Jeff Bezos Interview -- Academy of Achievement

1 page print version: http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/printmember/bez0int-1

I really like Jeff Bezos, I didn't know he was such a modest, smart, and capable guy. Reading this interview has made him an inspiration to me. I like how he was so honest. From this interview, I imagine he's a great guy to work for and with.

> We needed to build the technology that would run the store, and found the person who turned out to be the most important person ever in the history of Amazon.com on that trip. A guy named Shel Kaphan, who built all of our early systems. He had help from others, but he was the architect, he engineered them, and just did a fantastic job.

I believe that many successful technical companies have a great technical wizard early on. Thomas Knoll (Adobe Photoshop), Jeffrey Dean (Google), Len Bosack (Cisco), of course, Steve Wozniak (Apple), Jim Clark (SGI - though he's gone way beyond pure technical to mogul), Parker Harris (Salesforce.com)

Still reading through this interview but this is fast becoming one of my favorites. I love this tidbit:

Bezos: We were packing these things, everybody in the company and I had this brainstorm as I said to the person next to me, "This packing is killing me! My back hurts, this is killing my knees on this hard cement floor" and this person said, "Yeah, I know what you mean." And I said, "You know what we need?" my brilliant insight, "We need knee pads!'" I was very serious, and this person looked at me like I was the stupidest person they'd ever seen. I'm working for this person? This is great. "What we need is packing tables."

The part I like about Bezos most is his uncompromising dedication to doing what's best for the customer, no matter what. There was this story when book publishers got angry at him for publishing all book reviews - good and bad. "Jeff, in this business you make money when you sell books", they told him. He insisted on publishing reviews because it was right for the customers and as we know now it was the right thing. This is really the only thing I need to know about Jeff Bezos. A true role model.

I like the bit about stress. Jeff says it's not caused by a lot of work but about feelings of uncertainty, and unaddressed things in your consciousness.

Liked this part about decision making.

"It really was a decision that I had to make for myself, and the framework I found which made the decision incredibly easy was what I called -- which only a nerd would call -- a "regret minimization framework." So, I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, "Okay, now I'm looking back on my life. I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have." I knew that when I was 80 I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed I wouldn't regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. I knew that that would haunt me every day, and so, when I thought about it that way it was an incredibly easy decision. And, I think that's very good. If you can project yourself out to age 80 and sort of think, "What will I think at that time?" it gets you away from some of the daily pieces of confusion. You know, I left this Wall Street firm in the middle of the year. When you do that, you walk away from your annual bonus. That's the kind of thing that in the short-term can confuse you, but if you think about the long-term then you can really make good life decisions that you won't regret later."