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, 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'd 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 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 anyway, 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 and 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.
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.
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.
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, 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 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 so 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 Wilkkey who was instrumental in the success of the company. We've all 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 Veneto too. So thank you Diego. And so one day in the early days because I 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 Wilkkey 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 but 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 Wilkkey 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? And 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 and 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. Wandering. Just one more thing on wandering. Wandering is so important because wandering is a kind of humility. So sometimes when people think about oh should how much should I wander? Wandering sounds so inefficient but you can only go straight to your destination is if you know where you're going. And sometimes you know where you're going but sometimes you don't. And so wandering is that acknowledgment that in life and in business and in exploration and in invention, in building a company, a lot of the time you can see the mountaintop, but you can't see the trail and you have to explore and you have to wander. It may feel very inefficient, but it's actually very valuable. And it's really a recognition. It's 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.
Yes. On the other hand, you need to be efficient once you start building that.
That's right. And iterate.
These are different things for different times. So sometimes when you know where you're going, yes, you should be very efficient.
So how to put it in harmony and not balancing. And I know you don't like to balance, right? And so how can you put in harmony the dream side and the build side? And by the way, just to fill that out a little, I don't love the word balance because it implies a tradeoff. Like I've often had people ask me, 'How do you deal with work life balance?' And I'll say, 'I like work life harmony because if you're happy at home, you'll be better at work. If you're better at work, you'll be better at home.' These things go together. They're not a strict tradeoff. And it's true I think for exploration but also determined execution. You just need to do both and they actually do feed each other. It's the things that come out of the execution give you new data and new ideas about what the next step should be in your exploration. So the two things don't work against each other. They work together. And how so how would you advise young founders in practical terms to be able to be in harmony with both?
The touchstone, the thing you always go back to is those customer needs. So that's the only way that I could advise any founder or entrepreneur is to deeply understand what are the big ideas that their customers want and you can ask them, ask your customers but it's not sufficient you also have to invent on their behalf because the biggest breakthroughs, the most important ideas, customers don't know to ask. They don't know to ask for those things. That's why dream. You have to dream and you have to use your intuition and your gut and your heart. All of the data that gets used in business is essential. If you're in business and you're not looking at your data, trust me, your competitors are going to beat you. But if you're only looking at your data, you also will not win or at least not win big. Because the most important decisions that every person makes when they're building something new is made with intuition. You cannot prove it, but you have an instinct and a hunch. And then you'll pay attention. If that turns out to be wrong, it won't be a big deal. You'll correct.
