Video from Jeff Bezos about Amazon and Zappos

hello my name is Jeff Bezos uh I started amazon.com about 15 years ago uh tons of stories from the early days so we started the company in my house um we didn't have enough electric power in the house at a certain point we only had about four employees at then but we already had enough computers and computer servers who had to string these big orange electric extension cords from every room in the house to get enough power uh into the room where the office was so we were basically all the circuit breakers were flipping we couldn't plug a vacuum cleaner in anywhere without flipping all the circuit breakers so we finally had to move to a real office when we uh launched the store um we made a very early mistake it's one of my favorite uh software bugs of all time we found that uh customers could order a negative quantity of books and we would credit their credit card with the price and I assume wait around for them to ship us the books um we we fixed that one uh it's fixed and uh we we've made a bunch of other mistakes over time but we've learned a lot my whole body is covered in Scar Tissue we initially programmed a bell to ring every time we got an order and I'm very pleased to say that within the first 30 days of doing business that Bell got annoying uh so we had to turn it off there was a great moment when we were examining every order that would come into Amazon and it was always a family member placing the order and the first order that we got from a stranger I remember you know there were probably half a dozen or 10 of us in the company that time were all gathered around after the bell rang and looking at the order and we're like is that your mom that's not my mom um and and and thus it began a lot has happened over the last 15 years as I said we've made a lot of mistakes we've learned some things uh and I want to tell you uh everything I know I can guarantee you everything I know it's a very short list th this won't take long um and it pretty it's it's complete too um all right well the first thing I know is that you need to obsess over customers uh I can tell you that we have been doing this from the very beginning and it's the only reason that amazon.com exists today in any form uh we've always put customers first when given the choice of obsessing over competitors or obsessing over customers we always obsess over customers we pay attention to what our competitors do but it's not where we put our energy it's not where we get our motivation from we really like to uh uh start with customers and work backwards and again that is the key thing uh that I know and it covers a lot of other mistakes if you're truly obsessed over customers it'll cover a lot of Errors um the second thing I know is in invent it's really important to invent uh anytime we have a problem we never accept either or thinking uh we try to figure out a solution that gets both things and that often requires invention but you can invent your way out of any box if you believe that you can and what we talk about is inventing on behalf of customers uh it's not a customer's job to invent on on for themselves uh you need to listen to customers it's critical uh if you don't listen to customers you'll go astray but they won't tell you everything and so you need to invent on their behalf and that focus on invention has served us well some of the recent things U even U Kindle uh not just Kindle but ec2 the elastic compute Cloud these are things that we would have never gotten to if we didn't have an inventive culture but also those are kind of large grain things but they're small things too and then think long term uh this is really uh critical any company that wants to focus on customers and put customers first any company that wants to invent on behalf of customers has to be willing to think long term and it's actually much rarer than you might think I find that most of the initiatives we undertake may take five to seven years um before they pay any dividends for the company uh they may start paying dividends for customers right away they often take a long time to pan out for shareholders and the company so that ability to think in sort of five years and seven-year time frames really is very very useful uh for us and and it's definitely one of the things that I know it requires by the way uh and allows a willingness to be misunderstood if you think long term many many of the inventions that we undertake maybe if they're disruptive in any way they may not be understood in in the early Innings and it's always been very important for us to think long term so that we can tolerate being misunderstood we've been called amazon. toast amazon.con um uh many different things uh many of them not appropriate for uh a video um and we if if we if we think we're right um then we continue if we think we're wrong if we're criticized about something we think we're wrong we change it um we fix it um so uh it's important to really think about those things but never to Buckle to sort of uh kind of standard kinds of pressures that come on that really Force short-term thinking and it's a huge competitive advantage to be able to think long term and you get to serve customers much better all right um that's all that I know really I I know one more thing I'll save it for the end um but I want to you know this is a very exciting day um important reason zapus has a customer Obsession um which is so easy for me to admire it is the starting point for never seen a company with a culture like zaposlitev are huge assets that I value very much and I want to see those things continue um and you're in such great hands with uh Fred Alfred and Tony that's a really that's a really big deal um I've seen a lot of leaders of companies too and I haven't seen people better than those three there's a lot of growth ahead of us with zapus this really is the beginning um I am uh I'm I'm just totally excited about what can be accomplished over time uh my my belief is we haven't seen anything yet as much as zaposlite culture and that great new ways to obsess over customers I'm super excited about

Channel: 07272009july

Views: 812,791

Keywords: jeff bezos, amazon, zappos, zappos.com, tony hsieh, amazon.com, online, online retailers

Id: -hxX_Q5CnaA

Length: 8min 10sec (490 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 22 2009