And Vento, the team behind this fantastic event. Congrats to the Vento team who did not tell me that I'd have to be riffing for a couple of minutes, but security is tight and rightly so, of course. Okay, it's going to be about an hour-long conversation, we hope, between John and Jeff talking no doubt about leadership, about businesses into the future, about innovation and maybe collaboration between Europe and the US on some of these key technologies. Please welcome to the stage John Elan and Jeff Bezos.
Thank you, Jeff, for being here in Torino. Last time was 2017.
Yeah. And a lot has happened since.
Yeah, for sure. So what you're seeing today, we really started in 2016 and it was very much driven by trying to see how we could in Italy and in Turin be more entrepreneurial and be more attuned with technologies of today and of tomorrow. And since then, if you look over the last decade in Europe, you've had investments going from 45 billion into the tech ecosystem to 425. If you look at the programs which we've been involved in, like Vento who came out from that 2016 period, we've now invested in many companies with Italian founders in Italy and outside of which one has just been acquired by Amazon. So thank you. Thank you. And the event that was started in 2018, 100 people, now we have 15,000 and we could have had more but we're constrained by capacity and this has very much been driven by Dial and all the team that have made it possible to be here today. Amazing. Amazing. Very cool. All of this to say that there's a huge amount of optimism. The president of the European Commission would sort of underline was very strong about why it's important to be optimistic. What do you think?
Well, first of all, I get all weak-kneed around entrepreneurs. I just love entrepreneurs and I always have. Like missionary entrepreneurs, people who are, you know, they're doing it because there's something about the mission that they just can't not do it. They're so passionate about it and I'm guessing that this room is full of such people and I think you should be very optimistic. In fact, entrepreneurs need to be optimistic almost to the point of delusion. You need to be right there. There's this, you may remember the great John F. Kennedy speech about going to the moon and other things. He says we do these things not because they are easy but because they are hard. But I've always thought that for entrepreneurs it should be a little different. We do these things not because they are easy but because we thought they were going to be easy. So that's a useful attitude for entrepreneurs and you know, Europe, you hear these things about Europe that it's, you know, it's not enough dynamism in Europe, there's too many regulations in Europe. Let me assure you there are plenty of regulations everywhere and what you need is that can-do attitude, that entrepreneurial attitude, that's what drives people to success and Europe has all of the ingredients they need to be a dynamic, entrepreneurial, you know, just a huge success and you can tell it just from the people in this room. Do you agree?
And of course, startup companies, small companies thrive in moments of great and rapid change. Stability favors incumbents and rapid change favors small, dynamic, nimble startup companies. And so the world is so rapidly changing right now. There's never been a better moment to be an entrepreneur. There has never been a better moment to be a startup company. And if you think about entrepreneurs and startup companies, Amazon now is a very large company. We are involved with very large companies and there's this idea that if you want to be an entrepreneur you should drop out from college, start your own company. Whilst if I look at my own experience, luckily I did not drop out from college and start my own company when I was studying engineering here and I ended up working for a very large company back then which was General Electric where I did learn how to work, where I had colleagues from many different places who had a lot to teach me and I was wondering if you had the different path than dropping out from college and starting your own company. If there are multiple paths and if working for big companies is also not exciting and within a large company you could still be entrepreneurial.
So there's a lot packed in there and I'll tell you my view on this is that it is possible to, you know, be 18, 19, 20 years old, drop out of college and be a great entrepreneur and the world is, we have famous examples of that working, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, etc. But these people are the exception. I always advise to young people, you know, go work at a best practices company somewhere where you can learn a lot of basic fundamental things. How to hire really well, how to interview, etc. There's a lot of stuff you would learn in a great company that will help you and then you can still, there's still lots of time to start a company after you have absorbed it. It increases your odds in my opinion. I started Amazon when I was 30, not when I was 20 and I think that that extra 10 years of experience actually improved the odds that Amazon would succeed. So that would always be my advice. I finished college and I enjoyed college and I think it's been helpful to me. And then I went on and I worked for a really great company called D. E. Shaw where I learned a tremendous amount, tremendous amount there. And working, and by the way as you mentioned when you're inside a big company you can be entrepreneurial. Big companies need mavericks. They need people to lift them up and make them see new things. And it's up to the leadership of big companies, good companies, best practices companies when they get larger, they defend their mavericks. They don't eject them. They figure out how to support them and keep them, you know, driving change inside the company because really most big companies get comfortable and the mavericks cause discomfort and so it's easy to keep them away and kind of drive them out, but you'll lose so much that way. At Amazon and at Blue Origin, we're very careful to keep our mavericks.
And I think this is really important, Jeff, because what we're trying to do here is show the future both from new companies who start but companies also who transform and evolve. Yeah. And being clear that working for our companies, for Amazon, for Stellantis, for Blue Origin, for Ferrari, for CNH is exciting. Yeah. And gigantic opportunities inside those companies and you can also on the back of that and on the back of that experience start companies that you would have had more difficulty in imagining if you started from scratch and I think that's important to share this experience with all of you. And among the experiences that also I felt was important and being more personal, one of the similitudes that Jeff and I have is we have had the fortune of having a very loving family and among a loving family we had very strong relationships with our grandparents and particularly we had grandfathers who had a big influence in what we did. So I had a grandfather, he was very young, 56 years old and he spent a lot of time with us and he really was able to do two things which have been very meaningful for me. On one side always try and stimulate curiosity and the way he would do that was always asking questions of what we'd think and it's quite rare that children get asked what they think and in any different situation if we'd go to a museum or if we'd meet someone or if he'd always be interested and that stimulation of curiosity and the second thing is responsibility since very young he really would want us to make choices. And choices could be like he liked to watch movies, had a very very short attention span. So if the movie wasn't good, five minutes was gone. If you like go half the way to the movie, that was success. And so we always had to choose the movie he would see. And so going from those small responsibilities to bigger responsibilities like taking care of something that he felt was important or a guest that he had and that trust in us and that sense of responsibility are things that stayed very much with me. And I know you also had incredible grandparents and incredible grandfather. And what stays as of today from him, from what he taught you?
Well, you're right. This is something we have in common. My mother had me when she was very young. She had just turned 17 years old. She was still in high school in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In fact, they tried to kick her out of high school for being pregnant. And my grandfather said, 'No, you can't kick her out. It's a public school. She gets to finish high school.' So anyways, there she was pregnant with me in high school and finishing her whole senior year after I was born. And because she was so young, my grandparents took me every summer so that she could have, you know, some other kind of life for a few months. Not only she was, you know, when you are a very very young mother, you grow up very fast. And so every summer from the age of three or four until I was about 16, I went and spent with my grandparents on their ranch in South Texas. And my grandfather at that point, so I only knew him as a rancher. He had done a bunch of things in his life, but at that point he was a rancher. And he did, and this is quite common, I think, in rural areas, that people do everything themselves. He did his own veterinary work. He repaired everything. He had this D6 Caterpillar bulldozer that he bought for like $5,000 because it was completely broken down. And we spent an entire summer fixing it. And to get the transmission out of the thing, we had to build our own crane. And so he had an incredible resourcefulness to him, you know, he believed he could solve any problem. And I sort of watched him, you know, his veterinary work on the cattle. He would make his own needles. He would get a little piece of wire and heat it up with a blowtorch and pound it flat and then sharpen it and drill a little 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 for me. And I thought I was a very smart little kid. I was very confident. And this I'm only at this point maybe 10 years old. And this was, you know, this would have been 1974 and there were a lot of radio commercials on the car radio about how smoking cigarettes kills you. This was 10 years after the US surgeon general's warning and it was still like there was big campaigns to get people to stop smoking. And one of these radio commercials said, 'Every puff on a cigarette takes two minutes off of your life.' And my grandmother was a chain smoker. She smoked all day long. And so always when we were in the car, she would have the window down and she'd be smoking the whole time. And I hated this. I thought it smelled bad and I didn't like it. And I was listening to these radio commercials. And so I decided I would calculate how many years of her life she had taken off by if every puff is two minutes. And I did some estimating and I stood up in the back of the car and I proudly announced that she had taken, I don't remember what the number was, let's say seven years off of her life. And I thought in my 10-year-old brain that they were going to congratulate me for being so clever. And instead, she burst into tears. And I was taken aback. My grandfather pulled the car over on the side of the road and he had never said one harsh word to me, by the way, in our entire relationship. He never did say a harsh word to me, by the way. And so he pulled me around. He took me out of the car and took me out to the backside of the car. She's still in the front seat, tears coming down her cheeks. And he said to me, I had no idea what he was going to say. And he said to me, '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. Yeah. And in some ways it's a choice and technology is just a tool that one can use. That's right. And you need to be clever to make technology but you can be kind in applying it. And I do think that for most of all you should also feel very at ease not only in being clever but equally being kind in what you do. Yeah. And the demonstration of what you've built and what Amazon is doing and in similar ways different conversations over the years we've had of this idea that business is a harsh environment, there's a very important humane side of it and then what we do is really we put technology and cleverness to the service of others and you can do that in a way which is kind. Yeah. And valuable. Yes.
And I think long-term thinking squares these things. So whenever you're in a situation where it seems that the short term, you're doing a business deal with someone and if you think you're never going to deal with them again, then maybe you would come to a certain answer. But if you realize, I'm probably going to deal with this person for the rest of my life in one way or another, you come to a different answer. And so long-term thinking, whether it's with your customers or your business partners or even with, you know, family members and loved ones, thinking about, okay, what do I want this to be like, not just right now, but five years from now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now. So, you know, in retail, I would always rather lose a sale than lose a customer. And you're thinking long term and shareholders and customers and the business. Everyone is aligned if you think out 10 or 20 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. And I do feel that if you do look at long term and if you think on decades rather than months, yes, what matters today is important for 10 years. Yes. And if you have that idea that 10 years things will be better and that we will have made progress, it helps today and it does relieve a lot of angst.
It also helps you decide what to focus on. So if you know in a world that's rapidly changing and because of AI and all the technologies we have and the dynamism in the world, so many things are changing and they're changing so rapidly. So if you think long term, it forces you to think what are the points of stability? What is not going to change? And one of the things that changes very slowly is customer needs. And so you can build a strategy around customer needs that will have durability. It will be durable in time. So an example at Amazon is that customers like fast deliveries. And so you would never expect to 10 years from now it would be impossible to imagine a customer saying I love Amazon I just wish you delivered a little more slowly or I love Amazon I just wish your prices were a little higher or at Blue Origin I love your rockets but I just wish they were a little less reliable. And so you can, these ideas, these big ideas that are customer-based, they start with the customer. It's an idea that is in the customer's brain. Those are the ones because human nature doesn't change rapidly. And so what we as customers want tends to change slowly. And if you base your energies and direction and strategies and tactics, everything that makes a company effective around those customer needs. Then you can change the details of how you get there all the time because the world is changing so rapidly. The technologies will change, your competitive set will change, everything will change except those needs. And so that's another way that long-term thinking is protective because it forces you to think about the real customer needs to center those as your big ideas and then put energy into them in a hundred ways and to be very dynamic. I always say be stubborn on the vision and flexible on the details and you have to be because the world is changing and you change your mind. I've noticed that people who are right a lot change their mind a lot. People who are wrong a lot are very 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. And I think this is really important particularly to who is starting their careers to make sure that reality is really key in what you do. And the other part that I think is really valuable, Jeff, and today we wanted to speak about dreams and to be able to dream, be dreaming and be building. And sometimes you just dream, but you're not able to build. Other times you just build but can't dream. And a lot of people know you as a founder, as a builder. But the reality, and I've been fortunate to know part of that reality well, is the inventor and Amazon was an invention. Blue Origin is an invention and there are many inventions that you've been making and that's what really is interesting for you. How can you make sure that as you invent and one of the main topics that we've discussed is how it's important to wonder, how it's important to explore. But as you invent and you wonder, how were you able not to get lost?
Well, that is such a good question and you know, my really my best thing, my favorite thing is to be with a small group of people with a big whiteboard in front of me and inventing. I am an inventor. This is my fundamental nature. And I remember one time we had an executive at Amazon for many many years, a guy named Jeff Wilke who was instrumental in the success of the company. We've been gifted with a large number of fantastic executives including Diego Piacentini who I think might be in the audience somewhere. And thank you Diego. Diego's contributions to Amazon are legendary and to Vento too. So thank you Diego. And so one day in the early days, because literally put me in front of a whiteboard and I can come up with a hundred ideas in half an hour. And early in Amazon's history, Jeff Wilke came to me one day. He worked for Amazon for a quarter of a century. But this is when he probably knew me only for a year and he said, 'Jeff, you have enough ideas to destroy Amazon.' And this was such a shocking idea for me. And as a founder I had the great luxury of always being able to hire my tutors, they would hire these experienced senior executives brilliant people like Diego and Jeff Wilke and there were several others too and I would listen to them and they would teach me. And Jeff said you have enough ideas per minute per day per week to destroy Amazon. I was like what do you mean? He's like you have to release the work at the right rate that the organization can accept it. And he was a manufacturing expert and so you know his view of the world was every time I released an idea I was creating a backlog, a queue, work in process and because it was just stacking up it was adding no value and in fact it was creating distraction. And so he said, 'Look, you have to figure out when to release these new ideas at a rate that the organization can accept them.' And this was, I mean this sounds so obvious, but it was not obvious at the time to me. And this was a profound insight for me. And so I started prioritizing the ideas better, keeping lists of them, keeping them to myself until the organization was ready for the ideas. And then I also started figuring out how can I build an organization that can be ready for more ideas. That's about having the right senior team and the right leadership and getting those people the executive bandwidth so they could do more ideas per unit time. And so that is what we built. We built a company that's very good at inventing and doing more than one thing at a time. And you do want to build as the company gets bigger, you do want to be able to do more than one thing at a time. But that idea of releasing the work was very profound for me. And it made us operationally more effective while still being inventive.
And do you think you're a better inventor on the back of that? So the actual inventions that probably because it also forces you if you are releasing the ideas through time it forces you to prioritize them better. You end up sharpening the ideas better. And so yeah probably does but you have to wander. Thank you.
