#321 Working with Jeff Bezos

What I learned from reading Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr. --- Founders Notes gives you the superpower to learn from history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. You can search all my notes and highlights from every book I've ever read for the podcast. Get access to Founders Notes here.  --- (8:00) Principles Jeff Bezos would repeat: customer obsession, innovation, frugality, personal ownership, bias for action, high standards. (10:30) Single threaded leadership: 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 is focused on that one project. (11:00) The best thing I did as a manager at PayPal was to make every person in the company responsible for doing just one thing. 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. — Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Futureby Peter Thiel. (Founders #278)   (12:30) Jeff said many times: We need to eliminate communication, not encourage it. Communication is a sign of dysfunction. (14:30) Jeff is insisted that instead of finding new and better ways to manage our dependencies, we figure out how to remove them. (15:30) Jeff on decision making speed: “Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you're probably being slow. 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." (16:30) The best way to fail at inventing something is by making it somebody's part-time job. (21:00) Even though you cannot