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Founders: #321 Working with Jeff Bezos

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What I learned from reading Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr. --- Founders Notes gives you the superpower to learn from history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. You can search all my notes and highlights from every book I've ever read for the podcast. Get access to Founders Notes here. --- (8:00) Principles Jeff Bezos would repeat: customer obsession, innovation, frugality, personal ownership, bias for action, high standards. (10:30) Single threaded leadership: For each project, there is a single leader whose focus is that project and that project alone, and that leader oversees teams of people whose attention is focused on that one project. (11:00) The best thing I did as a manager at PayPal was to make every person in the company responsible for doing just one thing. Every employee’s one thing was unique, and everyone knew I would evaluate him only on that one thing. I had started doing this just to simplify the task of managing people. But then I noticed a deeper result: defining roles reduced conflict. — Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Futureby Peter Thiel. (Founders #278) (12:30) Jeff said

[00:00:00] 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 one of his aircraft manufacturing facilities to check on the progress of his [00:00:31] latest project, the Hughes H-1 Racer, which is…

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