#321 Working with Jeff Bezos

0:00 Not long after the launch, my boss Steve, took me aside. He told me that he had an interesting meeting with Jeff. Who made it very clear. That setting and insisting on high standards. Was an essential part of Steve's job.

0:12 Jeff asked Steve If he had ever seen the movie The Aviator. The story of Howard Hughes, the business tycoon, aviator, and film director. Jeff described a scene.

0:24 in which Hughes, played by Leonardo DiCaprio visits one of his aircraft manufacturing facilities. to check on the progress of his latest project. The Hughes H one racer. Which is a sleek

0:35 single passenger plane Designed to set new speed records. Hughes examines the plane closely. Running his fingers along the surface of the fuselage. His team

0:48 Watches anxiously. Hughes is not satisfied. Not enough, he says. Not enough. These rivets have to be completely flush.

0:58 I want no air resistance on the fuselage. She's got to be cleaner. Cleaner. Do you understand? The team leader nods.

1:06 Back to the drawing board. Jeff had told Steve that it was his job to be like Howard Hughes. From then on. Stief had to run his fingers. Over each new Amazon product.

1:17 Checking for anything. That might reduce the quality. And insisting That his team maintained The highest standards.

1:26 Steve was telling me this story for two reasons. First it was a heads up. He wanted me to know as one of his senior team members that he would be sending me and my team Back to the drawing board. If our product didn't measure up.

1:38 Second He was telling me. That I too Was responsible. For setting high standards for our products.

1:45 He was telling me. That I had. To be more like Howard Hughes. That was an excerpt from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is working backwards. Insights, stories, and secrets from inside Amazon. And it was written by Colin Briar and Bill.

1:59 Car. This is the second time I've read this book, and I think this book is actually perfect to giving you an idea. of what it was like working with Jeff Bezos. The two Co authors actually worked with Jeff for combined twenty seven years.

2:12 And one of the co authors, Colin. was actually Jeff's shadow went everywhere with him. Every single meeting. For two straight years. And so the purpose of this episode is going to mirror the purpose of the book, where they said this book is primarily about showing you some of the unique principles and processes at Amazon with enough detail that you'll be able to implement them if you choose to. And most of my notes and highlights are ideas directly from Jeff. And what makes this book so special and what I really want to focus on today.

2:37 Obviously Jeff's brilliant. He's gonna have a lot of fascinating ingenious level insights, but it he also explains the reason behind his insights. So he says When I write about what led Jeff to making key decisions in this book, I can do so because I often directly asked him for his specific thinking behind his insights and the reasoning behind them. Was often more illuminating than the insights themselves. And as that be like Howard Hughes story illustrates.

3:00 Jeff is a masterful communicator. He's able to identify a handful of principles that are important to him and the building of his company. And then he find ways to teach those principles and to repeat those principles for everybody inside the company. And so they make the point at the very beginning of a company, the founder is the culture. The founder is the one that's teaching everybody the principles. So it says Amazon opened for business in July nineteen ninety five, staffed by a handful of people handpicked. By Jeff Bezos. He decided that getting in on the growth of the internet was a once in a lifetime opportunity.

3:29 So he gave up his lucrative and promising car'er. He wanted to create a new So there's just a few things to get started, a few a few traits to get started. One.

3:40 Handpick core. Two. Try to find and pursue a once in a lifetime opportunity. And then The third thing that he's gonna repeat over and over again for the next twenty years.

3:49 is that a company can be a fast follower, they can copy, they can imitate, or they can innovate. He repeats over and over again, Amazon is here to innovate. We are here to create new and compelling experiences that did not yet exist. the hands on nature of Jeff Bezos at the beginning and really throughout the entire book cannot be understated.

4:07 In the very early days of the company, when it consisted of a handful of people working out of three small rooms There was no formal leadership principles because Jeff was the leadership principles. He wrote the job descriptions, he interviewed the candidates, he packed and shipped boxes and read every email. That went out to customers.

4:24 Taking part in every aspect of the business allowed him to To communicate the Amazon philosophy informally to the relatively small group of employees. Jeff was never shy about how he wanted things done, and he began to instill guiding principles like customer obsession and unrelentingly high standards into every small step his team took. Jeff had one simple rule.

4:47 It has to be perfect. He'd remind his team that one bad customer experience would undo the goodwill of hundreds of perfect ones. So if you've ever read Jeff's shareholder letters You already know these principles. He identified them from the very beginning and repeats them over and over again. I made I think three episodes now.

5:02 on uh Jeff's shareholder letters. I'll leave them all linked in the show notes if you haven't listened to them. But the principles he would would repeat are customer obsession. Innovation. Frugality. Personal ownership.

5:12 bias for action. High standards. under promising and over delivering. In fact Talks about in the book that the fact he would proofread All the customer service emails.

5:23 And so one thing that he wanted to do at the very beginning, speaking of underpromising and over delivering is on when you go to buy something on the website You know, they'd say, Hey, we're gonna send this US postal first class mail, you might get it in about a week. Then once you place the order, you would get an email from Amazon saying, Hey, we upgraded you for free. And you should have your item within two to three business days. People love this.

5:43 Underpromise, over deliver. This is one response from a customer that Jeff particularly liked. This was called out as a complimentary upgrade in the shipment confirmation email. Thank you, emails for the upgrade, included one that read Quote You guys are going to make a billion dollars. When Jeff saw that he roared with laughter and then printed out a copy to take back to his office. There's so many people that work with Jeff that actually describe him the same way. They say he's relentless, he has unreasonably high standards.

6:09 And he's prioritizes speed. And so he has a genius idea on organizing uh groups within your c within your company. But I think it could be traced back. Actually. To the very first job description, the very first ad he ran. for A for Amazon employees. And so it says the job description that he wrote for the very first employee said

6:27 You must have experience designing and building large and complex systems. And you should be able to do it in about one third the time that most competent people think possible. And so that idea that he repeats over and over again is the fact that speed matters in business. And so he's constantly looking for ways to remove blocks. That slow down.

6:46 the speed at which this company can move. And so he comes up with this idea, which I'll get to in one minute. Wh which is called single threaded leadership. So he says Uh, the organization that moves faster will innovate more simply because it's able to conduct a higher number of experiments per unit of time. Yet many companies find themselves struggling against their own bureaucratic drag.

7:06 Which appears in the form of layer upon layer of permission Ownership. And accountability. All working against fast Decisive

7:15 Forward progress. So that is the problem. That Amazon's encounter, and that almost every other company's going to encounter. And so this is the solution they come up with. This the answer lies in an Amazon innovation called single threaded. leadership. So let me define single threaded leadership.

7:30 They say it's been one of Amazon's most useful inventions. The basic premise Is that for each project there is a single leader. Whose focus is that project and that project alone. And that leader oversees teams of people. Whose attention

7:45 І символ фокус. On that one Project. And so this is a main point that they're gonna come back to over and over and over again, that everyone in your company should work on one thing only. Full time.

7:58 I saw a very similar idea. In Peter Tele's book Zero to One, I wanna read from that book right now. Peter wrote. The best thing I did as a manager at PayPal. was to make every person in the company responsible for doing just one thing.

8:10 Every employee's one thing was unique. And everyone knew I would evaluate him only. On that one thing. I had started doing this just to simplify the task of managing people, but then I noticed a deeper result. Defining roles reduced conflict.

8:25 Jeff and his team at Amazon are gonna realize that, but they also realize that if you can avoid dependencies you actually move faster and spend less. So let's jump into what they figured out or w the the more about the problem they were trying to solve. and why they came up with this idea of single threaded leadership. We were spending more time coordinating and less time building.

8:43 And so what they do is they identify and then try to avoid dependencies. So any time two teams within a company have to speak to one another or have to coordinate with one another. to accomplish something, that slows the entire company down. Each overlap created a dependency.

8:56 And they define dependency as something one team needs but can't supply for itself. And so the more dependencies you have, the more bureaucratic drag you have. Why is that? Because managing dependencies requires coordination, meaning we have to talk to each other. People sitting down and hashing out a solution, and coordination takes time. We were spending too much time coordinating and not enough time building. And so that leads directly into one of

9:17 Jeff's best known ideas and this idea that he says that c communication internal Company communication is actually a sign of dysfunction. He is not trying Most Companies.

9:28 uh Jeff's point is most companies try to get better at communicating. To Jeff, that means you're encouraging it. He doesn't want to encourage communication. He wants to eliminate communication. And so this is more about why and then Jeff's solution to this. When your dependencies keep growing, it's only natural to spar try speeding things up.

9:44 By improving your communication. We finally realized that our all of this cross team communication didn't really need refinement at all. It needed to be eliminated. It wasn't just that we had the wrong solution in mind, rather we've been trying to solve the wrong problem altogether. We finally grasp at the true identity of our problem. The ever expanding cost of coordination among teams.

10:04 This change in our thinking Was nudged along by Jeff. I heard him say many times that That if we wanted Amazon to be a place where builders can build, we need to eliminate communication. Not encourage it.

10:17 When you view communication across groups as a defect, which Jeff does. The solution to your problems start to look quite different than traditional ones. He suggested that each software team should build and clearly document a set of application program interfaces, so APIs, what everybody calls APIs, right? For all the services that they offer. An API is a set of routines, protocols and tools for building software applications and defining how software components should interact. Jeff's vision.

10:42 Was that we needed to focus on loosely coupled interaction via machines through well defined APIs rather than via humans. Through emails and meetings. This would free each team. To act autonomously. And move faster.

10:58 Okay, so two things. One you gotta stick with me because it's remarkable how all of Jeff's ideas fit together. And how the logic is cohesive and everything relates one thing relates to another. But the second thing is if you don't already own this book, I'm gonna highly recommend that you buy it. It's a no brainer. I think I paid like twenty bucks for it. But now he's gonna go into why this is so important a few pages later. Jeff inst insisted that instead of finding new and better ways to manage our dependencies, we figure out how to remove them. Why? These largely independent teams could now do their work in parallel. Before you had two teams waiting on each other. Now you have two teams working continuously, right?

11:31 These largely independent teams can now do their work in parallel instead of coordinating better. They could coordinate less and build more. Now why is that Why is fixing this so important, right? And this is an entire chapter dedicated to this. And if you really think about what they're saying here, it's like the reason that fixing this is so important is because less coordination means more building. More building means more experimenting. More experimenting leads to more Unpredictable but lucrative products. There's a there's a sentence a couple pages earlier that I think relates to everything. Time and time again.

12:01 Think about how many freaking project products are inside Amazon, right? What they're about to tell us is very valuable. Time and time again, we learn that customers would behave in ways We hadn't imagined. Especially for brand new features or products getting So the building.

12:17 of those brand new features and products faster is unbelievably important. And one way to do that is through this Amazon innovation called single threaded leadership. Autonomous teams are built for speed. We must move faster. Then he ties this to everything. This is one of my favorite things he's ever said.

12:34 This is Jeff on decision making speed. And once you hear the way he thinks about this, you under you understand why he keeps Emphasizing, prioritizing, and repeating the need for speed. And this is from his 2016 shareholder letter. Jeff suggested that most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around seventy percent of the information you wish you had. If you wait for ninety percent, he said, in most cases you're probably being slow.

12:56 Plus, either way, you need to be good at quickly recognizing and correcting bad decisions. If you're good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think. Whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure. And what's fascinating is once you apply this idea

13:13 The bottleneck goes From being too much communication and too much waiting around for other people. Which delays your ability to build new products. to actually the limiting factor is going to be great leaders. We were able to identify some brilliant managers. They turned out to be notoriously difficult to find in sufficient numbers, even at Amazon.

13:31 Great team leaders prove to be rarities. Another way to think about that is great anything is rare. The limiting factor here is great leadership. And then the second part of that is they have to work on this full time. They cannot do anything else. This is just a fantastic line on why. The best way to fail at inventing something is by making it somebody's part time job.

13:51 And so the problem that they were trying to solve and the vision they had was how to move faster and remove dependencies, but what they also realized Once this was in place that Ownership and accountability are much easier to establish. under the single threaded leader model. And why? Because Jeff Bezos, just like Peter Thiel.

14:07 are only evaluating that person on one thing and one thing only. another unique idea in the way to build and run Amazon that Jeff came up with. He actually found this idea in a paper. And then decided to use it. So Something I'm gonna repeat over and over again. Uh you've heard me say it on past podcasts, but if you're paying attention, the whole world is a classroom. You'll be shocked.

14:25 If you go through this book you'll be shocked at how many ideas Jeff got from reading a paper, reading a book. having a conversation that he used inside of Amazon. If you're paying attention, the whole world is a classroom. So says if you were to ask recently hired Amazon employees what has surprised them most in their time at the company so far, one response would certainly top the list.

14:45 The eerie silence in the first twenty minutes of many meetings. The reason for the silence, a six page document. That everyone must read before a discussion begins. Amazon relies far more on the written word to develop and communicate ideas than most companies, and this difference makes for a huge competitive difference. advantage. So this is when they kick out PowerPoint and they switch to these narratives.

15:08 So Colin is Jeff Shadow at the time. He goes everywhere Jeff goes, sits on every single meeting. This the insights that he has in this book are remarkable. And so

15:18 A long time ago, way before Wi Fi on planes, he would take a lot of flights with Jeff. And so one thing that I love that I've learned about Jeff from the very first book I read on him. And it's really important. I think a lot of people already know to use this in the company. The importance of a shared base of knowledge. If Jeff thinks a book that's valuable to read, he doesn't it's not that he reads it by himself.

15:35 His entire he makes his entire executive team read this. And so On this flight, they're both reading the same essay. The idea was like we're gonna read and then discuss this essay. This is way before the narrative uh structure of the meetings, right? They're still using PowerPoint. And it's not going well and so they're looking for solutions. And so again, if you're paying attention, the whole world is a classroom.

15:53 After a particularly difficult presentation in early two thousand four, we had some downtime on a flight, and so we read and discussed an essay called The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint Pitching Out Corrupts Within Writ by Edward Tuft. Tuft identified in one sentence the problem that we'd been experiencing. As analysis becomes more causal, multivariate, comparative, evidence based, and resolution intense. The more damaging the bullet list powerpoint becomes.

16:19 Tough proposed a solution in the essay for serious presentations. It would be useful to replace PowerPoint slides. With paper hand outs With words. High resolution handouts allow viewers to contextualize, compare

16:32 Narrate. And recast evidence. He offered wise advice. On how to get started. Make this transition in large organization making this transition in large organizations requires a straightforward

16:45 Executive order. From now on, your presentation software is Microsoft Word, not PowerPoint. Get used to it. That is Tufts words. And that is essentially what we did. And so Jeff sends an email because this can only come from him. Des team received an email with the following subject like no PowerPoint presentations from now on. The message was simple and direct.

17:06 S team members would be required to write short narratives describing their ideas. Jeff was the only person in the company who could mandate such a change. And he offered a short explanation for the reason behind the change. The reason writing a four page memo is harder than writing a twenty page PowerPoint. It's because the narrative structure of a good memo forces better thought.

17:26 and better understanding of what's more important than what And how things are related. PowerPoint style presentations somehow give permission To gloss over ideas. To flatten out any sense of relative importance.

17:38 And to ignore the interconnectedness of ideas. And then they describe why spending the first, you know, twenty minutes of an hour long meeting In silence reading these narratives together. uh is so valuable. It's one of my favorite sentences. or paragraphs in the entire book. It's why books have lasted for five thousand years. In fact I got a text from a founder friend the other day.

17:57 He was asking me why why If noticed a bit why billionaires read so much. I'll get to that in a minute. The silence can be unsettling at first. But it becomes routine. Even though you cannot hear it.

18:07 With a well written narrative, there is a massive amount of useful information that That is being transferred in those twenty minutes. There is a massive amount. of useful information that is being transferred in those twenty minutes. So a friend text me the other day, him and his brother or co founders of a company's doing really, really well.

18:25 They're both relentless learners. And they've raised a bunch of money for their startup. From several billionaires, many of which or world famous, if I had mentioned them, you'd know who they are. And in many cases they get to spend time with them.

18:37 They uh go to their houses, they'd see their libraries, and I got a text from the other day that said something like I know a bunch of middling entrepreneurs Companies aren't that successful. They don't read at all. And then yet I spend time with all these billionaires and he's he's a and they read all the time. He's like, Why do billionaires read so much? And I think this sentence right here describes that. Even though you cannot hear it.

18:55 There's a massive amount. of useful information that is being transferred in those twenty minutes. that useful information, that knowledge can then obviously be turned into profit. It can make their companies better, it can make them more money. That is why you see So and I I I I talked about this on the um I Had Lunch with Sam's episode. I think it's episode two ninety seven.

19:13 And you know, I've seen this over and over again too. I had the same realization. Uh than my friend had. But I just remember after spending two hours with Sam Zell talking about all I mean, he knew everything about he knew way more about business history and read way more biographies than I have. And I remember on the drive back it just hit it me. It's like yeah, of course. You don't go and s You don't go and sell a company for thirty eight billion dollars and then read and learn all this stuff. He'd been doing that since he was twenty. By the time I met him, he was an entrepreneur for over sixty one years, and he was still up until the day he died.

19:40 Still reading books, still listening to podcasts, still being curious about the world around him, still treating the world. Like a classroom. And so not only do they read a lot, but they also are able to Produce unique insights. This is a simple tip. From Jeff Bezos on how to produce unique insights.

19:57 in what you're reading. Jeff has an uncanny ability to read a narrative and consistently arrive at insights that no one else did. Even though we're all reading the same thing. After one meeting I asked him how he was able to do that. He responded with a simple and useful tip that I have not forgotten.

20:13 He assumes each sentence he reads is wrong. Until he can prove otherwise. He's challenging the content of the sentence. Not the motive of the writer, and I love this part. Jeff, by the way. was usually among the last to finish reading.

20:30 Okay, so they realize the narrative structure. is superior to run their meetings. What they wind up Also realizing Is that it's superior for building products. For meetings, it's called a six page narrative.

20:42 for product design or new product creation, it's called the PR F A Q The Kindle is actually the first product. And we'll get into more detail about how the can Kindle came to be, including this very important meeting. that Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs. uh had in two thousand three.

20:58 And so this idea of working backwards is so ingrained in the Amazon culture. They thought it was so important that they named the book out after it. And really it's just you start with the desired customer experience. So it says most of Amazon's major products since two thousand four have one thing in common. They were created through a process called working backwards. It is so central to the company's success that we used it as the title for this book. Working backwards is a systematic way to vet ideas and create new products. It is a key tenant, or excuse me, its key tenant. is to start by defining the customer experience

21:26 Then iteratively work backwards from that point until a team achieves clarity of thought. around what to build. It's principal tool І за секформ. of written narrative called the PR FAQ. Short for press release.

21:40 Frequently asked. Questions. And so you start from the customer's perspective. You literally write a press release for a product that does not exist yet, right? The press release.

21:50 That literally announces the product as if it were ready to launch and an FAQ anticipating the tough questions and then work backwards from that. And so once again we see Jeff come up with unique insights because they weren't doing this originally, right? So they would come up with new ideas. And they'd pitch him to Jeff and in the the book it says, listen, we just tried We use like MBA style methods.

22:09 We would gather data about the size of a market. We'd construct financial models that project annual sales. We would calculate gross margins assuming a certain cost of goods from our suppliers. We pr we'd project operating margins, we would outline deals that we could make with other media companies. And Jeff did not find that this was a good use of their time. We had several meetings with Jeff to present our ideas. He never seemed satisfied or convinced. He found our proposals light on the details. as to how the service will work for customers.

22:34 He finally asked, Where are the mock ups? Jeff was referring to the visual representations that would show exactly how the new service would look on the Amazon website. We didn't have any mock ups, we just wanted to sell Jeff on the opportunity. We would deal with the customer experience and other details once we got his go ahead, but if Jeff wants to see mock ups, you had better make a mock-up a few weeks later. We were back with mock ups.

22:54 Jeff listened carefully to our presentation yet again and then began asking detailed questions. There's so many sentences in the book just like that. You're talking to him, you're presenting to him, and he gets right to the heart of the matter. I've read that in other books as well. And so he just goes straight down the details. He would ask questions about every button, every word, every link, every color. For music, he asked how our service would be better than iTunes. For eBooks, he wanted to know how much the ebooks would cost. He asked if people would be able to read their ebooks on a tablet or a phone as well as their PC. We answered as we had before. We had not figured out the stuff yet.

23:25 That answer did not go over well. At all. Jeff wanted to know exactly What we were going to build and how it would be better for customers. To Jeff, a half baked mock up was evidence of half baked thinking.

23:38 And he was quick to say so. Often using strong language to make his point. And so this is the first time I wrote in the book and on my notes, but it's over and over again. Founders force the issue. Founders are forcing functions, a forcing function, an event. That forces one to take action and produce a specific result. Remember this for later. It is uh mentioned over and over again.

24:00 the fact that this is the role that Jeff is playing inside of Amazon. Jeff suggested a different approach for the next meeting. Write a narrative document. In it described your best idea for a device or service. for the digital media business. He even offered to do it with them. This is incredible.

24:15 So the next time they meet, they bring their ideas, and it looks like a press release announcing what the their idea does for the customer. And then they're going to work backwards from that. This is the birth of this idea. Uh, one person proposed an ebook reader that would use new E Inc screen technology. Another described a new take on the MP three player. Jeff wrote his own narrative about a device he called the Amazon Puck. What I'm about to this is crazy. But I'm about to read to you.

24:39 He wrote in two thousand four. He is going to describe The Amazon Echo, which is going to sell hundreds of millions of these things. The Amazon Puck would sit on your countertop and could respond to voice commands like Puck Please order a gallon of milk and the puck would then place the order with Amazon. Why is Jeff forcing the issue? Why is he insisting on that we're doing this?

24:59 Because writing required us to be thorough and precise. We had to describe features, pricing, how the service would work. Why customers would want it. Half bake thinking was harder to disguise. On the written page than in PowerPoint slides. Jeff then pushed the idea further. He is the forcing function. What if we thought of the product concept narrative as a press release?

25:19 Usually in a conventional organization, a press release is written at the end. of the product development process. In this standard process, that company works forward. And really what they're telling you is Amazon inverted This process.

25:35 And so the Kindle is going to be the first product. In which they used and they created using this press release approach. And this is part of one of the reasons why it's so important. Previously they were working forward like every other company, now they're working backwards. When we were working forward, We were trying to invent a product that would be good for Amazon. The company, not the customer.

25:53 When we wrote a Kindle press release and started working backwards, everything changed. We focus instead on what would be great for customers. An excellent screen for great for a great reading experience. An ordering process that would make buying and downloading books easy. A huge selection of books.

26:08 Low prices, we would never have had the breakthrough necessary to achieve that customer experience. We're not For the press release process, which forced the team. To invent multiple solutions To customers.

26:21 Problems. And in the Kindle chapter, there's an entire chapter dedicated to describing the product development they go into why working backwards helps Your company developed new skills. you develop new skills over a long period of time, your company obviously becomes more valuable.

26:36 Another thing that Jeff insisted on, you have to have constraints. The the press release. portion of these documents has to be one page or less. And then I think they limit it to about five pages, uh five pages or less for the FAQ section. And then this is why. I just use the word forcing function as the founder. That's a term they actually use here.

26:53 Restricting the length of the document is a forcing function. We have s develops better thinkers and communicators, founders. develop better teammates which in turn Development. better products. It's the same idea.

27:08 So I want to spend a lot of time on the development of the Kindle before I get there. I wanna go back to this idea. That the whole world is a classroom. And you can't help but notice how many times Jeff is just using ideas from other companies or from things that he's reading and he's using them inside of Amazon, right? He's using them as a metaphor to use it.

27:24 uh to help his his company perform better. But I was also struck by this idea. While I was reading this book that You could think of the belief system. of the founder as the language of the company.

27:36 That is why it's usually written down and repeated over and over again. And it definitely is the case In Amazon, but you also see the belief system of the founder expressed through their actions. And so this idea That Jeff identified with from day one that We're going to obsess over customers.

27:51 He'd make every single person in the company. Including himself. Work customer service. Actually take calls. And so I love this. And there's a lot of good ideas here, including the importance of combining data and anecdotes. Data and anecdotes make a powerful combination when they're in sync.

28:06 And they're a valuable check on one another when they're not. The most powerful anecdote in this regard features Jeff himself. Amazon has a program called Customer Connection, which is mandatory. For corporate employees. Every two years the corporate employee is required to become a customer service agent for a few days.

28:22 They have to listen in on calls. watch email and chat interactions and then handle some customer contacts directly. Jeff is not exempt from this program. While I was working as his shadow, it came time for his customer connection recertification. Jeff was particularly good with customers over the phone.

28:37 No, he was sometimes O really generous. He gave one customer a full product refund when the policy was to refund the shipping cost only, it's one example. But this is fascinating. He's gonna use an idea from Toyota and realize oh Toyota has an idea.

28:51 and implements an idea in their company that we're lacking here. And it's because of this again, he's showing with his actions how important customer service is. On the first day of training, we listened to the CS to CS agents handle a few calls. On one call, the customer complained that her lawn furniture had arrived damage. The CS agent asked for the product number. As the customer was looking for it.

29:10 The CS agent muted the call and said to us. I bet she's referring to this lawn chair. And pointed to the product on the Amazon site. Sure enough. When the customer read out the number from the package slip.

29:22 It was the one that the C S agent had predicted it would be. After the call was ended, Jeff asked. How did you know the customer is going to say that? The CS agent responded that it happened quite often with this newly listed product.

29:35 The packaging was inadequate. And the furniture got banged up in transit. Jeff had recently been learning about how Toyota approached quality control and continuous improvement. He mentions this over and over again in shareholder letters, by the way. This this idea of continuous improvement that he learned from the Japanese. One technique they use in their automobile assembly line was the Andon cord.

29:56 And on court. When any worker notices a quality problem, they are authorized to pull a cord that stops the entire assembly line. A team of specialists swarms to the cord polar station. They troubleshoot the issue and they develop a fix so the error never happens again. Here was a similar situation at Amazon.

30:13 Except without the and on cord. Jeff yelled out we need an Andon cord for customer service. And so they wind up instituting one. It turns out that the Amazon version of the Andon cord empowered the right people, those on the front lines who were talking directly to customers. It surfaced serious issues as soon as they were noticed. Okay, so then we're gonna go into why working backwards was so important.

30:37 To that. They quote heavily Fareholder letters to really explain remember. The belief system of the founder is the language of the company.

30:47 Jeff's belief systems were written down in the shareholder letters and then repeated over and over again inside the company. And so this is Jeff writing in his shareholder sharing his belief, right? We want to be a large company that's also an invention machine. We want to combine the extraordinary customer serving capabilities that are enabled by size. With the speed of movement.

31:06 Nimbleness. and risk acceptance mentality normally associated with entrepreneurial startups. I believe we are the best place in the world to fail. And we have plenty of practice. And failure and then he's not failing just for failure's sake. He doesn't want to fail, right? This guy's super competitive, but this is his main point.

31:24 Failure and invention are inseparable twins. He just said Amazon will be a place the best place in the world to invent. So failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent, you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it's going to work, it's not an experiment. The kind they did not know in advance that the Kindle was going to work. Most large organizations embrace the idea of invention, but are not willing to suffer the string of failed experiments. Necessary.

31:48 To get there. And so one competitive advantage advantage that Jepp is who sees it, that Amazon has is they're willing to fail for a longer period of time. Long term thinking levers are existing abilities. And let's do new things we couldn't otherwise contemplate. Long term orientation interacts well with customer obsession.

32:04 If we can identify a customer need and if we can further develop conviction that the need is meaningful and durable. Our approach permits us to work patiently for multiple years to deliver a solution. The key word here is patiently. Many companies will give up on an initiative if it does not produce the kind of returns they are looking for.

32:22 within a handful of years. Amazon will stick with it. Patient and carefully manage investment over many years can pay off greatly. And so you might be thinking, Okay, that's great, David, but what does this have to do with working backwards? And they're about to get into that. Working backwards exposes skill sets that your company needs, but does not yet have.

32:39 So the longer your company works backwards, the more skills it develops. And the more valuable valuable it becomes. the more things it can invent. And his whole key for inventing is he only wants to invent Where and when differentiation matters. Invention works well. Where differentiation matters.

32:56 In the company's early days, the hardware that powered Amazon's data centers was not the point of differentiation that changes with time, which we'll get to In a little bit. was not a point of differenti or differentiation with the customer. Creating a compelling book buying online experience was Whereas with the Kindle, which is word we're about to go into

33:15 Others were selling ebooks. So there was a real value in owning and controlling the creation for an outstanding device. For our customers to read the ebooks on. differentiation with customers. is often one of the key reasons to invent

33:31 And so they're constantly talking about the way, hey, normal companies They But build things with a skills forward approach. What does that mean? They look inside the company like what are the assets that we have, what are the skills we have, what can we build with that? Working backwards forces you to master new skills. Again, working backwards exposes skill sets. That your company needs but does not have yet.

33:50 So the longer that your company works backwards, the more skills it develops, and the more skills it develops, the more valuable it becomes over time. Amazon's working backwards process starting with customers' needs. and not corporate needs or competencies often demands that in Jeff's words we exercise new muscles. Never mind how uncomfortable an awkward feeling

34:11 might be. And so I say all that to set this up. A meeting with Steve Jobs led to the invention of the Kindle. So you can really think about what's about to take place here is how the iPod and iTunes the development of the Kindle. This meeting is gonna happen in two thousand three.

34:28 At this time, I think seventy seven percent. of Amazon seventy or seventy seven percent somewhere around there. Of Amazon's revenue came from like physical books, books, CDs, music, that kind of thing, right? And th they clearly see that th this wasn't gonna last forever. So it says in two thousand three, uh Jeff and a bunch of people from Amazon traveled to the Apple campus in Cupertino to meet Steve Jobs, who had invited us down for a visit. Jobs got to the real purpose of the meeting and announced that Apple had just f finished building

34:53 Their first Windows application. He calmly and This is why I love jobs. I love his confidence. He calmly and confidently told us that even though it was Apple's first attempt to build for Windows, he thought it was the best Windows application anyone had ever built. He then personally gave us a demo.

35:10 of the soon to be launched iTunes for Windows. During the demo, Jobs talked about how this would transform the music industry. Up until this point, if you wanted to buy digital music from Apple, You needed a Mac, which at this time comprised Less than ten percent. Of all the home computer market.

35:25 Apple's first foray into building software on the competing Windows platform. Showed how serious they were. About the digital music. market. Now anyone with a computer would be able to purchase digital music from Apple. And then Jobs immediately attacks Amazon's business. Jobs said

35:41 That C Ds would go the way of other outdated music formats like the cassette tape. And their importance and portion of overall music sales would drop quickly. His next comment. could be construed as either a matter of fact statement or an attempt to go Jeff Into making a bad business decision by acting impulsively. He said

35:58 Amazon has a decent chance of being the last place to buy CDs. The business will be high margin but small. You'll be able to charge a premium for C Ds since they'll be hard to find. Jeff did not take the bait. Only Jeff can speak to how the meeting impacted his thinking. What we can say is what Jeff did and did not do afterward.

36:17 What he didn't do and what many companies would have done Is to kick off an all hands on deck project. To combat this competitive threat. And race. To build a copycat.

36:28 Digital music service. Over and over again, Jeff says, I do not want to be a copycat. I w I don't want to follow. I don't want to be a fast follower. I want to lead and I want to invent. Instead, Jeff took time to process what he learned from the meeting and formed a plan. He appointed a single threaded leader. Which is the guy Steve from the Howard Hughes story at the very beginning. So you have a single threaded leader named Steve to run digital who would report directly to Jeff

36:54 So that they could work together to formulate a vision And a plan for digital media. And I love the explanation of this. I'm gonna read the whole paragraph to you'cause I think it's so great. In other words, his first action was not a what decision. It was a who and a how decision.

37:08 This is an incredibly important difference. Jeff did not jump straight to focusing on what product to build. Which seems like the straightest line from A to B. Instead The choices he made suggest that he believed that the scale of the opportunity was large. And the scope of the work required to achieve success. Was equally large and complex.

37:24 He focused first. On how to organize the team. And who was the right leader to achieve the right result. At that time Amazon did not have billions of dollars to spend on digital media or anything else for that matter. So we would need to lean heavily on the frugality principle to stay in the game with the bigger players.

37:42 Jeff was a student of history. And regularly reminded us that if a company didn't or couldn't change and adapt to meet Shifting consumer needs, it was due. Remember, he's got to transition his business from Seventy percent physical b goods. to essentially all digital.

37:57 And he used the example of Kodak's failure to do so as a warning sign. You don't want to become Kodak, he would say. Referring to the once mighty photography giant. That had missed a turn from film to digital. We were not going to sit back and wait for this to happen to Amazon. So let's pause here before we move on. Again, it goes back to this main idea in the book.

38:15 You need to have single threaded leadership on every single important initiative or project inside your company. Why? Jeff felt that if we tried to manage digital media as a part of the physical media business. It would never be a priority. the bigger business carried the company after all, and we would always get the most attention. Getting digital right was highly important to Jeff, and he wanted Steve to focus on nothing else.

38:37 In other words, Jeff is disrupting himself. Then we go back. Again, you can think of the belief system of the founder as the language of the company. What is he gonna repeat? You can invent or copy, we choose to invent We had many meetings with Jeff, I would present our ideas for our music product. or a company we might acquire each time we had these meetings, Jeff would reject what he saw as copycat thinking.

38:59 Emphasizing again and again and again. That whatever music product we built, it had to offer a truly unique value prop for the customer. Let me repeat that. Any product we build has to offer a truly unique value proposition for the customer. He would frequently describe the two fundamental approaches that each company must choose between. When developing new products and services. We could be a fast follower and make a close copy of successful products. We could just make another iTunes, right?

39:22 We could go that route. We can make a close copy of a successful product that other company had built, or we can invent a new product on behalf of our customers. He wanted Amazon to be a company that invents. He would immediately force this. He recognized that building a copycat version of the iPod and iTunes was a non starter.

39:39 He chose the path of invention by looking beyond the music category. This is so important because every other big company i is essentially at this time just copying Are attempting to copy Apple they wind up going to these like uh this conference where these these music executives are um speaking. They know Jeff's in the audience. They kinda like

39:58 encourage him,'cause these are just more revenue for the music uh industry, right? Like Yeah, Amazon should build this and this would be more revenue for Amazon and more revenue for universal music and just like you're not controlling what I'm thinking. You don't get to dictate the product that my company makes. There is no differentiation. We cannot beat we can't out apple apple, so you don't try. What did Warren Buffett say?

40:19 How do you beat Bobby Fisher? The answer is you play him in any game except chess. Back to this. He chose the path of adventure by looking beyond the music category, which led him to begin Amazon's foray into digital by focusing on ebooks and an ebook reader device. In doing so, Jeff demonstrated his belief that true invention leads to greater long term value for customers and shareholders. Jeff is so good. This guy is so good. Look how he takes what Apple did to the music industry.

40:46 What they use for iPod. in iTunes and how it influenced the development of the Kindle. There's a reason why I keep making podcast after podcast and reading book after book of of Jeff Bezos. In fact, there's a line I read years ago. in uh the C B Insights newsletter.

41:00 that really hits home how special this guy is. And it says to read Jeff Basel's shareholder letters is to get a crash course in running a high growth internet business from someone who mastered it. Before any of the playbooks were written. Listen to what he does here. Jeff zeroed in on the fundamental difference between the digital media retail business. And our existing physical media retail business.

41:18 our competitive advantage or advantage in physical media was based on having the broadest selection of items available on a single website. But this could not be a competitive advantage in digital media. Where the barrier to entry was low, any other company could match our offering. Any other company could build an ebook store.

41:37 Where they offer the same breadth and depth of books and songs as any other digital venue. They just had to be willing to undertake the tedious work of aggregating the digital files together. Into a single online catalogue. So we knew we couldn't meet Jeff's requirement that our digital business Have a distinct and differentiated offering.

41:56 just on selection and aggregation, remember he's say he's the forcing function. He's saying Our digital business must have a distinct and differentiated offering. And so Jeff tells Steve, right, the guy with the single threaded leader on here, we have to move out of the middle and venture to either side of the value chain in digital. That meant focusing on applications and devices. Consumers used to read, watch, or listen to content. As Apple

42:19 had already done with iTunes the iPod. We all took note of what Apple had achieved in digital music in a short period of time and sought to apply those learnings. to our long term product vision our long term product vision in books not music We believe that customers would want the ebook equivalent of the iTunes iPod experience. An app paired with a mobile device that offered customers any book ever written.

42:43 The content available at a low price that they could buy, download, and start reading in seconds. But we would need to invent the device ourselves. The idea. This is so crazy. Now we know how successful it is. I had the first Kindle, by the way, which is like this big bulky white It's like four hundred bucks too. It was crazy.

42:59 But anyways. This is like now this makes sense. But back then This is how this is why he's so special. The idea that Amazon, a pure e-commerce e-commerce distributor of retail products made by others, which is what they were at this time. The idea that Amazon, a pure e commerce distributor

43:17 of retail products made by others would become a hardware company. and make it s and sell its own reader device was controversial. The Kindle chapter in this book is incredible. I'm still in it. Note enough myself, I wrote in a margin actually uh outsource and your company doesn't acquire the skills. Amazon wants the skills. What does that mean? Our decision to become a hardware device manufacturer would inform a number of decisions down the road.

43:39 Many companies that decide to enter a business area in which they have little internal expertise our capability, which is what Amazon ha doesn't ha ha A description of Amazon at this time, right? They choose to outsource. This can some times be a mistake, and they use an example in the early days of e commerce.

43:54 Brick and mortar retailers created their first online retail sites. They brought in third party developers. This approach enabled them to move quickly, but it deprived them of the flexibility to innovate and differentiate. And that's a big problem because who had that ability to differentiate and innovate and who are the now these brick and mortar

44:11 retailers going online and competing directly against Amazon. We know how that ends. Retailers who outsource e commerce lack the ability to ideate and test new products. And so they list a bunch of products that Amazon was able to test way faster because they had this ability. They can only pick from a menu of options from their outsource provider.

44:30 At best. They would be fast followers. of what the innovators built. The innovators being Amazon. So like okay we're gonna We're gonna take that same idea. and go out and acquire the skills necessary to become to transform

44:43 From A pure e commerce distributor of retail products made by others to hardware makers. And this directly leads to an idea that you and I have been talking about over and over again today. Founders force the issue. Not outsourcing means it's gonna be more expensive, we're gonna spend a lot more money. It's gonna take longer to get a product out there, but at the end of that, if we are successful, we have a set of skills that we lack beforehand.

45:05 Then we can go out and do this over and over again. Again, founders force the issue. We'd known that the Kindle would take time and money to develop, but by the middle of two thousand five it became clear That it was taking much longer and consuming more money than we had anticipated. What was Jeff Bezos' reaction to this?

45:20 There was a heated discussion. About the surprising ramp up in expenses. At some point in the debate Someone asked Jeff point blank. How much more money are you willing to invest in Kindle?

45:32 Jeff calmly turned to our CFO. Shrugged his shoulders and asked How much money do we have? That was Jeff's way of signaling the strategic importance Of Kindle.

45:45 Another example of the whole world is a classroom and Jeff taking an idea from another company. Jeff went through many Blackberry devices. This was hilarious. A few of which had been fried by sweat dripping on them. During his workouts. This sounds really intense. The feature that really attracted him to the Blackberry was constant connectivity. Jeff loved that his phone was always connected. And automatically refresh itself to display every new email.

46:07 In those early days of digital media, this was a first. And the Blackberry did this without having to connect to a computer. And so he has this idea. It's like why what's the Kindle what's that idea? the principle behind that idea that we can apply to the Kindle. He wanted the Kindle to be like the Blackberry. No wires.

46:22 Never need to connect to your PC. He talked over and over again about the ability to Be patient. to have long term thinking and to Want to invent and invest in

46:32 That invention. That meeting with Steve Jobs happened in two thousand three. The Kindle goes on sale for the first time. all the way in November of two thousand seven. It retails for three hundred and ninety nine dollars and would hold two hundred books. It sold out in less than six hours. And so another example of being influenced by another company

46:52 If you've ever read The Everything Store, it's talked about a bunch in there, the fact that Jeff met with Costco founder, Jim Sinegal. And the meeting changed the trajectory of Amazon. He implemented a bunch of ideas in that meeting into Amazon. One of those led directly to this membership program. that now over a hundred million people are members of m myself included, which is Amazon Prime.

47:10 What's fascinating is how fast They built Prime. Jeff sends a email in October two thousand four. saying we need to do this and by February of next year it is live and a product that actually exists.

47:22 This is what the email read. We should not be satisfied, remember. Back to the founders of the forcing function, right? We should not be satisfied with the growth of our retail business. This is a house on fire issue.

47:32 And we need to dramatically improve the customer experience around shipping. We need a shipping membership program. Let's build and launch it by the end of the year. And so their thinking was, let's not do what people expect now, but where is this going? Before you had to drive to the store to get something.

47:49 Then you order on Amazon maybe comes a week, ten days later. Then five days later, then three days later. Now, today it comes in a few hours, right? And they knew this all the way back in two thousand four. So let's start building for that future today. Two day shipping and eventually one day sipping. and same day shipping will become the norm.

48:04 Therefore While what we've built is good, it is not good enough. We should do this now. We have an unshakable conviction that long term interests of shareholders are perfectly aligned with the interests of customers. This is clear. in the interest of our customers, so we will do it now.

48:19 And again, there is many such sentences like this one in the book. Jeff insisted on this path. Which resulted in Amazon Prime. Now what's fascinating is as they develop Prime, we see That Jeff is just very uncomfortable with mediocrity. And he still wants to make sure that his company is not going with the skills forward approach that most companies have.

48:39 Let's start with the optimal customer experience and work backwards from that. And you're like, Jeff, but we don't have those skills. Exactly. So we're gonna go out and acquire those skills. And over time, that's gonna make our company more valuable. Now the customers had gotten a taste of free shipping, they no longer wanted to be forced to choose between slow and free. And fast and expensive. Jeff exhibits discomfort. When presented with an either or proposition

48:59 In which both results are mediocre. Viewed through his customer obsession lens. The only answer to the question Which would you rather have? Slow and free.

49:09 Are fast and expensive. Is fast and free. So the catch was that fast and free was where Amazon needed to go next. But our fulfillment capabilities were not yet up to the task. If you had read the book up until this point

49:25 Th this what I'm about to tell you is not in the book, but you would draw derive this conclusion at the end of that. Says the fast and free was where Amazon needed to go next, but our fulfillment capabilities were not up to the task, period. Most skills forward companies would stop there. That's not where Amazon stop. Another great idea. Walk your store. Walk your store again goes back to the founders is the forcing function.

49:48 More most retail COs walk the store when they have a chance and Jeff is no exception. The typical physical retail CEO can pay a visit to his outlet. when they're in the area and they'll do a bit of browsing and observe what's going on. An online retail CEO like Jeff Can walk the store any time. And Jeff's preferred walking the store time was early Saturday and Sunday mornings.

50:07 It was not unusual for me to wake up at seven AM on a weekend. And read five or six messages from Jeff to the relevant teams on issues that he had found while walking his store that morning. This is what he expects when he emails you. When he sent a team an idea, it did not need to be implemented.

50:24 But it definitely needed to be evaluated. And that evaluation needed to be communicated back to him. Again, he's showing with his actions this is important to him. They're supposed to have a meeting on Prime. The Jeff scheduled the meeting on Friday. Fortunately Amazon had this they had a like a site wide out outage. There was they were experiencing technical issues.

50:42 So this guy named V J He actually had to cancel the meeting, which is the right thing to do, and then reschedule for another time. Jeff took in his stride and said, Okay, we can reschedule the meeting. How about tomorrow morning at my house? And this idea that Jeff says at the meaning is genius. That's when Jeff and all these other people Matt at his house to go over what would become Amazon Prime. Jeff said this is his main directive. This is genius.

51:03 Jeff said he wanted to build a moat around his best customers. He wanted to build a moat around his best customers. So Prime starts with the free two day shipping that everybody knows. They now have added a bunch of different benefits at no additional cost. Although I think I think I started out paying like seventy nine dollars a year, and I think I pay like$129 a year. So I guess there is a cost. But At this time, it was the same price. And what was fascinating is I didn't know

51:27 Uh so obviously know that you know every prime member has access to Prime Video. But I didn't know. Or I didn't remember, rather. That they had started it out like trying to compete with other streaming services. And so they went from one bad idea to the next. And again, remember how he said that Jeff can read the same document as everybody else and get different insights?

51:42 Jeff actually comes up with another idea that no one was thinking of. Base an idea. That worked for another company in a different context. And that company was Netflix. So it says Jeff came up with a simple idea. Let's make videos free for Prime members. They were trying to make it a separate standalone subscription.

51:59 product. It was not succeeding. So, let's just add it to Prime. 'Cause again, his whole thing is how are we going to be differentiated? Now listen to this. This had not been on anybody's list of ideas. Jeff reminded us of how Netflix got started off by offering watch now streaming videos to its DVD subscription service. So I need to back up and go into more detail.

52:18 You may remember this. I've been a subscriber to Netflix forever. When I s first subscribed, I would get D V Ds in the mail. That was all Netflix offered. Then eventually they said, Oh, now you can stream, but their streaming offerings was like really, really it wasn't good. So instead of trying to sell it, they just gave it to existing members for free. So now you have Amazon Prime Video that's eh' not really good.

52:37 So why don't we just take the idea from Netflix and just add it as a benefit for our our existing subscribers. So says Jeff reminded us how Netflix got started off by offering watch now streaming videos to its DVD subscription service. It's an oh by the way offering, he said. When Netflix started, they didn't have a great selection of movies and TV shows either, not good enough that customers would pay extra for them. Instead, Netflix gave their customers additional value as part of their existing subscription.

53:04 Netflix was essentially saying The service you pay for is great. And oh by the way. Here is something extra for you to watch. And then he says why he wants to do this. Jeff argued that Prime with streaming video

53:17 would be a unique offering and a competitive differentiator. Any competitor might launch a prime sh prime shopping clone, he said. Or they could potentially build a new Netflix type service. But it was unlikely that any one of them would be able to do both. And then over time obviously further differentiation is hey

53:37 We're bidding against Netflix and Hulu and all these other Especially like studio and the the content creators have the supply. Then all the streaming service come in over the top and say, Hey How much you want for that? And another streamer server says, Oh you

53:49 You'll pay a billion, I'll pay two billion. And so they realize like we don't wanna be in this never ending cycle of bidding against Netflix and and Hulu We don't want to keep paying the studios more additional fees for every country that they enter and there's all these like issues that that they go into detail. And so again, they're like, Well if you wanted to be truly differentiated, what would you do? And once they asked themselves that question, it says that led to a starting conclusion. We had to create our own content.

54:12 It was time to make our own movies and T V shows. And I just want to share one more idea that I think ties a lot of these ideas that you and I have been talking about today together. the world is a classroom, we're gonna differentiate, we're not gonna copy We're gonna work backwards from the optimal customer experience. And we're gonna use a written narrative to guide product development.

54:31 Jeff and I attended An O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. And we went to a panel. Featuring Stuart Butterfield. who co founded Flicker.

54:39 And later Slack. Someone asked Stuart To describe a typical day of flicker. His answer was surprising. He said that about half the day.

54:48 was probably the same as it was for many of the people in the audience. Scrambling to keep their technology platform one step ahead. Of the rapid growth of their business. They worked on scaling their databases, web servers, software, and hardware half the day, right? Stuart said they did not spend as much time

55:07 As he would like on innovating things. That were unique to Flicker. After the panel, Jeff and I had a brief chat about Stuart's comments. We both notice the same thing. A phenomenon that Amazon would later refer to as

55:21 Undifferentiated heavy lifting. That is the tasks that we could do for the companies that would enable them to focus on what made them unique. This was an opportunity. The kernel for the opportunity for AWS, obviously.

55:37 In building and operating one of the world's largest websites, we had acquired a core competency only a few other companies could match. Working backwards documents for the early AWS products. The PRFAQ stated That we wanted the student in a dorm room to have access to the same world class computing infrastructure. as any Amazon software engineer.

56:01 That powerful metaphor In the PR FAQ document. Really help crystallize. The thoughts and IDEAS of the AWS product development teams.

56:14 And that is where I'll leave it. No brainer. absolute no brainer to buy this book. I'd buy this book for yourself, for a bunch of people on your team. If you buy the book using the link that's in the show notes on your podcast player, you'll be supporting the podcast all the same time. This is definitely a book I will reread and revisit into the future. If you want more episodes that are like this, one, I did an episode very similar to this, but it's about Steve Jobs. It's called Working with Steve Jobs. It's number two eighty one. By my count, this is the eighth.

56:39 Jeff Bezos episode. That I have made. If you want to listen to them, episode two eighty two, Jeff Bezos' shareholders. Episode one eighty, Jeff Bezos' uh Invention of a Global Empire. That is a sequel to the Everything Store. Episode one seventy nine, Jeff Bezos The Everything Store.

56:52 Episode one fifty five, Jeff Basil Invent and Wonder. Episode seventy one, Jeff Bezos' Shareholder Letters. Episode thirty eight, Space Barons, which goes into The difference between the way Jeff is building his rocket company And Elon is building his

57:06 That would be an interesting book to revisit because that was probably five or six years ago that did a book. And episode 17, Jeff Bates was the first time. I did an episode in him. As always, everything I mentioned will be linked down in the show notes and available at founderspodcast.com. That is three hundred and twenty one. I think that's three hundred and twenty one books down. One thousand ago.

57:24 And I'll talk to you again.

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