15: Bezos’s 14 Principles with Steve Anderson

22
Feb

Steve Anderson, publisher of a leading industry newsletter on how to maximize your technology in investment and insurance. He recently published a best-selling book titled, The Bezos Letters: 14 Principles To Grow Your Business Like Amazon.

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Listen to the podcast here

 

Bezos’s 14 Principles with Steve Anderson

Our guest is Steve Anderson, who is the president of the Amazon Network, the publisher of a leading industry newsletter on how to maximize your technology investment in insurance. He is also a member of several boards of directors and advisory boards around the insurance industry. But most importantly, recently he published a book titled The Bezos Letters, 14 Principles to Grow Your Business Like Amazon. So welcome to the show, Steve.

Steve, thanks for having me. It’s a real pleasure.

Great to have you. Steve, first of all, let me ask you, how does a person who lives their life in the insurance industry suddenly write a book about Amazon? How does that work? How does that came about?

I get that question often because it isn’t always intuitive, but insurance and risk management are what I’ve done for the last 20 years. And as you mentioned, helping insurance agents and brokers in the industry utilize technology. And as we all know, technology continues to develop really rapidly. And so a few years ago, I came up with this thought that the biggest risk businesses take is actually not taking enough risk.

And this is specifically with technologies, right? So as new stuff comes, 10, 15 years ago, businesses had a couple of years to think about how it would impact their business. Today, they don’t have nearly that amount of time. And so I started looking at businesses in general that were doing well with staying up with new stuff and those that didn’t. Those, the companies that didn’t do well, we all probably know is Blackberry and Blockbuster and Sears. I mean, there’s a whole list of companies that are no longer around.

I looked at companies that were doing it well and came across Amazon as one that continues to be able to invent and do new things in support of their customers. My research, I came across the shareholder letters, read a few of them, and was very impressed with the amount of information that Jeff Bezos included in there about how he does things. I ended up literally reading every letter, there were 20 at the time, as a single narrative, one right after the other.

I created what I called an executive summary of each letter and I was going to give it away just as, hey, here’s some good thoughts. Fortunately, my wife is in the book publishing business. I talked to her about it and she talked to a couple of friends of hers and they all said this is a book, not something just to give away. That started an 18-month plus journey of writing a book. It definitely has turned out well for me.

That’s awesome. So what are the secrets? And what does Bezos do that other mortals don’t do? And how does he describe his process?

I would say a couple of things. One is, again, from my risk management and insurance background, I call Jeff Bezos the master of risk, meaning one of the ways he has grown Amazon from a startup. And frankly, most businesses forget that he was on his hands and knees packaging books and driving them to the post office, literally like every other business owner.

But he takes a very counterintuitive approach to risk-taking, to managing the business. So that’s where the 14 principles that I came up with really came from. What are the things that he does and how does he go about doing it? I would say risk-taking and very counterintuitive business processes. He does things differently than most every other business I know of, that’s for sure.

When you’re talking about risk-taking, I’ve worked with a lot of entrepreneurs and what I find or what I have found is that it’s not so much the taking of the risk, which differentiates the successful ones, but it’s more about how do they take risks and manage risks at the same time so that they take risks, they experiment, but they also protect their downside. And they say that if you protect your downside, your upside will take care of itself.

Agreed.

So can you talk to that a little bit, how that works for Bezos?

Yeah, so in Bezos’ minds, everything is risk-taking, but you’re right, it’s managing that risk or taking risks strategically. And so principle number one, I talk about, the principle is encourage successful failure. And at Amazon, every employee is expected to experiment and look for new and better ways to do things. But their process is experimentation first. And by its very nature, an experiment is more likely to fail than succeed. So that’s kind of that first mindset shift.

Encourage successful failure. Click To Tweet

And two, experimentation leads to learning what works, what doesn’t work. And that leads to invention. So one of his phrases that perhaps one of my favorite is, we invent on behalf of the customer. And so it’s always customer focused and it’s looking to improve the customer experience on the website, in the shipment, in the delivery, in literally every area of what you know Amazon does.

So that’s interesting. So what you’re saying is that they have this customer focus and one of the things you mentioned in your book is that he expects his people to be obsessed with the customers. It’s not about just to focus on them but to obsess about them. So what does it mean being obsessed versus being focused? How do you get more focused by being obsessed?

It’s interesting the way he used the word obsessed and he did it in his first 1997 letter and he stated, our goal is to be the most customer-centric company in the world. And so customer obsession is just a more of a focus and for Amazon everything starts with the customer and they work backwards. In fact they have a process called working backward that they use in order to determine what decisions to make and and what to projects to move forward on.

And again, counterintuitively, in 2004, Bezos banned any kind of PowerPoint, keynote, slide-oriented presentation. And so their decision-making process is completely counterintuitive to what you find in almost any other business. And again, one of their core strengths is being able to so focus, obsess over customers, that they’re able to make and create new products and services that the customers they feel will eventually want. You know, Amazon Prime is a perfect example.

One of the core strengths is being able to focus, obsess over customers, and create new products and services that customers will eventually want. Click To Tweet

You know, at the time, this is early 2000s, nobody was asking for free shipping, but shipping costs were a friction point in the sales process. So if they could remove that friction, they would get more sales. That was the theory. Every manager, every executive at Amazon said we can’t afford to do that. But Bezos had an intuitive feeling that if it’s better for the customer, it will be better for Amazon and our shareholders. And I think we can look forward, you know, 20 years and see that I think he might be right.

Yes, it’s really interesting about Amazon that they take this very long view. So they are a public company, but Jeff Bezos seems to have ignored, you know, quarterly shareholder concerns and he went against the grain. And for, I don’t know, for 20 years, he didn’t pay any dividends. He was plowing everything back into the company and some shareholders hated him for it. But at the same time, the share price kept climbing.

And keeps climbing.

And it keeps climbing. At some point, maybe 10 years ago, I looked at their financial statements and what I found was that their profit, I think they made like $4 or $5 billion profit at the time and it was the same amount as the unclaimed Amazon gift card balance. Essentially, all the profit that they made was unclaimed Amazon gift cards essentially put every profit back into the company and to reinvest in the business.

Yep, and that’s very much so and you talk about the long-term thinking, that’s also a principle and he says in that very first 1997 letter and I’m quoting now, we believe a fundamental measure of our success will be the shareholder value we create over the long term. And so he pretty much single-handedly told Wall Street to take a hike, that they are not gonna focus on quarterly earnings and kind of what every other company does because for them, it was really a land rush at those early years in terms of the internet and building the infrastructure, building the delivery network, building the logistics to be able to deliver those packages. And I think you can say now, it’s certainly that long-term view has paid off.

Yeah, and ultimately from the shareholder’s perspective, if the best investment is to keep your money in Amazon, then why do you want to take it as a dividend? Why don’t you keep it in the company and let it multiply itself inside the company?

Exactly. In fact, they haven’t paid a dividend yet.

They have not. That’s right. Yeah, you know, there is the theory that the shareholders can manufacture dividends. They can just sell some shares and that’s their dividend. It’s up to them. So, you know, what this podcast is about, I call them management blueprints or business creating, business building frameworks, you can also call it. Kind of mental concepts that help you think about your business in a more strategic way and help you build your business. Have you found that Amazon has some of these in their business. How do they think about the framework?

I would kind of have two different answers to that or two parts of an answer. I think the first is the 14 principles I identify in the book are what I have seen as the growth principles that Amazon uses. And I do believe any business can look at these and focus on what they think is most important and use that framework in order to grow. The other part of the answer is Amazon has also 14 leadership principles that guide the company in their day-to-day activity.

And I think what’s important to note here is that these leadership principles aren’t just something on the wall, but literally it’s something that most employees, I won’t say every, but most employees refer back to and use as they’re making their day-to-day decisions. Those frameworks, leadership and my growth principles, work together in order to be able for Amazon to grow. Like I said, I think they can apply to any business that will be willing to think differently about their business.

Like, you know, successful failure. I mean, that most businesses don’t think that. And I’m convinced that employees aren’t actually afraid of failure. They’re actually afraid of the consequences of failure. And when you have consequences to failure, then your business growth stagnates because people won’t step out. They won’t experiment. They won’t try something new.

So it’s very much a cultural thing. How do you allow people to experiment? Like Google have, for years they had 20% time. Correct. And the employees could spend their Friday just working on their pet projects and some of them blew up and that’s really helped Google. Correct. To help keep the best employees.

Yeah, and that same idea, they don’t call it that, but that same idea happens at Amazon. I mean, literally every employee, regardless of where they are in the organization, are encouraged to keep asking questions. Why are we doing it this way? Is there a better way to do something? And that’s, again, when you look at all the new things that Amazon gets into, that’s the reason why. They have a, I call them an invention factory. I mean, literally, they keep manufacturing new inventions, all again, back to that customer obsession and focus on doing what’s best for the customer.

Encouraged every employee, regardless of their position, to keep asking questions and looking for better ways to do things. Click To Tweet

That’s fascinating. So going back to this management blueprint or business framework idea, so you know that there are 14 for growth, there are 14 for leadership. Can you share with us a couple of growth principles that can really help a small to medium-sized business to grow, especially a people business, professional services, technology business? Can you give an example?

So there are a couple things, a couple that come to mind. I’m going to pick a couple here. You know, one of the questions I get is, of the 14 principles, which is the most important? And that’s like asking which of my grandchildren I love best, right? So, I mean, I picked 14 for a reason. However, I think conceptually one of the important ones and one of the hardest to understand and implement is principle six, which is understand your flywheel.

So where that comes from is Jim Collins’ book, Good to Great. Chapter eight is the flywheel and the doom loop. What most people don’t know is Bezos invited Collins to Amazon in the fall of 2001, just before that book was published. And Colin spent a whole day with the senior leadership team teaching them, talking about the flywheel. And they came out of that meeting with a sketch of Amazon’s flywheel. And they’re still pushing that flywheel today.

So you can point to everything that they’ve done, maybe some things that seem crazy, but it’s all pointing back to what are the key components to continue the growth engine that is known as Amazon. So I think for a business, small, medium, large, thinking about what are the key inputs that we need to continue pushing that will continue to help our business to grow. And they won’t be what Amazons are, right? One of them for Amazon is low prices.

Well, that’s not necessarily the key to success and growth for every business. But what are the ones for your business? And so many people listening probably have that book on their shelf somewhere. Pull it out. Go to just chapter 8. Reread that chapter to get familiarized with that. But I think that’s a key concept that continues to drive Amazon today.

That’s fascinating. So how could the, so can you elaborate a little bit more? So what does Amazon do about the low prices that creates this flywheel effect? 

Well, the self-feeding is… Yeah, the self-feeding for Amazon, the way they sketched it out was, one, more customers to the website, so the more customers they can drive to the website, the more leverage they will have with manufacturers because they have higher volume, so they can get better pricing. Better pricing leads to more customers coming.

A great customer experience or obsessing over customers lead customers to telling other people about it, which brings more people to the website, which allows them to negotiate more. And then they added on to that kind of a outside loop, which was third-party sellers. So in early 2000, they literally opened up their website to third-party sellers to sell right next to Amazon’s products, their own products.

Now Amazon charged a fee, but again, the thought process is if a customer can find a product at a better price from a third-party seller, that’s better for the customer and it’s going to be better for Amazon. Amazon charges today 15% of that sale, right? To allow that third-party small business, mostly seller to have access to their real estate. So that’s now a whole no other business that continues to push that flywheel.

That’s really interesting. So essentially they are a marketplace in themselves. And they create this opportunity for others to be part of that marketplace and use the platform. Essentially, they are using the platform.

Use their platform, yeah, to sell.

Which is a fascinating idea. And this is one of the tenets, I’m part of a coaching program called Strategic Coach. And what Dan Sullivan talks about in Strategic Coach is that it’s basically a state of your company. You first you build your product and then you get your customer service, your customer relationship, and then you create a community in this in the marketplace, which can be turned then into a marketplace.

Right.

 You are actually creating this. This is more than just transactional relationship becomes more of an emotional lifestyle a lifestyle or even kind of a strategic partnership type relationship in the market. And this is how you expressly grow your business into a market. It’s really interesting.

And then you kind of have the whole Amazon Web Services that started out solving a need that Amazon had in terms of technology and computing platforms and all of those kinds of things. And then they realized, you know what, there’s probably other startups that would want access to computing power without having to build huge data centers and spend all that money. So that’s what started AWS and now a huge part of their profit and what they provide as part of their platform.

Yeah, they keep growing and expanding. That’s fascinating. I saw a chart recently which suggested that Amazon is now so dominant in retail that it’s bigger than the next five or six competitors combined. Walmart and Target and all these, it’s all smaller than Amazon. They keep kind of taking market share from others. So going back to this growth idea, you also talk in your book about four key growth cycles that every successful company is always moving through. Can you talk to this a little bit what that looks like and why this is important?

Yeah, the four cycles are test, build, accelerate, and scale. And I do believe that every business regardless of size is going through these different cycles. So you start testing, you have an idea, you have a product, you have a service. It could be a brand new startup, it could be an existing business that decides, okay, we can invent, right, on behalf of the customer, this new service. Are they going to like it? Let’s test it. And Amazon tests things all the time.

And they fail a lot. I mean, they’re, I describe in the book, I believe their biggest failure was the phone, the Amazon Fire phone. 2014, they, to great fanfare, Jeff Bezos on the stage, looking a little like Steve Jobs’ wannabe, announced this brand new phone. Well, you know, 2007, we got the iPhone, we already had Androids, why did we need another phone? Spectacular failure, they couldn’t give them away, they wrote off $178 million in inventory and development costs at the end of that last quarter of 2014.

But four months after the phone was announced, Bezos got his first demonstration of what we would come to know as the Echo and Alexa. So voice processing with this device that you talk to. Again, he talks about inventing on behalf of the customer. If we had asked customers, do you want a cylinder that sits on your table that you can talk to and ask questions? He said nobody would say that they wanted that. But we understand our customers so intimately that we realized that we could develop something that they would grow into using.

I have multiple ones in my house in terms of, I use them for cooking in the kitchen, all kinds of different things because now we’ve become used to this idea of being able to talk to a device and getting an answer from it. And that also illustrates one of the other principles, which is make complexity simple. So the technology behind Alexa, machine learning, voice processing, the Echo hardware device, and I’m still astounded that I can stand across the kitchen and ask Alexa to do something and she understands me. So that, it’s called far field voice processing. Those are huge technical problems and challenges that Amazon was able to solve and create now another platform, right? That engages people in a different way.

So this idea of simplified complexity, what is the process there? How do people do that? I know Steve Jobs did it with the iPhone. The earlier phones, I had a Palm Pilot.

Oh, yeah.

And they put a very sophisticated software, which was garbage. And then the whole company went down the drain. And what Steve Jobs did, he just said, OK, we just have a screen. And, you know, every application is just a little square. And then you just open it and it’s all intuitive. But how do you get to this point? So what is the process of simplifying?

Well, I think it starts with finding friction points that your customer experiences now. And I’ll go, I mean, the Kendall, right? Who announced in 2007, and he describes this that they, Amazon, had the audacious goal to reinvent the book, something that had been around for 500 years. And there’s a concept that he talks about, and he talks about it specifically in retail stores, right? So for many years, Amazon didn’t have retail stores, but then they all of a sudden started experimenting with what a retail store might look like.

Well, the same thing happened with the Kindle. How might a book be reinvented? And the phrase he uses is meaningful differentiation. So what he said in 2006 letter, he said, we don’t know right now how to create a retail experience that’s meaningfully different than what you can get right now. But fast forward to probably five years ago, they opened their first Amazon ghost store, which is a small 1500 square feet-ish convenience store, just kind of like a 7-Eleven, or you go get snacks and drinks and maybe some prepared sandwiches.

But literally you scan your app to get into the store, you pick off the shelf what you want to buy, and you put it in a basket or a bag, and you just walk out because the technology, machine vision, machine learning, all kinds of sensors know what you picked off the shelves and know the price, and you just get a few minutes later an email with your receipt. Well, that solved, that was meaningfully different than having to stand in a checkout line at a grocery store, even the self-checkout, right, which just doesn’t seem to work well. So that’s how they think. What can we do? Not just do what everybody else has done, but what can we do that’s meaningfully different? And again, it’s all focused on the customer.

So it makes sense. So basically what you’re saying is that it is a friction point for the customer in a grocery store that they have to queue up and wait in line to be able to pay and some of them slowly pull the products across the counter and they will look at it and it all takes a bunch of time and it’s probably meaningless. I mean, they already have the barcodes on it. So why do they have to again check the barcode? You just take it off the shelf and that’s already can register that there’s a transaction. Register that, yeah. And then you just walk out. So they remove this big friction and it becomes meaningful and different for them.

And they started with convenience store. They’ve now opened a 10,000 square foot grocery store with the same technology and they are licensing the technology to other retailers. So they’re able to invent for their own purposes and experiment and have real world examples and then license that to other retailers that want access to that technology.

That is amazing. I heard that Whole Foods is going to be like that at some point, which we acquired too. Yeah, can’t wait. Although you have all these shoppers who shop for you, so maybe you don’t need this anymore.

Exactly, that’s right. So that’s interesting.

So one of the other concepts you talk about, maybe that’s connected to this one, is how do you get to this point? And you talk about the high velocity decision making. And I wonder what that means. I mean, Amazon is a huge company, and they have, I mean, even if they try to keep very flat, they’re going to have a huge structure there, a corporate structure and people on the floor, they come up with a decision. How does it even get across and how do they process this stuff?

Well, and again I think this is where Bezos is very counter intuitive to how most business work and basically what he feels is that small teams one they communicate better and two, they can make faster decisions. And faster decisions lead to better results. And so they have a couple of things they do. I mentioned a meeting, a decision meeting, right? Okay, I have a new product I’m pitching, new service I’m pitching. That meeting starts with what’s called a six-page narrative.

Faster decisions lead to better results. Click To Tweet

And so no PowerPoint, nothing else. This is a written document, a maximum of six pages. The document starts with what they call a future press release, meaning this is the day two years from now that this product’s going to be released. Here’s the press release describing the benefit to the customer, what are the new things that they’ve done. And then they go into a FAQ. What are the common questions people are going to ask about how we’re going to do it, what the product does, what are the benefits, etc. That is handed out.

It is not sent out beforehand. It is handed out at the meeting. As Bezos describes it, we have a study hall for 15-30 minutes where everybody, executives on down, spend that first 30 minutes reading the memo. The benefit is you slow down to speed up, because now everybody literally is on the same page. If you have a question, it hopefully is answered in the FAQ. If it’s not, you have a discussion, but then the discussion is much more focused on problems they may not have seen, all of those things, it’s much more productive process.

And I don’t know of any other business that does it that way. The other thing they’d have is a rule, I’ll call it a rule, but a team at Amazon should be no bigger than what two large pizzas can feed. So they believe, now that may mean like a Kindle project, creating that, could mean they have 500 teams, each with responsibility for a specific part of the process. Because Bezos says, we don’t need better communication among teams. We need teams small enough that communication happens organically.

And those teams have responsibility and ownership of the decision they make, and that leads faster decisions. So that’s a little background. And quickly, the high velocity decisions, Bezos describes as two types of decisions. Type one, bet the farm, huge decisions. He says those should be made slowly, carefully, with lots of data by high level executives. He said the second type of decision are type two, which are decisions that are easily reversible. Type 1 are hard to reverse. Type 2 are easily reversible.

The way he describes it is, if you go through that door that that decision you wanted to go through and you get on the other side and don’t like what you see, you just turn around and come back. There is little consequence or you make another decision that pivots or changes the direction. He said what happens in larger companies is there’s a tendency to take type 2 decisions into a type 1 process and all the result of that is slowing down decision making which slows down growth.

Type 1 decisions should be made slowly, carefully, with lots of data. Type 2 decisions are easily reversible; if you don't like what you see on the other side, you can turn around and come back. Click To Tweet

That is very interesting and this is very true. I mean you have a negative economy scale. You are growing your team. I used to facilitate a group of CEO’s and as I was growing the group, when I crossed the 14 member threshold, 12 to 14, actually 12 was like the ideal, when you had 12, like the 12 apostles, the 12, you know, angry men. So when you had the 12 people, that was ideal because you would have enough diversity of ideas, but people were still engaged. They didn’t feel like, oh, okay, those people are talking over there. I don’t have to contribute.

You were actually accountable to this other group. As we crossed this threshold and the group became bigger, people disengaged. They felt like there’s not enough time for them to share their opinion or at least maybe to even to ask questions. So they would want to butt in and just share what they have, but the curiosity disappeared. So it is true that it’s critical to keep these teams small. I mean, food, pizza can feed them.

Well, and if the other, again, this is how the principals work with each other. They stand on their own, but they also work with each other. But one of the principals in the scale cycle is focused on high standards. And at Amazon, that’s hiring is a big piece of that, right? They hire A players. So the people on the team are not just skillful, but they are high quality people that want to work with other high quality people. So that synergy on those small teams becomes a real key factor in their growth.

That is true. I mean, A players want to play with A players. And sometimes, you know, there’s an interesting analogy. I think it was Malcolm Gladwell who kind of explained it in one of his podcasts, when he talked about that there are some sports where you improve the team by putting a star on the team, for example, basketball, you put LeBron James in a team, for sure, that’s going to make it to the playoffs. Well, maybe not every time.

And, but conversely, in soccer, which is a different sport, there you improve the team by removing the weakest player. So you’re actually helping by removing that B player that frustrates all the other people that makes that mistake that will lead to a goal. And I think that happens with companies as well, I mean, different types of companies, but you need both. You need to have some stars who obviously fit your culture, but you also need to remove that person that holds everyone back, that kind of sets a low standard that makes it okay for everyone else to not try as hard. It’s the Jack Welch idea of removing the lower layer every time to keep upping the quality of

The quality of the, of the resulting team.

Absolutely. Yeah, that’s, that’s awesome. So that’s, that’s great. And the high velocity decisions, obviously, it allows you to stay nimble as a big company, maybe you’re a big company, but you have this small team. So essentially, you are entrepreneurial within the big company. And is this what leads to the exceptional customer experience? So you’re talking about the customer experience pillars in your book. What is this idea about?

Yeah, so at Amazon, they really started with two, and Bezos added a third one. But the customer pillars are, and I mentioned them before in the flywheel idea, but it is wide selection, low prices, and fast delivery. And I like the way he describes it. He says, we can’t imagine a time that customers will want less selection, higher prices, and slower delivery. So again, when you look at what Amazon does, they still are focused on those three pillars. So wide selection, they keep expanding. It’s called the everything store for a reason.

They keep expanding what they have available to you. Their pricing is low. It’s not always the lowest, but certainly they’re trusted at having consistently low prices. Now, it used to be fast delivery was two days. Now it’s one day and it’s rapidly going to an hour or quicker, depending on where you are. Urban areas are a little easier to do that with, but there is even an initiative at Amazon right now where they’re building smaller distribution centers in more rural areas so they can, what? Deliver fast delivery in areas where it’s difficult to do right now. But always thinking about the customer and how we can improve that experience.

Sometimes, especially if you order something that is a common product. For example, I used to order a lot of the traction books from Amazon. Now, I no longer order it from them because I go for hardcover. But I used to order it from them and sometimes I would order it in the morning, not even early morning, like late morning, 11 a.m. And at 4 p.m. someone would show up with a car, a regular car, and they would just drop it off. I couldn’t believe it. And they are talking about the drones as well, which can even increase speed. I don’t know if that’s ever going to happen, but it sounds like a good idea.

It’s funny you mention drones, because that’s an interesting example of long-term thinking. They first announced, Bezos did on 60 Minutes six years ago now, I think, that they were experimenting with drones. Well, that’s a pretty long window of time. They’re still working and experimenting. In fact, they announced last month, let’s say recently, part of their Ring Home Security System, a drone that sits inside your house, that if an alarm goes off, the drone actually raises, flies to where the alarm was, a door or a window, with a camera and starts taking pictures. So a drone inside your house. Well, you know, some people are saying, what about privacy? I’m thinking, how creative is that? Now, it may not sell. And frankly, Amazon doesn’t care, but they keep experimenting and trying to see what might work.

What I’m most excited about, which I heard from Amazon, was that they made this commitment to get to zero emissions. I think it’s 2030 or some date. Do you know anything about that, how that is going and how they’re planning to achieve that?

Yeah, so they’ve had several initiatives for quite a while. One of the first ones was called frustration-free packaging. So I have seven grandchildren. Couple of years ago at Christmas, all the toys and all that stuff, well, all the adults, the dads were sitting around with knives and scissors and trying to get these toys out of this packaging, clamshell clear. And what someone at Amazon realized was, we don’t have to show toys in a store on a shelf that’s going to grab a kid’s attention.

We have a website, we show pictures. And so they started talking to manufacturers to create easily openable packaging and packaging that wouldn’t require another box for it to be shipped in. So they started several years ago trying to reduce their recyclable stuff and they’ve made huge success. Bezos just announced the first funding for sustainable grants to different organizations. He says he’s committed $10 billion over the next few years to move that forward.

So I think there’s a real emphasis and effort there at Amazon. It has been for a while, but we’re starting to see a bit more results or visibility. There’s been a lot of work going on inside that you don’t see until it’s announced. But yeah, that’s a big area for Bezos himself in terms of since high school. You know, he’s been concerned about that. Again, most people don’t understand that, but using his resources now to keep that movement moving forward.

And frankly, that’s the whole space thing, Blue Origin, too, is creating a way that the infrastructure for getting to space is significantly cheaper, so we have more invention of space utilization. Bezos started Blue Origin in 2000, and for the first five years never told anybody about it. But again, what most people don’t realize is Bezos was the valedictorian in his high school class, and in his speech he talked about the need to make the Earth a national National Park and that we needed to move manufacturing and those kinds of things to space.

And again, long-term vision, right? We talked about earlier, and he’s self-funded Blue Origin to the tune of over a billion dollars a year, and he calls Blue Origin his most important work. So I think there’s a real focus there on his part to improve both what Amazon does and what he can do himself.

I think if anyone, any entrepreneur can drive change, he certainly has the money. He’s got the vehicle, Amazon, which is this big company. And he also, I mean, Amazon produces a lot of packaging material, which really could do with, you know, do less and more recyclable. So definitely plenty of opportunities. So thank you very much. Really enjoyed talking with you. So if our listeners would like to learn more, obviously they can read the Bezos Letters, which is available on guess where?

On guess where, exactly.

14 Principles to Grow Your Business Like Amazon, and that works for small to medium-sized businesses, so professional service businesses, as well as technology companies. So I really recommend you check that out. Where else can people reach you, Steve?

So if you do buy the book, there’s some additional support material to help you to get the most out of it at thebezosletters.com, the website, along with just some other information there. So that would be the best place to go.

Okay, sounds good. Well, certainly check it out. And it was a pleasure having you. Lots of interesting information and stories. And great to have you. 

 

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