Amazon CEO Andy Jassy on Nimbleness, AI Strategy, and the Shifting Role of Managers

**SPEAKER_1** (0:03)
You've said that you want Amazon to operate like a start-up, like a very large start-up. And a lot of CEOs say that. And I'm interested, how do you try to make that happen? You're an enormous company with a lot going on.
How do you try to make that work?

**Andy Jassy** (0:18)
Yeah, well, we talk about, first of all, thanks for having me on, I appreciate it. We talk about wanting to operate like the world's largest start-up. And I actually think Amazon already, based on our DNA and the way that we have become a company over the last 30 years, moves very quickly. But when you get larger, there are all sorts of ways that, you know, natural ways that you can get slowed down. And so when we talk about operating like the world's largest start-up, we think about a few things. One is, I think in whatever we build, whatever we spend resource on, we have to make sure we're solving a real customer problem. And I think a lot of companies, technology companies in particular, fall in love with the technology.
And they are building things that they think are cool because they love the technology, but they get to the end and they haven't really solved anything remarkable. And so you have to be, start-ups are missionary about trying to solve problems for customers, and that's what we've got to make sure we've spent our time on. And then we need a lot of builders, disproportionately so. And I think of builders as people that like to invent, people that like to dissect a customer experience and figure out what's wrong with it, even if it's pretty good. And then rebuild it. And then you need owners if you're going to be a startup. You need people to think about what would I do if this were my money? What would I do if I owned all the resources? Hey, I see that I own this piece of the problem. I don't really know if the rest of it's solved. Should I spend my time on it or should I just assume someone's got it? You need people who really feel accountable. It's part of what our effort in trying to flatten our organizations is about, is we want the people doing the work to think like owners. And then you really need speed. And I think speed disproportionately matters in every business at every time. In my old job, when I was managing the AWS business, I had the privilege of speaking to a lot of CEOs of companies and enterprises. And they would often say to me something like, I don't know if you understand, we're big, we have security issues, we have compliance issues, we have lots of organizations that have to be involved, we just can't move fast. And I think honestly that speed is a leadership decision. You can decide you want to move fast, but you have to kind of figure out what's slowing you down and knock all those barriers out, and you got to get the whole organization aligned that you are going to move really fast, even if you make mistakes. And so I think part of that too, as you're a larger company, as you have more people, as you need to really try to root out bureaucracy, well-intended people as you get bigger, especially as you have a lot of managers, they keep layering in processes. And pretty soon, you have processes upon processes upon process that really slows people down so they can't get the real work done. And then I would say the two other things you need if you want to operate with a startup is you got to be scrappy. You can't think about every new project taking 50 to 100 people to do. We started in our cloud computing business, AWS, our storage service, we had 11 people or 13 people when we started, our compute service EC2, we had 11 people. You can get going with a small number of people and build something that people actually find resonant and then they keep iterating from there. And then I think you got to nail, you have to be willing to take risks. And I think that as companies get bigger, they often get very risk-averse. If you hire achievement-oriented type A people, which a lot of companies, including ourselves, have, they're not used to failing. And so a lot of times when they want to pursue something very different, they worry that they're going to be ostracized if they get it wrong. And so they'll play not to lose. And the only way to build something unique and different is to do something different from what people have done, and you have to be willing to take risks and be willing to fail sometimes.