For the following interview, Francis Suarez, mayor of the city of Miami, takes the stage of America Business Forum.
Get ready to have some fun. They love you, man.
So, let me just start by saying that the big miracle here is not that we have Jeff Bezos closing day two of the American Business Forum. The big miracle here is that we're running on time. So Jeff, you are the ultimate use case for a successful ecosystem. You're a Miami guy. You went to high school here in Palmetto High.
And you built two of the most successful companies shaping the world today. Did you ever think you were going to come back to Miami?
Well, this little kid who went here in high school 40 plus years ago was dreaming at that time of building a space company that would one day take heavy polluting industry off Earth. And this guy sitting here on stage with you is still dreaming the same dream 40 years later. That kid was also working at the McDonald's on Dixie and 130th Street. I recently took Lauren there. We drove through the drive-thru, got Big Macs and chicken nuggets. It looks exactly the same as it did 40 years ago. That was a great job, by the way. I learned a lot. Be on time. You have to start at the bottom. I cleaned the bathrooms. You learn a lot. The ketchup dispenser got stuck open one day. Five gallons of ketchup all over the floor. Then who do you think they asked to clean it up? This guy.
It's such an incredible lesson. I think for everybody here, part of the whole sort of genesis of this entire conference is the people in the audience seeing and hearing someone like you tell that story about McDonald's. And understanding that they can be up here one day. And I think we've seen this metamorphosis of Miami from a regional hub to what it is today. You who have, you know, your most precious asset is your time, but you've chosen to invest that most precious asset here in our ecosystem. What is it about our ecosystem? What is it about Miami and that change from a regional center to sort of a big tech conference and tech...
It has completely transformed over the last 40 years. It's an incredible city today. It has the energy and the dynamism. I love the Latin part of the culture here. There's so much energy. It's so alive. And I have personal reasons, too. My dad is Cuban. He's here in Miami. But this city has such good energy. You can just feel it. As soon as I land, I feel that energy. As soon as the plane gets on the ground, I feel that energy.
You started Amazon out of your garage and you saw the internet sort of happening before it happened. How did you, what confidence did you have in taking a leap that you could create a company like the one that you created?
Well, you know, all big things start small.
So, you've got to accept that that's the way it is. And you got to plant an acorn and work hard and water it and nurture it and maybe it grows into a big tree. For me, I made that decision and I knew that if I didn't try, I would always be haunted by that. I would always have regret. I would always wonder what might have been. And I think that's the best way when you're making a deeply personal decision about your own life. You can make pros and cons lists. You can be as analytical as you want, but at the end of the day, you have to project yourself forward. You know, age 80, we're all living longer now, maybe age 90, and say, do I want to be haunted by that regret? I want to minimize the number of regrets I have in my life. And when you start thinking that way, that you're looking back on your life from age 90, most regrets are acts of omission. They're things we didn't do.
I think one of the things I've learned from you and reading what you said and just being in your presence is you think about things very differently sometimes than everybody else does. Sort of this first order thinking that you have. And so often times people in a sort of disruptive modern day world are thinking about how do you predict the future, and what you said was diametrically opposite. You said what are the things about the future that we know are not going to change. And then you gave examples. You said...
You said, you know, we're not going to want to get packages slower.
We're not going to want things with less quality and we're not going to want to pay more for those things. And you can build a business around...
Knowing the things that aren't going to change. Tell us a little bit about that thinking and sort of...
So, you know, we live in a very dynamic world and everything changes. Technologies change, your competitive set changes, so many things are changing every day. You can't build a strategy on those. You have to build a strategy around stability. So you have to find the things that are not going to change and say 10 years from now what's going to be the same. And most of those things are going to be customer needs. So, as you were saying, examples for Amazon would be low prices, fast delivery. Nobody 10 years from now is going to say, 'I love Amazon. I just wish they delivered a little more slowly.' That's impossible. And you can use this... At Blue Origin, we have a rocket launch coming up this Sunday. I'm good, but I'm very anxious about it.
I know. I know. That's why I was trying to break the ice a little.
A lot. I'm excited and anxious. It's the second time we've launched the vehicle. It's a giant vehicle. It's called New Glenn. But I can use this method. What do we focus on for something like that vehicle? It's the same kinds of things that we know our customers will want. Nobody's going to say 10 years from now, 'I love New Glenn. I just wish it was a little more expensive' or 'I love New Glenn. I just wish it was a little less reliable.' Like in the context of being a mayor of a city, the same thing works. You can say, 'Look, 10 years from now, is anybody going to say, I love Miami, I just wish the crime was a little worse.' Or, 'I love Miami. I wish that the ambulances came more slowly or that the taxes...' You see what I'm saying?
Yeah, the taxes were higher.
These things are so fundamental. And when you pin them down, you can then put energy into them, making them better and better and better. If the ambulances take 11 minutes to come, then maybe you work on getting it to be 10 and a half minutes and then 10 minutes and 9 minutes. And that's how you could make a city great. And that's one of the things that people, I think, often times in business, people make this mistake. They focus too much on what's changing instead of what's not changing.
So sometimes intuition and data align and that makes it easy to make decisions, but often times the data and the anecdotal evidence or the intuition are misaligned. How do you sort of navigate that and what does your instinct propel you to do in those cases?
Well, it's a very interesting question. First of all, if you're running any organization of any scale whatsoever, it is essential to have data and to rely on data. That's so basic and so fundamental. But the data doesn't tell you everything. It often doesn't tell you about changes or things that you're missing or things that you're not measuring properly. And so that's where anecdotes come into play. And that's where intuition and gut instinct and heart come into play. A lot of the biggest things that we've done at Amazon, and it's going to be true in space for Blue Origin as well, it's true in AI, a lot of them come from instinct and hunches. If you take Echo and Alexa, which has been a fantastically successful product for us, it's installed in hundreds of millions of endpoints. Nobody was asking for a black cylinder that's always on that you can talk to and ask for music and to turn your lights on and off and set timers. We didn't know if people would want that. You just have to kind of use your intuition. AWS, again, nobody was asking for that. We had to use our intuition. Third-party marketplace. You know, we've been working on doing cloud computing in space at Blue Origin because you get eight times as much solar power per unit of area in space as you do on Earth. And so in principle you could make data centers in space that would be very efficient. That's something Blue Origin is working on, a lot of other companies working on that too. But that's not something you can be sure is going to work. You don't know what launch costs are going to be and other things. So technically it works but there's a lot of mysteries about it too. When you're talking about invention, you have to be a wanderer. You have to wander because if you're not wandering, you're going in a straight line. That means you know where you're going and a lot of the most important discoveries and most important inventions don't come from knowing where you're going.
Let's transition a little bit to Blue Origin. You were just talking about this impending launch. All the people that are working together, all the pressure, the expenses, etc. Why is space exploration so important to you?
Well, for me there are a bunch of reasons. But literally since I was a kid, literally a kid here in Miami, I have been thinking that ultimately if we want to keep growing our civilization and using more energy per person, we're eventually going to have to move all of our heavy industry off Earth. And that will happen. I know it sounds a little fantastical. Maybe it sounds like science fiction to some degree, but it will happen. I don't know how soon it will happen. It's a job that I won't finish. Probably my children's children won't finish. This is something that multiple generations will work on, but it will happen. One of the first steps there is that we already put a lot of communications in space. We can start to build factories in space. We can start to build data centers in space. We will ultimately get the materials not even from Earth but from the moon and near-Earth objects and asteroids. We have unlimited energy in space and unlimited material resources in space. And this planet is so beautiful and so unusual. This is the one that we're going to want to protect. There's no Plan B. We've sent robotic probes to every planet. This is the good one.
Listen, it sounds fantastical, but so did this conference to many people.
Yes. A lot of things that we have today sound fantastical. Go back in time a hundred years and show somebody your iPhone.
Very fantastical. They'll freak out. So, Amazon, Blue Origin, two very different companies.
Talk to me about your mindset in how you sort of pivoted from one thing to the other and how your brain works to be able to come up with something like this.
Well, I'm fundamentally an inventor. It's the thing I do the best. It's the thing that I enjoy the most. I'm a good brainstormer. I love problem solving. And to me, that creation of new ideas is what drives the world forward. Somebody 10,000 years ago or whatever it was invented the plow. And when they invented the plow, they made the whole world wealthier. And that's what happens. Every discovery, every invention, somebody invented penicillin and they made the whole world better. They discovered it and they perfected it and then they expanded it to other antibiotics. We're sort of one invention at a time. The world gets more prosperous. And that's my mindset. That's how I think about the world. I don't think there's any problem if we apply human ingenuity to it that we can't solve. And it's fun to do that, too.
So here's the inevitable pivot. AI. Everybody's talking about it. You can't have a conversation without it. You can't even give a key to the city apparently.
And rightly so, by the way.
Right. What about AI is exciting you? You got to see things that probably nobody else gets to see. What's exciting?
Heavily involved in AI. I spend a lot of time at it at Amazon and at Blue Origin and with some startup companies that I'm investing in. It is everything it's cracked up to be. Investors right now are investing in everything, the good ideas, the bad ideas, but the fundamentals of what are happening are very powerful. It will impact every industry and it will make every industry more productive. You'll see, you know, medicine, diagnosis will get better, so will drug discovery get better. But literally you can go through every single industry and every manufacturing industry, everything is going to get better. You in Miami should have an AI application that reads your building permit for a new house or a new building and it should give you a yes or a no in 10 seconds. And if the answer is no, it should tell you the six things you have to change to get a yes. And why does it take months and months and months to get a building permit? It doesn't make any sense.
He just described a business that I would love to create.
Exactly. This is a business opportunity.
This is a hundred billion dollar business, by the way.
Huge business. And most things, like have you ever noticed with any kind of permitting process in government, at the state level, the municipal level or the federal level, they almost always say yes, they just make you wait a long time.
So like if they're going to say yes, can we do that quickly?
