#374 Rare Jeff Bezos Interview

**David Senra** (0:00)
From day one, in his very first shareholder letter, Jeff Bezos emphasized the importance of having the very best team. He wrote, Setting the bar high in our approach to hiring has been, and will continue to be, the single most important element of Amazon's success. Jeff's focus on talent is just like this quote from Steve Jobs that actually happened in an interview that very same year. Steve gave this interview in 1997, and Steve said, I think I've consistently figured out who the really smart people were to hang around with. You must find extraordinary people. The key observation is that in most things in life, the dynamic range between average quality and best quality is at most two to one. But in the field that I was interested in, I noticed that the dynamic range between what an average person could accomplish and what the best person could accomplish was 50 or 100 to one. Given that you're well advised to go after the cream of the cream. You're well advised to build a team that pursues A-plus players. And that is exactly what Ramp did. Ramp has the most talented technical team in their industry. Becoming an engineer at Ramp is nearly impossible. In the last 12 months, they hired only 0.23% of the people that applied. So when you use Ramp, you now have access to top tier technical talent and some of the best AI engineers working on your behalf 24-7 to automate and improve all of your business' financial operations. And they do this all on a single platform. The longer you use Ramp, the more efficient your company becomes. This is important because as Sam Walton said in his autobiography, you can make a lot of different mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation, or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you're too inefficient. Ramp helps you run an efficient organization. In the end of that interview, Steve Jobs added, he said a small team of A-plus players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players. From a customer perspective, what does a team of A-plus players sound like? It sounds like this customer review that I read, which said, Ramp is like having a teammate who you never need to check in on because they have it handled. Ramp gives you everything you need to optimize all of your financial operations on a single platform. Ramp's website is incredible. Make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud by going to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business today. That is ramp.com.
Jeff Bezos just did this interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin at the Dealbook Summit. And the interview gave me so much energy that actually printed out after I finished listening to it, I printed out the transcript and it's like 45 pages long when you print it out. And actually went through the transcript just like every book that I cover on the podcast. So I have all my notes, my highlights, my underlines in there. And then what I decided to do is I rearranged my outline in order by topic. So if you listen to the full interview, which I highly recommend that you do, you're going to see the same topics appear in different parts of the interview. So I want to start with one of my favorite things that Jeff Bezos said, because Jeff is one of my favorite living entrepreneurs and he says that retirement is lame. And they start talking about the fact that he says, this retirement thing I've turned out to be extremely lame at. So he left Amazon, he was always working on Blue Origin, but now he's back working at Amazon. He's going to talk a lot about what he's doing there. But he said something that was very fascinating, the importance of building a company that can outlast you. And he's going to talk about why he is so bullish on AI. And he's got a great metaphor for what he thinks AI is. So Sorkin asks Bezos, he says, Amazon is your baby. You stepped away from that. What did it feel like? And Bezos says something that was very fascinating. He says, even when Amazon was a tiny company, I always had it in my mind that I wanted to build a company that would outlast me. So I've always been thinking about it in that framework and how it could kind of grow into a young adult and be set off into the world successfully and independently. I felt like a parent sending your kid off to college. And you're hoping that you've created this independent young adult who can go off into the world. You don't want them to be dependent on you. If they are, you fail. And so I want to pause right there because when I got to this section, there's two things I thought about based on what Jeff was saying. One comes from Daniel Eck, the founder of Spotify. The other comes from Steve Jobs. And so earlier this year, I actually got to have dinner with Daniel Eck. And it was one of the best, it was, I would say, not one of, it was the best and most impactful conversation that I've had all year. And like an idiot, I didn't make an episode about it. In fact, if I just texted Daniel, I was like, hey, we should run that back. So I'll see if he's up to doing that. And then I'll make sure I take notes and make an episode about it. Because I think Daniel is obviously one of the most impressive living entrepreneurs, and there's just a ton that we can learn from him. But during the conversation that I did have with Daniel, he was telling me about the history of Spotify. And he said something that was very fascinating. He has this metaphor that a company ages like a child. And anyone that has kids knows that when your kids are really small, their behavior and their traits is really just a reflection of you. And yet, as they age, I'm going through this right now with my 12-year-old daughter, and it's kind of hard to deal with. But as they age, they become less of like a copy of you, and they have more of their, like their own like distinct personality emerges. And so by the time they're 18, they have traits that are performed by their own experience, and they're completely separate and independent of the control or even the influence of their parents. And Daniel X said, a company is the same way. At the beginning, the company is the founder and is wholly reliant on the founder. But now that Spotify is 18 years old, it's developed all these skills and traits that the founder one could not have predicted and has have emerged from within the company, from its own experience. And it's actually the job of the founder to make sure that the company can survive and thrive independent of any one person. So it was very interesting for me to hear Bezos use a similar metaphor in this interview. I mean, he even says, I thought about it in a framework, how a company could grow into a kind of a young adult and be set off into the world successfully and independently. The second thing that popped to my mind, and I double underlined, it was really important to me. Bezos was talking about, he's like, listen, even at the very beginning, I always wanted to build a company that would outlast me. And so when Steve Jobs knew he was dying, he was working with Walter Isaacson on that biography. And he said something that was very fascinating, and it's going to sound a lot like what Bezos is saying. And so Steve says, I hate it when people call themselves entrepreneurs, when what they're really trying to do is launch a startup and then sell or go public so they can cash in and move on. They're unwilling to do the work it takes to build a real company, which is the hardest work in business. That's how you really make a contribution and add to the legacy of those who went before you. You build a company that will stand for something a generation or two from now. That's what Walt Disney did, and Hewlett and Packard, and the people who built Intel. They created a company to last, not just to make money. That is what I want Apple to be. And so Steve was very adamant about building Apple to last beyond him. And Jeff is saying the exact same thing here in this interview about Amazon. And so let's go back to what Jeff's saying in this Amazon. So he says, so I want Amazon to go off without me. I'm still at Amazon, by the way. I haven't left fully. You never stop being a parent later on in the interview. He says, really funny, he's like, I'm a 60 year old man, and my parents are still worrying about me. So he says, my heart is at Amazon. My curiosity is at Amazon. My love is there. So throughout this entire interview, Jeff will constantly talk about the importance of curiosity. He will mention how he follows his curiosity. I just gave a talk, a few talks at these conferences. And one of the conferences were for post exit founders. So founders that have already had a successful exit and they're trying to figure out what to do next. And then when you have conversations with them one on one, in private, a lot of the same questions come up, where they're like, I just don't know what to do. What should I do next? Do you have any insight into how I should choose what I work on next or what my next company should be? My answer is very simple and similar to what Jeff is saying here. So you just follow your innate curiosity. There is this great essay by Paul Graham. I think it's episode 314 of Founders. It's called How to Do Great Work. I want to read an excerpt from it right now, because I believe this is what Jeff is saying in this interview, and this is surely what I've done in my own life. And I've been obsessed with entrepreneurship, history, podcasts, and reading for my entire life. That's exactly what Founders is. This is my life's work, and it's just a collection of these weird passions that have grabbed hold of me since I was a child. And so in this essay called How to Do Great Work, it says, curiosity is the best guide. Your curiosity never lies, and it knows more than you do about what's worth paying attention to. If you asked an oracle the secret to doing great work, and the oracle replied with a single word, my bet would be on curiosity. This whole process is kind of a dance with curiosity. And so later on, when Jeff starts telling you and I about how he's spending time, what's exciting him, you realize like he's just dancing with his own curiosity. So back to Jeff. He says, right now I'm putting a lot of time in at Amazon because I can help and it is super interesting. And so Andrew Sorkin asks a follow up question. What is it that you're doing at Amazon? AI, Jeff says, it is 95% AI. We're literally working on 1000 applications internally. You have to remember, this just sings to my soul. I love how all these things connect over the time. I'll explain what I mean in one second. You have to remember, modern AI is a horizontal enabling layer. It can be used to improve everything. It will be in everything. This is most like electricity. And so I want to pause there. He just said AI is most like electricity. This is like going to be an inception, like an idea inside of an idea, okay? I've been obsessed with studying Bezos for a long time. And I'm going to pause where we were in this interview. I want to go back to this TED Talk he gave. He gave this TED Talk 21 years ago. I took notes on Jeff Bezos' TED Talk five years ago. And so I went and pulled them up. His TED Talk is called The Electricity Metaphor. This is the description of the TED Talk. It says, the.com boom in Boston is often compared to the gold rush. But Amazon founder Jeff Bezos says it's more like the early days of the electric industry. So I'm going to read you some of my notes from this TED Talk. The TED Talk is Jeff Bezos on the Electricity Metaphor of the Web's future. He's saying this in 2003