Andy Jassy on AI, Bezos, and the Secrets to Amazon’s Success

There is this very strong force inside the company that we're here to make customers' lives easier and better every day. And a lot of companies talk about it. Not that many really live it. And Amazon is a company that really lives it every day.

I buy so much on Amazon Prime. Probably either razor blades or biotin. I buy so many of my everyday essentials from Amazon just because the selection is so broad and the delivery is so fast, so convenient. So, that's probably the last two.

And bless you, David. Thank you.

A lot of my childhood was dominated by sports. I played competitive tennis. I played that junior national circuit and I played soccer. And I would say on the tennis side, it was actually kind of a hard way to grow up. It's such an intense sport. It's so individual focused. When you lose, there's nobody to blame but yourself. When you win, there's no one to really celebrate with but yourself. And growing up on the East Coast, I also felt like the parental environment around tennis was very intense. But tennis taught me a lot of lessons that have really helped me later in my life. It taught me what hard work looks like and what happens when you don't work hard. It taught me really how to be focused in the moment. When you get to competitive levels in tennis, all the matches are won by like 15 to 20 points during the match. So, you just have to have the ability to be laser focused in the moments that matter. It taught me how to move on. You can play a tennis tournament and have the best win of your year at 9:00 am and then go out at 2 PM and play another match and it's all gone. And so, you have to be able to move on from success really quickly and from failure very quickly because when you play tennis at a competitive level, you rarely win the tournament. So, it means you actually lose almost every single time that you play. It did teach me as well that you have to find a way to be good to yourself even when things go wrong. We all plan so hard and work so hard and no matter what happens sometimes it just doesn't work out and if you're competitive and have high standards you have to live with that and then you have to find a way to give yourself a little bit of a break. I learned those things from tennis which have been helpful. And one lesson from my soccer life which really involved my dad, who's probably the person on this planet that I most respect. As a kid, I really kind of worshiped my dad. I still do. But I remember I went to a soccer game, my younger brothers, and I was driving my dad crazy and I just being antsy and he said, 'Why don't you go run a mile around the track?' The field was inside of a quarter mile track. And so I went and I ran it really slowly, but I ran it. And I got back and I said to my dad, 'See, I did it.' And he said, 'If you're going to run like that, why bother running? If you're going to do something, do it.' And he doesn't really remember that story, but that story always stuck with me that if you're going to do something, whatever it is, do it. And do it to your fullest or don't do it. So, those were good lessons for me.

I did. I loved watching the movie Broadcast News, if you've ever seen that movie. That gave me the bug for TV. And then I got an opportunity to work as an intern between my sophomore and junior years in college, which I then did for three years working for a startup morning show in New York called Good Day New York. I started about a month and a half before it went to air. And I just loved everything about it. I love the rush of live TV. I love the imperfections of live TV and the things that go wrong are often some of the most amusing moments. So I thought I wanted to be a sportscaster. I sent my reel to I don't know 80 markets around the country, small markets. I only got two offers. They were in places I just couldn't bring myself to move to. And I went and worked at ABC Sports initially as a production assistant. And back then when there were way fewer places to be that were broadcasting live sports, that was kind of the end of my sportscasting career was moving to production.

I went from doing that, working at ABC Sports to working at a direct marketing company that a couple Procter & Gamble guys spun out. It was really a great general management experience. They did direct marketing of continuity series collectibles and I learned a lot doing that. And then I got a little bit bored with the subject matter and I tried a couple of my own businesses that went middling but they weren't what I wanted to do long term. So I went back to business school and when I was at business school I thought that I would probably start my own business again. That's really what I wanted to do. And I had written this field study with a few friends from school on building a music management label company that we called Cage Shakers. We had a band that we were managing at the time in Boston called Tuton Shoe and that was going to be the first band in this thing. I was going to do one of my partners and his wife very appropriately said, 'We're not spending all this money and going into debt so you can start like a music label company with Andy.' So he decided not to do it. And then I decided I would probably go work at a company, try and pay back some debt, and I could learn a lot. And it's funny. I went to the Bay Area for a last round interview at a technology company. I took a redeye back to Boston. I hardly ever checked my answering machine, but my wife was at work, so I checked it. And there was this woman who came on and said, 'Look, I found your resume in the resume book. I have a cancellation at 9:00 a.m. I'm not going to fill it. You can come or you can not come. It's your call.' It was this woman from Amazon. I didn't even really know Amazon at that time. This was probably March of 1997. But I was leaving that morning at 11. I was driving with my friend to go see a concert in New York and then go on spring break. So I had this window. I said, 'Oh, I'll go to the interview.' I went to the interview. I loved the person I met. I got asked to come to Seattle. I really liked the people I met in Seattle. And my then fiance now wife, we had met on the East Coast, but she's from LA, and she wanted to live closer to her family for a couple years. And our plan was, which we wrote on a napkin in a bar, that we would be on the West Coast for two to three years and move back to New York City. That was our plan. And so I got this job at Amazon and I was really excited about the idea of it. Nobody knew. Anyone who tells you they knew Amazon was going to turn into what Amazon turned into was just lying to you. Nobody knew. But I did figure that if it didn't work out, it did seem the internet was going to be a big deal. And it did seem that e-commerce was going to be a big deal. So I would have interesting experience to take back to New York. And that was almost 28 years ago. I started here three days after the last final exam of business school and I've been here for almost 28 years at this point.

I wished I kept the napkin but I don't have the napkin and my wife has argued that the statute of limitations on that napkin have expired. So I'm here.

Well, first of all, I feel like my journey or adventure was a lot of luck. And I think maybe one of the things I did best was not overthink it. I have a 21-year-old son and a 24-year-old daughter. And one of the things I see with them and their peers is that they all feel like they have to know what they want to do for their life at that age. And I really don't believe that's true. I mean, look at the path. I wanted to be a sportscaster and then I did sports production. Then I was a product manager. Then I started two businesses during that whole interim before I went to business school. I worked at a retail golf store. I coached my high school soccer team. I tried investment banking. I tried sales at an ad specialty company. So, I tried a lot of things. And I think that early on, it's just as important to learn what you don't want to do as what you want to do because it actually helps you figure out what you want to do. And I went to business school in part thinking when I was doing recruiting at the end of college, I was doing sportscasting. So I didn't do any of the recruiting and I didn't take any of the classes that would allow me to maybe be an investment banker or do consumer packaged goods or lots of things. And I got done with business school and realized after trying all the other things that I did and didn't like them that I actually wanted to go back and do something entrepreneurial. So, I do feel like one of the lucky parts for me was that I tried lots of things and was able to sort for myself what appealed to me and what didn't. I think your attitude is an embarrassing amount of your success or lack thereof. Are you reliable? Do you do what you said you were going to do? Do you work hard? Do you like being on teams? Are you trustworthy? Are you a good learner? I feel like those are things that you can control and it's actually amazing to me how often people don't control it but you really can completely control those things and I feel like I worked hard at those things over time.

Well, I could probably fill your whole podcast, David, with stories of things that didn't go well or times I failed. And I actually will say for whatever it's worth that every most significant learning I've had has been after something that didn't work out. If you're self-reflective, it's just an incredible opportunity to self-assess and figure out what you want to change. But I've had many experiences that were embarrassing. But I'll tell you one of them. When I was probably 2001, I was co-running marketing for Amazon with another person and we used to do these operating planning reviews that were very long PowerPoint presentations. We don't do PowerPoint anymore in the company, but back then we did and we had this deck that this co-marketing leader and I did that was like 140 pages. It was really long deck and I owned presenting the first 70 pages and we worked really hard on this presentation. So it was in front of the senior leadership team and I get maybe three slides in and I'm talking about customer retention and Jeff Bezos, who was our founder and was our CEO at the time, interrupted me and said all the numbers on this page are wrong. And you're not expecting that. So I said, 'Well, why do you think they're wrong?' And he started to go through the first set of numbers and you know that feeling when somebody is going through it and you're realizing step by step that they're right. He's not all the way through it yet. And I realized as he's saying that somehow the numbers are all wrong. And so I said, 'Well, actually, you're right. These numbers are wrong.' And then there was this long pause. He said, 'Why should I trust one other thing you say this entire presentation?' And I said, 'Well, I hope you do because we have 137 pages left in this presentation. It's going to be a really long few hours for you if you don't.' And it was, I would say the presentation did not go well. I don't think we covered ourselves in glory, particularly me. But it's funny, in many ways that experience was very seminal for me because it was one of my worst fears realized. One of the things I had to get over in my career was whenever I got in front of new audiences who I felt like didn't know me well, I too often felt like it was a past fail referendum on my competence. And the thing I almost always feared most at work was going into a big meeting and being exposed as not knowing what I was talking about or being wrong or not worthy. And so here it was really kind of my worst fear realized and I got through the presentation anyway. I regained my composure and it was not a great presentation but it was not a catastrophe and I felt like afterwards, that's the worst that happens when you get something really wrong and get called out for it publicly. I can deal with it. And so it was actually in a weird way a confidence builder.

Yeah, he did. And you know what? He did hang in there. Actually, everybody was very respectful the rest of the way. Who knows if they were paying attention, but it seemed like they were.

It's unlike any role I've ever done or will do in the future. It's funny. Interestingly inside the company when I was asked to do the role, everybody I respected told me not to do it and they said, 'You're too senior to do that role. It's like a glorified briefcase holder. It's such a left turn in your career.' And the only person who told me to do it was the person I was co-running marketing with. And some of it may have been that he wanted to run marketing himself, but the thing he told me that at least I believed him on was that he had done the same role in the British Navy and that he had found it an incredible learning experience. And so Jeff very graciously offered me the ability to shape what the role would be with him. We made it like a chief of staff role. And then the idea for him was it was a way to extend his bandwidth. We would be in all the same meetings together, including his one-on-ones. And he would often say to me, 'Why is nobody telling me anything?' I would say, 'Well, it's not really a one-on-one because I'm in the meeting.' But it was a way for him to extend his bandwidth with somebody who'd been at the company for a while. Then for me, I just was able to soak up everything. Jeff is one of the most amazing business leaders in this generation and all his leaders were also quite good and I got to learn just how they led and a lot of things that I wanted to emulate, some things that maybe I wanted to avoid. And so what I learned in the role apart from just observing is just I always was amazed at the way that Jeff was able to context shift. It was a different form of what I was talking about earlier in being in the moment in tennis and those 10 to 15 points. The breadth of what we do at Amazon is quite broad. And he was amazing at going from one meeting working on things in our fulfillment network to going to the next meeting inventing technology that could help with discovery in our retail business. He was just really good at turning it on and turning it off and moving to the next topic and being in that topic and not allowing the last meetings to distract him. He also was quite good at asking people for more than they thought they were capable of doing. And that was a really interesting learning experience, too, just because as a leader, you often don't want to over ask because you feel like people might turn you off if you ask for things that aren't realistic. But he had a really good balance of how to ask for more than what the team believed they could do, but not so much that it wasn't credible. And that was really interesting to me. I felt like I had really high standards heading into that job. That was a strength of mine. And I realized that my standards weren't high enough after doing that job. So, I just learned a lot in the role and I was very lucky to do it. It really did shape a lot of my leadership career.

Many times. In the early stages of AWS, which I went to do coming out of that shadow job, I worked with a team of people to write a vision document to see if there was something there when we were defining the first set of services. He pushed the team and me to think bigger than we were already thinking. I remember in the early days of AWS when we actually had the services built and we were trying to attract enterprises and startups used AWS from the very start. A lot of the big startups of the last 15 years, Instagram, Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe, built on top of AWS. But when we started getting enterprises and government agencies using AWS, it just changed the trajectory of the business. And I remember in the early days enterprises really like to match up title for title. So, a lot of these enterprise CEOs, if they were going to do a big deal with us, wanted to talk to Jeff. And I would say to Jeff, 'I really need your help. I really need you to come and talk to this enterprise and that enterprise.' And he just refused to do it. And I remember sitting in a conference room with him talking to him about it when we were about to try and approach Netflix, who became our first really big all-in AWS customer. And I was really kind of pleading with him to do it. And he said, 'You know what? You can do it. And good luck with it.' And actually it was great. It was just what I needed at the time. And just knowing that there wasn't an alternative made me have to figure out how to step up on those spots and be the right partner for those enterprise CEOs. And it would never have scaled given the breadth of Jeff's job as CEO of Amazon if he had had to be in the middle of those conversations. So, he was right about that, but I wasn't sure at that time that people would accept it and it was great the push.

Well, it's funny, David. I never really thought much about it before because I loved what I was doing running AWS and I also just didn't think Jeff was ever going to step away from it. And so some people said, 'Oh, you must have thought about it for a lot of years.' I really didn't until he told me. And I was not expecting it. As I was thinking about it, I had a few months in between when it was announced and then when the transition happened. AWS is maybe a sixth or a seventh of the size of Amazon in general. And I remember when AWS was a tenth of the size of what it was at that moment and it didn't seem that different to me. So I thought maybe it might not be that different. And it turns out the job is really different. If you're going to run one of these significant businesses, AWS being one of them, you have to massively delegate to be successful, but you can still be in the weekly rhythms of the business. I could still go to the weekly business review or the weekly ops review or the weekly sales review. When you have 25 businesses across the company, you can't be in the weekly rhythms of the business. It doesn't scale for the businesses or for you or the company. So you have to build completely different mechanisms in what you're going to spend your time on and how you're going to audit and inspect and add value. So that was different. I think a second thing was all the people that were going to report to me I knew them all because I was on the senior leadership team with them for many years and I had good relationships with virtually all of them. And so I just didn't think it was going to be that big a deal moving into the new job. But what happened was every single relationship reset. I didn't expect that. Some reset really quickly, some took a little longer to reset and some never reset. And the ones that didn't reset, both sides have to move on from that. But I didn't expect that. And then I would say, I think anytime you become the CEO of a company, there are predecessors and people are going to always want to compare. And I was succeeding, to your point, maybe the most iconic business leader of our generation. I think that a lot of people told me before I did the job, 'You just have to be you.' And that sounded a little bit cliche to me and it's kind of easier to say than do.

But I realized over time that was really true: you have to play to whatever your own strengths are, and you can't try to be someone else. You can learn from whoever you worked with in the past, but you can't be that person. You have to be who you are. I had the circumstance in 2022 on the backside of the pandemic where we had all sorts of challenges. We took a fulfillment network that we built over the first 25 years of Amazon and doubled it in 18 months, then built out a last-mile transportation network the size of UPS in about 20 months. So we had a very different fulfillment network than before, and it took a while to figure out how to connect it right and get the cost structure right. While that was happening, our cost to serve was too high. When you end up in something like that, with the explosion of AI and big business-altering situations, it forces you quickly to figure out who you are as a leader and how to lead as a team.

A little bit of just learning again to trust yourself. At almost every leadership level, when you step up, if you have humility and respect for what you don't know, you can sometimes have too much respect for it. You're encountering areas you haven't been in before, with really great leaders who are deep in that area, and you can delegate too much or you have instincts and certain things seem off, but you don't trust yourself enough to speak up and call them out. During that time, there were some things that seemed a bit off to me that a lot of people told me were okay, and it turned out we needed to move faster. So it was a good reminder to trust your own instincts and gut, even if you're wrong, people will show you why it's okay.

Yeah. Well, one, all of us have been customers of lots of different businesses, and we know what it's like to be treated poorly or like we don't matter, and what it's like to be treated well. Maybe the biggest driving force of many in the Amazon culture is just how customer-focused we are. Everything we do, from how we build products to how we conceive of ideas to how we make decisions on choices when we're going to err for customers versus trying to save money—we always try to err on the side of doing right by customers. There's a very strong force inside the company that we are here to make customers' lives easier and better every day. A lot of companies talk about it, but not many really live it, and Amazon is a company that really lives it every day. That is very motivating and inspirational. Actually, one interesting thing when I was working on the AWS business—I had never worked in technology or the B2B business; I'd always been a consumer person. When I learned about the different companies, most technology companies tend to be competitor focused. They look at what their competitors are doing and try to fast-follow and one-up them. One or two are product focused, saying, 'It's nice that you, Mr. and Mrs. Customer, have an idea, but you should leave it to the experts. We know what we're doing.' Both strategies can be very successful, but they're not ours. Our strategy is to hear what customers are struggling with. Sometimes they can tell you specifically what they want you to fix; other times, all they can do is tell you what's going wrong, and you have to read between the lines and invent on their behalf. I love that mission, and every builder here loves it because we're here to make lives better for customers.

Before we write code, we do these working backwards documents. There are two main documents: one is a press release, and the other is a frequently asked questions (FAQ) document. The press release makes sure we try to write a forward-looking press release on what we want to announce the day we launch this product we're thinking of building. It makes you really think: what are you providing? How is it differentiated from what's out there today? Why will it be remarkable when you launch it? We've all been part of products where you get to the very end and think, 'Why did we think anyone would care about this? What's remarkable about it?' So it forces you to have something you believe matters. The FAQ document is very useful because we force people to figure out ahead of time how they're going to build the product and why. It asks: who are you building the product for? What problem are you trying to solve? How does this really solve the problem? Why do you draw the line at launch for V1? Is it enough functionality that people will care? What will people be most disappointed about when you launch V1? What will they say doesn't work? Are we okay launching before we get those pieces? How will we price it? What will people love most? What will they dislike? How does it compare competitively? What's the architecture? All the questions that force you to really think through the product. By the time we get through the working backwards documents—typically two, three, four drafts—we don't have to check in with the team again. They know what they're building. They know it's a dynamic set of documents, so they keep updating them as they learn more while building. But it takes a half step back to allow teams to move two steps faster. I think we hit the mark not all the time, but much more frequently with customers than other processes do.