[fjtorres]

...and other anecdotes...

http://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-...on-post-2018-4

Döpfner: Did she, being an author, suggest that you focus on the book business at the beginning?

Bezos: No, I picked books. It is true that she's a big reader and I'm a big reader. But that's not why I picked books. I picked books because there were more items in the book category than in any other category. And so you could build universal selection. There were 3 million in 1994 when I was pulling this idea together — 3 million different books active in print at any given time. The largest physical bookstores only had about 150,000 different titles. And so I could see how you could make a bookstore online with universal selection. Every book ever printed, even the out-of-print ones was the original vision for the company. So that's why books.

He waxes philosophical a couple of times:

I think the great thing about humans in general is we're always improving things. And so if entrepreneurs and inventors follow their curiosity and they follow their passions, and they figure something out and they figure out how to make it. And they're never satisfied. You need to harness that. In my view, you need to harness that energy primarily on your customers instead of on your competitors. I sometimes see companies - even young, small startup companies or entrepreneurs who arrived — is that they start to pay more attention to their competition than they do to their customers. And I think that in big mature industries, that can or might be a winning approach that some cases they kind of close follow. They let other people be the pioneers and, you know, go down the blind alleys. There are many things that a new, inventive company tries that won't work. And those mistakes and errors and failures do cost real money.

And so maybe in a mature industry where growth rates are slow and change is very slow, but, as you see in the world more and more, there aren't that many mature industries. Change is happening everywhere. You know, we see it in the automobile industry with self-driving cars, but you can go right down the line of every industry and see it.

Döpfner: But Amazon had serious crises. You went almost bankrupt. What went wrong?

Bezos: We had so many; there have been so many. I haven't had any existential crises — knock on wood — I don't want to jinx anything. But we've had a lot of dramatic events. I remember, early on, we only had 125 employees, when Barnes & Noble, the big United States bookseller, opened their online website to compete against us, barnesandnoble.com. We'd had about a two-year window. We opened in 1995; they opened in 1997. And at that time all of the headlines — and the funniest were about how we were about to be destroyed by this much larger company. We had 125 employees and $60 million a year in annual sales — $60 million with an "M." And Barnes & Noble at that time had 30,000 employees and about $3 billion in sales. So they were giant; we were tiny. And we had limited resources, and the headlines were very negative about Amazon. The one that was most memorable was just "Amazon. toast." [Laughs]

And so I called an all-hands meeting, which was not hard to do with just 125 people. We got in a room, and because it was so scary for all of us, this idea that now we finally had a big competitor. That literally everybody's parents were calling and saying, "Are you OK?" It's usually the moms calling and asking their children are you going to be OK? So, and I said, "Look, you know, it's OK to be afraid, but don't be afraid of our competitors, because they're never going to send us any money. Be afraid of our customers. And if we just stay focused on them, instead of obsessing over this big competitor that we just got, we'll be fine." And I really do believe that. I think that if you stay focused and the more drama there is and everything else, no matter what the drama is. Whatever the actionable distraction is, your response to it should be to double down on the customer. Satisfy them. And not just satisfy them — delight them.

And this:

Döpfner: Last week we had Bill Gates for dinner here and he said in a self-ironic manner that he has a ridiculous amount of money and it is so hard to find appropriate ways to spend that money reasonably and to do good with the money. So what does money mean for you, being the first person in history who has a net worth of a three-digit amount of billions.

Bezos: The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel. That is basically it. Blue Origin is expensive enough to be able to use that fortune. I am liquidating about $1 billion a year of Amazon stock to fund Blue Origin. And I plan to continue to do that for a long time. Because you're right, you're not going to spend it on a second dinner out. That's not what we are talking about. I am very lucky that I feel like I have a mission-driven purpose with Blue Origin that is, I think, incredibly important for civilization long term. And I am going to use my financial lottery winnings from Amazon to fund that.

And this:

So, in a natural state, where we're animals, we're only using 100 watts. In our actual developed-world state, we're using 11,000 watts. And it's growing. For a century or more, it's been compounding at a few percent a year, our energy usage as a civilization.

Now if you take baseline energy usage globally across the whole world and compound it at just a few percent a year for just a few hundred years, you have to cover the entire surface of the Earth in solar cells. That's the real energy crisis. And it's happening soon. And by soon, I mean within just a few 100 years. We don't actually have that much time. So what can you do? Well, you can have a life of stasis, where you cap how much energy we get to use. You have to work only on efficiency. By the way, we've always been working on energy efficiency, and still we grow our energy usage. It's not like we have been squandering energy. We have been getting better at using it with every passing decade. So, stasis would be very bad, I think.

Now take the scenario, where you move out into the solar system. The solar system can easily support a trillion humans. And if we had a trillion humans, we would have a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts and unlimited, for all practical purposes, resources and solar power unlimited for all practical purposes. That's the world that I want my great-grandchildren's great-grandchildren to live in.

He's a space cadet!

Lots of other stuff.

Highly recommended.

Video and transcript.