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Most big technology companies are competitor focused. They see what others are doing, and then work to fast follow. In contrast, 90 to 95 percent of what we build in AWS is driven by what customers tell us they want.
Here’s a starter pack of essentials for Day 1 defense: customer obsession, a skeptical view of proxies, the eager adoption of external trends, and high-velocity decision making.
Staying in Day 1 requires you to experiment patiently, accept failures, plant seeds, protect saplings, and double down when you see customer delight. A customer-obsessed culture best creates the conditions where all of that can happen.
Good inventors and designers deeply understand their customer. They spend tremendous energy developing that intuition. They study and understand many anecdotes rather than only the averages you’ll find on surveys. They live with the design.
The outside world can push you into Day 2 if you won’t or can’t embrace powerful trends quickly. If you fight them, you’re probably fighting the future. Embrace them and you have a tailwind.
most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70 percent of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90 percent, in most cases, you’re probably being slow.
use the phrase “disagree and commit.” This phrase will save a lot of time. If you have conviction on a particular direction even though there’s no consensus, it’s helpful to say, “Look, I know we disagree on this, but will you gamble with me on it? Disagree and commit?” By the time you’re at this point, no one can know the answer for sure, and you’ll probably get a quick yes.
recognize true misalignment issues early and escalate them immediately. Sometimes teams have different objectives and fundamentally different views. They are not aligned. No amount of discussion, no number of meetings will resolve that deep misalignment. Without escalation, the default dispute resolution mechanism for this scenario is exhaustion.
Modern applications are driving the need for low latencies, real-time processing, and the ability to process millions of requests per second. It’s not just key-value stores like DynamoDB, but also in-memory databases like Amazon ElastiCache, time series databases like Amazon Timestream, and ledger solutions like Amazon Quantum Ledger Database—the right tool for the right job saves money and gets your product to market faster.
As a company grows, everything needs to scale, including the size of your failed experiments. If the size of your failures isn’t growing, you’re not going to be inventing at a size that can actually move the needle.
cavalierly.
W
We plan to meet the pledge, in part, by purchasing one hundred thousand electric delivery vans from Rivian—a Michigan-based producer of electric vehicles. Amazon aims to have ten thousand of Rivian’s new electric vans on the road as early as 2022, and all one hundred thousand vehicles on the road by 2030.
shopping online is already inherently more carbon efficient than going to the store.
Typical single-company data centers operate at roughly 18 percent server utilization. They need that excess capacity to handle large usage spikes.
Theodor Seuss Geisel: “When something bad happens you have three choices. You can either let it define you, let it destroy you, or you can let it strengthen you.”
Q
In most occupations, if you’re in the ninetieth percentile or above, you’re going to contribute. In theoretical physics, you’ve got to be, like, one of the top fifty people in the world, or you’re really just not helping out much.
Cleverness is a gift; kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy—they’re given, after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you’re not careful, and if you do, it’ll probably be to the detriment of your choices.
When you are eighty years old and, in a quiet moment of reflection, narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story.
When I’m eighty, I want to have minimized the number of regrets that I have in my life, and most of our regrets are acts of omission, things we didn’t try, the path untraveled. Those are the things that haunt us.
MOST OF THE inventing we do at Amazon goes like this: somebody has an idea, other people improve the idea, other people come up with objections for why it can never work, and then we solve those objections. It’s a very fun process.
You need to be thinking two or three years in advance, and if you are, then why do I need to make a hundred decisions today?
If I make, like, three good decisions a day, that’s enough, and they should just be as high quality as I can make them. Warren Buffet says he’s good if he makes three good decisions a year, and I really believe that.
When I meet with the entrepreneur who founded the company, I’m always trying to figure out one thing first and foremost: Is this person a missionary or a mercenary? The mercenaries are trying to flip their stock. The missionaries love their product or their service and love their customers, and they’re trying to build a great service.
THE WAY YOU earn trust, the way you develop a reputation is by doing hard things well over and over and over.
Is your work depriving you of energy, or is your work generating energy for you?
There are two types of decisions. There are decisions that are irreversible and highly consequential; we call them one-way doors, or Type 2 decisions. They need to be made slowly and carefully.
The most important factor for nimbleness is decision-making speed. The second-most important factor is being willing to be experimental. You have to be willing to take risks. You have to be willing to fail, and people don’t like failure.
Innovative people will flee an organization if they can’t make decisions and take risks. You might recruit them initially, but they won’t stay long. Builders like to build. A lot of this stuff is very simple, really. It’s just hard to do.
The only way to stay ahead and to keep that unlevel playing field, which is what you certainly want, is to innovate.
We know for a fact that a kid who falls behind has a really, really hard time catching up, and if you can give somebody a leg up when they’re two, three, or four years old, by the time they get to kindergarten or first grade, they’re much less likely to fall behind.
That head start builds on itself fantastically. If you can get that starting at age two, three, four, there’s a powerful compounding effect there.
I believe in the power of wandering. All my best decisions in business and in life have been made with heart, intuition, and guts, not analysis. When you can make a decision with analysis, you should do so, but it turns out in life that your most important decisions are always made with instinct, intuition, taste, and heart,
It is a huge advantage to any company if you can stay focused on your customer instead of your competitor.
Why do we need to go to space? My answer is different from the common “plan B” argument: the Earth gets destroyed and you want to be somewhere else. It’s unmotivating and doesn’t work for me.
My friends who want to move to Mars? I say, “Do me a favor. Go live on the top of Mount Everest for a year first and see if you like it—because it’s a garden paradise compared to Mars.”
Carl Sagan was so poetic: “On that blue dot, that’s where everyone you know, and everyone you ever heard of, and every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. A very small stage in a great cosmic arena.”
We have to realize that there are immediate problems, things that we need to work on, and we are working on those things. They’re urgent. I’m talking about poverty, hunger, homelessness, pollution, overfishing in the oceans. The list of immediate problems is very long, and we need to work on those things urgently, in the here and now.
the price of admission to do interesting things in space right now is just too high. Because there’s no infrastructure.
Infrastructure lets entrepreneurs do amazing things.
First, we must have a radical reduction in launch cost. Launches are simply too expensive today. And second, we have to use in-space resources. Earth has a very powerful gravitational field, and lifting all of our resources off of Earth just isn’t going to work. We need to be able to use resources that are already in space.
Real data backs up the fact that a surgery is much safer if your surgeon is practicing it at least five times a week. And so we need to be going to space very frequently in a very routine way. One reason aviation is so safe today is because we do have so much practice.
I get asked a very interesting question from time to time: “Jeff, what’s going to change over the next ten years?” And I enjoy playing with the answer. That’s a fun dinner conversation. But there’s an even more important question I almost never get asked: “What’s not going to change over the next ten years?” And that question is so important because you can build your plans around those things.
know for a fact that Amazon customers are going to want low prices ten years from now. That’s not going to change. Customers are going to want fast delivery. They’re going to want big selection.
the moon has six times less gravity than Earth. When you get resources from the moon, you can get them into free space at very low cost. It takes twenty-four times less energy to lift a pound off the moon than it does off the Earth. That is a huge lever.
If this generation builds the road to space, builds that infrastructure, we will get to see thousands of future entrepreneurs building a real space industry, and I want to inspire them.
big things start small.
Q
Our scale allows us to make a meaningful impact on important societal issues.
Amazon Future Engineer is a global childhood-to-career program designed to inspire, educate, and prepare thousands of children and young adults from underrepresented and underserved communities to pursue a computer science career. The program funds computer science coursework and professional teacher development for hundreds of elementary schools, introductory and AP Computer Science classes for more than 2,000 schools in underserved communities across the country, and 100 four-year, $40,000 college scholarships to computer science students from low-income backgrounds.
