profitable in three years, but we're going to burn 200 million this year. And then we did that for five years.

• 31:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:45Speaker 02

  Can I ask you a question about being a small business owner now?

• 31:48Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 31:48Speaker 02

  I think like you have a coaching business.

• 31:50Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 31:51Speaker 02

  You do podcasts, you're, we're all the same here. And yet, like both Sean and I, we founded companies. And I look at these guys who run these huge businesses or who are part of these huge businesses. And every once in a while, I feel envy where I'm like, they're taking over the world. And it sounds really interesting and fascinating, the scale. You've experienced that. Now you're experiencing being your own boss and having a small business.

• 32:16Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 32:17Speaker 02

  And you don't have billions of dollars to play with and you're not going to change the entire world. But you're going to like be the director of your own movie at a, at a much smaller scale. Can you compare and contrast those two careers and which you prefer and why?

• 32:31Speaker 00

  Oh, I tell people I'm much happier now, but also I didn't know that would be true. So what I tell people, I will contrast it, but just to give you numbers. I tell people all the time, at Amazon, if you'd have asked me how happy I was, I'd say, would have said seven or eight out of 10. Like I'm well paid, I'm doing important work, it's big scale. When I left, now I would say it's 11 out of 12. And there are two things going on there. Number one, I moved up like three points in happiness. But number two, I didn't know the scale went to 12. I didn't know I could work from home and work on only things I love and work only part time and make kind of equal money. You know, at Amazon, my target comp my last year, this is something Emmett knows, was $900,000.

• 33:14Speaker 00

  Because the stock always did better, I tended to make low one millions. But that was like what Amazon thought I was worth. What I do today, this year, I'll end the year at like $700,000 or $800,000. But as opposed to 50 to 60 hours a week plus travel, that'll be an average of 20 hours a week with a lot of vacation. So I'm very okay with that. So contrasting though, the biggest thing is loss of identity. I don't really know how, like you introduced me as former Amazon VP or you said former Amazon. I don't really have a good way, you know, a good current title. Sure, I'm a executive coach.

• 33:57Speaker 00

  You kind of feel like, we, we. Yeah, yay. Because, you know, even, even if I'm good at what I do, you just don't have that platform. So to summarize, the thing you're envying is real. It's the platform that if I as an Amazon VP, let alone one of the SVPs or somebody else there, wanted to talk to anyone at any company, they would generally take the call because it's Amazon calling. And that might mean a billion dollars for them. Usually it didn't, but they had that image, right? That's the loss. That said, I love working for myself much more.

• 34:39Speaker 02

  Do you guys ever think about this? I think, I read a lot of history, Ethan, and I, and I like studying CEOs. I like studying personalities. Oftentimes I wonder like, what will, what would certain titans do if they weren't doing the thing that they are known for? And would they still be successful? Like who, who's an animal that couldn't be held back? Who was just put in the perfect place at the perfect time and they took advantage of it? Do you think about that ever with, with some of the great guys who you've been around?

• 35:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, of course you wonder how much was Jeff was going to be who he is, no matter what and how much was.

• 35:15Speaker 02

  Cause he was like a traitor.

• 35:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, he was, he worked at a place called DE Shaw and, and he was a traitor. And he used to talk about this idea, the everything store, I guess, with the DE Shaw guy. And then one day he loaded up his car and drove to Seattle to go build it. And of course, as they say, the rest is history and only, you know, 35 years of work or whatever to get there. I think Jeff, of course, would have been very successful, but I think of this like, I'm sure both of you know Naval Ravikant and his writing. Naval writes about like, how do you live so that 99 times out of 100, you end up wealthy? But he has an acknowledgement that you're not going to end up equally wealthy in those 99 parallel lives.

• 35:57Speaker 00

  I think there's a, a very realistic life where Jeff ends up running some company or founding a few companies. Some have succeeded and failed and ending up certainly with a hundred million dollars or something, but not being Jeff Bezos. He would even tell you his signature insight was the internet is going to be a huge opportunity. I have to get in on that. And so part of that tells you it was a moment in time. Because if he's 10 years older, he's already deeply entrenched in a partner at DE Shaw, making 10 million a year. And he probably doesn't drop everything to go. And if he's 10 years later, he's too late and can he find the next thing? Can he, whatever, attach to the iPhone or I don't know.

• 36:42Speaker 00

  And that's no insult to Jeff. I just think for anybody, there's something about timing.

• 36:46Speaker 02

  I think about it all the time. Sean, I don't know if you do either, but I think about, because if it is, if what you're saying is true, that means that opportunity selection. I think Sean, you call it something else where you say projects, yeah, project selection is far more important than anything else. Because oftentimes I tell myself, and I think most people tell themselves, which is like, I'm already doing this thing. I'm already deep down it, I might as well just keep going and, or they'll say like, oh, but I can like pivot. I can make this, you know, into something else. But the reality is that oftentimes if you, the greatness requires a great person, but an equally great opportunity. And the great opportunity thing is probably easier to change than how great you are.

• 37:26Speaker 00

  Well, yeah. So a story that would reinforce that, I told you when I joined Amazon, they wouldn't tell me what I was going to do. So I got to Amazon and I asked my boss, like on the second day, I said, like, so I'm here, what am I supposed to do? And he said, well, I have two teams that don't have leaders yet. There's a team that's supposed to build a video product and there's a team that's going to do a shared ingestion platform that will like take in all the books, music and video and, you know, make them available to these three product teams. What do you want to do? And I said, oh, I'm a product guy. I want to do the video team. Well, lo and behold, this other guy starts the next week and he comes in and he'd kind of apparently been told you'll be the video guy. But I'm in that chair.

• 38:09Speaker 00

  And so he gets the ingestion platform. And if you were to look at our two careers, they're very different. Now, how much is it that I'm really better than him? And how much is it I was a week earlier and got to take the chair he wanted? And for that matter, that my boss, whether through ignorance or low integrity, gave it to me. I can't answer that. We can't A B test that, but I think a lot about the opportunity I effectively took away from him.

• 38:33Speaker 01

  Well, even now you look at, you know, he retired, Bezos retires, I don't know, whatever, whenever he retired. But goes to, you know, he's in Ibiza, he's taking Oyster.

• 38:46Speaker 00

  Right.

• 38:46Speaker 01

  You know, down and he's having a good time for a period of time. He had, you know, he was in retirement mode. And then the AI window opens and now he's back and he's got a new company. But he understood when the, you know, he understood when there was actually a big fat pitch to swing at. And the fat pitch now with AI and what he's doing, building the sort of like artificial general engineer with Prometheus. That's his, he sees that as the, you know, the sort of bigger, Amazon sized opportunity again.

• 39:15Speaker 02

  And what's that opportunity, Sean? Is it, he's taking AI to like manufacturing companies?

• 39:20Speaker 01

  Ethan, you might know better than me. My understanding is he says, the kind of large language model approach, which is giving us awesome kind of knowledge workers, will not give us awesome engineering. And so we need to build, you know, an artificial general engineer, meaning we need to build a AI specialized to actually build things, to make stuff in the real world. I don't know what that means if it's going into robots or if it's planning tools. I'm not sure exactly what it is, but it's to build shit, you know, it's.

• 39:50Speaker 00

  Well, with the name Jeff likes literal names. So even though Prometheus isn't exactly literal, he clearly means, you know, building a giant worker. He liked to name things what they do. It's why before it was Prime Video, it was simply Amazon Video and Amazon Music. So, uh, yeah, okay, you have a great point, but he's sitting in a very different chair now. Like, let's put it this way, he can single-handedly choose any swing to take. Like in my case, maybe I could have chosen a different swing, but like I didn't have unlimited job opportunities. I had to pick from the swings that were offered to me. Now, modern Jeff can just look at the world and decide when to swing. I think any baseball player, since we're using this analogy, would love new rules to baseball.

• 40:35Speaker 00

  Because I'm a star, I get to sit in the dugout and decide when I'll come to the plate. Oh, this, this pitcher is, his pitch counts in the high eighties. I'm going to come take my swings now. Oh, it's a reliever, I'll sit back down and wait. He's in that situation where he can literally decide when to go to the plate. It's great.

• 40:54Speaker 01

  Well, I think what's even more impressive, use the baseball analogy, is not swinging. So he, Warren Buffett famously said, you know, there's no called strikes in investing, meaning you could sit there and look at every possible investment and there's no penalty for not swinging. You just have to hit when you do swing. And so what's actually impressive to me isn't that, you know, he swung at the obvious pitch of AI. It's that for five years or six years or whatever in between, he didn't get itchy and swing at the wrong thing, right? Like, you know, if you look at what he did, Amazon, Blue Origin, which is another like, you know, space travel was probably one now as Elon has shown with SpaceX is the second or third biggest opportunity in the world. And then, and then AI. And so it's, it's all the other stuff he didn't swing at that I think is, you know, it's

• 41:39Speaker 01

  the dog that didn't bark. That's actually the one that you should pay attention to. Because I would say most of us spend too much of our time swinging at useless stuff, at, you know, swinging at the wrong pitches, to the point where we're not even available mentally or physically to swing at the big ones.

• 41:56Speaker 00

  Well, interesting point. Jeff got pitched a lot internally and externally to enter industries he's always declined. So he came from D E Shaw. People were always pitching him, let's go into finance, right? We have, you know, a billion credit cards on file. We have financial relationships. We should become a bank. We should this, we should that. He always declined. And his argument was, it's well served. Like, there's a lot of people in that space and it's heavily regulated. And I, he generally tried to avoid things with lots of regulation because that slowed down his ability to do whatever he wanted. He was pitched healthcare, which he's dabbled in certainly. He was pitched travel. I was part of pitching travel to him.

• 42:39Speaker 00

  Like, oh, Amazon, you know, has all these customer relationships. We should compete with Expedia or Airbnb or whatever. He declined that. So he has some algorithm, which I don't know is he's totally shared for deciding what to swing at. I know some of the variables he considers. Like, is it highly regulated? Is it already mature?

• 42:59Speaker 03

  So a lot of times, people at the podcast, they'll reach out to me and they're wondering, hey, Sam and Sean, how do you meet all these amazing entrepreneurs? How do you find all these stories? Well, I have a hack. You see, I actually have a community called Hampton. It's a community for entrepreneurs doing at least 3 million revenue, although we do on average, just something like $25 million a year in revenue. We have the founders of DoorDash, of Figure, of BlueChu. All these amazing companies are part of Hampton. And what's interesting is because of the environment in Hampton, which frankly is very similar to my first million, we have a very unique, high trust environment. When people apply and go through the vetting process, they're put in groups of like eight or nine other entrepreneurs, and they get real about everything that's going on in their life and in their business. And sort of like when people listen to MFM, they get inspired to come up with

• 43:42Speaker 03

  new solutions for business. That's what happens in real life in Hampton. It's life changing. And so if you're a founder of a startup that does at least 3 million in revenue, and you just want to go ahead and pull forward five or 10 years worth of success, then check it out. The URL is joinhampton.com. Again, the URL, joinhampton.com.

• 44:00Speaker 02

  How do, as a guy like him, or even the Andy Jassy, I think his name is, when you're CEO of one of the largest companies and, or one of the wealthiest persons on, people on earth, how do you say, stay normal, like in terms of day to day activity? And, or do you even want to?

• 44:17Speaker 00

  I can, I can better tell the stories of watching him progressively get pushed behind the security wall. When I started at Amazon, there was a one sort of slightly overweight security guard sitting at a desk. And that guy was some retired, limited pro baseball pitcher. I think he pitched for like a season or something. But he was now a security guard. Well, some reporters slipped by and got straight to Jeff's office and walked into his office and was asking him questions. We had a new security firm the next day. And, you know, like much tighter, we had gates all of a sudden, and you had to badge in and out as opposed to just flash your badge to the, to the retired pitcher. So that was

• 44:57Speaker 00

  phase one. Then one day, we built new buildings. We built a campus. And I was going to visit Jeff. And I saw this person who had this absolutely terrible cube. And it sat on the elevator, like opened the elevator bay, and it had a glass wall. But it was a person just sitting there. And I walked by and I thought, what a shit seat, all the elevator traffic. And then, of course, the light went off, like, oh, wait, security. So I went back to the guy, because I'm curious. And I'm like, so you're security, right? He's like, yeah. And I'm like, so where's the panic button? And he's like, oh, it's right here. And, you know, at that point, somewhere in the building, there was a SWAT team, you know, like if that guy pushed the button, the guys with the guns would run down the

• 45:40Speaker 00

  hall. And the last time I was in Amazon's executive suite, that was still a floor that anyone could take the elevator to. In the new buildings now, like Andy Jassy, there's the Andy Jassy elevator, that you don't get in without permission and can be stopped. And then you're just stuck in the elevator. And then you end up on a floor that you can't get to without going through, you know, and it's, it's like Fort Knox. So they became progressively isolated. Did I see them try to be normal? Yes. Jeff used to come out, we, we held an annual picnic in the beginning at like a big farm outside of Seattle. He

• 46:22Speaker 00

  would come out to the farm. There was a weird game we played called broom ball. Broom ball took like a, one of the exercise balls you work out on, the squishy ones, not heavy, and brooms, and you kind of played soccer. Well, people got really hurt in this, because you have enthusiastic engineers who have no coordination, but lots of enthusiasm, swinging brooms at each other. One of my bosses had somebody else break his hand by hitting his hand. Jeff used to play broom ball. I don't think he's probably been, well, certainly since he retired, but I don't think he was at an Amazon picnic for like a shit long, shit ton, long time while he was still there. Because they had to become these affairs that were held in the stadium in Amazon with food trucks and 10,000 people. His presence

• 47:07Speaker 00

  or absence, you know, A, it was probably unpleasant. And B, only 2% of those people would ever talk to him anyway. So I don't think he went. So I think he gave up being a man of the people when there were too many people to know.

• 47:23Speaker 01

  Hey, can you tell the story of Amazon Prime? That starts somewhere. It starts with an idea. So were you there? What was it?

• 47:31Speaker 00

  I joined Amazon right after Prime. I've met the engineer who may still be at Amazon. You can, one of you can Google in the background. His name is Charlie Ward. Charlie Ward, who became a VP at Amazon, claims that as a principal engineer, he invented the idea of Amazon Prime. I believe Jeff Bezos also claims that Jeff himself invented it. So I don't know if they had the same idea at the same time, or, you know, if there's a little appropriation going on there.

• 47:58Speaker 02

  Well, it wasn't that unique, right? Like Costco, like.

• 48:01Speaker 01

  Well, there's, there's multiple things, right? Was the initial thing just, hey, there's a membership with perks? Or was it two day? Hey, what if we could do two day shipping? That'll change everything.

• 48:10Speaker 00

  Yeah. So there, originally, there was supposed to be no perks. It wasn't a perk based program. It was purely a fast shipping program. That was the initial idea. And I think the biggest thing that would be interesting is Jeff was about to have a shitty quarter. And he could see things lining up. It was right after the internet crash, kind of instilled a bubble. He could see the quarter wasn't going to be what Wall Street wanted. And so he said, we need something. And so Prime was originally called Project 100, because they had to figure out how to announce it and start doing it in 100 days. It's not a two day shipping program. It's a two day delivery program. And you might be like,

• 48:55Speaker 00

  what's the difference? That's a distinction without a difference. Jeff figured out, we're going to call it two day delivery. It began with a lot of FedEx two day shipping, but he knew over time, he'd get down to where two days, he could do often one day through the post office, or one day on his own trucks. And, and it never told you the shipping method. So the origin, anyway, was Jeff trying to have good news to tell investors in a rough time. Because back then, he wasn't Jeff Bezos, the inevitable tycoon. He was still Jeff Bezos, the dot com, maybe dot bomb guy. In any case, whether it was from him or from Charlie, Charlie, there was this thing at Amazon, this is, you'll love this, it was

• 49:38Speaker 00

  called the idea tool. And anybody could put any idea into the idea tool. And, you know, Jeff would sometimes look at them and maybe others, and some of them would get done. Charlie put a description of a rapid shipping program into the idea tool. I then pressed out 100 days later, you have the launch of Amazon Prime. The idea of adding ancillary benefits to it, perks, came later.

• 50:05Speaker 01

  Well, even the fast shipping thing, okay, that sounds not controversial, but nobody was doing it. And I think nobody was doing it because it was going to be expensive. You'd lose money. And so there had to be some strategic rationale, or some big picture vision, or some clever hack to make that pencil out when you didn't, it wasn't clear that it would pencil out, right?

• 50:25Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, Jeff was willing to lose money for a long time. But the big joke at Amazon for a long time was, oh yeah, we lose money on every unit, but we'll make it up in volume. Which of course, on straight math, you're just going to lose more money. But of course, with economy of scale, and potentially the evolution of time, things like Moore's law or whatever, you can shift the unit economics so that you can do that.

• 50:52Speaker 00

  Prime had a trial run that you're not thinking of or recalling. And that trial run was simply free shipping. Before there was Prime, Jeff had a big argument again with this other guy, Jeff Wilkie, who was the Walmart guy, where he said, look, we have to figure out a way to do free shipping. And Wilkie said, yeah, but Jeff, shipping costs money. Like, it's a thing. We actually pay for that. So Jeff said, but my customers hate paying for shipping. So we gotta figure out how to do it. Well, probably from Freakonomics, you know, a lot of the story because it's been documented. But the key thing is, what they did is when that very first came out to get free shipping, you had to pay a hundred dollars.

• 51:34Speaker 00

  And they realized like, oh, okay, at a hundred dollars, we can put enough stuff in a box to get enough profit to give the shipping away. And then they started carving away. So if you actually look at the history, it went 175, 50, then 25. And it sat at 25 for many, many years. And the secret they figured out by experimentation was at that point in time, the big things we shipped, I mentioned, were books, music, DVDs. Twenty-five dollars was this magic number that meant you had to buy two. You had to put two things in the box. And what they figured out was there wasn't enough profit in a single DVD to cover the shipping and still be in business. But if you could put two or more in the box, DVDs, CDs, some mix,

• 52:18Speaker 00

  there was enough profit to ship it for free. So Prime was an outgrowth already of having figured all that out and seen like, oh, we can figure out how to ship for free.

• 52:30Speaker 02

  Can I ask you a question about Amazon's website? I use Amazon as an example about why bad design is better than good design. And I use the example, like, good, good design is used, I think, poorly. Good design means the, the customer does the desired action. But oftentimes, like a Brooklyn cool kid will think good design means like certain colors and flat, like whatever this bullshit is. But if you go to like, Amazon Kindle, which is their listing page, which is like one of the top selling products I'd imagine on Amazon, it's like thousands and thousands, or it's probably actually hundreds of thousands of words if you add up all the reviews. It's mostly copy. It's pretty ugly.

• 53:10Speaker 02

  There are some photos, but it is not what a 25-year-old cool kid would ever design. Can you tell me about some of the A B experiments that you guys ran? Or what the, what the strategy was for using copy versus like this beautiful, whatever the trend has been throughout the eras of like making things pretty?

• 53:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, first, everything at Amazon is A B tested, and the winner is what drives up sales. It's a program called Web Lab. And you run a Web Lab, and there are many, they have a complicated system so that thousands of competing experiments can be running at the same time. And yet somehow, they can distill the data for one experiment and tell you what it did. So it is data-driven, and it's profit-driven. Nobody cares about the pixels as long as they sell. There were many pushes in Amazon to make it prettier. And there were several design VPs hired who fought for that. The actual algorithm behind the Amazon homepage and Amazon pages for a long time

• 54:15Speaker 00

  was not what was on them, but how fast they load. Because Amazon came of age when internet was still somewhat slow. And they realized the biggest thing that drove abandonment was slow page load time, looking at the spinner. So the biggest single metric was not what are you putting on there? But how you, you militantly could not add a millisecond to load time. You know, if you wanted to add a feature, you had to figure out how to do it load time neutral. So the design, the, the overall design principle, I guess I'm telling you, that was hidden behind the scenes was speed equals sales. And beyond that, whatever goes on the website equals sales. And pretty pixels didn't seem to matter.

• 54:59Speaker 00

  Clarity, having that buy box always be the same so you could find the buy button? And what could you put in the buy box that had an attractive offer? Low price, showing a discount, showing the delivery schedule. But mostly Jeff figured out low price drove business. I was there. I said I joined in 2005. That means I was there in sort of the recession of 2007, 2008. Amazon froze hiring for a little while, and I had been in a couple startups that had run out of money. So I started looking over my shoulder like, oh, is it, you know, is it time to get the resume sharp again?

• 55:41Speaker 00

  Amazon profited during that time because since we had focused so much on low prices, when money got tight, more people converted to online shopping. So that low price was just a huge driver for many, many years.

• 55:56Speaker 02

  I feel guilty sometimes shopping on Amazon because they just, A, I just buy the cheapest, dumbest shit that ends up just getting thrown away, particularly with kids. Sean and I talk about this all the time, like, for birthday parties, it's just plastic bullshit because, and like, I'll be like, oh, someone just went on Amazon and typed in kid's bike because I just got four of the exact same ones. Was there ever like a sentiment of like, I don't know if this is actually a net positive?

• 56:22Speaker 00

  So obviously, there was some thinking about that. You know, Jeff did the climate initiative. We've tried to do packaged stuff. Jeff has some environmental bones in his body, clearly. But in the end, I think he's also very much a libertarian and a free market guy. And his viewpoint is give customers the choice. It's up to them what they buy. Do I have some problems with it? Do I think Amazon is always a positive? I worry about some of that, just like you do. But I think, from what I know of Jeff's expressed values, he would say, give customers choice, they will do the right thing. So he's a free market economics believer. I think he would also say, well, a lot of people are dumb.

• 57:05Speaker 00

  Effectively, he wouldn't use those words. We say a lot of people buy dumb shit. Like, like, we are well, am I doing wrong by letting people buy the dumb shit they want? And making it easy, you know, I don't know. I think, again, he'd be like, there's always been dumb people buying dumb shit. I just give them a broader range of dumb shit to buy. And also, he would certainly say, if I don't sell them the dumb shit, you know, the Bentonville boys will. So, you know, because Walmart was a huge stalking horse and opponent for a long time. He'd say like, hmm, if people want dumb shit, we should do it best. There's a, there's an Ethan ascribing a new Amazon principle.

• 57:48Speaker 00

  Amazon should sell the dumb shit fastest and cheapest.

• 57:52Speaker 01

  Was, was there anybody that, you know, he quoted a lot? Or he seemed to admire or, you know, was a big fan of that we wouldn't, we wouldn't know?

• 58:01Speaker 00

  The big one, I can't remember, but it's somebody Warren Buffett also follows. You guys will know him, the gentleman who said, the market isn't a short term, it's a voting machine. Long term, it's a weighing machine.

• 58:12Speaker 01

  Benjamin Graham.

• 58:12Speaker 00

  Benjamin Graham. So Jeff quoted that a lot. His, he had a variation of it, which is he said, look, when Amazon's stock goes up 10%, you're, it doesn't mean we're 10% smarter. So when it goes down 10%, don't go around hangdog and feel like we're 10% dumber. Like, you know, because it's a voting machine, it's gonna go up and down. What we, the only thing we can do is focus on increasing our weight over time. And that will eventually, you know, eventually it'll be pulled back to the norm. He talked a lot about, uh, stock price in the sense of you've got to put up with the volatility. Because I'm not gonna try, you know, he's got that famous statement in his letters

• 58:56Speaker 00

  about we'll take cash flows over short-term GAAP results. You know, we prioritize free cash flow, not optimizing for quarters. He, he did say, you'll like this. If you look at Amazon's history, it turned profitable for a single quarter and then went negative again. And he definitely said back at the time, in that era, letting us go profitable for a quarter was a terrible mistake because now there's a comp. Versus if we had just stayed slightly in the red, we'd have been the, you know, always losing money company until we were ready to be profitable. So he felt kind of hosed by that one profitable anchor point. I was in the room with him once when his CFO, they were having an argument

• 59:41Speaker 00

  about what to invest in a program, I think it was Kindle. The CFO, it's the previous CFO, a guy named Tom Skutak, was trying to reel him in and said, Jeff, you know, we only have so much money in the bank. Like, trying to say, because Jeff was investing in this and investing in that. Oh, well, do this, do that. And this is Jeff's sharp edge. He turned to the CFO and said, Tom, well, how much is that, Tom? I might want to spend it. You know, just making clear like, remember our roles here. You count the pennies, I use the pennies. Like, so, thank you for your input, but your job is to tell me how many pennies we have. I will decide what to do with them. And he definitely could put people in their place.

• 1:00:24Speaker 00

  You know, wasn't that, you know, you asked me about flaws earlier. Like, taking your CFO and bitch slapping him in front of a room? It was a message. Because the CFO was trying to be pretty diplomatic, right? Like, hey, Jeff, stop wasting money like that would have been like, ah, off. But like, hey, Jeff, you know, we only have so much money in the bank is a pretty soft way to roll out like, hey, boss, could you think a little bit before you spend another 10 million? Cause we didn't have that many at the time. You know, Jeff wasn't having any of it.

• 1:00:59Speaker 02

  Dude, you're fun to talk to. You have, you also have a great voice.

• 1:01:02Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:01:03Speaker 02

  You got a great voice. You have an announcer voice. It's lovely.

• 1:01:06Speaker 00

  Wow, appreciate that.

• 1:01:07Speaker 02

  What do you, what do you, what do you uh, got to do in the next couple of years? What's your 10 year goal?

• 1:01:12Speaker 00

  So I left Amazon to try to help other people have success. Uh, to pay, I, I say to pay for my good fortune, but that's specifically by helping others have both career success. And I think something you guys are more into now, career satisfaction. What's it all for? So I'm trying to help people get to financial security, but then to say, what are they going to do with that? Because a lot of people don't have any, they're so focused on, I gotta get the nest egg big. I gotta pay off the mortgage. I gotta get the kids through college. So that's my main teaching is yes, but then what? And for me, that's meant different types of social impact. Of course, my social impact mostly is helping other people succeed. I also do work though, helping uh, those displaced by the war in Ukraine.

• 1:01:57Speaker 00

  I run a charity in Poland that kind of catches them as they come across the border and rehomes them in Poland. So I have a number of things that give me personal meaning. The next thing I'm going to do, I think is something Sam, you've done. I'm going to start a, a small coaching, a, a community. I get too many people asking me for coaching. I have to scale it somehow. And that really means bringing people together in small groups and masterminds. So I can scale a little. So that's next up on the business front. 10 year plan is to, my vision is create more people who have the money and the confidence to then do something good in the world. I think there's a lot of people who envision that one day they'll do something good. I was one of them.

• 1:02:42Speaker 00

  I crossed that to where to some degree, I'm now doing something good. I want to create more people in that situation.

• 1:02:49Speaker 01

  That's pretty cool. I, that's actually a surprisingly good answer for uh, what sounds like a simple question that almost nobody really has a good answer to. So props to you for that.

• 1:02:58Speaker 02

  Take credit, Sean. You're the one who inspired him to do the.

• 1:03:01Speaker 01

  Well done, well done.

• 1:03:02Speaker 00

  Thank you, thank you, Coach Sean. You know, no. Well, the, having the 10 year plan, you know, I do have it written out and Bill Gates, I think, said, most people underestimate, I'm sorry, overestimate what they can do in one year, but underestimate what they can do in 10 years. So I combined that with what Sean said about 10 year plans. And I thought, okay, well, Gates is pretty smart. Is that right? And I think it is. Everybody has all these ambitions for what they're going to do this year, but they have no real plan beyond that. Better to spread it out slightly, but then stick to a long-term goal. And I want my life to mean something. And that's something I think is the other people I leave behind who are equipped to do more than I did, or more than I could do alone.

• 1:03:47Speaker 02

  Hold up that note, Sean. I know something cool just came out of that. Ethan said something.

• 1:03:53Speaker 01

  It's on red. I, can you really, can you?

• 1:03:55Speaker 00

  It's just a triangle or a funnel.

• 1:03:57Speaker 02

  A triangle.

• 1:03:58Speaker 01

  I drew a little like a cone, like a vision, right? So if you're looking out 10, you know, I made it really broad and it was just 10 years out. You know, it should be very simple, something you could fit on the size of a sticky note, right? What you just said, you said, cool, 10 years from now, there, I want there to be a batch of people who are in a much better spot. And you defined that spot. You said, people who've had the money and success so they can go do the good they've always wanted to do. That resonates with me. There's a lot, I, I have that. I, I went out to a date night with my wife and we were talking and you know, she, she had written in her college essay that she was like, gonna, you know, start an orphanage. She was gonna do something good in the world. That was something she really was impacted by, something she saw when she was younger that she wanted to always do. And she said out loud, she's like, you know, I have no plan of how to do that.

• 1:04:42Speaker 01

  I have no idea when I'm going to do that. It's sort of just this thing I say.

• 1:04:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:04:47Speaker 01

  And, and there's a danger in that, in being the type of person who had, just has shit that they say. And so, you know, you gotta pull reality, you gotta pull the future forward sometimes. And I think there's a lot of people who dream of doing good, that tell themselves that someday I'll do that. And that someday has, is completely ill-defined. And if it sounds like what you're trying to do is get people to a point where they feel, you know, they've slayed the money monster enough and the success monster enough and the, I'm enough monster, where they're comfortable in their own skin to go do something they actually would feel really satisfied and really good about themselves for doing internally.

• 1:05:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:27Speaker 01

  I think that's a great idea. And so I just drew this to say, hey, I think everybody should kind of have a simple, what are these building blocks of each year? What are they building towards? Is there something? Or are we just stacking Legos and we'll see what happens at the end?

• 1:05:39Speaker 00

  Yeah. Uh, I'm a big believer in planning. One thing, if you want to give people sort of a tangible, you know, a lot of people are working in corporate jobs. I absolutely used Twitch to get where I am today. And the specific way I used it was uh, I started broadcasting on Twitch, not as a gamer, but as a coach. And a lot of people made fun like, what's grandpa doing here, talking to us, you know, and all the usual dicks. But it gave me a chance to practice talking to random people about their careers and lives and hone my message and my answers and get comfortable on a mic and on a screen.

• 1:06:18Speaker 01

  Sam, I don't know if you ever saw this. He would go live on Twitch, which is like not.

• 1:06:21Speaker 02

  You would, Ethan?

• 1:06:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:23Speaker 01

  Ethan would go live. There would be like 30 or 40 viewers in the chat, which is on Twitch, you know, not, not small, but not big for sure. Like it's not like, they're not like crushing it. It's very modest and you know, it's username, you know, ballsballs63. And ballsball63 is listening to this guy's like, are you really a VP at Amazon? Like, what? You're just giving career advice out here? And then he would do it. He would do it weekly and he would, I really admired that. That takes courage and like not worrying about appearances. And you were just getting reps. I didn't know where it was going, but, but maybe you didn't even at the time.

• 1:07:02Speaker 00

  Well, I didn't know exactly, but I knew generally. So fun fact though, Amazon VPs, executives were not allowed to speak to the public without PR approval. So I knew that and I'm like, that I want to do what I want to do. So before I ever did it, I sent email both to a leader in Amazon, who you would have known, a guy named Mike Frazini, and to Emmett. And I was very careful and I said, I, I figured like, how can I get around this stupid PR restriction? And I said, Emmett, I think it would be really valuable if I started streaming on Twitch, because I need to use our product. I'm one of our executives. I want to be an expert on the product. You know, do you support me streaming on Twitch? And by the way, I don't want any special privileges. I don't want to be made a partner.

• 1:07:47Speaker 00

  You know, will you support me doing this? And of course, what's he gonna do? I did a lot of this baiting people into obvious responses. Of course he wrote back, that's awesome. You should totally do it. So fast forward, I'm doing it. It leaks back to Amazon. Some Amazon lawyer sees it. They forward it to an Amazon HR guy who works for Andy Jassy. That VP calls me up and says like, uh, seems like you're talking in public without PR approval every week? And I'm of course like, oh no. Well, first I've had PR training and if you look at anything I've done, you'll notice I refuse to talk about the Amazon business. I only give career advice, i.e. I'm, you know, safe.

• 1:08:31Speaker 00

  But I'm using our product. I work at this company and you know, all the bullshit you'd expect me to say. Bottom line is I have my CEO's approval to use the product and that's what I'm doing. Well, credit to this HR guy. He goes silent for about a minute at last. He's smart and says, okay, I see you've thought about this. Cause he realizes I've like put up the shields that are going to get hard, it's gonna be hard.

• 1:08:56Speaker 02

  You, you judoed him a little.

• 1:08:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, but he saw it and he's like, so what's really going on here? I envision some future where maybe I'll want to coach full-time. And he's like, okay, I got it. You're, you're going out on your own soon. You're going to hang out your own shingle. Fine, don't say anything stupid. Right? Like, you know, he, he could see like, this is a problem I don't have to fight because it's going to go away in six months when you leave or, you know? The takeaway point, I think for people is how can you use what you're doing today to start building towards that good you want to do tomorrow? I saw an opportunity to get in reps on Twitch. Well, everybody has some asset like that in what they're doing today that can become that orphanage tomorrow.

• 1:09:42Speaker 00

  I don't know what it is and it takes a little creativity.

• 1:09:44Speaker 01

  I remember Tony Robbins talked about this early in Tony's career. He, you know, now he sells out stadiums and whatever, coaches presidents, but obviously you can't start there. So where did he, where did Tony Robbins actually start? I don't know if you guys know this story. He used to call into radio stations and just say, my name is Anthony Robbins and I'm, you know, and he would make a bold claim that he couldn't even really fully back up. He's like, if anybody's got a trauma, phobia, I will cure it. I'll cure it in seven minutes. I don't care if you've had it for 17 years. You give me seven minutes and I will snap you out of that pattern. And people were like, oh, this guy's a charlatan. He said, oh, you think I'm a charlatan? Wonderful. Well, why don't you say it to my face? And they're like, what? He's like, I will be here to prove it.

• 1:10:27Speaker 01

  I will be at the mall on West Ridge by the fountain. And he's like, you, anybody can come and you could see for yourself that this is real. This is realer than real. And then he would go to the mall and two people would show up and he would get some guy to stop smoking cigarettes. And he tried to do it in seven minutes. It actually took 70 minutes for him to like run his whole routine until he felt like he got him there. But then he would do it and he would check back in. He'd be like, I got him. And he would do it again the next week and the next week. And he was just performing at malls, unlike, not even like a sanctioned thing. Just meet me by the, by the fountain. And he would call into radio stations with this shock value thing, just to get reps. He did that for, for like his first three years.

• 1:11:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, definitely my early days on Twitch were. Grim, right? And you had to learn all the, all the things and all the things about trolls and whatever that are part of particularly that social media. So I did some reps and I tell people now, people wonder like, why can't I be thrown by most questions, right? And it's because I've answered 10,000 questions live. So if it's a career question, anyway, unlikely you're going to ask me something I haven't heard before.

• 1:11:38Speaker 02

  Thanks for doing this, man. I like talking to you. You can talk about stressful or complicated things in a way that's quite soothing.

• 1:11:44Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:11:46Speaker 02

  And I think it's a, we enjoyed it a lot. What do you think, Sean?

• 1:11:50Speaker 01

  I feel like you're always able to tell the truth without the other person feeling bad on the other side, even if it wasn't what they wanted to hear. And I thought that was pretty rare. I remember I think it, the first few times I interacted with you when I was at Twitch and, you know, it's still the case today where you don't have to choose between, I'll just say what they'll, what they, kind of what will be not confrontational here. I'll just tell them what they want to hear. But then I did, I'm a disservice in the long run. Or I'll tell them the truth, but they're going to feel like shit walking out of here and I'm the bad guy. And that's kind of a trap I fall into a lot. And you have a gift of doing, telling them the truth, but in a way that, that doesn't leave them feeling bad. And I don't know exactly how you do it, but I try to, I'm trying to piece it together still. Is there a tip in how to do that?

• 1:12:34Speaker 00

  There is. It comes from a book, a little bit less known, called Leadership and Self Deception by the Arbinger Institute. But basically, you have to see the person as a human, not as a machine to fix. So I have to care about the person first. And that doesn't change what I say, it changes my tone and my body language. If I'm caring about you, Sean, as a person, or you, Sam, and I'm trying to help you, the idea that I'm trying to help you will come through more strongly than the fact that I'm saying your baby's ugly. Right? It's like, hmm, I hate to break it to you, but, you know, you gotta change the baby's outfit because whatever. Like, it's honest empathy. That, that I think is

• 1:13:15Speaker 00

  the secret, is care about the person first. The message then hits less hard. The second trick, if you like it, as a coach, because I know Sam was talking about coaches, and I'll quit going on about it. As a coach, you have a different tool. As a coach, Sean, if I were coaching you, I have a signature line that then lets me say anything to you. I say, well, Sam, as a coach, it's unfortunately my job, you're paying me to give you some very difficult news. And at that point, I've set you up because you've laid down the money, you've asked for it. From that moment, I can kind of say anything, and you're going to be like, well, I did pay him to do that. And so that's another, now, I keep the honest

• 1:13:57Speaker 00

  caring for you, but there's also this positional thing in that circumstance where I could say, you know, it's not that I want to say something mean to you, it's that you're actually paying me to give you the strongest truth I can.

• 1:14:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:14:12Speaker 02

  Well, thanks for doing this, dude.

• 1:14:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:14:14Speaker 02

  I'm like, looking at my computer, all these things you keep mentioning, I'm like running down. I'm like, looking at Leadership and Self Deception, I'm like, writing all this stuff down. This is a good episode because we took a ton of notes, but we appreciate you.

• 1:14:25Speaker 00

  Thank you, Sam. Thank you very much, both of you for the invite. It's good to reconnect with you, Sean, after a few years. Happy to talk more some other time.

• 1:14:33Speaker 02

  All right. Thank you. That's it. That's the pop.

• 1:14:46Speaker 01

  All right, let's take a quick break. I want to tell you about Marketing School. It is a podcast that is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network, and it is run by Neil Patel and Eric Su. And these guys are both marketers who are running businesses. And so if you want real world tactics from practitioners who are actually out there in the field doing it, this is the podcast for you. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts.