THE RICHEST PERSON EVER - Jeff Bezos [Business And Life Advice]

almost seven years ago now I started this most incredible journey called amazon.com actually at that time it wasn't even called amazon.com it was called Cadabra Inc as an abracadabra that was the original name of the company I had phoned a lawyer on the way to Seattle from a cell phone and he said well what do you to incorporate the company he said what do you want the company to be called and I said Cadabra he said cadaver and I knew that was a bad name we changed it a few months later web usage worldwide web usage was growing at something like twenty three hundred percent a year and that was sort of wake-up call for me that there was something going on and you know many people at that point hadn't heard of the web they didn't have internet access this was the time of you know twenty eight kill kilobit per second modems and dial-up access and so on and so on so it's a very different age but there was clear it was clear that there was gonna be something there and you I realized you could make a bookstore on the web that could hold more books than a physical bookstore could ever hold it could truly have universal selection and of course you know since then we've expanded that into other categories and we keep pursuing that notion of Earth's biggest selection at Amazon well my background was in computers and but books were the first best product to sell online as a happy coincidence I've always been a big reader but that wasn't the reason that we chose books my real compact my real passion was computers and that's how I was involved in this world of the web back in 94 the books was a great first best product to saw online because books were very unique and still are in one respect and that is that there are more items in the book category than there are items in any category there are millions of books active and in print around the world and the largest super store so largest physical book super stores only carry about a hundred one hundred and fifty thousand of those millions of different books so on the web you could build something that solved a real problem that people can't find some of these books that they want to find they're very good books but they may be very narrow have a very narrow audience and so we basically built Amazon to make it possible for people to find those hard-to-find books like low prices we know customers like big selection and we know that customers like fast delivery and those things are going to be true ten years from now they're gonna be true twenty years from now so we can count on those things and we can put energy into them we know customers like their products fast and so we work on things that we know customers like what has worked at Amazon is focusing on the customer being very cutting the customer first which is easy to say but difficult to do if you really are customer centric it's like being the host of a party you're holding the party for your guests sometimes the host the party is holding the party for the host of the party and that's that leads to a different kind of party it's very important to pursue your passions and if you're doing that the risks are often not as great as they seem to be so for me when I thought about you know leaving my job to starting this company I knew there was a good chance that it wouldn't work but I also knew that when I was 80 years old and thinking back over my life I would never regret having tried and failed but I might regret having never tried and when I thought about that way it didn't actually seem like that big of a risk but we have always wanted to do it's raised the standard for what it means to be customer centric to such a degree that other organizations whether they be other companies or whether they be hospitals or government agencies whatever the organization is they should look at Amazon as a role model and say how can we be as customer centric as Amazon even quick editors I imagine right hopefully competitors as well but if we could make you know if that could be our legacy that we kind of raised the general idea of what it means to be customer centric that would be a huge accomplishment it would be accomplishing a mission that's much bigger than ourselves very rare idea that can be done by a single individual almost everything that is going to change the world solve a problem improve something these are usually big efforts and they require you know teams a team working together to really get something important done and that has been the story of Amazon comet every step along the way we've had a team here that is is making this work I mean I don't know even even at the smallest scale you have to figure out how to get help from your friends from your family members from people that you can hire in those early days I think without that it would never work what we're really focused on is thinking long term putting the customer at the center of our universe and inventing those are the three big ideas to think long term because a lot of invention doesn't work if you're going to invent it means you're going to experiment you have to think long term so these three ideas customer centricity long term thinking and a passion for invention those two go together that's how we do it and by the way we have a lot of fun doing it that way you have been known to be somebody who is going to plant seeds and just wait how do you deal with the pressure say Wall Street or you have a dot-com crash you I've never seen you panic I'm sorry you stay the course and you sort of stick to your script how do you do that and how do you advise us to sort of internalize that as well as a strategy well I think that if you're straightforward and clear about the way that you're going to operate then you can operate in whatever whatever way it is and and we don't even take a position on whether our way is the right way we just claim it's our way but you know Warren Buffett has a great saying along these lines he says you can hold a ballet and that can be successful and you can hold a rock concert and that can be successful just don't hold a ballet and advertise it as a rock concert you need to be clear with all of your stakeholders with you know are you holding a ballet or are you holding a rock concert and then people get to self-select in I think um I don't I don't think there's a particular recipe but there are elements of what we do that I think help so one of them is that inside our culture we understand that even though we have some big businesses new businesses start out small and so you know it would it would be very easy for say the person who runs our us books category to say why are we doing these experiments with things I mean you know that generated you know a tiny bit of revenue last year why don't we instead focus those resources and that you know that all that brainpower on this on the books category where we which is a big business for us and instead that that would be a natural thing to have happen but instead inside Amazon you know when a new business you know reaches some small milestone of sales email messages go around and everybody is you know giving virtual high-fives for reaching that milestone and I think it's because we know from our past experiences that big things start small you know the biggest oak starts from an acorn and you've got a recognizing you've got to be willing to let that acorn grow into a little sapling and then finally into a small tree and maybe one day it'll be a big business on its own done so well at Amazon is you've undercut all of your rivals by keeping the prices low does that same strategy apply to tablets yes our approach is premium products at non premium prices so we sell the hardware at breakeven so we don't try to make any money when we saw this hardware and we hope to make money when people use the devices not when they buy the devices and so that's a very different approach from most companies most companies are building quite a bit of profit into the sale of these devices gret a team for Oct what does that mean to you well it means step by step ferociously and it's the motto for Blue Origin and basically you can't skip steps you have to put one foot in front of the other things take time you there are no shortcuts and but but you want to do those steps with you know passion and ferocity where it is that you want to do you there's gonna be risk in your life and risk is a necessary component of progress you can make any pioneering movements in the world of any kind whether they be the geographical physical exploration that I've just been talking about whether it be you know a more cerebral exploration of a scientific field or I bet you could ask that question of every speaker here and I bet that every speaker here has taken substantial risks whether it be intellectual or otherwise to achieve what they're you know what they've done I think to some degree you follow your passions and then weight that you know you have to hope the wave catches you I was always interested in computers I was always interested in software was always a big reader and so it wasn't you know which made me alert to things like the Internet and the possibility that you could build a bookstore online that would have Universal selection I think everybody has their own passion their own thing that they're interested in you're very alert to the things that that are in the sphere of influence of that passion so your passion has led you to change the world frankly with Amazon but yet you've got the origin you've got Bezos exploration this why can't something like you just rest on your laurels go oh well I you know I love what I do I have I also have four kids I have wife that I love I have a lot of passions and interests but I one of them is you know at Amazon the rate of change is so high and I love that I love that I love the pace of change I love the fact that I get to work with these smart big smart teams the people I work with are so smart and they're all they're self selected for loving to invent on behalf of customers and so you know it's not mimouna of every day no that's why they call it work there's you know there's always there are things that I with that I don't enjoy but if I'm really objective about it and I look at it I'm so lucky to be working alongside all these passionate people and I love it why would I why would I go sit on a beach you have to back up and find the right time horizon for what you're trying to do but you know at Amazon we probably do most of our things we expect that to get some results in sort of five six seven eight years but we find a lot of our you know other companies that compete against us in various ways they're often trying to get things done and you know two or three years and so we can do things that you know if you if you if everything has to work in two to three years then that limits what you can do if you give yourself the breathing room to say okay I'll okay it takes seven years all of a sudden you have way more opportunities bands for companies are like reputations for people and reputations are hard-earned and easily lost so the most important intellectual property that a company can have is for us it's that it's it's it's Amazon it's that name but what it stands for we've worked very hard to earn trust you can't ask for trust you just have to do it the hard way one step at a time you see you make a promise and then fulfill the promise you say we'll deliver this to you you know tomorrow and then you actually deliver it tomorrow and if you do that over and over again then ultimately you can instill your company's name with a reputation and that's I think you know sometimes people talk about brands in this very amorphous way but for me I like to think of it as a person and what if the reputation of that person has and how have they earned that reputation always wanted to please you know it was one of the things and I think one of the things that these teachers who are really really good do is they recognize that the their students they sort of they get they create that environment where you can be very satisfied by what's by the process of learning that's going on so it's just it's like anything if you do something and you find it to be a very satisfying experience then you want to do more of it and so the great teachers somehow convey and their very attitude and their words and their actions and everything they do that this is an important thing you're learning and and by doing that you end up wanting to do more of it and more of it and more of it and I you know I think that's a a real talent that some people have to kind of convey the importance of that to reflect it back to the student not easy to make things different I mean it's not difficult it's not hard to make things different but it is hard to make things different and better most of the solutions most of the problems in the world already have solutions of one kind or another so all of those solutions can be improved upon there's no chance that anything is perfected yet I don't believe that but those all those solutions are highly evolved and they've been you know people been working on solutions to most problems for a long time but still I you know you know somebody it wasn't that long ago somebody figured out that you should add wheels to suitcases pretty good improvement when we were Amazon toast we only had a hundred and when we were declared Amazon duct oats I think we had a hundred and fifty employees Barnes & Noble had 30,000 employees and somebody wrote an article that said you know Amazon has had a great two-year run but now the big boys have shown up and they're gonna steamroll them and you know we had a All Hands meeting called a hundred and fifty employees together I said look because everybody's worried but they were every employee has read the Amazon Duck toast article every mother of every employee has read the Amazon toast article has falled and said father mother love you New York are you okay and so we had an all-hands meeting and I said look and you should wake up worried terrified every morning but don't be worried about our competitors because they're never gonna send us any money anyway let's be worried about our customers and stay heads down focused it's hard work so it's it's easy to have ideas it's very hard to turn an idea into a successful product there are a lot of steps in between it takes persistence relentlessness so I always tell people who are you know who think they want to be entrepreneurs it's you need a combination of stubborn relentlessness and flexibility and you have to know when to bewitch and basically you need to be stubborn on your vision because otherwise it'll be too easy to give up but you need to be very flexible on the details because as you go along pursuing your vision you'll find that some of your preconceptions were wrong and you're gonna need to be able to change those things so I think taking an idea successfully all the way to the market and turning it into a real product that people care about that really improves people's lives is a lot of hard work it doesn't make sense for us to think of it as a pitched battle you know sometimes people think about business as it's kind of like a sporting event there's a winner and a loser it's not a zero-sum game usually isn't I'm sure there are cases where but most often industries succeed so I can tell you I think ecommerce is succeeding and the way we think about it nobody else has to fail for us to do well I think ebooks is like that I think they're gonna be many winners I think ebooks is gonna be a huge industry I think it's always hard to know why you're drawn to a particular thing I think part of it is if you have a facility with that thing and of course it's satisfying to do it and suppose in a way that's self reinforcing and I and certainly I always had a facility with computers I always got along well with them and and it was you know was there's such extraordinary tools I mean you can you can teach them to do things and then they and then actually do them I mean it's kind of an incredible tool that we've built here in the 20th century and that was a love affair that really did start in a fourth grade and then when I by the time I got to high school I think when I was in 11th grade I got an Apple two plus and you know continued fooling around with computers and then by the time I got to Princeton I was you know taking all the computer classes and actually not just learning how to hack but learning about algorithms and in you know some of the mathematics behind computer science and it's fascinating I mean it's really a very involving and fun subject our focus is going to be you know it will try to pay attention to those competitors and we're not gonna obsess over them we're gonna obsess over readers and that because those are the people who are buying that device and we're gonna make it and it's not just a business for us it's a mission for us and missionaries build better products cannot invent and pioneer if you cannot accept failure it's you to invent you need to experiment and if it's if you know in advance that it's going to work it is not an experiment and so that's a very important thing you know it's these they're inseparable twins failure and invention it's so you have to be willing to do that it's embarrassing to fail you know it's always embarrassing to fail but you have to say no that's not how this works if I said to you you have a 10% chance of a with a particular decision a 10% chance of a 100x return you should take that bet every time but you're still going to be wrong nine out of ten times and it's gonna feel bad nine out of ten times and in in in with technology the outcomes the results can be very long tailed they it's very the payoff is can be very asymmetric which is why you should do so much experimentation you know penny buddy knows that if you swing for the fences you hit more home runs but you also strike out more but with the baseball that analogy doesn't go far enough because with baseball no matter how well you connect with the ball you can only get four runs the success is capped at four runs but in business every once in a while you step up to the plate you hit the ball so hard you get a thousand runs and so when that when you have that kind of asymmetric payoff and you know one at one at back and get you a thousand runs it encourages you to experiment more it's the right business decision to experiment more it's also better for your customers customers like the successful experiments newer 23 years old is that you don't already know everything it turns out I mean as I suspect you know people learn more and more as they get older that you seem to learn you seem to realize that you know less and less every year that goes by I can only imagine that by the time I'm you know 70 I will realize I know nothing things for companies is you need to be if you nibble and robust so you need to be able to take a punch and you also need to be quick and and and and innovative and and doing new things at a high speed that's that's the best defense against the future and you have to always be leaning into the future if you're if you're leaning away from the future the future is gonna win every time never ever ever lean away from the future you know at this point in time we haven't built a lasting company yet we still have a tremendous amount of hard work ahead of us but we have all the assets in place now we have illuminated the necessity for the luck that a start-up company requires and now you know our future is in our own hands as a team and as a company we have so many smart people we have so many customers who treat us so well and and and and we have the right kind of culture that obsesses over the customer if there's one reason we have done better than most of our peers in the internet space you know over the last six years it is because we have focused like a laser on customer experience and that really does matter I think in any business it certainly matters online where word of mouth is so very very powerful you know if you make a customer unhappy they won't tell five friends they'll tell 5,000 friends so we are at a point now where we have all the things we need to build an important and lasting company and if we don't it will be shame on us I'll have adversity in our lives yeah I would I would I doubt if you really you know if you know somebody any friend or anybody that you talk to there's no lack of adversity and the and by the way that's good because it's what teaches us how to get back up you fall down you get back up it always happens and you know you get certain gifts in life and you want to take advantage of those but you like s my advice on adversity and success would be to be proud not of your gifts but of your hard work and your choices so you know you may be the kinds of gifts you get like you know you might be really good at math it might be really easy for you that's a kind of gift but practicing that math and taking it to the next step that could be very challenging and hard and take a lot of sweat that's a choice you can't really be proud of your gifts because they were given to you you can be grateful for them and thankful for them and but your choices you choose to work hard you choose to do hard things those are choices that you can be proud of you can be one of the things that's very important to note about stress is the stress primarily comes from not taking action over something that you can have so if I find that some particular thing is causing me to have stress that's a a warning flag for me what it means is there's something that I haven't completely identified perhaps in my conscious mind that is bothering me and I haven't yet taken any action on I find as soon as I identify it and make the first phone call or send off the first email message work whatever it is that we're gonna do to start to address that situation even if it's not solved the mere fact that we're addressing it dramatically reduces any stress that my company so stress comes from ignoring things that you shouldn't be ignoring I think in large part so it's jest doesn't come people get stress wrong all the time my opinion stress doesn't come from hard work for example you know you can be working incredibly hard and loving it and likewise you can be out of work and incredibly stressed over that so and likewise if you kind of use the you know use that as an analogy for what I was just talking about if you're out of work but you're going through you know a disciplined approach of you know a series of job interviews and so on and working to remedy that situation you're gonna be a lot less stressed than if you're just worrying about it and doing nothing be an inventor of any kind inventing a new you know a new service offering for customers or a new product or anything the being an inventor requires because the world is so complicated you have to be a domain expert I mean in a way even if even if you're not at the beginning you have to learn learn learn learn learn enough so to become a domain expert but the danger is once you've become a domain expert you can be trapped by that knowledge and so inventors have this paradoxical ability to have that you know 10,000 hours of practice and be a real domain expert and have that beginner's mind have that that look at it freshly even though they know so much about the domain and that's the key to inventing you have to have both and I think that is intentional I think all of us have that inside of us and we could all do it but you have to be intentional about it you have to say yeah I am gonna become an expert and I'm gonna keep my beginner's mind other things I think people would be surprised to learn and I don't know if this is true for everybody but I I suspect it is and I think that at least at a certain age the basic foundational things about people are largely set and so you know I'm a lottery winner of a certain kind and I suspect if you were to go you know serve a lottery winners you would find that the core things about them don't really change because they won the lottery and I think I think that's probably and I think people are always very curious about that how does it profound ational II fundamentally change a person when they win a lottery I don't think it does very much did I kind of anticipate what would happen over the last 22 years at Amazon and the answer is god no so you know Amazon started as a very small company it was me and a few other people I was driving all the packages to the post office myself in my 1987 Chevy Blazer and do it when I raised money for Amazon I had to raise a million dollars which I raised from 22 different investors $50,000 each they got 20% of the company for for the million dollars and it was a 40 people told me no so I did take sixty meetings to get 20 yeses the first question was always what's the internet and I had to walk through that and this was 1994 early 95 and so did I anticipate you know fast forward to today and and the current version of it no it has been one foot in front of the other and I think that that is true for most businesses where you kind of proceed adaptively its step by step you figure it out you have a success and then you kind of double down on that success and you figure out what what else you can do what customers want I find very motivating and it's encrypted and I think this is probably a very common form of motivation or motive for a cause of motivation is I love people counting on me and so you know today it's so easy to be motivated because we have millions of customers counting on us at amazon.com we've got thousands of investors counting on us and we've got you know we're team of thousands of employees all counting on each other and so it's and that's fun since I was 5 years old that's when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the Moon I've been kind of passionate about space rockets rocket engines space travel I became a science fiction reader and I've always known that I wanted to you know do something having to do with space and I've spent a lot of time thinking about it for really almost my whole life and that's one of the things you guys will find that you have passions and having a passion is a gift I think we all have passions and you don't get to choose them they pick you but you have to be alert to them you have to be looking for them and when you find your passion it's a fantastic gift for you because it gives you direction it gives you purpose you could have a job or you can have a career or you can have a calling and the best thing is to have a calling and if you find your passion you'll have that and all your work won't feel like work to you do something you're very passionate about and don't try to chase what is kind of the hot passion of the day I think we actually saw this you think you see it all over the place in many different contexts but I think we saw it in the internet world quite a bit where you know it's sort of peak of the sort of Internet you know mania and say 1999 you found people who were you know very passionate something they kind of left that job and decided I'm gonna you know could do something in the internet because it's you know it was almost like the you know the 18-49 Gold Rush in a way I mean you find that people if you go back and say to the history of the 18-49 Gold Rush you find that you know at that time everybody who was in was within a shouting distance of California was you know they might have been a doctor but they quit being a doctor and they started panning for gold and that that almost never works and even if it does work you know according to some metric financial success or whatever might be I suspect it leaves you ultimately unsatisfied so you really need to be very clear with yourself and I think one of the best ways to do that is this notion of projecting yourself forward to age 80 looking back on your life and trying to make sure you've minimized the number of regrets you have that works for that works for career decisions works for family decisions you know do one I have a 14 month old son and it's very easy for me to if I think about myself when I'm 80 I know I want to watch that little guy grow up and so it's I don't want to be 80 and think shoot you know I missed that whole thing and I don't have the kind of relationship with my son that I wished I had and so on and so on so if you think about that so I guess another thing that I would recommend to people is that they always take a long term point of view and I think this is something about which there's a lot of controversy you know there's a there's a you know something a lot of people and I'm just not one of them believe that you should live for the now I think what you do is you think about the the the great expanse of time ahead of you and try to make sure that you're planning for that in a way that's gonna leave you ultimately satisfied so this is just my this is the way it works for me and I mean this is everybody needs to find that for themselves so there are a lot of paths to satisfaction and you need to find one that works works for you ask everybody to not think in two to three-year timeframes but to think in five to seven-year timeframes to not think about when somebody says to me congratulate Sam azan on a good quarter which is a very common thing to say you meet somebody they're being nice they looked at your financial results for the quarters a good quarter I say thank you but what I'm thinking to myself is that quarter all that those quarterly results were actually pretty much fully baked about three years ago and so like today I'm working on you know a quarter that is going to happen in 2020 not next quarter next quarter for all practical purposes is done already and it's probably been done for a couple of years and so if you start to think that way it changes how you spend your time how you plan where you put your energy and and your ability to look around corners gets better so many things improve if you can take a long term by the way it's not natural for humans so it's a it's a discipline that you have to build the the kind of you know get rich slowly schemes are not big sellers on infomercials you know it's and so that's something that you have to sort of steel yourself for discipline and teach over time one of the things that you you get a chance to do at some point in your life is to be a philanthropist and so I you know I didn't grow up hoping you know boy maybe I'll be a threat philanthropist one day that wasn't ever on my list of you know archaeologist astronaut and those things I wanted to be physicist I never I think in large part cuz I never expected to have the means to be a philanthropist but I think that if you win a lottery of this kind of size that one of the things that that the over time you have an obligation to do is to think about the ways that that that wealth can be used in a highly leveraged way I also think by the way it's really easy to give away money in highly unleveraged ways where it's just a waste of money and I suspect that it takes as much sort of time energy focus and hard work to effectively give away money as it does to get it in the first place you can choose we all get to choose our life stories and it's the choices that define us not our gifts everybody in this room has many gifts I have many gifts you can never be proud of your gifts because they're gifts they were given to you you might be you know tall or you might be really good at math or you might be extremely beautiful or handsome or you know there are there many gifts and you can only be proud really of your choices because those are the things that you are that you're that you are acting on and one of the most important choices that each of us has and you know this just as well as I do is you can choose a life of ease and comfort or you can choose a life of service and adventure and when you're 80 which one of those things you think you're going to be more proud of you're gonna be more proud of having chosen a life of service or adventure I've always been focused when I was in Montessori School the Montessori School teacher told my mom that I wouldn't switch tasks and they were and they got me to switch tasks by picking me up including my chair and just moving me to the new task station I've gotten a little better about that over the years but it's still task switching is still a problem for me on the internet today you know two kids in their dorm room can reinvent an industry that's how how it could because you don't you the heavy lifting infrastructures in place for that today two kids their dorm room can't do anything interesting in space you know you could build a CubeSat there's not that much interesting about cube chess and the that may change but right now there's just you need there are certain laws of physics and certain things you need size for and things need to be big we need to be able to put big things in space at low cost and so if I'm 80 years old and I can say to myself that Blue Origin did the heavy lifting you know come are using my Amazon winnings to do a new piece of heavy lifting infrastructure which is low-cost access to space vehicles have to be reusable you can't throw them away throw away space vehicles every time you're never gonna lower the cost so we're trying to lower the price of admission into space so that thousands of entrepreneurs can then do amazing surprising things nobody and they tell you I've that much just nobody in 95 predicted snapchat you know it's like I can't predict for you what amazing entrepreneurs brilliant amazing entrepreneurs will do in space but I know if I give them low-cost access to space some brilliant you know 22 year old is gonna figure it out it's one of those things about what companies get sustainable it's those that provide platforms on pond which others can build if you Amazon others empower others to do things so AWS is like that Kindle direct publishing is like that our third-party selling businesses like that fulfil up by Amazon is like that every time you figure out some way of providing tools and services that empower other people to deploy their creativity you're really onto something but motivates me when times are rough you know I find if I'm stressed about something it's usually because I'm not doing anything about it and so if I was stressed about something I've transferred why am i stressed I'm listening to my body as a signal that I'm that something is awry and then I find that the stress goes away the second I take the first step of you identify the source of the stress why am I stressed about this what's going on and then you know talk to somebody about it find in a find allies you know I would say that if you can find friends who are interested in similar things or want to help you solve a problem problem solving is is inspiring for me all by itself I have as long as I have allies there's nothing more fun than getting in a room with a group of inventors and saying look here's the problem let's invent a solution to it and as soon as you start doing that I find that it turns from something that might create stress into something that creates fun

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Keywords: Mulliganbrothers, mulligan brothers, motivational videos, motivation, motivational speech, jeff bezos, jeff bezos interview, jeff bezos net worth, jeff bezos biography, richest man in the world, jeff bezos advice, richest people in the world, jeff bezos house, world's richest person, bezos, jeff bezos motivation, jeff bezos documentary, jeff bezos laugh, richest person, jeff bezos amazon, jeff bezos lifestyle, jeff bezos just passed bill gates for world's richest person

Id: IBuIdAubQ3o

Length: 40min 33sec (2433 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 10 2018

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