Everything Jason Kilar said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Kilar: 90% of people are not comfortable with Amazon-style culture
“It's something that I bet 90% of humans out on the sidewalk would absolutely not be comfortable doing, and therefore they should never apply and go work at a place like Amazon.”
Jason Kilar: Company culture is determined by how leaders act when unobserved
“You know, as the founding CEO of Hulu you know, it was very, you know, clear to me that the culture of Hulu really was going to be how I acted a lot when no one was looking because people model that over time and then it perpetuates.”
Kilar: Relying on good intentions at scale guarantees organizational failure
“When you're, as Sam and Reed were saying, when you're a team of 30, good intentions are good enough. But when you're a team of a thousand or 10,000 or 300 plus thousand, as the case is with Amazon right now, Good intentions are a recipe for disaster, and certa…”
Kilar: Celebrating the destruction of bureaucracy is essential when scaling
“When you're scaling a company, Bureaucracy, which is bad process, creeps in each and every day, and to be able to have mechanisms that celebrate the destruction of bureaucracy that's just as important as things that celebrate frugality”
Company cultures must repel bad fits as much as they attract talent
“It's very, very important when you think about your cultures to make sure that they're a repellent as much as they are a magnet because then, you know, you've, you actually stand for something and you're actually probably going to be effective so long as you m…”
Kilar: Constantly disagreeing with an employee means they are in the wrong role
“I don't think it should happen a lot, and if it's happening a lot, I would ask if you've got the right person in the role, if there's a certain person that you're constantly disagreeing with that's my experience at least.”
Kilar: Hulu took more inspiration from Disney than from Amazon
“It's funny, I took more from Disney than I took from Amazon when it came to Hulu.”
Kilar: Bad process is bureaucracy, good process is a mechanism
“Bad process is bureaucracy, good process is a mechanism.”
Sending a comic strip to Michael Eisner landed Kilar a Disney internship
“What finally landed me an internship at Disney was sending a comic strip of myself to Michael Eisner and his direct reports. And so this was the comic strip where Back then there was a movie called Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, and I basically used that as a narra…”
Kilar personally interviewed Hulu's first 500 team members
“I think probably for the first 500 team members, I interviewed everybody as well”
Kilar: Three of Jeff Bezos's direct reports have tenures of 19-20 years
“My peers, three of my peers who are there today, they are there 19 years, 19 years, and 20 years in terms of other direct reports of Jeff.”
Kilar: Hulu Grew From Zero to $1B Revenue in First Six Years
“There wasn't probably a week that went by during the first six years of Hulu's life where it obviously started at zero and went to a billion dollars in revenue in the first six years of its life where we were not tested in terms of how we behaved and the decis…”
the Y Combinator Startup Podcast 1