Speaker 1: In a young engineer named Jeff Bezos have the idea
Speaker 1: to sell books online. He called his new company Amazon
Speaker 1: and warned many of his early investors, which included his parents,
Speaker 1: that there was a seventy percent chance the venture would
Speaker 1: either fail or go bankrupt. Twenty five years later, it's
Speaker 1: very clear that Bezos' idea did not fail. Amazon not
Speaker 1: only survived, it thrived, whethering the dot com bubble and
Speaker 1: eventually expanding to become the world's largest online sales company
Speaker 1: and the world's largest provider of cloud infrastructure services. According
Speaker 1: to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Amazon's success has made Bezos
Speaker 1: the wealthiest person in the world, with a net worth
Speaker 1: of nearly one hundred sixty billion dollars, which he's using
Speaker 1: to fund his space company Blue Origin and contributing to charity,
Speaker 1: including his recent pledge to spend two billion dollars to
Speaker 1: help homeless families. Bezos recently sat down with Carlisle Group
Speaker 1: co founder David Rubinstein. They spoke on David Rubenstein's Bloomberg
Speaker 1: television program Peer to Peer Conversations. Your stock is actually
Speaker 1: up seventy this year, Um, is there one thing that
Speaker 1: you think is responsible for that is several things, because
Speaker 1: is pretty good now, I am it's I have been lecturing.
Speaker 1: We have all hands meetings at Amazon and for twenty years,
Speaker 1: ever since we've been twenty one years now. Um, every
Speaker 1: at almost every all hands meeting, I said, look, when
Speaker 1: the stock is up in a month, don't feel thirty
Speaker 1: percent smarter, because when the stock is down in a month,
Speaker 1: it's not gonna feel so good to feel dumber. And
Speaker 1: that's what happens. Never spend any time thinking about the
Speaker 1: daily stock price. I don't. Okay, So, as a result
Speaker 1: of going up seventy percent this year, you have become
Speaker 1: the wealthiest man in the world. It is that a
Speaker 1: title that you really wanted or not? I is it?
Speaker 1: I can assure you I have never sought that title.
Speaker 1: And um, it was fine being the second wealthiest person
Speaker 1: in the world. That actually worked. Fine. Um, it's not.
Speaker 1: It isn't a it. I would say people, it's something
Speaker 1: people naturally are curious about, you know, it's a kind
Speaker 1: of an interesting curiosity. But it's not the thing I
Speaker 1: would much rather if they said, like, um, you know
Speaker 1: inventor Jeff Bezos or entrepreneur Jeff Bezos, or you know,
Speaker 1: father and Jeff Bezo. Those kinds of things are much
Speaker 1: more meaningful to me. And the you know, the it's
Speaker 1: an output measure that if you look at the financial
Speaker 1: success of Amazon and the stock I own sixteen percent
Speaker 1: of Amazon. Um, Amazon is worth roughly a trillion dollars.
Speaker 1: That means that what we have built over twenty years,
Speaker 1: we have built eight hundred and forty billion dollars of
Speaker 1: wealth for other people. And that's great. That's how should be.
Speaker 1: You know. There, I believe so powerfully in uh the
Speaker 1: ability of entrepreneurial capitalism and free markets to solve so
Speaker 1: many of the world's frothers. Not all of them, but
Speaker 1: so many of them. So, Um, you live in Washington State,
Speaker 1: near in Seattle. We're outside of Seattle. Now. The man
Speaker 1: who was the richest man for about twenty years is
Speaker 1: named Bill Gates, And um, what is the likelihood that
Speaker 1: the two richest men in the world live not only
Speaker 1: in the same country, not only the same state, not
Speaker 1: only the same city, but in the same neighborhood. I mean,
Speaker 1: is there something in that neighborhood that we should know about?
Speaker 1: And are there any are there any more houses for sale?
Speaker 1: There After I saw Bill uh not not too long ago. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, we were joking about the World's Richest Man
Speaker 1: thing and I basically said thank you know, I said
Speaker 1: you're welcome, and he immediately turned to me and said
Speaker 1: thank you. Um, but no me. Dina is a great
Speaker 1: little uh it's a suburb of Seattle, and you know,
Speaker 1: I'd don't think there's anything special in the water there.
Speaker 1: And you know, I did locate Amazon in Seattle because
Speaker 1: of Microsoft. I thought that that big pool of technical
Speaker 1: talent would provide a good place to recruit talented people
Speaker 1: from and that did turn out to be true. So
Speaker 1: it's not a complete coincidence. There's some correlation there. Do
Speaker 1: you go into a store when you want to buy something?
Speaker 1: Do you have to put a credit card down you
Speaker 1: to say I'm Jeff Bezos and they send you the stuff?
Speaker 1: How do you do that? And you have to carry
Speaker 1: you carry cash around or you carry yeah? I think
Speaker 1: I do carry cash, and I have I have credit cards. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and if your credit have to show my driver's license
Speaker 1: and you know, but have you ever had a credit
Speaker 1: card denied? Never? Had I have? I've had my credit
Speaker 1: card denied. So what do you say when then you
Speaker 1: say don't you know, I give him another credit card.
Speaker 1: I stay here, try this one. O. Thank you. So, UM,
Speaker 1: you made an announcement that is, uh, the most significant
Speaker 1: philanthropic gift you've made in this type. UM. It was
Speaker 1: a in about a about a year ago. You said
Speaker 1: you wanted to look for some good philanthropic ideas and
Speaker 1: you've got I think forty seven thousand of them and
Speaker 1: you yea reviewed them. And how did you decide where
Speaker 1: to put this two billion dollars? And would you describe
Speaker 1: exactly what you're gonna Well, that process was very helpful.
Speaker 1: So I I solicited ideas, kind of crowdsourced, and I
Speaker 1: got literally, as you said, something like forty seven thousand,
Speaker 1: maybe even a little more. Some of them came to
Speaker 1: my inbox, most of them came on social media, and
Speaker 1: I read through thousands and thousands of them. My office
Speaker 1: kind of correlated them all and put them into buckets,
Speaker 1: and UM, there were some themes that emerged. But the
Speaker 1: other thing that's fascinating about the kind of exercises you
Speaker 1: see just how long tailed it is. People are interested
Speaker 1: in trying to help the world in so many different ways.
Speaker 1: A lot of people, UM, are very interested homelessness, including me.
Speaker 1: A lot of people are very interested in education of
Speaker 1: all kinds. I'm very interested an early education. And um,
Speaker 1: I made that. You know, the apple doesn't fall far
Speaker 1: from the tree. My mother has become in running the
Speaker 1: Bezos family Foundation, she has become an expert in in
Speaker 1: early education. I'm a student of Monastory schools. I started
Speaker 1: at Monastory when I was two years old, and uh,
Speaker 1: the teacher complained to my mother. The Monetary school teacher
Speaker 1: complained to my mother the I was two task focused
Speaker 1: and that she she couldn't get me to switch tasks,
Speaker 1: so she would have to just pick up my chair
Speaker 1: and move me. And by the way, I think that's
Speaker 1: you asked the people who work with me. That's still
Speaker 1: probably true. That teacher ever call you since, and she
Speaker 1: was responsible for your succession. Now I'm in touch with
Speaker 1: several of my UM high schooled elementary school teachers though,
Speaker 1: but I don't know any of my Monastory school teachers.
Speaker 1: So the gift that you're giving, essentially you're gonna have
Speaker 1: some for preschool for children who need preschool. For each
Speaker 1: treaty full tuition preschool Monastory inspired. Um, I'm very excited
Speaker 1: about that because I'm going to operate that. That's going
Speaker 1: to be an operating nonprofit, and we're gonna put them
Speaker 1: in low income neighborhoods. We know for a fact that
Speaker 1: if a kid falls behind UM, it's really really hard
Speaker 1: to catch up. And if you can give somebody a
Speaker 1: leg up when they're too three or four years old
Speaker 1: by the time they get to kindergarten or first grade,
Speaker 1: they're much less likely to fall behind. You can still happen,
Speaker 1: but you've really improved their odds. The money spent there
Speaker 1: is going to pay gigantic dividends for decades. And the
Speaker 1: other part of your gift will be to give awards
Speaker 1: out to yes and that's gonna be more traditional grant
Speaker 1: making philanthropy. So there, I'm gonna identify, with the help
Speaker 1: of a team, identify and fund VET and fund um
Speaker 1: Family Homeless Shelters, and that will be You said you
Speaker 1: would give an initial two billion dollars, expect to add
Speaker 1: to that. Yeah, it's day one. Every thing I've ever
Speaker 1: done has started small. Amazon started with a couple of people,
Speaker 1: and UM Blue Origin started with five people, and the
Speaker 1: budgeted Blue organ was very very small. Now the budget
Speaker 1: of Blue Regions approaches a billion dollars a year. Next
Speaker 1: year it will be more than a billion dollars. And
Speaker 1: Amazon literally was teen people. Today it's half a million people.
Speaker 1: But you it's hard to remember for you guys, But
Speaker 1: for me, it's like yesterday I was driving the packages
Speaker 1: to the post office myself and hoping one day we
Speaker 1: could afford a forklift and so but so for me,
Speaker 1: I've seen small things get big, and it's part of
Speaker 1: this day one mentality. I like treating things as if
Speaker 1: if they're small, you know, Amazon, even though it is
Speaker 1: a large company, I wanted to have the heart and
Speaker 1: spirit of a small one. And uh. Then so anyway
Speaker 1: that the day one foundation is going to be like that,
Speaker 1: will will will will wander a little bit too. So
Speaker 1: I we have some very specific ideas of what we
Speaker 1: want to do, but I believe in the power of wandering.
Speaker 1: All of my best decisions in business and in life
Speaker 1: have been made with heart, intuition, guts, uh you know,
Speaker 1: not not uh analysis. When you can make a decision
Speaker 1: with analysis, you should do so. But it turns out
Speaker 1: in life that your most important decisions are always made
Speaker 1: with instinct, intuition, taste, heart. Um, And that's what we'll
Speaker 1: do with this Day one foundation too. It's and the
Speaker 1: customer is going to be the child. This is this
Speaker 1: is so important because the secret sauce of Amazon where
Speaker 1: there are several principles of Amazon, but the number one
Speaker 1: thing that has made us successful by far is obsessive,
Speaker 1: compulsive focus on the customer as opposed to obsession over
Speaker 1: the competitor. And I talked so often to others oh
Speaker 1: and some other CEOs and also founders and entrepreneurs, and
Speaker 1: I can tell that even though they're talking about customers,
Speaker 1: they're really focusing on competitors. And it is a huge
Speaker 1: advantage to any company if you can stay focused on
Speaker 1: your customer instead of your competitors. So then you have
Speaker 1: to identify who is your customer. Um. So at the
Speaker 1: Washington Post, for example, is the customer the people who
Speaker 1: buy advertisements from us? No, the customer is the reader.
Speaker 1: And in the school, who are the customers? Is it
Speaker 1: the parents? Is that the teachers? No, it is the child.
Speaker 1: And that's what we're gonna do. We're gonna be obsessively
Speaker 1: compulsively focused on the child. We're going to be scientific
Speaker 1: when we can be and We're gonna use heart and
Speaker 1: intuition when we when we when you use your intuition
Speaker 1: and make decisions. Where is the intuition leading you now?
Speaker 1: On your second headquarters? All right? Can can we just
Speaker 1: take a moment to acknowledge that that may be the
Speaker 1: best segue in the history of interviewing? Seriously, David? So
Speaker 1: that is that? Is all right? That's amazing? Answer is uh?
Speaker 1: The answer is very simple. We we will announce the
Speaker 1: decision before the end of this year. So we've made
Speaker 1: tremendous progress. The team is working their butts off on it,
Speaker 1: and we will get there. No, no, hey be nice.
Speaker 1: Come on, Why did you buy the Washington Post? You
Speaker 1: had no background in that area. What convinced you to
Speaker 1: do that? Okay? First of all, I was not looking
Speaker 1: for a newspaper. I had no intention of buying newspaper.
Speaker 1: I had never thought about the idea had never occurred
Speaker 1: to me. It was never something. Wasn't like a childhood dream. Nothing.
Speaker 1: And um, my friend Don Graham, who at that time
Speaker 1: I had known fifteen years. I know him twenty years now.
Speaker 1: He approached me through an intermediary and I wanted to
Speaker 1: know if I would be interested in buying the Washington Post,
Speaker 1: and I sent back word that I would not um
Speaker 1: because I didn't really know anything about newspapers, and Don
Speaker 1: over a series of conversations convinced me that, UM, that
Speaker 1: was unimportant because we had inside the Washington Post, we
Speaker 1: have so much talent that understands newspapers. That wasn't what
Speaker 1: the problem was. But they needed was somebody who had
Speaker 1: an understanding of the Internet. And so so that was
Speaker 1: the first thing. That's kind of how it got started.
Speaker 1: And then I so I did some soul searching and
Speaker 1: again my decision making process something this would definitely be
Speaker 1: intuition and on analysis the financial situation of the Washington
Speaker 1: Post at that time, this was very upside down. The
Speaker 1: problem was a secular one. The Internet was just eroding
Speaker 1: all of the traditional advantages that local newspapers had, all
Speaker 1: of them. And I said, UM, you know, is this
Speaker 1: something I want to get involved in. If I'm gonna
Speaker 1: do it, I'm gonna put some heart into it and
Speaker 1: some work into it. And I decided I would only
Speaker 1: do that if I really believed it was an important institution. UM.
Speaker 1: And I said to myself, if this were a financially
Speaker 1: upside down salty snack food company, the answer would be no.
Speaker 1: As soon as I started thinking about that way, I
Speaker 1: was like, this is an important institution. It is the
Speaker 1: newspaper in the capital city of the most important country
Speaker 1: in the world. The Washington Post has an incredibly important
Speaker 1: role to play in this democracy. There's just no doubt
Speaker 1: in my mind about that. So and and so, as
Speaker 1: soon as I had passed through that gate, I only
Speaker 1: had one more gate that I had to go through
Speaker 1: before telling Don yes, and that was I wanted to
Speaker 1: look myself, you know, be really open with myself and
Speaker 1: look in a mirror and sort of think about the
Speaker 1: company and be sure that I was optimistic that it
Speaker 1: could work, because, um, you know, if it were hopeless,
Speaker 1: that would also be not something I would get involved in.
Speaker 1: And I looked at that and I was super optimistic. Um,
Speaker 1: and it needed to be transitioned to a national and
Speaker 1: global publication. There's one gift that the Internet brings newspapers,
Speaker 1: and that is free global distribution. So we had to
Speaker 1: take advantage of that gift. And that's the That was
Speaker 1: the basic strategy. We had to switch from a business
Speaker 1: model where we made a lot of money per reader
Speaker 1: with a relatively small number of readers to a little bit,
Speaker 1: tiny bit of money per reader on a very large
Speaker 1: number of readers. And that's the transition that we did.
Speaker 1: I'm pleased to report to you that the Post is
Speaker 1: profitable today. Um. The newsroom is growing. It's been growing
Speaker 1: every year since I've been there. It's working, and I'm
Speaker 1: so proud of that team. And I know for a fact,
Speaker 1: when I'm eight year let's say, I always project myself
Speaker 1: forward to age eight, but as I get older, I
Speaker 1: was starting to do ninety. So I know that when
Speaker 1: I'm ninety it's gonna be. One of the things I'm
Speaker 1: most proud of is that I took on the Washington
Speaker 1: Post and helped them through a very rough transition. So, UM,
Speaker 1: when you when you agree to buy it, um, I
Speaker 1: think they asking price was two million dollars. You didn't negotiate,
Speaker 1: you know, h done. I asked him how much he
Speaker 1: wanted He said to fifty. I said, fine. I didn't
Speaker 1: negotiate with him, and I did no due diligence, and um,
Speaker 1: I wouldn't need to have done. He told, you have
Speaker 1: something I'd like to sell now that you own the
Speaker 1: Washington Post. Sometimes there are some people who criticize some
Speaker 1: things that the Washington Post says. And you've been remarkably quiet.
Speaker 1: I have no idea what you're talking about. Well, you've
Speaker 1: been remarkably quiet and not defending yourself. Well, I do
Speaker 1: defend the Post. It is a mistake for any elected official,
Speaker 1: in my opinion. I don't think this is a very
Speaker 1: out their opinion to attack media and journalists. Um. I
Speaker 1: believe that it is an essential component of our democracy.
Speaker 1: There has never been I was gonna say, never been
Speaker 1: elected official who like their headlines. I think there's probably
Speaker 1: a no, no public figure who has ever liked their headlines.
Speaker 1: It's okay, it's part of the process, you know. It's
Speaker 1: it's um. If you're the president of the United States
Speaker 1: or a governor of a state or whatever, you don't
Speaker 1: take that job thinking you're not going to get scrutinized.
Speaker 1: You're gonna get scrutinized. And it's it's it's healthy and um,
Speaker 1: somebody very you know what what what what the president
Speaker 1: should say is this is right, this is good. I'm
Speaker 1: glad I'm being scrutinized, and that would be so secure
Speaker 1: and confident. But it's really dangerous to demonize the media.
Speaker 1: It's dangerous to call the media low life. It's dangerous
Speaker 1: to say that they're the enemy of the people. We
Speaker 1: live in a society where it's not just the laws
Speaker 1: of the land that protect us. We do have freedom
Speaker 1: of press. It's in the constitution we but what what
Speaker 1: we But it's also the social norms that protect us
Speaker 1: those we we It works because we believe those words
Speaker 1: on that piece of paper, and every time you attack that,
Speaker 1: you're eroding it a little bit around the edges. Now, look,
Speaker 1: I don't want to be dramatic here. We are so
Speaker 1: robust in this country. The media is going to be fine.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about how you came to the situation where
Speaker 1: you are today. So you grew up in Texas initially, yes,
Speaker 1: and from early age where you are pretty smart student
Speaker 1: and your teachers tell you this. You know you were
Speaker 1: good or I have always been academically smart and um
Speaker 1: that you know. By the way the older I get,
Speaker 1: I realized how many kinds of smart there are. There
Speaker 1: are a lot of kinds of smart. There are a
Speaker 1: lot of kinds of stupid too, um, but but there
Speaker 1: are you know, I c p blaw all the time.
Speaker 1: Who I know, they wouldn't have gotten a plus is
Speaker 1: on you know, their calculus exams. But they're incredibly smart.
Speaker 1: But yes, I was a very good student. So you
Speaker 1: ultimately moved into high school in Miami and then you
Speaker 1: were valuatorian ever your class. And then you gave a
Speaker 1: speech as the valigatorian saying you thought we should colonize
Speaker 1: space or something like that. I did it. It was
Speaker 1: too I graduated from high school, big Publicist Miami palmetto
Speaker 1: Senior High, Go Panthers. Uh and uh. There were seven
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty kids in my graduating class. And um,
Speaker 1: I loved high school. I had so much fun we
Speaker 1: had I got I lost my library privileges because I
Speaker 1: laughed too loudly in the library. And about that laugh,
Speaker 1: where did you get that laugh from? You know, it
Speaker 1: is distinctive. I've had that laugh all my life. There
Speaker 1: was a short, not that short. There was a multi
Speaker 1: year period where my brother and sister would not see
Speaker 1: a movie with me because they thought it was too embarrassing. Um,
Speaker 1: and my I don't know why I have this laugh.
Speaker 1: It's just it's just and I laugh easily and often. Um,
Speaker 1: the people who know me you know, you asked my
Speaker 1: mom or anybody who knows me well, and they'll say,
Speaker 1: if Jeff's unhappy, wait five minutes. You graduated as Valgatory
Speaker 1: and you decided to go to Princeton. How come you
Speaker 1: decided to go to Princeton because I wanted to be
Speaker 1: a theoretical physicist. I changed my major very quickly to
Speaker 1: electricaltioning your company. You graduated Summa comality. I graduated Summa Kappa.
Speaker 1: And then you went into the highest calling of mankind finance. Yes,
Speaker 1: I went. I went to New York City and I
Speaker 1: ended up working at a quanty of hedge fund run
Speaker 1: by a brilliant man named David Saw d Saw and Co.
Speaker 1: I learned so much from him. I used a lot
Speaker 1: of his ideas and principles on things like HR and
Speaker 1: recruiting and what kind of people to hire. When I started,
Speaker 1: very very good, well known hedge fund, and you were
Speaker 1: a star there. As I understand what propelled you to say,
Speaker 1: I'm quitting this. I'm going to start a company selling
Speaker 1: books over the internet. I'm gonna do it from Seattle.
Speaker 1: Where did the idea come from? I came across the
Speaker 1: fact um. So this is nobody has heard of the Internet,
Speaker 1: very very few people. And I came across the fact
Speaker 1: that the web, worldwide Web was growing at something like
Speaker 1: percent a year. This is anything growing that fast is
Speaker 1: even if it's baseline usage today is tiny, it's growing
Speaker 1: so fast it's gonna be big. And so I looked
Speaker 1: at that and I was like, there's gotta be I
Speaker 1: should come up with a business idea and that get
Speaker 1: you know, on the internet, and then let the Internet
Speaker 1: go around this and we can keep working on it.
Speaker 1: And so I made a list of products that I
Speaker 1: might saw online and I started force ranking them, and
Speaker 1: I picked books because books is super unusual in one respect,
Speaker 1: which is that they're more book items in the book
Speaker 1: category than there are items in another category. There three
Speaker 1: million different books active and in print around the world
Speaker 1: and be given time. So my, my, the founding idea
Speaker 1: of Amazon was to build universal selection of books. The
Speaker 1: biggest bookstores only had a hundred and fifty thousand titles.
Speaker 1: And so that's what I did, and I, you know,
Speaker 1: I hired a small team, We built, we built software.
Speaker 1: I moved to Seattle. I mean, you told your parents
Speaker 1: you're gonna quit d Shaw where you're successful making presuming
Speaker 1: a fair amount of money. And you told your wife Mackenzie,
Speaker 1: that you're going to move across the country. What did
Speaker 1: they all say? They were immediately and reflectively supportive. Right
Speaker 1: after they asked the question, what's the internet? And UM,
Speaker 1: so you know that, but this is right, you know, um,
Speaker 1: you know you on with your loved ones. You you
Speaker 1: you bet on them. You're not betting on the idea,
Speaker 1: You're you're you are betting on the person. And that was, uh.
Speaker 1: That And it's one of those decisions I made with
Speaker 1: my heart and not my head. And I basically said,
Speaker 1: I don't want to regret. I don't when I'm a
Speaker 1: d now ninety I have. I want to have minimized
Speaker 1: the number of regrets that I have in my life.
Speaker 1: And most of our regrets our acts of omission. There
Speaker 1: are things we didn't try. It's the path untraveled. Um,
Speaker 1: those are the things that haunt. And you were telling
Speaker 1: me that you had to go deliver the books, Yeah,
Speaker 1: for the post office yourself. I still I don't still
Speaker 1: deliver too. But I was doing that for years and
Speaker 1: I was packing boxes on my hands and knees. In
Speaker 1: the first month I was packing boxes on my hands
Speaker 1: and knees on the hard cement floors, and um, with
Speaker 1: somebody else sitting standing next to kneeling next to me,
Speaker 1: we're packing and and I said, you know what, we
Speaker 1: need knee pads. This is killing my knees. And this
Speaker 1: guy packing alongside me said we need packing tables. And
Speaker 1: I was like, that's the most brilliant idea I've ever heard.
Speaker 1: And the next day I went and bought packing tables
Speaker 1: and it like doubled our productivity. Think about it as
Speaker 1: a senior executive, what do you really get um paid
Speaker 1: to do you get paid to make a small number
Speaker 1: of high quality decisions? What propelled you to sell things
Speaker 1: more than books? After books, we started saying music, and
Speaker 1: then we started selling videos. And then I got smart
Speaker 1: and I emailed a thousand randomly selected customers and asked them,
Speaker 1: besides the things we saw today, what would you like
Speaker 1: to see us sell? And that answer came back incredibly
Speaker 1: long tailed. The way they answered the question was with
Speaker 1: whatever they were looking for at that moment. So like
Speaker 1: I remember, one of the answers was I wish you
Speaker 1: sold Winshield wiper blades because I really need Winshield wiper blades,
Speaker 1: and I thought to myself, we can sell anything this
Speaker 1: way and um, and then so then we launched electronics
Speaker 1: and toys and many other categories over time, and the
Speaker 1: vision became because you read the original business plan, it's
Speaker 1: just books. Your stock at one point, I think went
Speaker 1: to a hundred dollars, but then I went down to
Speaker 1: six or something like that. At the peak of the
Speaker 1: Internet bubble, our stock peaked somewhere around a hundred and
Speaker 1: thirteen dollars. And then after the Internet bubble, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: busted open, our stock went down to six. It went
Speaker 1: from a hundred and thirteen to six in less than
Speaker 1: a year. So my annual shareholder that year starts with
Speaker 1: a one word sentence, and that one word sentences the
Speaker 1: word ouch. So most of those internet companies of the
Speaker 1: dot com era are out of business. Yeah, you survived,
Speaker 1: what was that that made you to survive? And virtually
Speaker 1: the rest of them are gone. Um, it's very That
Speaker 1: whole period is very interesting because the stock is not
Speaker 1: the company and the company is not the stock. And
Speaker 1: so as I watched the stock fall from a hundred
Speaker 1: and thirteen to six, I was also watching all of
Speaker 1: our internal business metrics, number of customers, profit per unit,
Speaker 1: um uh, you know, everything you can imagine, defects, et cetera.
Speaker 1: Every single thing about the business was getting better and fast,
Speaker 1: and so as the stock price was going the wrong way,
Speaker 1: everything inside the company was going the right way. And
Speaker 1: um uh, I you know, so I wasn't We didn't
Speaker 1: need to go back to the capital markets. We didn't
Speaker 1: need more money. The only reason, you know, a financial
Speaker 1: uh bust like the Internet bubble bursting, is it makes
Speaker 1: it really hard to raise money. But you know, we
Speaker 1: already had the money we needed, so we just needed
Speaker 1: to continue to progress. Wall Street kept saying, well, Amazon's
Speaker 1: not making any money, They're just getting customers. Where are
Speaker 1: the profits? Where the profits? And Wall Street kept beating
Speaker 1: you up on that, and your response was, I don't
Speaker 1: really care what you think Amazon was. Uh. You know,
Speaker 1: people always accused us of selling dollar bills for ninety
Speaker 1: cents and said, look, anybody can do that and grow revenues.
Speaker 1: That's not what we're doing. We always had positive gross margins.
Speaker 1: It's a fixed cost business. And so what I could
Speaker 1: see is that from the internal metrics is that what
Speaker 1: at a certain volume level um, we would cover our
Speaker 1: fixed costs and the company would be profitable. So who
Speaker 1: came up with the idea of prime Prime seems to
Speaker 1: be a great way to get money in advance of
Speaker 1: people actually getting the services. Who's actually it's very interesting. So,
Speaker 1: like many inventions, inside of a team, and I love team.
Speaker 1: Inventing is my favorite. So I tap dance into the office.
Speaker 1: I love Amazon. I have so much fun there. I
Speaker 1: love Blue Origin, I love the Washington Post. But Amazon
Speaker 1: is my full time job and I get to invent.
Speaker 1: I get to live two to three years in the future.
Speaker 1: And um, most of the invention we do there is
Speaker 1: you know, if somebody has an idea, and then other
Speaker 1: people improve the idea, and other people come up with
Speaker 1: objections why I can never work, and then we solve
Speaker 1: those objections, and it's a very it's a very fun process.
Speaker 1: We're always wondering what could a loyalty program be? And
Speaker 1: then actually kind of a junior software engineer came up
Speaker 1: with this idea, not as a loyalty program, but this
Speaker 1: idea that we could um uh offer people, um kind
Speaker 1: of an all you can eat buffet of fast free shipping.
Speaker 1: And when we modeled that so then you know the
Speaker 1: finance team went and modeled that idea and that the
Speaker 1: results were horrifying, that we would offer unlimited shipping shipping
Speaker 1: is expensive, um, and that we would customers love free shipping.
Speaker 1: But we could see I mean again back to that,
Speaker 1: you have to use heart and intuition. There has to
Speaker 1: be risk taking. You have to have instinct all the
Speaker 1: good decisions have you made. That way, you do it
Speaker 1: with a group. You do it with great humility, because,
Speaker 1: by the way, getting it wrong isn't that bad. That's
Speaker 1: the other thing. When when when we make mistakes, and
Speaker 1: we've made doozies like the fire phone and many other
Speaker 1: things that just didn't work out, I could I could look,
Speaker 1: we don't have enough time for me to list all
Speaker 1: of our failed experiments. But the big winners pay for
Speaker 1: thousands of field experiments. So you try something like prime
Speaker 1: and it was very expensive at the beginning. It costs
Speaker 1: us a lot of money. Because what happens when you
Speaker 1: offer a free all you can eat buffet? Who shows
Speaker 1: up to the buffet first? The heavy eaters. It's scary.
Speaker 1: It's like, oh my god, did I really say as
Speaker 1: many prawns as you can eat? And um, and so
Speaker 1: that is what happened. But but surely we could see
Speaker 1: the trend lines. We could you that you know, all
Speaker 1: kinds of customers were coming and they appreciated that service.
Speaker 1: You shit around with your team and so forth. But
Speaker 1: you don't like meetings before ten am. No, you'd like
Speaker 1: to get eight hours of sleep and don't like UM
Speaker 1: power points, explain all that. Why is that? Okay? Many?
Speaker 1: So I like to putter in the worry. I get
Speaker 1: up early, I go to bed early, I get up early.
Speaker 1: I like to putter in the morning. So I like
Speaker 1: to read the newspaper. I like to have coffee. I
Speaker 1: like to have breakfast with my kids before they go
Speaker 1: to school. So I have my kind of puttering. Time
Speaker 1: is very important to me. And so that's why I
Speaker 1: set my first meeting for ten o'clock. I like to
Speaker 1: do my high i Q meetings before lunch. Like anything
Speaker 1: that's gonna be really mentally challenging, that's a ten o'clock meeting.
Speaker 1: And because by five pm, like I can't think about
Speaker 1: that today, Let's try this again tomorrow at ten am
Speaker 1: and UM. And so then on sleep I get eight
Speaker 1: hours of sleep. I prioritize it unless I'm traveling in
Speaker 1: different time zones. Sometimes it's impossible. But I am very
Speaker 1: focused on it. And and and for me, I needed
Speaker 1: a dog to sleep. I think better, I have more energy,
Speaker 1: my mood is better. All these things. And think about it.
Speaker 1: As a senior executive, what do you really get UM
Speaker 1: paid to do? As a senior executive, you get paid
Speaker 1: to make a small number of high quality decisions. Your
Speaker 1: your job is not to make thousands of decisions every day.
Speaker 1: Is that really worth it if the quality of the
Speaker 1: decisions might be lower because you're tired, or grouchy or
Speaker 1: any number of things. Now, it's different if it's a
Speaker 1: startup company. I mean, you know, you're really you know,
Speaker 1: when Amazon was a hundred people, it's a different story.
Speaker 1: But but Amazon is not a startup company. And all
Speaker 1: of our senior executives operate the same way I do.
Speaker 1: They work in the future, they live in the future.
Speaker 1: None of the people who report to me should really
Speaker 1: be focused on the current quarter. UM. I always tell
Speaker 1: people sometimes they get, you know, we'll have a good
Speaker 1: UM quarterly conference call or something, and and Wall Street
Speaker 1: will like our early results. And I'll get people will
Speaker 1: stop me and say congratulations on your quarter, and I
Speaker 1: say thank you, But what I'm really thinking is that
Speaker 1: quarter was baked three years ago. Right now, I'm working
Speaker 1: on a quarter that's gonna reveal itself in one sometime.
Speaker 1: And that's what you need to be doing. You need
Speaker 1: to be out sort of you know, two or three
Speaker 1: years in advance. And um, if you are, and then
Speaker 1: why do I need to make a hundred decisions today?
Speaker 1: If I make like three good decisions a day, that's
Speaker 1: enough and they should just be as high quality as
Speaker 1: I can make them. When you buy over the internet Amazon,
Speaker 1: do you ever get the wrong order? Is anything ever wrong?
Speaker 1: What do you do? Do you calm up and complain?
Speaker 1: Or you don't have any problems? No? I I am.
Speaker 1: I'm a customer of Amazon, hopefully like all of you
Speaker 1: in this one person if there wasn't even the stream
Speaker 1: who's not an Amazon customer, see me right afterwards and
Speaker 1: I'll walk you through it. It's um, I yeah, I
Speaker 1: get I have problems sometimes, um and I and I
Speaker 1: treat them like the same way treat a problem that
Speaker 1: I would get from customer. My email address is famous
Speaker 1: and I keep it and I read it. It's Jeff
Speaker 1: ad Amazon to calm. I don't see every email that
Speaker 1: I get anymore because I get too many, but I
Speaker 1: see a lot of them, and I use my curiosity
Speaker 1: to pick out certain emails. I'll get one from a
Speaker 1: customer and there's a defect. You know, we've done something wrong.
Speaker 1: That's the usually people are writing us. Not always, but
Speaker 1: usually the writing us because we've screwed up their order somehow.
Speaker 1: And I am so I'm looking at this and for
Speaker 1: some reason, it's something seems a little odd about that one,
Speaker 1: and so I'll ask the to you to do a
Speaker 1: case study and and find real root cause or causes.
Speaker 1: It's usually causes, real root causes, and then real root fixes,
Speaker 1: so that when you fix it, you're not fixing it
Speaker 1: for that one customer. You're fixing it for every customer.
Speaker 1: And that process is a gigantic part of what we do.
Speaker 1: So I would treat my if I have a failed
Speaker 1: order or some bad customer experience, I would treat it
Speaker 1: just like that. So, um, you've revolutionized retail, as I say,
Speaker 1: but now you are in the bricks and mortar business.
Speaker 1: You bought whole food. That was the theory behind buying
Speaker 1: something that doesn't sell things over the internet. We're very
Speaker 1: interested in physical stores, and we haven't. I've been asked
Speaker 1: for years, Um we have opened physical stories literally twenty years.
Speaker 1: Have been asked the question, and I always say yes,
Speaker 1: but only when we have a differentiated, differentiated offering, something
Speaker 1: that's not me too, because that space physical stores is
Speaker 1: so well served. If we offer a meat product offering,
Speaker 1: it's not gonna work. We're and it's also just we're
Speaker 1: not very good at that, most of them. Whenever we've
Speaker 1: tried dabbling in something that's a me to service, we
Speaker 1: tend to get beaten. It doesn't work. We're our culture
Speaker 1: is much better at pioneering and inventing, and so we
Speaker 1: have to have something that's different. And that's what Amazon
Speaker 1: Go is. It's completely different, the Amazon Bookstore, completely different.
Speaker 1: And we have ideas about how to merge Prime and
Speaker 1: Whole Foods to make that those are still rolling out
Speaker 1: you haven't seen them yet, but to make to use
Speaker 1: Amazon Prime to make Whole Foods a very differentiated experience.
Speaker 1: And so what we're gonna be able to do is
Speaker 1: take some of our resources, some of our technical, technological
Speaker 1: know how, and and expand the Whole Food's mission they
Speaker 1: have a great mission, which is to bring nourishing food
Speaker 1: to everybody, organic nourishing food to everybody. And um, but
Speaker 1: you know, we have a lot to bring to that
Speaker 1: table in terms of resources, but also in terms of
Speaker 1: operational excellence and in terms of technology. Know how. One
Speaker 1: of the other companies you started within your company, which
Speaker 1: is technologically a superior company, is Amazon Web Services. Where
Speaker 1: did the idea come from? AWS? We started it, I
Speaker 1: don't know, a long time ago, now fifteen years ago. Um,
Speaker 1: and worked on it behind the scenes for a long
Speaker 1: time and then finally launched it. Um it has become
Speaker 1: a very large company. Um uh. And at AWS, we
Speaker 1: completely reinvented the way that companies by computation. Then a
Speaker 1: business miracle happened. This never happens. This is like the
Speaker 1: greatest piece of business luck in the history of business
Speaker 1: so far as I know. We faced no like minded
Speaker 1: competition for seven years. It's unbelievable. And uh we like.
Speaker 1: I'll give you like when I launched Amazon dot com.
Speaker 1: Barnes and Noble launched Barnes and Noble dot com two
Speaker 1: years that's very class, that's very typical if you invince
Speaker 1: something new. We launched Kendall, Barnes and Noble launched Nook.
Speaker 1: Two years later, we launched Echo. Google launched Google Home
Speaker 1: two years later. When you pioneer, if you're lucky, you
Speaker 1: get a two year head start. Nobody gets a seven
Speaker 1: year head start. And so that was incredible because, um,
Speaker 1: and I think it was a whole confluence of things.
Speaker 1: I think that the big established enterprise software companies did
Speaker 1: not see Amazon as a credible enterprise software company, and
Speaker 1: so we had this long runway to build this incredible
Speaker 1: feature rich and it's just so far ahead of all
Speaker 1: the other products and services available to do this work today.
Speaker 1: But do you worry that the US government might come
Speaker 1: along or or the European government some regulatory thing could
Speaker 1: come and impair your business? Well not. Here's here's what
Speaker 1: I think of it that I have. I have a
Speaker 1: couple I could ask this question frequently, and I thought
Speaker 1: it was an original question. Now, sorry, you do do
Speaker 1: that sometimes, but that's not one of them. Um and uh,
Speaker 1: my view on this is very simple. Um, all big
Speaker 1: institutions of any kind are going to be and should
Speaker 1: be examined, scrutinized, inspected. Governments should be inspected. Government institutions,
Speaker 1: big educational institutions, big nonprofits, big companies, They're gonna get scrutiny.
Speaker 1: It's not personal, it's kind of what we as a
Speaker 1: society want to have happened. So that's that's one thing.
Speaker 1: And I remind people internally when you know, they if
Speaker 1: they don't take this personally, that will lead you in
Speaker 1: a lot of wasted energy. This is just normal, it's
Speaker 1: actually healthy, it's good. And then, UM, the second thing
Speaker 1: I think is we are so inventive that whatever regulations
Speaker 1: are promulgated or however it works, that will not stop
Speaker 1: us from serving customers. So to to really you know,
Speaker 1: I mean, under all uh kind of regulatory frameworks that
Speaker 1: I can imagine, UM, customers are still gonna want low prices,
Speaker 1: They're still gonna want fast delivery, They're still gonna want
Speaker 1: big selection. It's really important that UM that UM politicians
Speaker 1: and others not they need to understand the value that
Speaker 1: bring big companies bringing and not demonize or vilify business
Speaker 1: in general or especially not business. Well, they shouldn't vilify
Speaker 1: big companies and they shouldn't vilify business in general for sure.
Speaker 1: And the reason is simple, UM, there are certain things
Speaker 1: only big companies can do. I love you know, garage entrepreneurs.
Speaker 1: I invest in a lot of other companies. I know
Speaker 1: many of them. Um, but nobody in their garage is
Speaker 1: going to build and all carbon fiber, fuel efficient bowing.
Speaker 1: It's not gonna happen. You need Bowing to do that.
Speaker 1: This world would be really bad without Bowing, and without Apple,
Speaker 1: and without Samsung and so on. One of your passions
Speaker 1: is not just Amazon, but it's outer space and space
Speaker 1: travel and Blue Origin. So you've started Blue Origin a
Speaker 1: little bit in secret, then you've made it public. You're
Speaker 1: putting a billion dollars or more of your own personal
Speaker 1: capital into it every year. Next year it will be
Speaker 1: more for the first time. All right, And um, what
Speaker 1: you are you going to get out of it? Are
Speaker 1: we going to have people going into space? What is
Speaker 1: the use? This is? Um? This this is the most
Speaker 1: important work I'm doing. And I have great conviction about that.
Speaker 1: It is um, It's simple argument. Um, this is the
Speaker 1: best planet. We have now sent robotic probes to every
Speaker 1: planet in this Solar system. Believe me, this is the
Speaker 1: good one. UM. My friends who say they want to
Speaker 1: move to Mars, I say, look, do me a favorite
Speaker 1: moved to the top of Mount Everest for a year first,
Speaker 1: because that's a garden paradise compared to Mars. And so
Speaker 1: this gem of a planet, Um, we're finally as a
Speaker 1: species big enough to really impact it. And so you know,
Speaker 1: for for thousands and thousands of years, Earth was really
Speaker 1: big and humanity was really small. That's not true anymore.
Speaker 1: And so we face a choice as we move forward.
Speaker 1: We're going to have to decide whether we want a
Speaker 1: civilization of stasis, which we could do. That's a real
Speaker 1: that's a legitimate choice. What does it mean. It means
Speaker 1: we will have to cap population. We will have to
Speaker 1: cap energy usage per capita. So people don't think about
Speaker 1: how much energy they use. It's it's um. It takes
Speaker 1: a lot of energy. And uh so do you want
Speaker 1: that to continue for your grandchildren and your grandchildren's grandchildren.
Speaker 1: In other words, I want my grandchildren's grandchildren to be
Speaker 1: using way more energy per capita than I am. And
Speaker 1: I would like to see not have a population cap
Speaker 1: I wish there were a trillion humans in the Solar System.
Speaker 1: Then there would be a thousand nine Steins and a
Speaker 1: thousand Mozarts. But we don't have that long. So there's
Speaker 1: all sorts of problems, um, that we are about to
Speaker 1: face because for the first time in our civilizational history,
Speaker 1: going back thousands of years, we're now big compared to
Speaker 1: the size of the planet. We can fix that problem,
Speaker 1: but we can fix it in exactly one way by
Speaker 1: having by moving out into the Solar system. And uh,
Speaker 1: you know, and so my part, my role in that
Speaker 1: is I want to build reusable space vehicles. That's the
Speaker 1: heavy lifting. Amazon was able to get started with only
Speaker 1: a million dollars in capital um and uh and and
Speaker 1: because I got to write on the back of the
Speaker 1: credit card system, I got to write on the back
Speaker 1: of the pre existing transportation network that could deliver packages, um,
Speaker 1: the pre existing telecommunications network that could allow people to
Speaker 1: connect to our servers. All of that, all that would
Speaker 1: have been hundreds of billions of dollars in CAPEX. But
Speaker 1: the heavy lifting was already in place. And that's what
Speaker 1: allowed Facebook. If you think about it, two kids in
Speaker 1: a dorm room made this half trilli into our market
Speaker 1: cap company. And you know, in an incredibly less than
Speaker 1: two decades. That's unbelievable. And so, but that can't happen
Speaker 1: in space. There's no way two kids in a dorm
Speaker 1: room can start a space company of any significance because
Speaker 1: the price of admission is so high. And so I
Speaker 1: want to um build space infrastructure so that the next
Speaker 1: generations of people can use that infrastructure the same way
Speaker 1: I used UPS and fed X and so on to
Speaker 1: build Amazon UM and that and and and so that's
Speaker 1: what Blue Origin is all about. So do you ultimately
Speaker 1: want that to be your legacy? Or Amazon? And what
Speaker 1: would you like to be have as your legacy, world's
Speaker 1: oldest man um. That's a that's a famous line I like.
Speaker 1: But but the real thing is, you know, it'll be
Speaker 1: whatever it's gonna be. I'm gonna be proud of the
Speaker 1: things I want to I I live my life in
Speaker 1: such a way that when I in a quiet moment
Speaker 1: of reflection and I'm thinking back on my life, that
Speaker 1: I have as few regrets as possible. And I don't
Speaker 1: you know what would my legacy? But I have no idea,
Speaker 1: And I don't even want to spend a lot of
Speaker 1: time thinking. You you intend to give away the bulk
Speaker 1: of your fortune at some point in your life. I
Speaker 1: tend to give away I don't know how much of it.
Speaker 1: I'm going to give away. I'm going to give away
Speaker 1: a lot of money um in a nonprofit model, but
Speaker 1: I'm also gonna invest a lot of money and something
Speaker 1: that any rational investor would say is a really bad
Speaker 1: investment um, which is Blue Origin. But I think it's
Speaker 1: super important. And if I can't make Blue Origin a
Speaker 1: for profit thing, maybe I'll convert it to nonprofits at
Speaker 1: some distant point in the future. But that would be
Speaker 1: I would be. I wouldn't want that. I want I
Speaker 1: wanted to be a thriving eCos and more like ups
Speaker 1: and FedEx. Now let's just close with your wife. We
Speaker 1: haven't mentioned her yet. We met in New York City
Speaker 1: at d Shanco where we worked. We got engaged at
Speaker 1: we got we got we dated for three months, were
Speaker 1: engaged for three months, and then got married. So we
Speaker 1: our whole kind of dating engagement period was only six
Speaker 1: months long. Um it's uh. I also, I would like
Speaker 1: to take a moment to talk about my parents, if
Speaker 1: that's okay. You didn't ask me, but I I would
Speaker 1: like to. They're they're here in the audience, and UM,
Speaker 1: my parents are I thank you guys? Um Uh, you
Speaker 1: know you get different gifts in life, and one of
Speaker 1: the great gifts I got as my mom and dad. UM,
Speaker 1: and it's amazing. My highest admiration is withheld for those people.
Speaker 1: And we all know some of them. I know several
Speaker 1: of them who had terrible parents, maybe they were abusive, um,
Speaker 1: whatever it is. And some of those people who who
Speaker 1: so admirably break that cycle and pull out and and
Speaker 1: and make that all work. I did not have that situation.
Speaker 1: I was always loved. UM. My parents loved me unconditionally
Speaker 1: and uh and and by the way, it was pretty
Speaker 1: tough for them. You know, she doesn't talk about it
Speaker 1: that much, but my mom had me when she was
Speaker 1: seventeen years old. She was a high school student in Albuquerque,
Speaker 1: New Mexico. You could ask her, but I'm pretty sure
Speaker 1: that wasn't cool in nineteen sixty four to be a
Speaker 1: pregnant mom in high school in Albuquerque, New Mexico. And
Speaker 1: in fact, my grandfather, who is another incredibly important figure
Speaker 1: in my in my life, UM, I went to bat
Speaker 1: for her. And because the high school wanted to kick
Speaker 1: her out. You weren't allowed to be pregnant in high
Speaker 1: school there, and and my grandfather said, you can't kick
Speaker 1: her out. It's a public school. She gets to go
Speaker 1: to school. And they negotiated for a while, and the
Speaker 1: principal finally said, okay, she can stay and finished high school,
Speaker 1: but she can't do any extracurricular activities and she can't
Speaker 1: have a locker, and um, I know. And then and
Speaker 1: my grandfather, being a very wise man, he was like, done,
Speaker 1: we'll take that deal. And so she finished high school,
Speaker 1: she had me um, and then she married my my
Speaker 1: dad and my dad is my real dad, not my
Speaker 1: biological dad. His name is Mike. He's a Cuban immigrant,
Speaker 1: got a scholarship to to UH College in Albuquerque, which
Speaker 1: is where he met my mom. So I have a
Speaker 1: kind of a fairytale story. And my grandfather um, possibly
Speaker 1: because I mean, I'm pretty sure, because my parents were
Speaker 1: so young. Starting at age four, he would take me
Speaker 1: every summer on his ranch and it was the most spectacular.
Speaker 1: From age four to sixteen, I basically spent every summer
Speaker 1: we're working alongside him on the ranch. He was the
Speaker 1: most resourceful man. He would um did all his own
Speaker 1: veterinary work. He would even make his own needles. He
Speaker 1: would pound the wire with an oxyus satelene torch and
Speaker 1: drill a little hole in it and sharpen it and
Speaker 1: make a suiture, like make a needle that he could suit.
Speaker 1: Youre up the cattle with. Some of the cattle even survived,
Speaker 1: and um he was a remarkable man and a huge
Speaker 1: part of all of our lives. Um. But it is
Speaker 1: you don't realize, you know, if you just look back
Speaker 1: and you know if you if you don't have these parents, Um,
Speaker 1: you know how it's so important. So um it's just
Speaker 1: a really big deal. And my grandfather too, he was
Speaker 1: like a second set of parents for me. Would