Jeff Bezos
An AI built from 28 public sources about Jeff Bezos's work. It is not Jeff Bezos and is not endorsed by them.
Think through a business problem the way Jeff Bezos wrote about it: start from the customer, work backwards, take the long view and decide fast when the door swings both ways.
Big ideas
- Obsess over customers, and work backwards from a need: A company can center itself on competitors, products, technology or customers.
- It's all about the long term: The 1997 letter set out how the company would choose.
- Cash flow, not earnings, and inputs, not outputs: He said a share is worth the present value of future cash flows, so the figure to drive is free cash flow per share .
- Price, volume and the flywheel: **Price against the math.** When you cut prices, short-term math nearly always says you should have raised them.
- Day 1 versus Day 2: "Day 1" is the energy of a young company that is still experimenting.
- One-way doors and two-way doors: In 2015 Bezos split decisions into two types.
Hire Jeff Bezos for
- A new product or service: Write the press release and the list of hard questions before you build anything.
- A stuck decision: Sort it into a one-way door or a two-way door, and pick how much evidence is enough.
- Meetings and memos: Turn a deck into a narrative memo your team can read in silence, then check it.
- Goals and numbers: Swap outputs for the inputs you control, and find where a metric or a rule has quietly replaced the real goal.
- Bold bets: Design an experiment and work out how much failure you can afford.
- An annual letter or review: Write to your team or owners about what you will do for the long term, in plain promises.
- Hiring and standards: Set the bar for a role and for the quality of the work.
- Learning a hard skill: Judge what good looks like and how long it truly takes.
Skills from their work
- Annual letter writer
- Business activity metric planner
- Cash versus earnings checker
- Decision evidence checklist
- Decision method planner
- Durable customer need finder
- Future press release writer
- Long-shot bet planner
- Long-term principles writer
- Narrative memo checker
- Product launch FAQ writer
- Program keep-or-cut reviewer
- Reversible decision sorter
- Six-page narrative memo writer
- Stakeholder value calculator
- Team decision announcement writer
- Partner update about mistakes
- Weekly product funnel watcher
- Work-backwards plan checker
- Business bet risk review
- Business metric quality review
- Team decision ownership planner
Pairs well with
Built from
- 2012 letter to shareholders, with the 1997 letter attached, Jeff Bezos
- 2015 letter to shareholders, Jeff Bezos
- 2016 letter to shareholders, Jeff Bezos
- 2017 letter to shareholders, Jeff Bezos
- 2020 letter to shareholders, Jeff Bezos
- Working Backwards, Werner Vogels, All Things Distributed (2006)
- Leadership Principles, Amazon
- Jeff Bezos, Wikipedia
- Criticism of Amazon, Wikipedia
- 1997 letter to shareholders (reprinted at the end of the 2015 letter), Jeff Bezos
- 1998 letter to shareholders, Jeff Bezos
- 1999 letter to shareholders, Jeff Bezos
- 2000 letter to shareholders, Jeff Bezos
- 2001 letter to shareholders, Jeff Bezos
- 2002 letter to shareholders, Jeff Bezos
- 2003 letter to shareholders, Jeff Bezos
- 2004 letter to shareholders, Jeff Bezos
- 2005 letter to shareholders, Jeff Bezos
- 2006 letter to shareholders, Jeff Bezos
- 2007 letter to shareholders, Jeff Bezos
- 2008 letter to shareholders, Jeff Bezos
- 2009 letter to shareholders, Jeff Bezos
- 2010 letter to shareholders, Jeff Bezos
- 2011 letter to shareholders, Jeff Bezos
- 2013 letter to shareholders, Jeff Bezos