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My First MillionEx-Amazon VP: the RUTHLESS reality of working for Jeff Bezos
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75 min read · 14,756 words- 0:00 – 3:15
Intro
- SPSam Parr
You know, you asked me about flaws earlier. Like, taking your CFO and bitch-slapping him in front of a room.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- SPSam Parr
It was a message. [upbeat music]
- SPShaan Puri
All right, Ethan Evans is here. Ethan, you're former, um, VP over at Amazon Prime. Uh, you were there for a long time. You're there, you're at Amazon for what?
- EEEthan Evans
15 years.
- SPShaan Puri
20 years.
- EEEthan Evans
15 years.
- SPShaan Puri
200 years maybe.
- EEEthan Evans
Yeah, well, dog years for sure.
- SPShaan Puri
So Sam, you, you don't know this, but me and Ethan kind of loosely worked together. When my company got bought by Twitch, I joined what's called a, a ET team, the executive team, and on that team was Ethan, and I was... I... You know, everybody else was somebody at Twitch. "Hey, this person, they work on chat. This person works on video." And then I was like, "What does that guy do?" "Oh, he's the parental guardian. Uh, he was assigned by Amazon. Amazon bought this company for a billion dollars, and they had to put an adult in the room." And so I was told you were the adult in the room, and I was like, "Oh, oh, okay, gotcha. I, uh, better say smart things to this guy." Is that true?
- EEEthan Evans
Uh, that is largely true. There was, in fact, early on there was a huge overtone that I was just a spy-
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- EEEthan Evans
... and that my job there was to, like, shadow Emmett and then take him out.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- EEEthan Evans
So there was very much a worry that, like, I was the replacement in waiting when they got sick of Emmett. That was never, that was never the actual plan, but you can't convince people of that.
- SPShaan Puri
Right.
- EEEthan Evans
Telling them there is no conspiracy is hopeless.
- SPShaan Puri
It only heightens it. Yeah. [laughs]
- EEEthan Evans
Right. Oh, yeah, deny- You're right. Denial just makes it worse.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- SPSam Parr
Do you guys remember when Twitch was acquired? It was the biggest deal ever, and now thinking, I... Like you're saying, Twitch was acquired for only $1 billion.
- EEEthan Evans
Billion, yep.
- SPSam Parr
Actually 970 million. So yeah, like, it didn't even quite make a billion.
- SPShaan Puri
I like the mental win of not paying the full billion, 'cause you know at that point, like, is the deal really gonna fall apart over the last 30?
- EEEthan Evans
No.
- SPShaan Puri
Uh, I'm not sure, but somebody had to win at the end, and it's like, "You will feel worse if this falls apart than I will"-
- EEEthan Evans
Right
- SPShaan Puri
... uh, is what I, what I read when I read that price.
- EEEthan Evans
Well, I think the most interesting thing is Twitch definitely had the last laugh because Amazon stock 5X'd in the, in the earn-out period for those people.
- SPShaan Puri
Yep.
- 3:15 – 5:15
Criticism without praise
- SPSam Parr
"You know, you'd be a little bit better if you fixed blank," or, "You tend to be blank, and people don't like that."
- EEEthan Evans
Yeah, so I watched Jeff work to turn a weakness into a strength, and it was really funny because I saw a moment where he was obviously working on it, probably a talk... He got an executive coach, and it seemed like you could see the coach kind of with the, the puppet strings or the hand up the butt, right? Like, so Jeff was not mean, but very demanding and never said anything good. He just would come in and be like, "Okay, I see your idea. Here's the three things to fix. Get moving." And, uh, for some people who didn't have very thick skin, no matter what results you took to him, they'd get, like, a nod and then the three things to improve. And that o- only criticism, only corrective feedback, that was one of his flaws.
- SPSam Parr
When he gave feedback, would he be correct? Was his taste good?
- EEEthan Evans
His taste was great. It doesn't mean he didn't make mistakes. We know, uh, about the Fire Phone, $170 million of write-off just for the hardware that got thrown in a dumpster, let alone all the opportunity cost. But he was generally right. He fought the right battle on Kindle. He fought the right battle on Prime and two-day shipping becoming one-day shipping. He fought a lot of right battles, and in fact, it was annoying because he was so right. We would bust our butts preparing, and we would think, like, "We know our business. We've got it." And he would look at our stuff and, like, two minutes later be like, "What about this?" And he'd be like... But, but an flaw of his was being always critical, and I was in a meeting where he more or less, you know, told us everything we had missed for an hour and then stood up to leave, and then literally turned back to the table and said, "Oh yeah, but good job. You're doing great" -
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- EEEthan Evans
... and walked back out. And you could just see he was, like, checking off his list, and he's like, "Oh, right, the coach said praise." It was... You know. Now, he evolved over time, right, and got better at that.
- SPSam Parr
Okay, so, so
- 5:15 – 7:05
The every-great-man flaw
- SPSam Parr
he, he didn't compliment enough. What else? What, what are some other, uh... If, if you're working with him, you're gonna say, "Needs to compliment more." What else?
- EEEthan Evans
Well, I'm gonna say, you know, give your team some sort of props or support. Um, Jeff fell into the flaw of every great man, which I think is having been right a lot, he started to believe his vision was perfect, and that's what led to the Fire Phone disaster. So he's probably learned this lesson, but I would say realize that being really smart and really right and having the courage of your convictions can lead you as CEO to eventually drive the company off a cliff. Everyone was trying to tell him the Fire Phone was not a good product. It's like trying to tell a new father, "That baby is butt ugly." It's just not something you can do effectively. This is really hard, of course, because he had gotten several products that people had told him weren't, weren't gonna work, and they did. Now everybody's telling him again it's not gonna work, and it turns out that everybody's right, not Jeff. I don't know how to fix that, but that's certainly a growth area. Of course, if we look at modern Jeff, that's a whole other thing. If we come all the way to modern Jeff, I, I have, like, a list of criticisms. He seems to have changed radically since he left Amazon. He could be very cutting. So we talked about not praising enough. One of his famous ridicules he made of a team that is well-documented is too much. There was a team in the room, he didn't like what they had presented, and he stopped the meeting and said, um, "So is the A team for this project available? Because this is clearly the B team."
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- EEEthan Evans
And, and-
- SPSam Parr
Dude, did he, like, snap? [laughs]
- EEEthan Evans
Right. No.
- SPShaan Puri
So that just destroys them or what?
- EEEthan Evans
Well, I mean, they had... You know, that's the thing, is, uh, I talked to a VP. I saw one VP get torn apart in a meeting, and he went out of the meeting
- 7:05 – 11:45
Attack mode
- EEEthan Evans
and called his boss and said, uh, the SVP who worked directly for Jeff, and said, "It was a terrible meeting. This is what happened. You know no one can deal with him." Jeff would get frustrated and go into attack mode, and what that really was, yes, he was frustrated with the team who screwed up, but he was also frustrated with himself that he let it get that way. But he would just be relentless, and it was like beating himself up and you with him. A, a case of that that I know about is one year we had a... You know, somebody had a great idea, which is we're gonna give customers an app where they can snap a price, a picture of a price in a store and send it to us to say, "Hey, we found this in a store at a lower price." So that sounds great, except the way it plays out in the media is Amazon is using its customers to spy on small-town America, you know, to undercut them. And Jeff in the meeting, I talked to the woman who was in PR sitting across from him, and he came into the meeting and was like, "How could we be so stupid? How could anyone screw this up?" And she's sitting across from him kind of feeling like he's saying this to her, but she eventually realized he's just saying it to himself. The bottom line is I guess he let... He's famous for his laugh. He let his emotions through on both sides. If he was unhappy, that unhappiness came out, you know, in, in conduct.
- SPShaan Puri
Do you think that, uh, that thing you said, 'cause th- the thing you said where you could be work- a team could be working on something for a month or three months. You come in, you present a plan. You think you've thought of everything, and, and here's a person who they've been in back-to-back-to-back meetings about other things. They open the piece of paper, they read the thing, and they're able to put their finger right on the key point of leverage, maybe the key-
- EEEthan Evans
Mm-hmm
- SPShaan Puri
... flaw in the thing or the weakness or quickly identify why this is good or why this is bad. I, I saw Emmett do a lot of that, too, and it, it kinda sh- I didn't know what to make of it. I'm curious what you make of it. Is it just these people are just smarter, that's why they're at the top? Is it that they have a lot of pattern recognition? Is that a gift or is that a learned behavior? What is that?
- SPSam Parr
I think the best way to become successful is to see how other people did it, whether you're gonna copy them or just use it as inspiration because then now you know what's possible. So starting at the age of 24, I did this relentlessly, and I was very methodical about it. And I created a spreadsheet where I tracked roughly 50 people who were uber successful, and I looked at the year that they were born, the year that they started their apprenticeship, and then the year that they started the first thing that made them successful, finally the year that they broke through. And I aggregated all this data, along with the stories of what they did to be an apprentice and what they did to finally break through, and I put it together in a database. And HubSpot went and spawned this thing that I frankly even forgot about, but it did change my life, and they resurfaced it. They made it even better, and they put it into a thing that you can download for free right now. So if you click the link in the description or click the QR code right here, you can see this database that I made when I was 24, and it changed my life. And so if you're looking to become successful or you're already successful and just want some more inspiration, check it out.
- EEEthan Evans
Well, Jeff is one of the few people... You know, we're all smart people here. He's one of the few people I sat around and thought, "Okay, but smarter." Like, here's a guy who's clearly smarter. Emmett was somewhat that way as well. You could sit around and be like, "I am smart, you are smart, but that guy's really sharp." However, I think it was pattern recognition. He did that all day, three, four, five of those reviews a day. He did it for years. We've all heard that thing about 10,000 hours to become an expert. He literally spent 10,000 hours reading those documents and giving feedback. So sure, he also had greater context, but it was 10,000 hours of taking a business you don't really know, reading about it for 20 minutes, and then having the ability to turn it into an insight.
- SPSam Parr
Have you guys ever met someone who's successful and not smart?
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah. I went to a real estate conference. Met a bunch of them. It was great. [laughs]
- SPSam Parr
Like, whenever people call Jeff smart, I'm like, did you have any peers-
- EEEthan Evans
Eh-
- SPSam Parr
... who became uber successful who were average smart?
- EEEthan Evans
Oh, boy. Ah, you're putting me on dangerous ground 'cause the peers will see this. Um-
- SPSam Parr
Bro, didn't you just, like, LinkedIn post about how, like, someone tried to seduce your wife? Like, you're, you're, you, you don't mind revealing it all.
- EEEthan Evans
Uh, that post was a while ago, but-
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- EEEthan Evans
... anyway, it's obviously very memorable. Yes, there were a couple people at Amazon, and I think... What I think is everyone who ends up rich, unless they're just lucky or inherit it, has some gift. The person I'm thinking of had a gift of loyalty. If Jeff wanted it done, that guy was gonna run through any wall to get there. He made a, a ton of money from Amazon from
- 11:45 – 19:35
“Sometimes all you need is a B”
- EEEthan Evans
Jeff rewarding him, not for him being the smartest guy, but for him being the I will just take on any mess you give me. And I don't think Jeff gave him things expecting brilliant, transformative results. He expected him to go in and grind away and turn a D into a B. And sometimes, this is an important point you'll like, in a business as big as Amazon, sometimes all you need is a B because-
- SPSam Parr
Right
- EEEthan Evans
... there's some other A product that's gonna drag through the revenue, and a B product ... on that engine or a B support system is completely good enough, and I need a guy who's gonna go take a D or an F and get it to a B, and that's all I need, and that's better than, like, the high beta leader who's gonna try and make that thing an A but might not get there.
- SPShaan Puri
We were at a offsite once for Twitch, and, um, th- this lady presented what she called the trust equation.
- EEEthan Evans
Mm.
- SPShaan Puri
And she had three parts of the room labeled. So one part of the room was intimacy.
- EEEthan Evans
Mm.
- SPShaan Puri
So it was like, how close do you feel to each other? Another one [laughs] was, um, credibility, and she said, "This is saying, uh, if you say, 'I got it. I'll take care of it,' that means, that means I got it. I will actually-
- EEEthan Evans
Mm-hmm
- SPShaan Puri
... go try to take care of it."
- EEEthan Evans
Yep.
- SPShaan Puri
And then the third one was, uh, integrity. It was like, uh, does somebody have kind of your best interest or the team's best interest at heart?
- EEEthan Evans
Yep.
- SPShaan Puri
And she said, "Walk to the area of the room that you think is, um, most important, the most important variable in the trust equation." I think there... Let's say there's 20 of us. 18 of us walked to integrity, including myself. One guy, Hubert, if you remember-
- EEEthan Evans
Yeah, I know Hubert
- SPShaan Puri
... walked over to intimacy.
- EEEthan Evans
Yep. Of course he did.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs] And then, and then Emmett walked over to credibility and s- sat there. [laughs] And I was like, "What, what is going on?" And to me, I couldn't even believe it. I was like, what could possibly be more important in a team working together or having trust than the integrity of the person? That, that just seemed like-
- EEEthan Evans
Yep
- SPShaan Puri
... I- I couldn't... And I guess 18 people agreed. And Emmett, they were like, "W- well, that's interesting. Why are you over there?" And he goes, "'Cause you know how many times in a company, uh, somebody tells me, 'I got this,' and I think, 'Okay, good, they got this.' And I go move my attention to something else, and two months later, I come back and find out that that area's a mess, and they, in fact, did not got this?" And he goes, "I don't care how smart you are. I don't care how much I like you. I don't even care if you're a particularly good person. I just care that when you say, 'I got this,' that means you got this." [laughs] And it was, like, such a, like, a wound in the CEO.
- EEEthan Evans
Yeah.
- SPShaan Puri
Is that... What do you make of that?
- EEEthan Evans
Well, that, that's, that's this guy, who I don't think was the smartest, but he was the I-got-this guy, and he had Bezos' trust that he would do an above average, very good, but not great job.
- SPShaan Puri
Right. [laughs]
- EEEthan Evans
And that he could... And that therefore Jeff could turn his back on some fire and be like, "That guy will throw his body on it and roll around and take the burns until the-
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- EEEthan Evans
... fire's mostly out." And he had a couple of those guys, and they never became top leaders, but they kept getting moved and rewarded. And I get it because, you know, uh, Sam, you mentioned me leading hundreds of people. I didn't lead on the scale of Jeff himself by any means, but you get to a point where you're like, "I just need to be able to get this out of my head. I can't worry about this anymore."
- SPSam Parr
Hey, what was it like working with coworkers who became incredibly wealthy? If I was wealthy and a boss said to me, "Does the... Is the A team here?" I would be like, "I'm out." Like, I- I'd be like, "I don't know if I feel like putting up with this." What is the motivating factor for these people, and what's it like working with coworkers who are, uh, genera- generationally rich?
- EEEthan Evans
Yeah, great question. Um, you know, I, I think the guy I'm talking about ended up, the last time I knew, is probably worth about $75 million, so t- clearly generationally rich.
- SPShaan Puri
By the way, this Amazon stock price 2005 I think is, like, in the $2 range. It's now 248. I don't even know if that's a split or not.
- 19:35 – 22:25
Question mark emails
- EEEthan Evans
scale still means, like, 25 million packages a day not getting there right. And so when somebody then calls up to say, like, "I didn't get my thing and blah, blah, blah," that's a real story from that 1%, which is still huge. And we... There was this whole process you may have heard about. If you haven't, it's fun. He was very, very busy, so what he would do when he got one of those complaints from one of your areas is, of course, he knew everybody's area. He'd get an email, and it would be a forward of that complaint with just a single question mark at the top.
- SPSam Parr
Yeah, I remember that.
- EEEthan Evans
And everybody... We called these question mark mails, emails, and everybody knew what that meant, which is it meant you have 24 hours to get back and explain what's going on. So you'd scramble around and try and figure out what the hell happened to this customer. And then the biggest thing was could you show it was a weird exception and no big deal, or second best, that, uh, it was a problem, but you had a solution, and it was implemented or gonna be implemented soon. And the worst was where you're like, "Yeah, this is [beep] , and we're, it's gonna take a while."
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- EEEthan Evans
So, uh, I remember one of these. You, you like his pithy criticisms. You'll love this. He sent us an email-
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- EEEthan Evans
... and we got something worse than a question mark. This is when I ran Amazon's Appstore. He sent us an email that said, "Please tell me we're not doing this."
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- EEEthan Evans
And unfortunately, we had to respond and say, "Eh, yeah, actually we are." And his reply to that was, "Just euthanize me." [laughs]
- SPSam Parr
[laughs] He just got done watching season one of Entourage and, uh, was trying to, like, implement some Ari Gold stuff. [laughs]
- EEEthan Evans
Yeah, just euthanize me. Um, uh, but it was... That's how he scaled that process was you'd send these question mark... He'd send out these question marks, and he'd get back his answers. Everyone from Amazon can tell a question mark email story like I just did. They all have their own version. And that, that's a way to scale that culture across hundreds of leaders is this standardized process of customers complain to me, I send you question marks, you tell me what's going on, you better damn well fix it. You know, because, uh, Sam, Jeff viewed every customer as his customer, even, you know, he s- he still would say, "Well, my customer."
- SPSam Parr
Amazon, Bezos kinda seems like a near-perfect entrepreneur. I think Zuck has the, takes the crown right now. One, he hasn't had too many personal scandals, and also he's right, like, all the time. And Jeff was like that. It... I mean, I've read The Everything Store. I've read, uh, some books about him. Now we're talking to you. It seems like he's just mostly nailed it.
- EEEthan Evans
Yeah. I think that's true. Um, uh, and look, if Jeff called me and wanted me to take a job for him tomorrow, I would stop what I'm doing and go do it because I respect him that much and his ability. And he's the only person on Earth I would take that call from. And it's, you know, to go to Shaan's point in the trust equation, he has
- 22:25 – 24:10
Strategically patient, but tactically impatient
- EEEthan Evans
a high trust equation with me because I know he's good, I know how he thinks, and that I can be successful working for him. I don't want that call in the sense that I have, you know, stuff I like doing, but, you know, he's, he is that good. So you're right about that.
- SPShaan Puri
Can we talk about this idea of strategically patient but tactically impatient?
- EEEthan Evans
Sure.
- SPShaan Puri
What does that mean?
- EEEthan Evans
Uh, another Jeff idea. Basically, Jeff said, "Look, important things take a long time." So today he would say, like, putting people in space takes a long time. You can have the idea. You can have the right vision, but it's still gonna take years and years to, like, design rockets and build a rocket base and, you know, set up or learn and build all the software. So that means you have to be... On big strategic ideas, you have to be patient. Another example of that would be Prime. You can have the idea of two-day shipping that's gonna be great, but to really realize that and then make it one-day shipping and then make it same-day shipping, that's decades of work. So his point was to do anything great, you're gonna have to be patient for the end result, but every day you better be making every tiny bit of progress you can squeeze out. Like, the difference between a day that's a nine and a 10 on progress, that's one thing done and three things done, that's what accumulates to ever get you there. So he was always pushing on what can you do more this quarter on this five-year project because it's, you know, five years is an accumulation of 20 quarters. We can't lose any of those, or we won't get there.
- SPShaan Puri
So it's like you have this 10-year, uh, a 10-year view with a 24-hour clock-
- EEEthan Evans
Yes
- SPShaan Puri
... [laughs] that you're giving yourself every day. [laughs]
- EEEthan Evans
That's how he saw it.
- SPShaan Puri
You can't take 10-year view and say, "Oh, I got 10 years to get there." You'll never
- 24:10 – 25:15
Work hard, long, and smart
- SPShaan Puri
get there.
- EEEthan Evans
You'll never get there, right?
- SPShaan Puri
Right.
- EEEthan Evans
That, that he wanted us busting our ass every day, and he was very... You know, Amazon has a lot of euphemisms. I can't say they're all directly from Jeff, but a lot of euphemisms to say, "Yes, we're a sweatshop." In a slightly more acceptable way. [laughs] They would say things like, well, his biggest one was to say, "I don't like the term work-life balance. I prefer work-life harmony. If you enjoy your work, the fact that you're working a lot may mean, still mean that your life is in harmony." So that was a way of saying like, "Yeah, screw balance," you know, "Put in a lot." He would say, uh, "We work long, hard, and smart. Two out of three don't count." So it's great that you're working smarter, but we also want harder. So, you know, just because you had a good idea doesn't mean you can go home at 3:00. We still like, "Great, write that one down, and get me another one by 7:00 and another one by 10:00, and you can go home at 10:00." The last one Amazon said was like, "Your career will have seasons, and maybe Amazon isn't
- 25:15 – 28:05
Where high-performers go to feel bad about themselves
- EEEthan Evans
the right place in certain seasons," i.e., if you have kids and you don't wanna not see them, don't work here. Mm. Right? Like, or, you know, do work here and don't see them. That's okay, too. Like go home at 6:00- [laughs] ... put them to bed, get back on at 8:00. Right. Work till midnight, no problem. And that's how his people worked, and he built a company of... Another saying you might enjoy, Sam, is, uh, it was often said Amazon is a place where high-performers go to feel bad about themselves because he had this idea of a relentlessly high bar. You know, and so great, you're super smart. You killed it. We're gonna up the goal. Dude, do you ever get nervous talking trash? Now? Yeah. No. 'Cause you're, you're very transparent, and I dig it, but has it gotten back to you where these guys are like, "What the hell? Why are you talking about all this?" I know that inside Amazon, like some people will watch this inside Amazon, and it'll go around, and they'll be like, "Can you believe he said that?" But others will be like, "Yeah," and, "Well, that's true," or, "It was true." I still think about what I say. It's like when you asked me about, you know, who's, who's not as smart. I was like, "Oh, what do I actually wanna say?" Because, you know, some of the people I might have thought that of might hear this and know that I'm thinking of them. I try to be polite, but life's too short for bullshit. I... Here, I'll be transparent this way. When I got to VP, I looked around at my peers, and I, I did what all of us do, even if we don't admit it. I evaluated. Now, Amazon was huge. There were about 300 VPs. And so I kinda stack ranked myself, like where am I in the 300? Because there were only about a dozen SVPs, so if I wanna be one of them, like gonna have to be on top of the pile of 300. And I looked at some of my peers, and I thought, "I am better than you." But I looked at others, and I thought, "Oh, shit, I am not, I'm not punching on his level." Like, so I stack ranked myself, and I said, "I'm kind of in the middle." And I don't have any problem admitting I feel I was like a, a middle VP at Amazon. I can live with that. But that's because I could see the people who were better, and I could also see some people that, at least in my estimation, I could run circles around. So do I worry about it? I don't wanna, like personally name and insult any of the people I felt I could run circles around. I'm happy to name the ones I thought were better. But, you know, unless you go super dystopian, no one can do anything to me. One of the great things about being retired, what are they gonna do? Tell me I'm a bad person? Tell me I'm wrong? [laughs] It's great. Sign me up for my coaching program? Right. Or, or- [laughs] Here's, here's the worst thing. You know this- Book a call? [laughs] You know this from Twitch. No, you know this from Twitch, Shaan. The worst thing anybody can do is respond to this podcast and say, "Ethan is so wrong." Do a post or a tweet, "What an asshole." Right. "He's completely wrong." Wow, what did he say? Right? Exactly. [laughs] So I'm not
- 28:05 – 31:35
Ethan evaluates Shaan
- EEEthan Evans
out to insult anyone, but the only thing they can do coming after me is make me more famous, right? Like lend their voice to mine. So that's- Right ... the old Calvin Klein, there is no such thing as bad publicity. Well, Ethan, I'll give you permission to beat me up come... 'cause I'm curious. You know, I was at Amazon. I was kind of a kid. I was, what, 29, 30 years old maybe. Uh, feel free to beat me up. What, what did you, what did you think? Was I... Maybe there was nothing notable. I'm curious. Uh, I'd love to know. Well, on the positive side, you taught me about the value of 10-year plans and 10-year lists because you and I had a discussion of you had a 10-year plan and, like, 10-year goals and were checking them off. And I remember discussing with you, I dug out my old 10-year plan, which I had written but done nothing with, and now I pay much more attention to that. The things, uh, if I were to criticize the Shaan I knew then, one is you obviously didn't fit at Twitch, let alone at Amazon. Meaning you were clearly entrepreneurial driven. It was pretty obvious that, like, you were a round peg in a square hole. And, and- [laughs] ... you weren't gonna be like, "Oh, I'm in a corporation now. I'll learn how to be corporate." So that made you smart but kind of useless because- [laughs] He, he kept it too real. Well- Like keeping it real goes wrong. [laughs] Well, keeping it real is great, but you're inside a machine. You know, a real, like a real rock inside a machine just stops the machine. It doesn't change the machine. Are you saying I was a bad boy? All I'm hearing is I was a bad, bad boy. No, no. And I'm kinda loving it. I, I'm not gonna lie. [laughs] Uh, and then, of course, the other thing is you quickly learned that at Twitch it was okay to just mail it in, right? Yeah. The, the like, oh, Twitch had this idea. I guess the weirdest question I was ever asked by, legitimately asked by a Twitch leader as the Amazon guy was, "You guys keep talking to us a- about money and profit. Why do we have to worry about that? We're owned by Amazon now. Can't you just pay for it?" Right. And that was, like, the disconnect. A spoiled child. Well, that was the disconnect I was fighting was, "Oh, well, since Amazon is a big company, we never have to make money. We just have to be Twitch and, and make gamers happy, and that is our only job." And the fact that we're burning a billion dollars of cash, because this is another fact, Sam. At times, Twitch was burning Certainly hundreds of millions, and over the first five years burned over a billion dollars of cash with no real sight to profitability. Every year, Emmett and team would prepare a plan that said profitable in three years, and every year, at the end of the year, we would be in the exact same spot and turn in the same plan that said profitable in three years.
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- EEEthan Evans
And for about five years, Andy Jassy let that fly. Eventually, he did get tired of it, and Emmett left, and there were layoffs, and you know, now it's maybe somewhat different. But for five consecutive years it was profitable in three years, but we're gonna burn two hundred million this year. And then we did that for five years.
- SPSam Parr
Right. [laughs] Can I ask you a question about being a small business owner now?
- EEEthan Evans
Sure.
- SPSam Parr
I think, like, you ha- you have a coaching business.
- EEEthan Evans
Yep.
- SPSam Parr
Um, you do podcasts. You're, you're... We're all the same here. Uh, and yet, like both Shaan and I, we, we've founded companies, and I look at these guys who run these huge businesses or who are part of these huge businesses, and
- 31:35 – 35:55
Post-Amazon
- SPSam Parr
every once in a while I feel envy, where I'm like, "They're taking over the world." And it sounds really interesting and fascinating, this scale. You've experienced that. Now you're experiencing being your own boss and-
- EEEthan Evans
Yep
- SPSam Parr
... having a small business.
- EEEthan Evans
Yep.
- SPSam Parr
And you don't have billions of dollars to play with, and you're not gonna change the entire world.
- EEEthan Evans
Nope.
- SPSam Parr
But you're gonna like be the director of your own movie at a, at a much smaller scale. Can you compare and contrast those two careers and which you prefer and why?
- EEEthan Evans
Oh, I tell people I'm much happier now, but also I didn't know that would be true. So what I tell people, I, I will contrast it, but just to give you numbers, I, I tell people all the time, uh, at Amazon, if you'd have asked me how happy I was, I'd say, would have said seven or eight out of 10. Like, I'm well paid, I'm doing important work, it's big scale. When I left, now I would say it's 11 out of 12, and there are two things going on there. Number one, I moved up like three points in happiness, but number two, I didn't know the scale went to 12. I didn't know I could work from home and work on only things I love and work only part-time and make kinda equal money. You know, at Amazon, my target comp my last year, this is something Emmett knows, was $900,000. Because the stock always did better, I tended to make low one millions. But that was like what Amazon thought I was worth. What I do today, uh, this year I'll end the year at like seven or $800,000, but as opposed to 50 to 60 hours a week plus travel, that'll be an average of 20 hours a week with a lot of vacation. So I'm very okay with that. So contrasting though, the biggest thing is loss of identity. I don't really know how... Like, you introduced me as former Amazon VP or you said former Amazon. I don't really have a good way, you know, a good current title. Sure, I'm a executive coach. You kinda feel like, "Wee, wee."
- SPSam Parr
Wah, wah. Yeah. [laughs]
- EEEthan Evans
Yeah, yay. Um, because, you know, even, even if I'm good at what I do, you just don't have that platform. So to summarize, the thing you're envying is real. It's the platform that if I as an Amazon VP, let alone one of the SVPs or somebody else there, wanted to talk to anyone at any company, they would generally take the call because it's Amazon calling, and that might mean a billion dollars for them. Usually it didn't, but they had that image, right?
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- EEEthan Evans
Um, that's the loss. That said, I love working for myself much more.
- SPSam Parr
Do you guys ever think about this? I think... I, I, I read a lot of history, uh, Ethan, and I, and I like studying CEOs, I like studying personalities. Oftentimes I wonder, like, what will, what would certain titans do if they weren't doing the thing that they, uh, are, are known for, and would they still be-
- EEEthan Evans
Hmm
- SPSam Parr
... successful? Like, who, who's an animal that couldn't be held back? Who was just put in the perfect place at the perfect time and they took advantage of it? Do you think about that ever, uh, with, with some of the great guys who you've, uh, been around?
- EEEthan Evans
Yeah, of course you wonder how much was Jeff was going to be who he is no matter what and how much was-
- SPSam Parr
'Cause he was like a, a trader
- EEEthan Evans
... Yeah, he was, he worked at a place called D.E. Shaw, and, and he was a trader, and he used to talk about this idea of the everything store, I guess, with the D.E. Shaw guy, and then one day he loaded up his car and drove to Seattle to go build it. And of course, as they say, the rest is history. Only, you know, 35 years of work or whatever to get there. I think Jeff, of course, would've been very successful, but I think of this like, I'm sure both of you know Naval Ravikant and his writing. Naval writes about, like, how do you live so that 99 times out of 100 you end up wealthy? But he has an acknowledgement you're not gonna end up equally wealthy in those 99 parallel lives. I think there's a, a very realistic life where Jeff ends up, uh, running some company or founding a few companies, some that succeed and fail, and ending up certainly with $100 million or something, but not being Jeff Bezos. He would even tell you his signature insight was the internet is going to be a huge opportunity. I have to get in on that. And so part of that tells you it was a moment in time because
- 35:55 – 39:50
Project selection
- EEEthan Evans
if he's 10 years older, he's already deeply entranced in a partner at D.E. Shaw making 10 million a year, and he probably doesn't drop everything to go. And if he's 10 years later, he's too late, and can he find the next thing? Can he... Whatever, attach to the iPhone or I don't know. And that's no insult to Jeff. I just think, uh, for anybody, there's something about timing
- SPSam Parr
I think about it all the time. Shaan, I don't know if you do either, but I think about... Because i- if it is, if what you're saying is true, that means that opportunity selection, I think, Shaan, you call it something else. Well, you say-
- EEEthan Evans
Project selection
- SPSam Parr
... Yeah, project selection is far more important than anything else because oftentimes I tell myself, and I think most people tell themselves, which is like, "I'm already doing this thing. I'm already deep down it. I might as well just keep going."
- EEEthan Evans
Mm.
- SPSam Parr
And, um... Or they'll say like, "Oh, but I can, like, pivot. I can make this, you know, into something else." But the reality is is that oftentimes if you... The, the greatness requires a, a great person but an equally great opportunity, and the great opportunity thing is probably easier to change than how great you are.
- EEEthan Evans
Well, yeah. So a story that would reinforce that, I told you when I joined Amazon, they wouldn't tell me what I was gonna do. So I got to Amazon, and I asked my boss, like, on the second day, I said like, "So I'm here. What am I supposed to do?" And he said, "Well, I have two teams that don't have leaders yet. There's a team that's supposed to build a video product, and there's a team that's gonna do a shared ingestion platform that will, like, take in all the books, music, and video and, you know, make them available to these three product teams. What do you wanna do?" And I said, "Oh, I'm a product guy. I wanna do the video team." Well, lo and behold, this other guy starts the next week, and he comes in, and he'd kind of apparently been told, "You'll be the video guy." But I'm in that chair, and so he gets the ingestion platform. And if you were to look at our two careers, they're very different. Now, how much is it that I'm really better than him, and how much is it I was a week earlier and got to take the chair he wanted and, for that matter, that my boss, whether through ignorance or low integrity, gave it to me? I can't answer that. We can't A/B test that, but I think a lot about the opportunity I effectively took away from him.
- SPShaan Puri
Well, e- even now you look at, um, you know, he retire... Bezos retires at, I don't know, whatever, whenever he retired.
- EEEthan Evans
Right.
- SPShaan Puri
Goes to, you know, he's in Ibiza. He's taking Oyster-
- EEEthan Evans
Right
- SPShaan Puri
... you know, down, and he, he's having a good time for a period of time. He had... You know, he was in retirement mode, and then the AI window opens, and now he's back. And he's got a new company, but he understood when the... You know, he understood when there was actually a big, fat pitch to swing at.
- EEEthan Evans
Mm.
- SPShaan Puri
And the fat pitch now with AI and what he's doing building, uh, this sort of, like, artificial general engineer with Prometheus, that's his... He sees that as the, you know, the sort of bigger Amazon-sized opportunity again.
- EEEthan Evans
Yep.
- SPSam Parr
And, and, and what's that opportunity, Shaan? Is it, uh, he's taking AI to, like, manufacturing companies?
- SPShaan Puri
Ethan, you might know better than me. My understanding is he says the kinda large language model approach, which is giving us awesome kind of knowledge workers, will not give us awesome engineering, and so we need to build, you know, an artificial general engineer, meaning we need to build a AI specialized to actually build things, to make stuff in the real world. Uh, I don't know what that means, if it's going into robots or if it's, uh, planning tools. I don- I'm not sure exactly what it is, but it's to build shit. You know, it's to-
- EEEthan Evans
Ah. Well, with the name, Jeff likes literal names. So even though Prometheus isn't exactly literal, he clearly means, you know, building a giant worker. He liked to name things what they do. It's why before it was Prime Video, it was simply Amazon Video and Amazon Music. So, uh, yeah, okay, you have a great point, but he's sitting in a very different chair now. Like, let's put it this way. He can single-handedly choose any swing to take. Like in my case, maybe I could have chosen a different swing, but, like, I didn't have unlimited
- 39:50 – 42:30
Waiting for fat pitches
- EEEthan Evans
job opportunities. I had to pick from the swings that were offered to me. Now, modern Jeff can just look at the world and decide when to swing. I think any baseball player, since we're using this analogy, would love new rules to baseball. Because I'm a star, I get to sit in the dugout and decide when I'll come to the plate. Oh, this, this pitcher is, his pitch count's in the high 80s. I'm gonna come take my swings now. Oh, it's a reliever. I'll sit back down and wait. He's in that situation where he can literally decide when to go to the plate. It's great.
- SPShaan Puri
Well, I, I think what's even more impressive, and use the baseball analogy, is not swinging. Uh, so he, you know-
- EEEthan Evans
Yeah
- SPShaan Puri
... Warren Buffett famously said, you know, there's no called strikes in investing, meaning you could sit there and look at every possible investment, and there's no penalty for not swinging. You just have to hit when you do swing.
- EEEthan Evans
Yep.
- SPShaan Puri
And so what's actually impressive to me isn't that, you know, he swung at the obvious pitch of AI. It's that for five years or six years or whatever in between, he didn't get itchy and swing at the wrong thing, right? Like, you know, if you look at what he did, Amazon, Blue Origin, which is another, like... You know, space travel was probably one of... Now as Elon has shown with SpaceX is the second or third biggest opportunity-
- EEEthan Evans
Mm
- SPShaan Puri
... in the world and then, and then AI. And so it's, it's all the other stuff he didn't swing at that I think is, you know, it's the dog that didn't bark that's actually the, the one that you, you should pay attention to, uh, because I would say most of us spend too much of our time swinging at useless stuff, at, as, you know, swinging at the wrong pitches to the point where we're not even available mentally or physically to, to swing at the big ones.
- EEEthan Evans
Well, interesting point. Jeff got pitched a lot internally and externally to enter industries he's always declined. So he came from D.E. Shaw. People were always pitching him, "Let's go into finance," right? "We have, you know, a billion credit cards on file. We have financial relationships. We should become a bank. We should this, we should that." He always declined, and his argument was it's well-served, like, there's a lot of people in that space, and it's heavily regulated. And I... He generally tried to avoid things with lots of regulation because that slowed down his ability to do whatever he wanted. He was pitched healthcare, which he's dabbled in certainly. Uh, he was pitched travel. I was part of pitching travel to him. Like, "Oh, Amazon, you know, has all these customer relationships. We should compete with Expedia or Airbnb or whatever." He declined that. So he has some algorithm, which I don't know if he's totally shared, for deciding what to swing at. I know some of the variables he considers. Like, is it highly regulated? Is it already mature?
- 42:30 – 45:50
Jeff’s security detail
- SPShaan Puri
How does a guy like him or even the, um, Andy Jassy-
- EEEthan Evans
Yeah
- SPShaan Puri
... I think his name is. When you're CEO of one of the largest companies and, or, or one of the wealthiest persons on, um, people on Earth, how do you say, stay normal, like, in terms of day-to-day activity and, or do you even want to?
- EEEthan Evans
I can, I can better tell the stories of watching him progressively get pushed behind the security wall. When I started at Amazon, there was, uh, one sort of slightly overweight security guard sitting at a desk, and that guy was some retired limited pro baseball pitcher. I think he'd pitched for like a season or something. But he was now a security guard. Well, some reporter slipped by and got straight to Jeff's office and walked into his office and was asking him questions. We had a new security firm the next day. And, you know, like much tighter, we had gates all of a sudden, and you had to badge in and out as opposed to just flash your badge to the, to the retired pitcher. So that was phase one. Then one day, we built new buildings. We built a campus, and I was going to visit Jeff, and I saw this person who had this absolutely terrible cube, and it sat on the elevator, like open to the elevator bay, and it had a glass wall. But it was a person just sitting there. And I walked by, and I thought, "What a shit seat." All the elevator traffic. And then of course, the light went off like, "Oh, wait, security." So I went back to the guy 'cause I'm curious, and I'm like, "So you're security, right?" He's like, "Yeah." And I'm like, "So where's the panic button?" He's like, "Oh, it's right here." And, you know, at that point, somewhere in the building there was a SWAT team. You know, like if that guy pushed the button, the guys with the guns would run down the hall. And the last time I was in Amazon's executive suite, that was still a floor that anyone could take the elevator to. In the new buildings now, like Andy Jassy, there's the Andy Jassy elevator that you don't get in without permission and can be stopped, and then you're just stuck in the elevator. And then you end up on a floor that you can't get to without going through, you know. And it's, it's like Fort Knox.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- EEEthan Evans
So they became progressively isolated. Did I see them try to be normal? Yes. Jeff used to come out... We, we held an annual picnic in the beginning at like a big farm outside of Seattle. He would come out to the farm. There was a weird game we played called Broomball. Broomball took like a, one of the exercise balls you work out on, the squishy ones, not heavy, and brooms, and you kind of played soccer. Well, people got really hurt in this because you have enthusiastic engineers who have no coordination but lots of enthusiasm, swinging brooms at each other.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- EEEthan Evans
One of my bosses had somebody else break his hand by hitting his hand. Jeff used to play Broomball. I don't think he's probably been, well, certainly since he retired, but I don't think he was at an Amazon picnic for like a shit long, shit ton long time while he was still there because they had to become these affairs that were held in the stadium in Amazon with food trucks and ten thousand people. His presence or absence, you know, A, it was probably un- unpleasant, and B, only two percent of those people would ever talk to him anyway, so I don't think he went. So I think he gave up being a man of the people
- 45:50 – 47:55
The story of Amazon Prime
- EEEthan Evans
when there were too many people to know.
- SPShaan Puri
Hey, can you tell the story of Amazon Prime? That starts somewhere.
- EEEthan Evans
It does.
- SPShaan Puri
Starts with an idea. So what... Were you there? What was it?
- EEEthan Evans
Uh, I joined Amazon right after Prime. I've met the engineer who may still be at Amazon. You can, one of you can Google in the background. His name is Charlie Ward. Charlie Ward, who became a VP at Amazon, claims that as a principal engineer, he invented the idea of Amazon Prime. I believe Jeff Bezos also claims that Jeff himself invented it.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- EEEthan Evans
So I don't know if they had the same idea at the same time or, you know, if there's a little appropriation going on there.
- SPShaan Puri
Well, it wasn't that unique, right? Like Costco, like... Well, there's, there's multiple things, right? Was the initial thing just, "Hey, there's a membership with perks," or was it two-day, "Hey, what if we could do two-day shipping? That'll change everything"?
- EEEthan Evans
Yeah, so there were-- Originally, there was supposed to be no perks. It wasn't a perk-based program. It was purely a fast shipping program. That was the i- initial idea. And I think the biggest thing, uh, that would be interesting is Jeff was about to have a shitty quarter, and he, he could see things lining up. It was right after the internet crash, kind of, and still the bubble. He could see the quarter wasn't gonna be what Wall Street wanted. And so he said, "We need something." And so Prime was originally called Project 100 because they had to figure out how to announce it and start doing it in one hundred days. It's not a two-day shipping program. It's a two-day delivery program. And you might be like, "Well, what's the difference? That's a distinction without a difference." Jeff figured out, "We're gonna call it two-day delivery." It began with a lot of FedEx two-day shipping, but he knew over time he'd get down to where two days he could do often one day through the post office, uh, or one day on his own trucks. And, and it never told you the shipping method. So the origin, anyway, was Jeff trying to have good news to tell investors in a rough time. Because back then, he wasn't
- 47:55 – 50:55
Amazon's idea tool
- EEEthan Evans
Jeff Bezos, the inevitable tycoon. He was still Jeff Bezos, the dot-com, maybe dot-bomb guy. In any case, whether it was for h- from him or from Charlie, Char... There was this thing at Amazon, this is... You'll love this. It was called the Idea Tool, and anybody could put any idea into the Idea Tool and, you know, Jeff would sometimes look at them and maybe others, and some of them would get done. Charlie put A description of a rapid shipping program into the idea tool. And then presto, 100 days later, you have the launch of Amazon Prime. The idea of adding ancillary benefits to it, perks, came later.
- SPShaan Puri
Well, even the fast shipping thing, okay, that sounds not controversial, but nobody was doing it, and I think nobody was doing it because it was gonna be expensive. You'd lose money.
- EEEthan Evans
Mm-hmm.
- SPShaan Puri
And so there had to be some strategic rationale or some big picture vision or some clever hack to make that pencil out when you didn't... it wasn't clear that it would pencil out, right?
- EEEthan Evans
Yeah. Well, Jeff was willing to lose money for a long time, but, um, the big joke at Amazon for a long time was, "Oh, yeah, we lose, uh, money on every unit, but we'll make it up in volume." Which, of course, on straight math, you're just gonna lose more money. But of course, with economy of scale and potentially the evolution of time, things like Moore's law or whatever, you could shift the unit economics so that you can do that. With, uh, Prime had a trial run that you're not thinking of or recalling, and that trial run was simply free shipping. Before there was Prime, Jeff had a big argument again with this other guy, Jeff Wilke, uh, who was the Walmart guy, uh, where he said, "Look, we have to figure out a way to do free shipping." And Wilke said, "Yeah, but Jeff, shipping costs money. Like it's a thing. We actually pay for that." So, uh, Jeff said, "But my customers hate paying for shipping, so we gotta figure out how to do it." Well, uh, probably from Freakonomics you know a lot of the story 'cause it's been documented. But the key thing is what they did is when that very first came out, to get free shipping, you had to pay $100. And they realized like, "Oh, okay, at $100 we can put enough stuff in a box to get enough profit to, to give the shipping away." And then they started carving away. So if you actually look at the history, it went 100, 75, 50, then 25, and it sat at 25 for many, many years. And the secret they figured out by experimentation was at that point in time, the big things we shipped, I mentioned, were books, music, DVDs. $25 was this magic number that meant you had to buy two. You had to put two things in the box. And what they figured out was there wasn't enough profit in a single DVD to cover the shipping and still be in business. But if you could put two or more in the box, DVDs, CDs, some mix, there was enough profit to ship it for free. So Prime was an outgrowth already of having figured all that out
- 50:55 – 54:15
Good design vs. bad design
- EEEthan Evans
and seeing like, oh, we can figure out how to ship for free.
- SPSam Parr
Can I ask you a question about, uh, Amazon's website?
- EEEthan Evans
Sure.
- SPSam Parr
I use Amazon as an example about why bad design is better than good design, and I use the example like good, good design is used, um, I think poorly.
- EEEthan Evans
Mm-hmm.
- SPSam Parr
Good design means the, uh, the customer does the desired action. But oftentimes like a Brooklyn cool kid will think good design means like certain colors-
- EEEthan Evans
Colors
- SPSam Parr
... and fla- like whatever-
- EEEthan Evans
Yeah
- SPSam Parr
... this bullshit is. But if you go to like Amazon Kindle, which is their listing page, which is like one of the top selling products I'd imagine on Amazon, it's like thousands and thousands or it's probably actually hundreds of thousands of words if you add up all the reviews.
- EEEthan Evans
Mm-hmm.
- SPSam Parr
It's mostly copy. It's pretty ugly. There are some photos, but it is not what a 25-year-old cool kid would ever design. Can you tell me about some of the AB experiments that you guys ran or what the, what the strategy was for using copy versus like this beautiful... whatever the trend has been throughout the eras of like making things pretty?
- EEEthan Evans
Yeah. Well, first, everything at Amazon is AB tested, and the winner is what drives up sales. It's a program called Web Lab, and you run a Web Lab, and there are many... They have a complicated system so that thousands of competing experiments can be running at the same time, and yet somehow they can distill the data for one experiment and tell you what it did. So it is data driven and it's profit driven. Nobody cares about the pixels as long as they sell. There were many pushes in Amazon to make it prettier, and there were several design VPs hired who fought for that. The actual algorithm behind the Amazon homepage and Amazon pages for a long time was not what was on them, but how fast they load. Because Amazon came of age when internet was still somewhat slow, and they realized the biggest thing that drove abandonment was slow page load time, looking at the spinner. So the biggest single metric was not what are you putting on there, but how you, y- you militantly could not add a millisecond to load time. You know, if you wanted to add a feature, you had to figure out how to do it load time neutral. So the design, the, the o- the overall design principle I guess I'm telling you that was hidden behind the scenes was speed equals sales, and beyond that, whatever goes on the website equals sales, and pretty pixels didn't seem to matter. Clarity, having that buy box always be the same so you could find the buy button. And what could you put in the buy box that had an attractive offer? Low price, showing a discount, showing the delivery schedule. But mostly Jeff figured out low price drove business. Um, I was there. I said I joined in 2005. That means I was there in sort of the recession of 2007, 2008. Amazon froze hiring for a little while, and I had been in a couple startups that had run out of money, so I started looking over my shoulder like, "Oh, is it, you know, is it time to get the resume sharp again?" Amazon profited during that time because since we had focused so much on low prices,
- 54:15 – 56:15
The morality of Amazon
- EEEthan Evans
when money got tight, more people converted to online shopping. So that low price was a, just a huge driver for many, many years.
- SPSam Parr
I feel guilty sometimes shopping on Amazon because they just... A, I just buy the cheapest, dumbest shit that ends up just getting thrown away, particularly with kids. Shaan and I talk about this all the time. Like, for birthday parties, it's just plastic bullshit because... And, like, I'll be like, "Oh, someone just went on Amazon and typed in kids' bike, because I just got four of the exact same ones."
- EEEthan Evans
[laughs]
- SPSam Parr
Was there ever, like, a sentiment of, like, "I don't know if this is actually a net positive?"
- EEEthan Evans
So obviously, there was some thinking about that. You know, Jeff did the climate initiative. We've tried to do package stuff. Jeff has some environmental bones in his body, clearly. But in the end, I think he's also very much a libertarian and a free market guy, and his viewpoint is give customers the choice. It's up to them what they buy. Do I have some problems with it? Do I think Amazon is always a positive? I worry about some of that, just like you do. But I think, uh, from what I know of Jeff's expressed values, he would say, "Give customers choice. They will do the right thing." So he's a free market economics believer. I think he would also say, "Well, a lot of people are dumb," effectively. He wouldn't use those words. He'd say, "A lot of people buy dumb shit."
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- EEEthan Evans
Like, like, we are con [beep] .
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- EEEthan Evans
Well, well, am I doing wrong by letting people buy the dumb shit they want and making it easy? You know, I don't know. I think again, he'd be like, "There's always been dumb people buying dumb shit. I just give them a broader range of dumb shit to buy." And also, he would certainly say, "If I don't sell them the dumb shit, you know, the Bentonville boys will." So, uh, you know, 'cause Walmart was a huge stalking horse and opponent for a long time. He'd say, like, "Hmm, if people want dumb shit, we should do it best." There, there's a, there's an Ethan, uh, ascribing
- 56:15 – 1:04:10
Who Jeff studied
- EEEthan Evans
a new Amazon principle.
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- EEEthan Evans
Amazon should sell the dumb shit fastest and cheapest.
- SPShaan Puri
Was, was there anybody that he, uh, you know, he quoted a lot, or he seemed to admire or, you know, was a big fan of that you, we wouldn't, we wouldn't know?
- EEEthan Evans
The big one I can't remember, but it's somebody Warren Buffett also follows. You guys will know him. The gentleman who said, uh, the market isn't, uh... Short-term, it's a voting machine. Long-term, it's a weighing machine.
- SPShaan Puri
Benjamin Graham.
- EEEthan Evans
Benjamin Graham. So Jeff quoted that a lot. His-- He had a variation of it, which is he said, "Look, when Amazon stock goes up 10%, y- your... it doesn't mean we're 10% smarter. So when it goes down 10%, don't go around hang dog and feel like we're 10% dumber. Like, you know, because it's a voting machine, it's gonna go up and down. What we... The only thing we can do is focus on increasing our weight over time, and that will eventually, you know, eventually it'll be pulled back to the norm." He talked a lot about, uh, stock price in the sense of you've gotta put up with the volatility because I'm not gonna try... You know, he's got that famous statement in his letters about we'll take cash flows over short-term GAAP results. You know, we prioritize free cash flow, not optimizing for quarters. He, uh, he did say, you'll like this, "If you look at Amazon's history, it turned profitable for a single quarter and then went negative again." And he definitely said back at the time in that era, "Letting us go profitable for a quarter was a terrible mistake because now there's a comp versus if we had just stayed slightly in the red, we'd have been the, you know, always losing money company until we were ready to be profitable." So he felt kinda hosed by that one profitable anchor point.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- EEEthan Evans
I was in the room with him once when his CFO, they were having an argument about what to invest in a program. I think it was Kindle. The CFO, it's the previous CFO, a guy named Tom Szkutak, was trying to reel him in and said, uh, "Jeff, you know, we only have so much money in the bank." Like trying to say... 'Cause Jeff was investing in this and investing in that. Oh, we'll do this, do that. And, uh, this is Jeff's sharp edge. He turned to the CFO and said, "Tom. Well, how much is that, Tom? I might wanna spend it." You know, just making clear like-
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- EEEthan Evans
... remember our roles here. You count the pennies.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- EEEthan Evans
I use the pennies. Like, so thank you for your input, but your job is to tell me how many pennies we have. I will decide what to do with them. And he definitely could put people in their place. You know, it wasn't that... You know, you asked me about flaws earlier. Like taking your CFO and bitch slapping him in front of a room.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- EEEthan Evans
It was a message.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- EEEthan Evans
Because the CFO was trying to be pretty diplomatic, right? Like, "Hey, Jeff, stop wasting money like that," would've been like, "Ah, [beep] off." But like, "Hey, Jeff, you know, we only have so much money in the bank," is a pretty soft way to roll out, like, "Hey, boss, could you think a little bit before you spend another 10 million?" 'Cause we didn't have that many at the time. You know, Jeff wasn't having any of it.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- SPSam Parr
Dude, you're fun to talk to. You, you have, you, you also have a great voice.
- EEEthan Evans
Thank you.
- SPSam Parr
You got a great voice. You have an announcer voice. It's lovely.
- EEEthan Evans
Oh. Appreciate that.
- SPSam Parr
What are you, what are you, what are you, uh, gonna do in the next couple years? What's your 10-year goal?
- EEEthan Evans
So I left Amazon to try to help other people have success, uh, to pay... I, I say to pay forward my good fortune, but that's specifically by helping others have both career success and I think something you guys are more into now, career satisfaction. What's it all for? So I'm trying to help people get to financial security, but then to say, what are they gonna do with that? Because a lot of people don't have any cl- they're so focused on, I gotta get the nest egg big, I gotta pay off the mortgage, I gotta get the kids through college. So that's my main teaching is, yes, but then what? And for me, that's meant different types of social impact. Of course, my social impact mostly is helping other people succeed. I also do work, though, helping, uh, those displaced by the war in Ukraine. I run a charity in Poland that kinda catches them as they come across the border and rehomes them in Poland. So I have a number of things that give me personal meaning. The next thing I'm going to do, I think is something, Sam, you've done. I'm going to start a, a small coaching, a, a community. I get too many people asking me for coaching. I have to scale it somehow, and that really means bringing people together in small groups and masterminds so I can scale a little. So that's next up on the business front. 10-year plan is to... My vision is create more people who have the money and the confidence to then do something good in the world. I think there's a lot of people who envision that one day they'll do something good. I was one of them. I crossed that to where, to some degree, I'm now doing something good. I wanna create more people in that situation.
- SPShaan Puri
That's pretty cool. I- that's a gu- that's actually a surprisingly good answer for, uh, what sounds like a simple question that almost nobody really has a good answer to. So props to you for that.
- SPSam Parr
Take credit, Shaan. You're the one who inspired him to-
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah. Yeah, yeah
- SPSam Parr
... to do the-
- SPShaan Puri
Well, well done. Well done.
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- 1:04:10 – 1:13:19
Streaming career advice on Twitch
- EEEthan Evans
I'm a big believer in planning. One thing, if you wanna give people sort of a tangible, you know... A lot of people are working in corporate jobs. I absolutely used Twitch to get where I am today, and the specific way I used it was, uh, I started broadcasting on Twitch, not as a gamer, but as a coach. And a lot of people made fun, like, "What's Grandpa doing here talking to us?" You know, and all the usual dicks. But it gave me a chance to practice talking to random people about their careers and lives, and hone my message and my answers, and get comfortable on a mic and on a screen. Uh-
- SPShaan Puri
Sam, I don't know if you ever saw this. He would go live on Twitch, which is, like, not the place you would-
- SPSam Parr
You would, Ethan?
- EEEthan Evans
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
- SPShaan Puri
Ethan would go live. There would be, like, 30 or 40 viewers in the chat, which is, on Twitch, a, you know, [clears throat] not, not small, but not big, for sure.
- EEEthan Evans
Right.
- SPShaan Puri
Like, it's not like-
- EEEthan Evans
Very modest
- SPShaan Puri
... you're not, like, crushing it. It's very modest and, you know, it's username, you know, BallsBalls63. And BallsBalls63 is listening to this guy, he's like, "Are you really a VP at Amazon? Like, what? You're just giving career advice out here?" And then he would do it, and he would do it weekly, and he would... I really admired that. That takes courage and, like, not worrying about appearances. And you were just getting reps. [laughs] I didn't know where it was going, but-
- EEEthan Evans
Yeah. Well-
- SPShaan Puri
But... And maybe you didn't even at the time.
- EEEthan Evans
No, I didn't know exactly-
- SPShaan Puri
But it worked out really cool
- EEEthan Evans
... but I knew generally. So fun fact, though, Amazon VPs, executives, were not allowed to speak to the public without PR approval. So I knew that, and I'm like, " [beep] that. I wanna do what I wanna do." So before I ever did it, I sent email both to a leader in Amazon, who you would've known, a guy named Mike Frazzini, and to Emmett, and I was very careful and I said, I, I figured, like, "How can I get around this stupid PR restriction?" And I said, "Emmett, I think it would be really valuable if I started streaming on Twitch, because I need to use our product. I'm one of our executives. I wanna be an expert on the product. You know, do you support me streaming on Twitch? And by the way, I don't want any special privileges. I don't wanna be made a partner. You know, will you support me doing this?" And of course, what's he gonna do? I did a lot of this baiting people into obvious responses. Of course, he wrote back, "That's awesome. You should totally do it." So fast-forward, I'm doing it. It leaks back to Amazon. Some Amazon lawyer sees it. They forward it to an Amazon HR guy who works for Andy Jassy. That VP calls me up- And says like, "Uh, seems like you're talking in public without PR approval every week." And I'm of course like, "Oh, no. Well, first I've had PR training, and if you look at anything I've done, you'll notice I refuse to talk about the Amazon business. I only give career advice, i.e., I'm, you know, safe. But I'm using our product. I work at this company," and, uh, you know, all the bullshit you'd expect me to say. Bottom line is I have my CEO's approval to use the product, and that's what I'm doing. Well, credit to this HR guy, he goes silent for about a minute at last. He's smart and says, "Okay, I see you've thought about this." 'Cause he realizes I've, like, put up the shields that are gonna get hard, gonna be hard-
- SPSam Parr
Yeah, you did it. You, you, you judo'd him a little.
- EEEthan Evans
Yeah. But he saw it, and he's like, "So what's really going on here?" "I envision some future where maybe I'll wanna coach full-time." And he's like, "Okay, I got it. You're, you're going out on your own soon. You're gonna hang out your own shingle. Fine. Don't say anything stupid." Right? Like-
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- EEEthan Evans
... you know, he, he could see, like, this is a problem I don't have to fight 'cause it's gonna go away in six months when you leave, or you know.
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- EEEthan Evans
The takeaway point I think for people is how can you use what you're doing today to start building towards that good you wanna do tomorrow? I saw an opportunity to get in reps on Twitch. Well, everybody has some asset like that in what they're doing today that can become that orphanage tomorrow. I don't know what it is, and it takes a little creativity.
- SPShaan Puri
I remember Tony Robbins talked about this. W- early in Tony's career, he, you know, now he sells out stadiums-
- EEEthan Evans
Yeah
- SPShaan Puri
... and whatever, coaches presidents, but obviously you can't start there. So where did he, where did Tony Robbins actually start? I don't know if you guys know this story.
- EEEthan Evans
No, I don't.
- SPShaan Puri
He used to call into radio stations-
- EEEthan Evans
Mm
- SPShaan Puri
... and just say, "My name is Anthony Robbins, and I'm," you know, b- And he would make a bold claim that he couldn't even really fully back up. He's like, "If anybody's got a trauma, a phobia, I will cure it. I'll cure it in seven minutes. I don't care if you've had it for 17 years. You give me seven minutes, and I will snap you out of that pattern."
- EEEthan Evans
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
And people were like, "Oh, this guy's a charlatan." He said, "Oh, you think I'm a charlatan? Wonderful. Well, why don't you say it to my face?" And they're like, "What?" He's like, "I will be here to prove it. I will be at the mall on Westridge by the fountain." And he's like, "You c- anybody can come, and you could see for yourself that this is real. This is realer than real." And then he would go to the mall, and two people would show up, and he would c- get some guy to stop smoking cigarettes, and he tried to do it in seven minutes. It actually took 70 minutes for him to, like, run his whole routine until he felt like he got him there. But then he would do it, and he would check back in. He'd be like, "I got him." And he would do it again the next week and the next week, and he was just performing at malls un- like, not even-
- EEEthan Evans
Hey, yeah. Yeah
Episode duration: 1:13:19
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Transcript of episode 0_hpTKQqKOQ
