Jeff Bezos

Who

Jeff Bezos studied at Princeton and worked at the investment firm D. E. Shaw before leaving in 1994 to start Amazon near Seattle. It began as an online bookstore and grew into one of the largest companies in the world. In 2000 he founded the space company Blue Origin. He stepped down as Amazon’s CEO in 2021 and became executive chairman.

Operating rules

Minimize regret, not risk. He has described deciding to leave a good job by imagining himself at 80. He would not regret trying and failing. He would regret never trying.

Know which doors are one-way. In his shareholder letters he separates decisions that are hard to reverse from those that are easy to reverse. The first kind deserves slow, careful thought. The second should be made quickly by small teams, because being slow is its own cost.

Write the narrative, not the slides. Senior meetings at Amazon became known for starting with a written memo of up to six pages, read in silence before discussion. Full sentences expose weak thinking that bullet points can hide.

Work backward from the customer. New products often start as a draft press release and a list of likely questions, written before any building begins. If the announcement is not compelling, the product probably isn’t either.

What I borrowed

The one-way door test. Before I decide anything, I ask whether it can be undone, then decide how long to spend on it. It keeps my 12-week sprints moving, and it saves my slow, careful thinking for the few choices that deserve it. His memos also strengthened my habit of writing bottom line up front.

What I won’t copy

The scale of personal bets. A decades-long project like Blue Origin rests on a fortune few people will ever have. His patience is portable. His balance sheet is not.