Jeff Bezos

“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.”

“Jeff often makes the distinction between mercenaries and missionaries. Yeah? Mercenaries are the startup founders that are in it for the money. Yeah? And missionaries are the ones that are in it for the love of the product. Yeah? I want to build this product, …”

“Jeff Bezos once said that, like, taste is not transferable across domains, and to me, this is like a great example of that. I would say, Elon, like, if I drive a Tesla, I think it's the best car that I've ever sat in, but the taste and the decisions they made …”

“So choosing the software architecture of your tech stack used to be a one-way door. Once you're built on top of a certain tech stack, you know, set a database schema, really hard to change it. So that used to be a one-way door. I don't want to say it's totally…”

“Founder mode is for Every founder. I like to say to founders, you went and became a founder to bet on yourself, and now you don't, you shouldn't abdicate that to somebody else, to your board or your investors.”

“One of my very many failed investor pitches was in 2015 when Jeff Bezos passed on our seed round at Boom. And then he wrote the 2015 Amazon shareholder letter about how there's certain things that only big companies can do. And he cited airliners as one of the…”

“He was laughed at internally and laughed at by his board when he launched Amazon Web Services. He was laughed at by the world for e-commerce.”