Clark: True trust is built by delivering on hard, high-effort promises
Dave Clark · Dave Clark: Lessons from Leading 1M Employees w/ Jeff Bezos at Amazon to CEO of Flexport | E1036 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Jul 17, 2023 · at 25:45
Dave Clark, former Amazon executive and CEO of Flexport, shares his core management mantra regarding how companies earn credibility with clients and teams.
0:00 / 0:21exact quote · 21.3s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“And, but if you deliver on it, you earn an immense amount of trust. Like it, you get a lot of credit for committing to deliver something that they know is not, that they know requires a lot of work. And then when you actually do, just following through on, you know, doing what you mean, meaning what you say, you know, is where trust is built.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Dave Clark
Clark: One-hour delivery lacks a feasible, profitable business model
“There's not a real feasible, like one hour delivery profitable model. Yeah. Despite, you know, all the efforts, you know, all the subsidized, you know, funding processes to the contrary, there's not a lot of great profitable models for that.”
Clark: Unscaled last-mile delivery startups will fail, not be acquired
“And the people without scale just won't make it. They'll go away. I don't expect a lot of acquisition, because there's not a lot of value in acquisition for those.”
Clark: Amazon culture evaluates people solely on yesterday's performance
“Amazon's a fairly intense place, you know, and it's a you know, Amazon, I think you kind of, you know, it's very, you know, you're as good as what you did yesterday kind of thing. There's not a lot of longitudinal, you know, stickiness in that way.”
Clark: Hire for the job needed three to five years out
“And I think too many people look for somebody who's going to do what they're told. Like, you know, they want somebody who's going to fill the job of the now. And what I want is somebody who's gonna fill the job that's gonna be the job three years from now, or …”
Clark: Jeff Bezos excels at context shifting and focusing on critical 10%
“He is one of the best simplifiers, if not the best simplifiers I've ever met, which is he can context shift incredibly well. You have a meeting, you know, this hour on AWS, the next hour on the consumer business, the next hour on labor, and be perfectly in the…”