- The speaker is promoting a live show in New York City with Patrick O'Shaughnessy from Invest Like the Best
- The speaker recommends getting 8 hours of sleep based on Jeff Bezos' advice and recommends the 8 Sleep product
- The speaker also mentions the Vesto product for investing idle cash in US Treasuries
- The speaker discusses the book "Working Backwards" about Jeff Bezos and highlights his principles and communication style
- Jeff Bezos emphasizes high standards, customer obsession, innovation, frugality, personal ownership, bias for action, and under-promising and over-delivering
- Jeff Bezos prioritizes speed and uses the concept of single threaded leadership to remove blocks and increase the speed of the organization.

- The concept of single threaded leadership is introduced as a solution to the problem of bureaucratic drag in companies.
- Single threaded leadership involves having a single leader focused on a specific project, with teams dedicated to that project.
- The importance of avoiding dependencies and reducing coordination time is emphasized.
- Jeff Bezos believes that communication within a company is a sign of dysfunction and should be eliminated.
- The need for speed in decision-making is highlighted, with the suggestion that decisions should be made with around 70% of the desired information.
- Great leadership is identified as a limiting factor in companies, and it is emphasized that leaders should focus on their role full-time.
- The use of written communication and narratives is highlighted as a competitive advantage for Amazon.
- The transition from PowerPoint to paper handouts is discussed as a more effective means of presenting information.

- Jeff Bezos sent an email to the S-Team stating that PowerPoint presentations would no longer be allowed and instead, short narratives would be required to describe ideas.
- Writing narratives forces better thought and understanding, while PowerPoint presentations can lead to glossing over ideas and ignoring interconnectedness.
- Spending the first 20 minutes of a meeting in silence reading these narratives is valuable because it transfers a massive amount of useful information.
- Billionaires read a lot because they gain knowledge and insights from reading, which can be turned into profit.
- Amazon uses a process called "working backwards" to vet ideas and create new products, starting with defining the customer experience and then working backwards to determine what to build.
- Jeff Bezos challenges the content of what he reads and assumes each sentence is wrong until proven otherwise, which helps him produce unique insights.
- Jeff Bezos emphasizes the importance of thorough and precise writing to avoid half-baked thinking and disguise in PowerPoint slides.
- The press release approach is used to develop products, with constraints on length to serve as a forcing function for creativity and clarity.

- Restricting the length of documents helps develop better thinkers and communicators
- Jeff Bezos uses ideas from other companies to improve Amazon
- The belief system of the founder is the language of the company
- Jeff Bezos emphasizes the importance of customer service and implements practices from Toyota to improve it
- Amazon's long-term thinking and patience with failure allows for invention and differentiation
- Working backwards exposes skill sets that the company needs but does not have yet
- A meeting with Steve Jobs leads to the invention of the Kindle
- Jeff Bezos takes time to process the meeting and appoints a leader to formulate a vision and plan for digital media.

- Jeff Bezos appointed a single threaded leader named Steve to run the digital media division at Amazon.
- Bezos believed that the scale of the opportunity in digital media was large and complex, so he focused on organizing the team and choosing the right leader.
- Bezos did not want Amazon to become like Kodak, which failed to adapt to changing consumer needs.
- Bezos emphasized the importance of offering a truly unique value proposition to customers, rather than copying successful products.
- Amazon decided to focus on ebooks and invented the Kindle device, recognizing the need for a distinct and differentiated offering in the digital media market.
- Bezos believed that Amazon should not outsource its hardware manufacturing, as it would limit their ability to innovate and differentiate.
- Despite the challenges and unexpected expenses, Bezos was willing to invest in the Kindle, signaling its strategic importance to Amazon.
- Bezos was influenced by the constant connectivity feature of the BlackBerry and wanted the Kindle to offer a similar experience.
- The Kindle was launched in 2007 and sold out in less than 6 hours, demonstrating the success of Amazon's approach to digital media.

- Jeff Bezos was influenced by a meeting with Costco founder Jim Sinegal, which led to the creation of Amazon Prime.
- Bezos wanted to improve the customer experience around shipping and implemented the idea of a shipping membership program.
- Amazon Prime started with 2-day shipping and eventually added more benefits, such as streaming video.
- Bezos wanted to differentiate Amazon from competitors like Netflix and Hulu by creating their own content.
- The concept of "undifferentiated heavy lifting" led to the development of AWS, leveraging Amazon's core competency in building and operating large websites.
- The book "The Everything Store" provides more insights into Bezos' strategies and decision-making.

In this video, the speaker mentions several podcast episodes about Jeff Bezos and his career. They also discuss the Founders AMA private feed, where subscribers can ask questions and receive personalized answers. The speaker emphasizes the value of the information they have gathered over the years and encourages listeners to become members to benefit from this unique data set.

- The speaker promotes a live show in NYC with Patrick O'Shaughnessy from Invest Like the Best.
- The speaker recommends getting 8 hours of sleep and mentions the 8 Sleep product.
- The Vesto product for investing idle cash in US Treasuries is mentioned.
- The book "Working Backwards" about Jeff Bezos is discussed, highlighting his principles and communication style.
- Jeff Bezos emphasizes high standards, customer obsession, innovation, frugality, personal ownership, bias for action, and under-promising and over-delivering.
- Single threaded leadership is introduced as a solution to bureaucratic drag, involving a single leader and dedicated teams.
- Jeff Bezos believes in avoiding dependencies and reducing coordination time.
- Communication within a company is seen as a sign of dysfunction and should be eliminated.
- Speed in decision-making is prioritized, with around 70% of desired information.
- Great leadership is a limiting factor and leaders should focus on their role full-time.
- Written communication and narratives are a competitive advantage for Amazon.
- Transition from PowerPoint to narratives is discussed as more effective.
- Jeff Bezos challenges what he reads and emphasizes thorough and precise writing.
- The press release approach is used to develop products, with length constraints.
- Jeff Bezos uses ideas from other companies to improve Amazon.
- Customer service and practices from Toyota are emphasized.
- Amazon's long-term thinking allows for invention and differentiation.
- Working backwards exposes skill sets the company needs.
- A meeting with Steve Jobs leads to the invention of the Kindle.
- Bezos appoints a single threaded leader for the digital media division.
- Bezos focuses on organizing the team and choosing the right leader.
- Amazon decides to focus on ebooks and invents the Kindle.
- Bezos believes in offering a unique value proposition.
- Amazon Prime is created to improve the customer experience around shipping.
- The concept of "undifferentiated heavy lifting" leads to the development of AWS.
- The book "The Everything Store" provides more insights into Bezos' strategies.

What I learned from reading Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr.

29 days from now, I'm doing a live show in New York City on October 19th with Patrick O'Shaughnessy from Invest Like the Best.

Some of the best interviews and conversations I've had have been on Patrick's show, Invest Like the Best.

You can find it on the Invest Like the Best feed.

It is episode 343, David Sandler in service of founders.

If you live in New York City or you're looking for an excuse to travel to New York City, highly recommend coming out to the show.

It's guaranteed to be a fun and entertaining conversation.

If you're interested in that, I will leave a link so you can grab your tickets.

You can also get your tickets at founderspodcast.com.

Second thing that I want to tell you about, you're about to listen to an episode full of great ideas from Jeff Bezos.

1 of my favorite things that I don't think I talk about in the episode that I heard Jeff Bezos say that changed my perspective on the importance of high quality sleep was he was giving an interview and he said that he makes sure he gets 8 hours of sleep a night.

As a result his mood, energy, and decision-making is improved and his point was that you get paid to make high quality decisions and you can't do that if you were sleeping terribly.

The only thing that I have found that has improved my sleep has been getting an 8 sleep.

8 sleep comes with a ton of useful and helpful features.

The best feature, the 1 that's most important to me, is the ability to change the temperature of my bed, Not only before, so I make it ice cold before I jump into bed, but it stays cold the entire night, so I wake up less.

And because you control the temperature of your bed with your phone, my bed's cold before I get in it, so I fall asleep faster.

In my opinion, that feature is worth 10 times the price.

My wife and I were just at a wedding for a weekend away in Canada, and now we have the same ritual every time we come home, we say the same thing, I cannot wait to get back to our 8 sleep.

There are very few no-brainer investments in life, but taking care of your sleep and getting an 8 sleep is 1 of them.

You can get $150 off on your 8 sleep by going to eightsleep.com forward slash founders.

Again, you get $150 off by going to 8Sleep.com forward slash founders and that link will be down below as well.

And finally I want to tell you about another product that several of my founder friends are using and that is Vesto.

Vesto makes it easy for you to invest your business's idle cash.

Vesto helps businesses of all sizes invest their cash in U.S.

When your business owns treasuries, that cash is backed by the US government and you earn interest while it sits there.

I have 1 founder friend who raised a bunch of venture capital and he uses Vesto as a way to extend his runway.

I have another founder friend who bootstrapped his company and he uses Vesto to get a better rate of return than if his money was just sitting in his bank account.

If this sounds interesting to you, I highly recommend that you go to Vesto.com and check out what they have to offer.

If you schedule a demo, if you go to Vesto.com and schedule a demo, you actually speak directly to the founder, Ben.

I think he's incredibly impressive, and I think if you speak to him, you'll be impressed too.

Make sure that you tell him that David from Founders sent you.

And with that, let's get into the genius mind of Jeff Bezos.

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.

To make his point 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 in which Hughes, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, visits 1 of his aircraft manufacturing facilities to check on the progress of his latest project, the Hughes H-1 Racer, which is a sleek single passenger plane designed to set new speed records.

Hughes examines the plane closely, running his fingers along the surface of the fuselage.

These rivets have to be completely flush.

I want no air resistance on the fuselage.

Cleaner, do you understand?" The team leader nods back to the drawing board.

Jeff had told Steve that it was his job to be like Howard Hughes.

From then on, Steve had to run his fingers over each new Amazon product, checking for anything that might reduce the quality and insisting that his team maintain the highest standards.

Steve was telling me this story for 2 reasons.

He wanted me to know as 1 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.

Second, he was telling me that I too was responsible for setting high standards for our products.

He was telling me that I had to be more like Howard Hughes.

That was an excerpt from the book 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 Breyer and Bill Carr.

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 2 co-authors actually worked with Jeff for a combined 27 years, And 1 of the co-authors, Colin, was actually Jeff's shadow.

Went everywhere with him, every single meeting, for 2 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, obviously Jeff's brilliant, he's going to have a lot of fascinating and genius level insights, but 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, Jeff is a masterful communicator.

He's able to identify a handful of principles that are important to him in the building of his company.

And then he finds 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 1 that's teaching everybody the principles.

So it says Amazon opened for business in July 1995, 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.

So he gave up his lucrative and promising career.

He wanted to create a new and compelling experience for customers.

So there's just a few things to get started.

1 handpicked core to 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 20 years 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.

In the very early days of the company, when it consisted of a handful of people working in 3 small rooms, There was no formal leadership principles because Jeff was the leadership principles.

He packed and shipped boxes and read every email that went out to customers.

Taking part in every aspect of the business allowed him 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 1 simple rule, it has to be perfect.

He'd remind his team that 1 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, 3 episodes now on 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 repeat are customer obsession, innovation, frugality, personal ownership, bias for action, high standards, under-promising and over-delivering.

In fact, he talks about in the book that the fact he would proofread all the customer service that emails and so 1 thing that he wanted to do at the very beginning speaking of under promising and over delivering is 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.

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 2 to 3 business days.

Under-promise, over-deliver, this is 1 response from a customer that Jeff particularly liked this is called out as a complimentary upgrade in the shipment confirmation email thank you emails for the upgrade included 1 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.

He has unreasonably high standards and he's prioritizes speed.

And so he has a genius idea on organizing groups 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 Amazon employees.

And so it says, the job description that he wrote for the very first employee said, you must have experience designing and building large and complex systems and you should be able to do it in about 1 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 the speed at which his company can move.

And so he comes up with this idea, which I'll get to in 1 minute, which is called single threaded leadership.

So he says, 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 which appears in the form of layer upon layer of permission, ownership, and accountability all working against fast decisive forward progress so that is the problem.

That Amazon's encountering and then almost every other companies can 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 they say it's been 1 of Amazon's most useful inventions the basic premise is that for each project there is a single leader whose focus is that project in that project alone and that leader overseas teams of people whose attention is similarly focused on that 1 project.

And so this is a main point that they're going to come back to over and over and over again that everyone in your company should work on 1 thing only full time.

I saw a very similar idea in Peter Thiel's book, 0 to 1.

Peter wrote, the best thing I did as a manager at PayPal was to make every person in the company responsible for doing just 1 thing.

Every employee's 1 thing was unique and everyone knew I would evaluate him only on that 1 thing I had started doing this just simplify the task of managing people but then I noticed a deeper result defining roles reduced conflict Jeff and his team at Amazon are going to 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 what 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.

And so what they do is they identify and they try to avoid dependencies so anytime.

2 teams within a company have to speak to 1 another or have to coordinate with 1 another to accomplish something that slows the entire company down each overlap created a dependency.

And they define dependency is something 1 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 1 of Jeff's best known ideas and this idea that he says that communication internal company communication is actually a sign of dysfunction he is not trying most companies just point is most companies try to get better at communicating to Jeff that means you're encouraging he doesn't want to encourage communication he wants to eliminate communication and so this is more about why and then Jeff solution to this when your dependencies keep growing it's only natural to spark try speeding things up by improving your communication.

We finally realized that our all of this cross team communication didn't really need refinement at all.

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 grasped that the true identity of our problem, the ever expanding cost of coordination among teams.

This change in our thinking was nudged along by Jeff.

I heard him say many times that if we wanted Amazon to be a place where builders can build, we need to eliminate communication, not encourage it.

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 API is 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 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.

1, 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, 1 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.

I think I paid like 20 bucks for it, but now he's going to go into why this is so important.

A few pages later, Jeff 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 2 teams waiting on each other.

Now you have 2 teams working continuously, right?

These largely independent teams can now do their work in parallel instead of coordinating better.

They could coordinate less and build more.

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 experimenting leads to more unpredictable but lucrative products.

There's a sentence a couple pages earlier that I think relates to everything time and time again I 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 learned that customers would behave in ways we hadn't imagined especially for brand new features or products, getting to the building of those brand new features and products faster is unbelievably important.

And 1 way to do that is through this Amazon innovation called single threaded leadership.

This is 1 of my favorite things he's ever said.

And once you hear the way he thinks about this, 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 made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had if you wait for 90% he said 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.

And what's fascinating is once you apply this idea to your company, you realize 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 great team leaders proved to be rarities another way to think about that is great anything is where 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 a fantastic line on why the best way to fail and inventing something is by making it somebody's part time job.

And so the problem that they were trying to solve in the vision they had was how to move faster and remove dependencies but what they also realize once this is in place that ownership and accountability are much easier to establish under the single threaded leader model.

Because Jeff Bezos, just like Peter Thiel, are only evaluating that person on 1 thing and 1 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, it's something I'm gonna repeat over and over again.

You've heard me say it on past podcasts, but if you're paying attention, the whole world is a classroom.

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 asked recently hired Amazon employees, what is surprising most in their time at the company so far?

1 response would certainly top the list the eerie silence in the first 20 minutes of many meetings the reason for the silence a 6 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 advantage.

And so this is when they kick out PowerPoint and they switch to these narratives.

Remember, he goes everywhere Jeff goes, sits on every single meeting.

The insights that he has in this book are remarkable.

And so a long time ago, way before Wi-Fi on planes, he would take a lot of flights with Jeff.

And so 1 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 there's a book that's valuable to read, he doesn't, it's not that he reads it by himself, 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 going to read and then discuss this essay.

This is way before the narrative structure of the meetings, right?

They're still using PowerPoint and it's not going well and so they're looking for solutions.

So again, if you're paying attention, the whole world is a classroom.

After a particularly difficult presentation in early 2004, 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, written by Edward Tuft.

Tuft identified in 1 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.

For serious presentations, it would be useful to replace PowerPoint slides with paper handouts with words.

High-resolution handouts allow viewers to contextualize, compare, 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 executive order.

From now on your presentation software is Microsoft Word not PowerPoint.

That is Tufts words and that is essentially what we did.

And so Jeff sends an email because this can only come from him.

The S-Team received an email with the following subject line, no PowerPoint presentations from now on.

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 4-page memo is harder than writing a 20-page PowerPoint is because the narrative structure of a good memo forces better thought 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 and to ignore the interconnectedness of ideas.

And then they describe why spending the first 20 minutes of an hour long meeting in silence reading these narratives together is so valuable.

This is 1 of my favorite sentences or paragraphs in the entire book.

It's why books have lasted for 5,000 years.

In fact, I got a text from a founder friend the other day and he was asking me why, if I've noticed, why billionaires read so much.

The silence can be unsettling at first but it becomes routine even though you cannot hear it with a well-written narrative there is a massive amount of useful information that is being transferred in those 20 minutes there is a massive amount of useful information that is being transferred in those 20 minutes.

There is a massive amount of useful information that is being transferred in those 20 minutes.

So a friend texted me the other day, him and his brother are co-founders of a company that's doing really, really well.

They're both relentless learners, and they've raised a bunch of money for their startup from several billionaires, many of which are world famous.

If I had mentioned them, you would know who they are.

And in many cases they get to spend time with them.

They they'd go to their houses, they'd see their libraries.

And I got a text from them the other day.

It 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 they read all the time.

It's like, why do billionaires read so much?

And I think this sentence right here describes that.

Even though you cannot hear it, there's a massive amount of useful information that is being transferred in those 20 minutes.

That useful information, that knowledge can then obviously be turned into profit.

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#321 Working with Jeff Bezos