He spent a lot of time with us and was able to do two things that have been very meaningful for me. On one side, he would always stimulate curiosity by asking us what we thought. It's quite rare that children get asked what they think. In any situation, going to a museum or meeting someone, he'd always be interested. The second thing is responsibility. Since very young, he wanted us to make choices. He liked to watch movies but had a very short attention span, so if the movie wasn't good, five minutes and it was gone. We always had to choose the movie he would see. Going from those small responsibilities to bigger ones, like taking care of something important or a guest he had. That trust in us and sense of responsibility stayed very much with me. I know you also had incredible grandparents and an incredible grandfather. What stays with you today from what he taught you?
You're right, this is something we have in common. My mother had me when she was very young. She had just turned 17, still in high school in Albuquerque, New Mexico. They tried to kick her out for being pregnant, and my grandfather said, 'No, you can't kick her out. It's a public school. She gets to finish.' So there she was, pregnant with me, finishing her whole senior year after I was born. Because she was so young, my grandparents took me every summer. When you're a very young mother, you grow up very fast. Every summer from age three or four until I was about 16, I spent time with my grandparents on their ranch in South Texas. My grandfather, I only knew him as a rancher at that point. He did everything himself, which is common in rural areas. He did his own veterinary work, repaired everything. He had a D6 Caterpillar bulldozer he bought for about $5,000 because it was completely broken down. We spent an entire summer fixing it. To get the transmission out, we had to build our own crane. He had incredible resourcefulness, this belief he could solve any problem. I watched his veterinary work on the cattle. He'd make his own needles from a little piece of wire, heat it with a blowtorch, pound it flat, sharpen it, drill a hole through it. Some of the cattle even survived.
And I remember a very meaningful lesson that he gave you when you were in the car with your grandmother who used to smoke.
Oh yes, that was a very formative moment. I thought I was a very smart little kid, very confident. I was maybe 10 years old, this was 1974, and there were a lot of radio commercials about how smoking kills you. This was ten years after the US Surgeon General's warning and there were big campaigns to get people to stop. One commercial said, 'Every puff on a cigarette takes two minutes off of your life.' My grandmother was a chain smoker. She smoked all day long. Always in the car, window down, smoking the whole time. I hated it. I thought it smelled bad. So I decided to calculate how many years of her life she'd taken off if every puff is two minutes. I did some estimating, stood up in the back of the car, and proudly announced she'd taken, I don't remember the number, let's say seven years off of her life. I thought in my 10-year-old brain they were going to congratulate me for being so clever. Instead, she burst into tears. I was taken aback. My grandfather pulled the car over. He had never said one harsh word to me in our entire relationship. He took me out of the car to the back side. She's still in the front seat, tears coming down her cheeks. I had no idea what he was going to say. He said, 'Jeff, one day you'll understand that it's harder to be kind than it is to be clever.'
And the reason I think this is a very meaningful lesson is because there's this idea that technology is clever but not kind.
And in some ways, it's a choice.
And technology is just a tool that one can use.
That's right. You need to be clever to make technology, but you can be kind in applying it.
And I do think that, above all, you should feel very at ease not only in being clever, but equally in being kind in what you do.
And the demonstration of what you've built and what Amazon is doing, and in similar ways, conversations we've had over the years about this idea that business is a harsh environment. There's a very important humane side of it. And what we do...
Is really putting technology and cleverness to the service of others.
And you can do that in a way which is kind.
And valuable. Yes. And I think long-term thinking squares these things. Whenever you're in a situation where the short-term answer seems clear, like you're doing a business deal and think you'll never deal with that person again, you might come to one answer. But if you realize you're probably going to deal with this person for the rest of your life, you come to a different answer. Long-term thinking with customers, business partners, even family members, thinking about what do I want this to be like not just now but five, ten, twenty years from now. In retail, I would always rather lose a sale than lose a customer. Everyone is aligned if you think out ten or twenty years.
And that is also important in moments like the ones we're living, where there's a lot of uncertainty, a lot of angst.
If you just get devoured by now, you'll lose the optimism for tomorrow. If you think on decades rather than months, what matters today is important for ten years. If you have the idea that in ten years things will be better and we'll have made progress, it helps today and relieves a lot of angst. Long-term thinking also helps you decide what to focus on. In a rapidly changing world with AI and all these technologies, it forces you to think about points of stability, what is not going to change. Customer needs change slowly. Build a strategy around durable customer needs. Customers like fast delivery. You'd never expect a customer to say, 'I wish you delivered more slowly' or 'I wish your prices were higher.' Be stubborn on the vision and flexible on the details. People who are right a lot change their mind a lot. People who are wrong a lot are stubborn on the details.
And that is also self-awareness of how reality is rather than how one would want it to be.
This is so true. You know who's undefeated? Reality. Reality wins every time. It's completely undefeated.
I think this is really important, particularly for those starting their careers, to make sure reality is key in what you do. The other part I think is really valuable, Jeff, today we wanted to speak about dreams and the ability to dream and build. Sometimes you just dream but can't build. Other times you just build but can't dream. A lot of people know you as a founder, a builder, but the reality is the inventor. Amazon was an invention. Blue Origin is an invention. There are many inventions you've been making, and that's what's really interesting. How were you able, as you invent and wonder, not to get lost?
That's such a good question. My favorite thing is to be with a small group of people with a big whiteboard in front of me, inventing. I am an inventor. This is my fundamental nature. I remember one time we had an executive at Amazon named Jeff Wilkkey, instrumental in the company's success. We've been gifted with fantastic executives including Diego Piacentini, who might be in the audience. Thank you, Diego. Diego's contributions to Amazon are legendary and to Veneto too. In the early days, because I can be put in front of a whiteboard and come up with a hundred ideas in half an hour, Jeff Wilkkey came to me one day. He'd known me maybe a year. He said, 'Jeff, you have enough ideas to destroy Amazon.' This was shocking. As a founder I had the luxury of hiring brilliant senior executives like Diego and Jeff Wilkkey, and I would listen to them. Jeff said, 'You have enough ideas per minute, per day, per week to destroy Amazon.' I said, 'What do you mean?' He said, 'You have to release the work at the right rate that the organization can accept it.' He was a manufacturing expert. His view was that every time I released an idea, I was creating a backlog, work in process, stacking up, adding no value, creating distraction. He said I had to figure out when to release new ideas at a rate the organization could accept. It sounds obvious, but it was not obvious to me at the time. This was a profound insight. I started prioritizing ideas better, keeping lists, keeping them to myself until the organization was ready. I also figured out how to build an organization ready for more ideas, having the right senior team and leadership with executive bandwidth. We built a company very good at inventing and doing more than one thing at a time. That idea of releasing the work was very profound. It made us operationally more effective while still being inventive.
And do you think you're a better inventor on the back of that? The actual inventions?
Probably, because releasing ideas through time forces you to prioritize them better. You end up sharpening the ideas better. So yes, probably.
But you have to wander. Thank you.
Wandering. Just one more thing on wandering. Wandering is so important because it's a kind of humility. When people think about how much to wander, it sounds so inefficient. But the only way to go straight to your destination is if you know where you're going. Sometimes you know, but sometimes you don't. Wandering is the acknowledgment that in life, business, exploration, invention, building a company, a lot of the time you can see the mountaintop but you can't see the trail. You have to explore and wander. It may feel very inefficient, but it's actually very valuable. It's a recognition, a humility that you don't know where you're going.
But inventing has a dose that is not efficient, and it does require time to get ideas, to learn, to dream.
