https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VXPpZJGScc

When current and aspiring tech entrepreneurs are asked who they look up to the most, they give the usual names: Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and maybe a few will mention Bill Gates. But, unfortunately, there aren’t many who mention Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.


This analytical, methodical, quick-to-laugh brainiac entrepreneur isn’t given the attention he deserves. He doesn’t have the charisma of Steve Jobs, run a car brand like Tesla, get the publicity of Zuckerberg (who had an entire movie devoted to him), or share the wealth of Bill Gates. But, in my view, he deserves to be included with all of these entrepreneurs, perhaps even at the top of the list.

Bezos does more than run a retail store. He’s also into many other ventures, including a private space endeavor called Blue Origin.

And there’s a lot we can learn from this summa cum laude Princeton graduate. Read on to learn about some of his business philosophies.

1. Be Stubborn and Flexible
According to Bezos, good entrepreneurs must be stubborn and flexible. When referring to Amazon, Bezos says, “We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details.”

Sticking to the vision is the first part, and being flexible about the tactics is the second part. Bezos adds, “If you’re not stubborn, you’ll give up on experiments too soon. And if you’re not flexible, you’ll pound your head against the wall and you won’t see a different solution to a problem you’re trying to solve.”

There’s a challenge in being stubborn and flexible. Bezos warns: “The thing about inventing is you have to be both stubborn and flexible, more or less simultaneously. The hard part is figuring out when to be which!”

One of the things I’ve heard about entrepreneurs is that they are inherently stubborn individuals. They’re the “natural leaders” who like to take charge and have things done their way. In this sense, it seems as if they are close minded on both tactical details and vision. So while having natural leadership skills is good, one of the characteristics that define good entrepreneurs is being flexible on details. Just ask the guy who built a company from 0 employees to over 117,000. He probably knows a few things about leadership.

2. Stick with Two Pizzas
Bezos seems to believe in small, autonomous groups. (Maybe the roots for this go back to his days as a startup CEO.) He believes in a “two pizza rule” for teams, meaning that the groups should be small enough to feed with only two pizzas. This generally works out to about 5 to 7 people in a team.


When teams grow larger, they have a tendency to become less efficient. This inefficiency reduces the output of the team and leads to waste. So keep teams small and let them test.

3. Never Stop Experimenting
I love this quote from Bezos:

“If you double the number of experiments you do per year you’re going to double your inventiveness.”

If you ask most CEOs, they’ll tell you that experimentation is imperative for their business. It’s how new innovations are born and how they stay competitive in the market. Automotive companies have concept cars; food companies experiment with new foods and flavors; retail companies experiment with placement of products and store atmosphere; drug companies are built on experimentation; tech companies have “labs” like Google Labs; and many high performing companies, like Google, allow their employees to experiment. Even sports teams experiment with new plays and/or players. Experimentation is everywhere and is always happening.

At Amazon, experimentation and willingness to invent has always been a part of the culture. It’s not secondary or something that “has to be done because everyone else does it.”



In the early days of Amazon, the executives wanted to know if it would be worth the cost to place advertisements on television. So they looked for two markets with a good blend of the customer demographics they target, and they found Portland and Minneapolis to be the best. They ran a test for 16 months, which is much longer than most companies would experiment. But Bezos said that Amazon was “unbelievably fixated on it” and that it was a “long, expensive test, but we were really determined to understand this for our company once and for all.”

While the ads did give Amazon a slight bump in sales, Bezos determined that it is wasn’t enough to justify the costs. So while this experiment was lengthy, it proved helpful for Amazon’s strategy.

https://neilpatel.com/blog/lessons-from-jeff-bezos/

Atleast I should be myself in 2021