Jeff Bezos, every mention
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Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Jeff Bezos comes up
Amazon Web Services · Acquired
- ▶ 27:03 David Rosenthal So after this meeting, Jeff does two things.
- ▶ 30:16 David Rosenthal And APIs that really starts to take hold, at least in Jeff Bezos's mind.
- ▶ 36:58 David Rosenthal Jeff is so focused on this and not only Jeff, his new assistant at this time is focused on this, his new technical assistant, his shadow, who is at this point in time, Andy Jassy, who was the first, a lot of listeners maybe don't know…
- ▶ 37:20 David Rosenthal Jeff's shadow.
- ▶ 37:32 David Rosenthal So the reason that Jassy becomes Jeff's first shadow is Jassy, it was a Harvard MBA.
- ▶ 37:57 David Rosenthal And Jassy was gonna get laid off with the whole department, but Jeff liked him.
- ▶ 38:02 David Rosenthal And so Jeff said, I'm gonna save Andy.
- ▶ 39:09 David Rosenthal But this is now the biggest problem in the company that Jeff is focused on and that Andy's focused on.
- ▶ 41:46 David Rosenthal That is not what Jeff and Andy decides to do.
- ▶ 42:07 David Rosenthal Jeff has been exposed here and Andy too as his TA to this concept of web two dot O this concept of APIs.
- ▶ 46:01 David Rosenthal And he himself was a hardened interface and Amazon is so terrible and Bezos is so terrible and they're so mean and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all this stuff.
- ▶ 46:36 David Rosenthal Steve writes that Jeff and Andy, uh, you know, as part of this sent a memo out to the whole company at Amazon.
- ▶ 46:44 David Rosenthal It was a big mandate and quote, Jeff's big mandate when something along these lines, one, all teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.
- ▶ 47:26 David Rosenthal Bezos doesn't care.
- ▶ 49:18 David Rosenthal And so this is where Jeff has this realization of none of that makes the beer taste better.
- ▶ 53:52 David Rosenthal Jeff Bezos himself is an investor in the company alongside Sequoia, Index, and many, many other great VCs.
- ▶ 57:37 David Rosenthal Of course, it wasn't like Bezos just sent the email that Steve Yege described and everything happened overnight.
- ▶ 57:44 Ben Gilbert Okay, so what you're telling me then is Bezos gets excited about this.
- ▶ 58:28 David Rosenthal Jassy's been working a lot on it as Jeff's TA and Jeff's like, okay, Andy, it's time for you to go back out into the company.
- ▶ 58:43 David Rosenthal It's almost like an echo of Jeff and David Shaw back at De Shaw.
- ▶ 1:00:21 David Rosenthal And Jeff loves it.
- ▶ 1:00:45 David Rosenthal Colin becomes Jeff's next shadow.
- ▶ 1:01:06 David Rosenthal Colin becomes Jeff shadow.
- ▶ 1:08:51 David Rosenthal Concurrently and separately to everything we just said in story number three, Randy Jassy working on Jeff's TA on this big problem, writing the vision doc, the business plan, all that hiring.
- ▶ 1:10:23 Ben Gilbert Here's where Ben Black and his blog post on the subject and then in future interviews he gives with Network World and others are very insistent that they then showed this to Jeff Bezos.
- ▶ 1:10:35 Ben Gilbert The proposal made its way to Jeff Bezos.
- ▶ 1:10:37 David Rosenthal Yeah, I think first to Rick and then to Jeff.
- ▶ 1:10:48 Ben Gilbert Before it got in front of Jeff get merged into Andy's proposal, and it was sort of greenlit as one big thing, or were there actually two different concurrent efforts?
- ▶ 1:13:00 David Rosenthal I spent most of my time trying to hide from Bezos.
- ▶ 1:13:18 Ben Gilbert Bezos Jassy leadership that even in the official Amazon things that they put out about the development in South Africa, like Chris Pinkham's name is sort of nowhere to be found even in this South Africa specific blog post about the history…
- ▶ 1:15:00 David Rosenthal What's Jeff's invent and wander, you know, is the kind of mantra of him and the company.
- ▶ 1:53:34 Ben Gilbert Well, in 2014, Jeff Bezos wrote a memo, the annual memo that comes out to letter to shareholders, and said that quote, I believe that AWS is market size unconstrained.
- ▶ 1:54:15 Ben Gilbert So it was probably like a four billion dollar business when Bezos is like, wow, this thing, I think it's unconstrained.
- ▶ 1:55:25 David Rosenthal Jeff is, it's a crazy statement, but I think he's right.
- ▶ 1:56:37 David Rosenthal Jeff Bezos becomes CEO of the whole company.
- ▶ 1:57:23 David Rosenthal Jeff Bezos.
- ▶ 2:31:05 Ben Gilbert Ok, my next one is about asymmetric upside, and this is another Bezos letter that I'm gonna quote from 2015, where he says, given a 10% chance of a hundred times payoff, you should make that bet every time.
- ▶ 2:32:24 Ben Gilbert And I think Jeff Bezos got that better than most VCs do.
- ▶ 2:32:41 Ben Gilbert So like all of these things, there's lots to say about Jeff Bezos.
- ▶ 2:33:10 David Rosenthal That's the most Jeff Bezos thing ever.
- ▶ 2:33:56 David Rosenthal Kind of like Bezos.
- ▶ 2:38:14 David Rosenthal I think on the last episode I said if, but of course, when we get to interview Jeff Bezos, the question I really want to ask him is, is it still day one?
- ▶ 2:38:34 David Rosenthal And Jeff would say, I told you guys all along is architected to always be a day one company in that it needs to always keep growing.
- ▶ 2:39:25 David Rosenthal Maybe this is part of Jeff stepping back and Andy Jassy becoming CEO of the whole company.
- ▶ 2:39:35 David Rosenthal I mean, I can imagine that that's a challenge that I'm totally projecting here into Jeff Bezos's mind.
- ▶ 2:40:36 Ben Gilbert And that's the exact opposite message of what Jeff Bezos said in the 20 20 letter right when COVID hit.
Amazon.com · Acquired
- ▶ 0:53 David Rosenthal Tom was the longest serving Amazon board member other than Jeff himself.
- ▶ 2:08 Ben Gilbert We've tackled bits and pieces, like our interview with former board member Tom Alberg in the Amazon IPO episode, our episode with Alfred Lin on Zappos, and of course by referencing Bezos' famous 2009 speech about outsourcing anything that…
- ▶ 3:07 Ben Gilbert So while you may be familiar with Jeff's flywheel diagram, or the famed door desks, or the Barron's article from the .com bust headlined Amazon.bomb, I can tell you from staring at my mountain of notes that, uh, there are some details in…
- ▶ 11:56 Ben Gilbert Oh, such a good quote, and he was writing that in 1992 while Jeff Bezos was ideating on what ideas could work on the internet while working at D.E.
- ▶ 13:28 David Rosenthal Where one Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen is born.
- ▶ 13:42 David Rosenthal When young Jeffrey's mother became pregnant, she was 16.
- ▶ 15:09 David Rosenthal Of Jeff Bezos' biological grandfathers worked there together, and Jeff's mom, Jackie, her dad was named Lawrence Preston Giese, Pop.
- ▶ 16:04 David Rosenthal And when Jeff is about 18 months old, they end up getting divorced.
- ▶ 16:09 David Rosenthal And Jackie, Jeff's mom, takes the baby, moves back in with her parents, because she's still only like 18 or 19 years old at this point.
- ▶ 16:17 David Rosenthal Eventually, a couple years later, when Jeff is four, Jackie remarries and moves in with her new husband, who is a petroleum engineer for Exxon, and her new husband's name is Miguel Aniel Bezos Perez.
- ▶ 16:37 David Rosenthal Jeff Bezos's adopted father.
- ▶ 18:29 David Rosenthal Mike adopts Jeff as his adopted son.
- ▶ 18:57 David Rosenthal Bezos grew up.
- ▶ 19:06 Ben Gilbert I mean, we're not gonna get into Blue Origin on this episode, but I think the last time we would have sort of talked about Jeff's space roots would have been, I think, on the Virgin Galactic episode when we were talking about the…
- ▶ 19:29 Ben Gilbert But basically, the College Space Club, Jeff was the head of that club, the president of the one, and maybe the founder of it at Princeton.
- ▶ 19:50 David Rosenthal Jeff, which we'll talk about in one sec and introduces him to science fiction and space because he was involved in all that at DARPA.
- ▶ 19:59 David Rosenthal Jeff grew up in Houston during the Apollo era.
- ▶ 20:05 David Rosenthal So Jeff goes to a Montessori preschool in Houston and he gets put into a new program for gifted young students in the Houston elementary school system.
- ▶ 20:46 David Rosenthal For you, Jeffrey Bezos.
- ▶ 20:49 Ben Gilbert I mean, there's a number of ways we could highlight how special Jeff was even as a very, very young child, but this is a pretty darn good one.
- ▶ 21:17 David Rosenthal There's a quote in the book, so it's, uh, written under, he's a pseudonym, he's quote unquote Tim in the book.
- ▶ 21:28 David Rosenthal So there's this quote in there where Julie, the author, asks Tim, Jeff's teacher, what grade level he's performing at.
- ▶ 21:49 David Rosenthal So, right around the time when the family moves to Houston, Pop retires from Sandia, and he and Jeff's grandmother move back to a big ranch in West Texas.
- ▶ 22:14 David Rosenthal And starting at this point, so Jeff's four when this happens, Jeff spends every summer on the ranch living with his grandparents a hundred miles from the nearest store, and he's just hanging out with his grandparents.
- ▶ 22:47 David Rosenthal You know, Brad writes about this in the book, but, and Jeff talks about this too, like, I think this is one of the most formative experiences of the person that becomes Jeff Bezos, because for the months that he's there every summer, they…
- ▶ 23:37 Ben Gilbert Man, it's so hard to do a podcast about Amazon and Jeff Bezos now because the company and Jeff as a person are a symbol for so many different things to so many different people.
- ▶ 23:52 Ben Gilbert Things that hit me when, you know, of course I follow Jeff on, on Instagram and you see him in sort of his cowboy boots with the blue origin rocket.
- ▶ 24:33 David Rosenthal So when Jeff's a teenager for high school, Exxon moves his dad to Florida, first to Pensacola and then to Miami.
- ▶ 25:04 David Rosenthal Jeff, as you said, graduates high school as valedictorian, and like all great talented high school graduates, goes on to Princeton.
- ▶ 25:30 David Rosenthal While Jeff is studying computer science at Princeton, Brooke Shields, Michelle Obama, and Jeff Wilkie is also there at the same time.
- ▶ 25:46 David Rosenthal So when Jeff graduates from college in.
- ▶ 27:17 David Rosenthal The reason we're spending so much time on Jeff's early years, and now we're gonna spend a lot of time on this chapter, it's totally like one of those Steve Jobs things.
- ▶ 27:25 David Rosenthal Like you can't connect the dots looking forward, but when you look back through Jeff's past, Joy Covey, who we'll talk about actually has like this quote that she gives to Brad Stone.
- ▶ 27:33 David Rosenthal Like it's like a straight line, you know, from birth to Jeff Bezos today.
- ▶ 27:41 Ben Gilbert Well, it's really hard to cover Amazon as a business without it being a Jeff Bezos biography, because in so many ways, Amazon is an, an extension of Jeff Bezos's brain.
- ▶ 28:09 Ben Gilbert Even though it's called Amazon, at least for a very long time, call it its first decade, it really is just Jeff Bezos at scale.
- ▶ 30:00 Ben Gilbert And Bezos does always sort of chuckle at that, where people would say, wait, you're starting this business that's meant to take advantage of this new piece of technology, and the new piece of technology is particularly good at distributing…
- ▶ 30:50 David Rosenthal Jeff gets a fateful call from a headhunter.
- ▶ 30:54 David Rosenthal Jeff's happy where he is.
- ▶ 30:55 David Rosenthal He was thinking about starting this startup and, uh, convinces Jeff to go interview at a new firm, financial firm that has been started just a couple of years earlier called D E Shaw.
- ▶ 31:10 David Rosenthal And Jeff, I think unexpectedly completely
- ▶ 31:39 David Rosenthal I assume with some of the professors who went on to go found FITEL that Jeff
- ▶ 34:15 David Rosenthal Well, and I think this is what Jeff falls in love with about the firm and about David.
- ▶ 34:21 David Rosenthal So Jeff joins, he rises through the ranks super quickly.
- ▶ 34:55 David Rosenthal To Jeff.
- ▶ 34:57 David Rosenthal So Jeff loves it there.
- ▶ 35:24 David Rosenthal Jeff Holden, I believe Bezos is involved in recruiting.
- ▶ 35:33 Ben Gilbert Conspicuously close to two years exactly after Jeff left Eshaw.
- ▶ 35:51 David Rosenthal And, uh, that's what we were referring to of Jeff falling in, in love at D Shaw in more ways than one.
- ▶ 35:58 David Rosenthal Count Jeff and Mackenzie would get married.
- ▶ 36:12 Ben Gilbert Certainly, she was already doing work, I think, particularly on accounting, working with legal, kind of setting up the operations of the business, before Jeff hired Shel Kappen, who was the first engineer, the first sort of full-time hire…
- ▶ 36:44 David Rosenthal And so David has Jeff working on a bunch of this stuff.
- ▶ 37:42 David Rosenthal But David and Jeff, you know, given their backgrounds and like David having done his PhD at Stanford, they know all these people that are starting the internet.
- ▶ 37:51 Ben Gilbert And even Bezos himself.