Andy Jassy 0:00 

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. You

David Novak 0:20 

and You know, a lot of leaders say they put customers first, but today, you're going to see what it really looks like when that mindset drives every decision. Welcome to how leaders lead. I'm David Novak, and every week I have conversations with the very best leaders in the world to help you become the best leader you can be. My guest today is Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon. He's been with the company for 28 years, and he's the guy who built and led Amazon Web Services before succeeding Jeff Bezos as CEO in 2021 now listen, it's not easy to lead one of the biggest companies in the world, not to mention following an iconic founder like Bezos, but as you'll see, Andy is more than up for the task. He's smart, he's curious, and he's committed not just to saying customers matter, but actually operationalizing it. Andy knows how to start with the customer and then work backwards, and if you want to make better decisions and launch better products, you've got to hear the strategies he shares, plus he's got some bold takes on AI and post pandemic work that are definitely going to get your wheels turning. So here's my conversation with my good friend and soon to be yours. Andy Jassy,

I got to ask you this, what was the last thing you bought on Amazon Prime? I

Andy Jassy 1:44 

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

David Novak 2:00 

Yeah. Well, I tell you what, my household is continually bombarded by Amazon, and we love it. It's such a great service. And bless you, David, thank you. Bless me and everybody else in the world. You know, everyone Andy knows about Amazon, but you know I'm not, not everyone knows your whole story. And so I'd like to take you back to, just to the beginning. What's the story from your childhood that's that's really shaped the kind of leader that you are today?

Andy Jassy 2:28 

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, it was actually kind of a hard way to grow up. It's such a intense sport. It's so individual focused. When you lose, there's nobody to billion but yourself. When you win, there's no one to really celebrate with but yourself. And growing up in the East Coast, I also felt like the parental environment around tennis was very intense. But, you know, 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. You know, when you get to competitive levels at 10 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 know, you know, when you you can play a tennis tournament and you can have the best win of your year at 9am and then go out at 2pm and play another match, and it's all gone. So you have to be able to move on from success really quickly and from failure very quickly. Because the other thing is, 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, you know. And then it did teach me as well that you you have to find a way to be good to yourself even when things go wrong, you know they're like 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, you have to find a way to give yourself a little bit of a break. And you know, I learned those things I would say from tennis, which have been helpful. And you know, I would say that one lesson I would say from my soccer life, which really involved my dad, was probably the, you know, the person on this planet that I most respect. And you know, as a kid, I really kind of worship 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 just being antsy. And he said, Well, 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. And I ran it really slowly, but I ran it and I got back, and I said to my dad, I said, see I did it. And he said, if you're going to run like that, why bother running like 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. And so that was, those were good lessons for

David Novak 5:23 

me. That was a great story. Said, and Andy, I understand that you actually wanted to be a sportscaster early on. I

Andy Jassy 5:31 

did, you know, I, I loved, you know, I watched the movie broadcast news, if you ever seen that movie. Absolutely. 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 I loved everything about I love the rush of live TV. I love just the imperfections of live TV, and the things that go wrong are often some of the most amusing moments. So I, you know, I thought I wanted to be a sportscaster. I sent my reel to to, I don't know, 80 markets around the country. Small markets 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.

David Novak 6:33 

Well, how'd you land at Amazon? I

Andy Jassy 6:34 

went from doing this, you know, working at ABC Sports, to working at a direct marketing company that a couple Procter and Gamble guys spun out that 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 I would say went middling, but they weren't what I wanted to do long term. So I 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, this field study with a few friends from school on building a music management slash label company that we called cage shakers. We had a band that we were managing at the time in Boston called two ton shoe, and we 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, 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 I, you know, it's funny, I went to the Bay Area for a last round interview at a technology company. I took a red eye back to Boston. I hardly ever check my answering machine, but my wife was at and then my fiance was 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 cancelation at 9am 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, this was March of 1997 and but I was leaving that morning at 11. I was driving with 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, 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, my then fiance, now wife. We had met on the east coast, but she really she's from LA and she wanted to live closer to her family for a couple years. And our plan was which we we wrote, we agreed on a napkin in a bar that we would be in on the west coast for two to three years, then moved 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. I didn't 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 you know, that was almost 28 years ago, and I started to hear the three days after the last final exam of business school. And I've been here for almost 28 years at this point,

David Novak 9:37 

got to ask you, did you frame that napkin at the bar. I wish I'd kept the

Andy Jassy 9:42 

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

David Novak 9:48 

here. You know, you've had quite a journey that you've gone from this aspiring sportscaster and in the world of sports to the CEO of Amazon. What do you think you did? Differently. Andy, as you you approached your career, and you climb so rapidly within Amazon, what advice could you offer up on how to do that? Well,

Andy Jassy 10:10 

first of all, I feel like my my journey or adventure was, was a lot of luck, and I think maybe one of the things I did best was not overthink it. You know, I have a 21 year old son and a 24 year old daughter, and one of the things I see with they 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. You know? I mean, I, I mean, look at the path I I wanted to be a sportscaster, and then I did sports production. Then I was a product manager, you know, then I started two businesses in between, you know, during that whole interim before I went to business school, I try, I worked at a retail golf store, I coached my my high school soccer team. I tried investment banking, I tried sales and ad specialty companies. 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 is 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 sports casting, 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 and I got done with business school, and realized, after finding a try and all the other things that I did and didn't like them, then 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. You know, like, are you reliable? Do you say, which 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, you know, I worked hard those things over time. Hey

Koula Callahan 12:18 

everyone, it's Kula from how leaders lead. And if you've watched our podcast for any number of episodes, you probably know that a common theme from all of the great leaders we interview is that they are active learners. They have this commitment to continuing to learn and grow, so that they don't say stagnant, and so that they continue to see success in their leadership and in their life. This theme of active learning is so important, and it's what David's latest book, how leaders learn is all about. It's all about helping you develop that skill of active learning so that you too can continue to see success in your leadership and in your life. The book is really entertaining. It pulls stories from some of our greatest podcast guests and pairs those stories with insights that you can incorporate into your leadership and into your life right away. Grab how leaders learn on Amazon or wherever books are sold, and I think you're really gonna love it. You feel David's personality through the pages and through his storytelling, and it's a really powerful way to level up your leadership. Now,

David Novak 13:15 

you mentioned earlier, one of the reasons why you like tennis is that you know, or you learned a lot from tennis, is that you don't always win. You got to get pick yourself back up. And as you look back on your career at Amazon, was there a particular time where you really had to pick yourself back up after you you know, something didn't go your way? And could you tell us that story and what you learned from it? Well,

Andy Jassy 13:35 

I could probably fill your whole podcast, David with stories of things that didn't go well, or times I failed and and I actually, I will say, for whatever it's worth, that every most significant learning I've had has been after something that didn't work out. You know, I just think that you're much 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 I'll tell you one of them. You know, when I was this was probably 2001 and I was co running marketing for Amazon, yeah, with, 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, you know, co marketing leader, and I did that was, it 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. And 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, you know is our founder and was our CEO at the time, interrupted me and said, all the numbers on this page are wrong, and you know, you're not you're not expecting that. And so I. Said, Well, why do you think they're wrong? And he said he started to go through the first set of numbers. You know that feeling when somebody is like going through it, and you're realizing step by step that they're right? He's not all the way through it yet. And he's taught, 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, really long, you know, few hours for you, if you don't. And it was, you know, I would say the presentation did not go well, and I don't think any, I don't think we cover ourselves in glory, particularly me. But, you know, it's funny in many ways, that experience was very seminal for me, because it was one of my worst fears realized. Like, you know, 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 pass, 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, like, 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, you know, if 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.

David Novak 16:44 

I'll tell you what. I'm impressed wise. He said, hey, look, you might not those first whatever pages didn't go so well, but we got a lot more. So hopefully something's right. That takes some courage there. I give him credit for hanging in there. You know,

Andy Jassy 16:57 

did, and you know what he did? Hey. I mean, actually, everybody was very respectful. The rest of the way. Who knows if they were if they were paying attention, but it seemed like they were. You

David Novak 17:05 

know, Amazon has this unique and it's now renowned. It's called a CEO shadow role. And you were tapped to be the first one under Jeff Bezos. And how did you, how did that role shape the leader that you, you've become?

Andy Jassy 17:18 

It's unlike any role I've ever done or will do in the future. It was, you know, 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 know, you're too senior to do that role. It's like a glorified, you know, 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 there. Now 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 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, by the way, including his one on ones. And he would often say to me, Why is nobody telling me anything I would say was not really a one on one, because I'm in the meeting, but, but it was, 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. You know, Jeff is, you know, one of the most amazing business leaders in this generation, and all these leaders were also quite good, and I got to learn just how they how they led. And, you know, a lot of things that I wanted to emulate, some things that maybe I wanted to avoid. And so what I learned, though, in the 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, it was kind of a different form of what I was talking about earlier in being in the moment in tennis and those 10 to 15 points like you either the breadth of what we do at Amazon is quite broad. And he was amazing at going from one meeting working on, you know, things in our fulfillment network, to going to the next meeting, inventing technology that could help Expo, you know, with 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 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. Of them, what the team believed they could do, but not so much that it was incredible, and that was really interesting to me. I felt like I had really high standards heading into that job. That was I felt like 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. You

David Novak 20:24 

recall a time when Bezos asked you something that to do something that you didn't know you're really capable of doing, and pushed you to the next level many

Andy Jassy 20:33 

times. I mean, you know, in the early stages of AWS, which I, you know, coming out of that shadow job. That's what I went to go do, is to work with a team of people to build, you know, 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 two when we actually had the services built and we were trying to attract enterprises startups used AWS from the very start that you know, a lot of the big startups the last 15 years, Instagram, Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe, like a lot of these startups, built on top of AWS. But when we started getting enterprises and government agencies using AWS to 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 gonna do a big deal with us, wanting to talk to Jeff. And I would say to Jeff, I really need your help, like, I really need you to come and talk to this enterprise and this enterprise. And he, he he just refused to do it. And he any, 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? He said, You can do it. He said, and good luck with it. And actually it was great. I mean, it was, 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 that people would accept it, and it was, it was great to push

David Novak 22:32 

well, they accepted enough to where you build over $100 billion business. It seemed to work out all right. Maybe he was pretty wise, and staying out of that meeting, that's fantastic. You know, when Jeff, you know, tapped you to be a successor, that had to come with a lot of pressure, since he's such an iconic leader, not only in business, but in business history. You know, what's the biggest challenge stepping into the CEO, CEO role in a in a position like that that you were in, and how'd you navigate it? How did you think about

Andy Jassy 23:04 

it? Well, you know, it's, it's funny, David, I never really thought much about it before, because I loved what I was doing, running AWS and and I also just didn't think Jeff was ever going to step away from it. And so I really, like 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 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 10th of the size of what it was at that moment, and didn't seem that different to me. So I thought maybe it might not be that different. And turns out, the job is really different. You know, if you run one of these significant businesses, AWS being one of them, you have to massively delegate to, you know, 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. Doesn't scale for the 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, you know, I 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 to be that big a deal moving into new job. But what happened was, every single relationship reset. I didn't expect that. Some reset really quickly, some took a little longer reset, and some never reset, you know, and the ones that didn't reset, you know, both sides have to move on from that. But. I didn't expect that, you know. And then I would say, you know, if you're gonna, I think any time you become the CEO of a company, there are, you know, predecessors, and you know, you know, people are gonna always want to compare and, you know, and I was succeeding to your point, maybe the most iconic business leader of our generation. You know, 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. It's kind of easier to say it than do it. But, you know, I realized over time that was really true, that you you have to play to whatever your own strengths are, and you can't try to be you can learn from whoever you've worked with in the past, but you can't be that person. You got to be who you are. I had the circumstance in 2022 on the backside of the pandemic, where we had all sorts of challenges, particularly, as you know, we we took a fulfillment network that we built the first 25 years of Amazon and doubled it in 18 months, and then built out a last mile transportation network the size of ups in about 20 months. So it turned out that we had a really different fulfillment network than we did before, and it took us a while to figure out how to connect it right and get the cost structure right. And while that was happening, our cost to serve was too high. And you know, when you end up with with something like that, and the explosion of AI with kind of big business altering situations, it has a way of forcing you quickly to figure out who you are as a leader and how you're going to lead as a team together and move on with it.

David Novak 26:43 

What was the biggest thing you learned about yourself in that period? A little bit of just

Andy Jassy 26:46 

learning again to trust yourself. You know, I kind of feel like at almost every leadership level, when you step up, if you know, if you have some humility and you have some respect for what you don't know and what you have to learn. You can also sometimes have maybe too much respect for it, and if you know, you're encountering areas that you haven't been in before, with really great leaders who are really deep in that area. And you can kind of, you know, at times, you can delegate too much, or you can have instincts certain things seem like you want to change, or maybe a bit awry, and you don't trust yourself enough to really speak up and call it out. And you know, I just think during that time, there were some things that seemed a little bit off to me, that a lot of people were telling me were okay, that just turned out that we needed to be moving on faster, and so just it was a good reminder that you just have to trust your own instincts and your gut sometimes. And you know, even if you're wrong, people will show you why you're wrong, and it's okay. You

David Novak 27:52 

know, the PGA Championship is this weekend, and after his historic win at Augusta National, all eyes are on Rory McIlroy, as he buys for another major go all in with Roy this week and catch my conversation with him last year where he shared his incredible insight about goal setting.

Rory McIlroy 28:09 

My attitude towards goal setting is is a little different. I think people you can make these grand, ambitious plans, but if you don't have a structure or a system to work within. Someone said once that you don't rise to the level of your goals, you you fall to the level of your systems. So if you have good systems in place, so for me, that would be okay. I want to be the best player in the world, or I want to win the Masters one day, for example. Okay, that's that's great. But how do you get there? And it's all to do. What does a practice day look like for me? Okay, well, I want to be in the gym for two hours, and I want to work in my short game for this amount of time, and I want to do this, and I want to do that. So my goals start to become more process driven rather than result driven. So if I can make my goals about the process, and I can check the boxes while I'm practicing and while I'm doing my the stuff I need to do, then hopefully one day, the results should just take care of itself. That's sort of my attitude towards goal setting. But you need to set the big goal to start, obviously. But then it's breaking it down into like, into these little sections that I think is the real important stuff. Go

David Novak 29:20 

back and listen to my entire conversation with Rory Episode 187 here on how leaders lead. You know, Andy, one of the things I was really impressed doing my research on you is just, I don't think I've ever seen anybody talk more about just having an obsession for the customer you are so passionate about, about that being the driving force. Can Can you share a little bit about that? Yeah,

Andy Jassy 29:42 

well, you know, one all of us have been customers of lots of different businesses, and I think 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, you know, maybe the biggest driving force of many in the. Amazon culture is just how customer focused we are. And you know, everything we do, from the way we build products to the way we conceive of ideas, to how we make decisions on choices when we're going to air for customers, versus try to save money, like we always try to shade and err on the side of doing right by customers. And 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. And that is very motivating and very inspirational, if you've been customers of companies and and I love it. I think actually, if I, if I look at one of the interesting things, when I was working on the AWS business, I had never worked in the technology business or in the B to B business. I'd always been a consumer person before that. And when I was learning about the different companies there. Most of the technology companies tend to be competitor focused. They will get what their competitors are doing, and then they try to fast follow and one up them. And then there's one or two of them that I would say are product focused. Where they they say, Well, it's nice that you, Mr. Mrs. Customer, have an idea about this product, but you should leave it to the experts. So you know, we know what we're doing. And both those strategies, by the way, can be very successful strategies. They're just not ours. Our strategy is try to hear what customers are struggling with. Sometimes they can tell you specifically what you what they want you to fix. Other times, all they can do is tell you what's going wrong, and then you got to read between the line and try to invent on their behalf. And I love that mission. I think everybody here who's a builder loves that mission, because we're here to make lives better for customers, and

David Novak 31:49 

that's the big why for your organization. Yeah, you have this, I love this working backwards document that you do talk a little bit about that

Andy Jassy 31:58 

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 document. And the press release is designed to make sure that we try to write a forward going press release on what we want to announce the day we launched this product that we're thinking about building. And what it makes you do is it makes you really think about, what are you providing? How's it differentiated from what's out there today, and why will it be remarkable when you launch it? Because we've all been a part of products, or at least, I have where you get to the very end and you go to announce it, and you think, like, why did we think anyone was going to care about this, like, what's remarkable about this? So really forces you to have something that you believe matters. And then I think the Frequently Asked Questions document is really useful, because we force people to figure out, ahead of time, how they're going to build the product and why. So it's who you build them the product for What's their problem you're trying to solve? How does this really solve the problem? Why does where you're drawing the line at launch for v1 Why is it enough functionality that people will care about? What are people going to be most disappointed about when you launch v1 what are they going to be saying, you know, doesn't work in the product, and are we okay launching it before we get those pieces. How are we going to price it, and what dimensions? What will people go most about it? Will people dislike? How does it compare to what's out there? Competitive all, what's the architecture you're going to build, and why? All the questions that force you to really think through the product. So that when we get through the working backwards set of documents, which takes us, typically, 234, drafts of that by that time, we don't have to check in with the team again, like they know what they're building. They know that it's a dynamic set of documents, so they keep updating them as they learn more as they're building the product. But it actually it takes kind of a half step back to allow teams to move two steps faster and so and I think we hit the mark, not all the time, but much more frequently with customers than I think other processes do. I love

David Novak 34:09 

that, that the way to really work future, back like that. That's just such a great insight. I'd also like you to explain your one way and two two way, two way door approach that you use when it comes to decision making, yeah, we

Andy Jassy 34:23 

have this concept internally about two way and one way doors. And if it's a two way door decision, it means that you can walk through that door, and if you got it wrong, you can rock, walk right back through it, and no harm. A one way door decision is when you walk through that door, and if you get it wrong, it's really hard to walk back. And so the you know, the two way what you really want, or what we want, at least the two way door decisions, which is the overwhelming majority of decisions we make in business, you want to push down to the people working do. The actual work and the owners, so that they don't have to go through a lot of meetings and a lot of approvals to get the two way door decisions done, because if they get them wrong, they know they can walk back through. You gotta have the right metrics to make sure you recognize when you've gotten something wrong. But you want to push down those two way door decisions, the one way door decisions, you want to make more methodically now they are the very small minority of decisions, but those you intentionally want to go methodically through it and make sure you've got the right answer, because if you get it wrong, it's hard to go backwards. So it's a very useful construct for us to think about. And you know, what's interesting to me in part about that construct is both of those constructs assume that the doors that you want to walk through are open and unlocked. And one of the interesting things when you think about invention, which we do a lot of we spend a lot of our waking hours trying to invent. Here it's kind of a little bit the opposite, where you're trying to figure out how you can unlock a door that seems like it's been bolted shut for a while. And so I think this concept of doors is very useful for us inside the company.

David Novak 36:05 

I love it. And speaking of decisions, you know, Amazon Prime is one of the greatest business success stories of all time. You know, looking back, what do you think has been the biggest strategic decision that you've made so far that has continued to, you know, have the kind of impact that's growing this business,

Andy Jassy 36:21 

maybe a few come to mind. I think, with our existing large businesses in our retail business, the decision to not give in on the choice people thought it was a binary choice between being able to ship items really quickly and being able to lower your cost to serve. And we just didn't believe that. And the you know, in that time I was mentioning earlier, where our cost to serve was too high, as we'd redone the network and expanded it dramatically, it really forced us to challenge our most closely held beliefs, and we re architected the network, especially in the US to go from this flat National Network to this regionalized network where we were able to get items much closer to end users, which meant shorter delivery times to customers which they love, and shorter distances mean lower cost and less energy consumed. And so we, you know, I think we were able to prove to ourselves with a number of inventions in our retail business that we could both ship items to customers faster and lower our cost to serve. I think, at the same time in our other really large business, in AWS, what's happened with AI, particularly generative AI is generative AI has, you know, I think it's going to reinvent every customer experience that we know of today, and some ones that we've only fantasized about. And I think we made a decision relatively early on that we were going to invest very, very substantially in generative AI. And I think that, you know, in the short term, it means we're going to spend a significant amount of capital and resource, but I think it's going to completely change our customer experiences and who we are as a company in the medium to long term, you know. And then I think there was a time in, you know, maybe in around the 2022 time frame, early 23 where, you know, at that time, where we we didn't have our cost server, we needed it, and we were struggling on some pieces in our retail business, where I think a lot of people would say things to me like, I don't know why you don't only do retail in AWS and shut everything else down. And, you know, I think that if your objective is to make customers lives easier or better every day. There are so many customer experiences that customers want us to help them with that. I think we can be a part of changing what's possible, and that will be really good businesses for Amazon as well, and that you have to be thinking five to 10 years out, not just a quarter at a time or one year out. And so I think it was a really good decision for us to continue investing in areas like Prime Video and Kuiper with our which is our low Earth orbit satellite, and some you know, healthcare, where I think we have the chance to really change the healthcare experience in the US. And I think the last thing would be, I don't think any of us know right now how much the pandemic really screwed us up, you know, like, I think, I think it screwed up families, it screwed up marriages, screwed up, you know, kids screwed up companies. And I just think that what happened during the pandemic was we were forced, you know, overnight, to basically completely change the way we had to work. And I think people really rallied and made it work. But I I'm not, you know, I don't think it was the best long term change. I think we did it over a short period of time, but a lot of things I think, went by the way. Side in what we all had to do in the emergency that turned out to be, to be hard to kind of get back to the spot that you believe you're behaving and acting best for customers in the business. And I think a lot of companies still haven't gotten back there. I think standards got relaxed because everyone felt like they had to. I think people got really disconnected from one another. I think people kind of lost touch with the culture, with everybody being remote. I think if you're inventing, if you're not together, it's much harder to invent Well, if you're not in person, riffing on one on one another's ideas, and, you know, staying after a messy meeting and figuring out the last 10% which is always the part that actually makes the idea really, you know, like real. And so I think just some of the cultural things that we have been working on together to make sure that we are optimizing for customers and being able to invent on their behalf have been really important for us too, you know.

David Novak 40:57 

Andy, it's been so much fun, and I want to have a little bit more with my lightning round of questions. Are you ready for this? Go for it. Okay, the three words that best describe you,

Andy Jassy 41:05 

entrepreneurial, curious and authentic.

David Novak 41:10 

If you could be one person for a day besides yourself, who would it be? Maybe

Andy Jassy 41:14 

Mark Messier, you know, who's the captain of the Rangers? I'm a lifelong Rangers, fans, just maybe one of the very best leaders of our generation,

David Novak 41:25 

the captain, for sure. What's your biggest pet peeve? My biggest pet peeve is

Andy Jassy 41:29 

probably, know it alls, you know, I feel like there's so much we all don't know, and it's unnecessary to act like you know everything, and it's also a lot of times unfund to be with. Know it alls I know you love Buffalo wings. Where do you get the best buffalo wings? My favorite buffalo wings are vindictive wings. Here in Seattle, they are outstanding, crispy, great sauce. If you get to Seattle, come to vindictive wings on First Avenue.

David Novak 41:58 

I'm on my way, that'd be great. Do you have any nicknames? A

Andy Jassy 42:01 

lot of people call me AJ, jazz, jazzer.

David Novak 42:06 

What's the one thing you do? Just for you,

Andy Jassy 42:08 

playing golf. I really enjoy playing golf, if it really gets me outside of my day to day. And I love being with people I've had the privilege to play with, or entertainment. You know, I my wife and I like to do that together, but I, I really love music, I really love movies, I really love sports and so those I share with my my family, but I, but I love them myself. If I turned on the radio in your car, what would it be? Probably a lot of band called The Beth's from New Zealand, the Foo Fighters, Brandy Carlisle, they'll probably be who's playing for me right now. You love

David Novak 42:45 

your music. I love it. You know, that's why you have you riff. You riff at Amazon. That's what you do there. You know what's something about you that few people would know? Well,

Andy Jassy 42:54 

probably until this that I played tennis very seriously, or that I tried to be a sportscaster. I played a lot of instruments growing up, and my kids are really good musicians, way better than I am, but I played piano and saxophone and guitar and a little bit of drums. Ran a couple marathons.

David Novak 43:16 

Well, I write songs, so maybe we can get together and we can riff and come up with some good ideas. You should be the one singing. No, no, I can't sing. All right, we're out of the lightning round. Great job. Andy, just a couple more questions, and I'll let you go now. You and your wife, Alana, have two kids. What's a leadership lesson that you've picked up at work that you're trying to live out at home?

Andy Jassy 43:36 

I think really being willing to to learn from everybody. You know. I think that an interesting thing to me. I don't know if you saw this. David is just at a certain point of a number of folks careers, they seem to lose their thirst to learn. I don't know. I don't know if it's because you get to a certain point and you think you should know what there is to know, or if it feels threatening to be senior and not know everything, or it's tiring to always be learning, but I think the second you're not learning is the second you're starting to unwind. And, you know, I feel like I optimize at work to learn. You know, I try in meetings to speak last if I don't have to say anything in a meeting, that's a great meeting. There's nothing wrong with that. And and I am willing to change my mind as often as I'm presented with information that should change my mind. And so I feel like, at home, I try to do the same thing, you know? I but my our kids are amazing. They're so thoughtful, and they're so authentic, and they are so open and and they see the world their own way. And I learn a lot from them. I try to listen to what they're saying, and while, you know, I'm often in the position where they're asking me maybe for some advice or guidance, I've learned a lot from. Us their own stories. And I also think that you know, being able to tell your kids when you've done something wrong in an interaction with either either an interaction with them or interaction at work, but being able to to say them I got this wrong, and I'm sorry, is also something that I feel like is a little bit generational. I feel like maybe the prior generations, it was the point of pride that you you didn't really say sorry to your kids, like, you know, it's not, you know that, you know. I feel like my generation was, you know, was there to be respectful. And I actually think it's opened up a lot of our best conversations when I have apologized, when I've gotten something wrong.

David Novak 45:43 

Yeah, that's great, great insight. And what do you see? Andy, is your your unfinished business?

Andy Jassy 45:49 

Oh, gosh, I feel like I have so much unfinished business. Yeah, I'll start with work. You know, I feel like it's so early with respect to what we're trying to do at Amazon. I mean, I think if you take our two biggest businesses, you know, a retail business, which is, it's a $500 billion plus a year annual run rate business, and 85% of retail worldwide still lives in physical stores, you know. So, like, I don't know if it's going to flip 8515 the other way, but it's going to the proportion is going to be very different in the future. You know, if you look at AWS, our cloud computing business, still about 90% of the global IT span is on premises that I do believe is going to flip in 20 years. So we just, you know, we have so much growth in front of us in our existing large businesses, and that doesn't include what we're building with Prime Video, what we're building with our low Earth orbit satellite, with Project Kuiper, what we're building with healthcare, what we're building on the grocery side, what we're building with our autonomous driving ride hailing service and zoox. I mean, there are just so many things that we're going to do for customers and AI will be underneath all of it and the amount that we're building right now to enable, enable, not just ourselves but others, to build AI. You know, whether it's chips that make a much more price performance for them to do training or inference, whether it's our own models with Amazon Nova that are much more cost effective and lower latency for them, or services that make it much easier to build generative AI applications. We just, we have a lot of unfinished business in Amazon, you know, just in my own life, I'm hoping that I'm only about halfway through it, you know. And there's a lot that I you know, I'm really lucky that I have an amazing wife and amazing kids and amazing friends, and there's so much more I want to do, and I'm hopeful I get a chance to do it over time.

David Novak 47:50 

Last question for you, what's one piece of advice you'd give to anyone who wants to be a better leader?

Andy Jassy 47:56 

Probably I would say the biggest difference between the people I started with 28 years ago here and what they're doing now has been their willingness and their aptitude to learn, you know, and, and, and I think that, you know, being a good learner. It starts with being able to be self aware about what's going well, what's not going well, and why, and being able to look at yourself and ask what I need to change, you know, and and I also know people who can tell you very well that they're a great learner and what they're doing wrong, and be right about what they're doing wrong, and never be able to put into action. And so that last part is you actually have to do it. And, you know, old habits die hard. And so you do have to be able to be flexible your whole life. You know, I feel like it's at least as important at this stage of what I do in my life to be a great learner as it was when I was 22 you

David Novak 48:58 

know, Andy, I had a great board member, the late John Weinberg from Goldman Sachs, and he had this saying. He told me that, you know, when we had a one on one one time, he said, David, in life, you're gonna learn that people either grow or they swell. And obviously, Andy, you are a person that's constantly focused on growth all the time. You have not swollen, you're humble, you are authentic, you're the real deal. And I had the privilege of meeting you a few months ago, and I was just blown away, just by your down to earth nature and your ability, obviously, to think through the issues that the largest companies in the world has to deal with. So thank you for taking this hour out with me. I appreciate you very much, and it was a real pleasure. Thank you,

Andy Jassy 49:46 

David, thanks for having me, and I feel the same way about you. So you know thank you for the time, and I look forward to seeing you again soon. Great, great.

David Novak 49:53 

Maybe on the golf course. I will go with that. You.

There's something in this conversation I think almost any leader can relate to. Maybe it stuck out to you too. Andy described that moment when you're about to launch a product and you kind of panic, and you ask, Why? Why did we think anyone would care about this? We've all had that sinking feeling that maybe we got it wrong, which is why I love the processes Andy uses to start with the customer and work backward. It's not just about building better products for customers, although that's definitely a part of it. It's also about creating more momentum and trust and clarity on your team, because when you're all aligned on the problem you're solving and you know you're serving, you can move faster and hit the mark more often. So here's something to try this week. Look around and find a project that's been floundering a bit, then take a page from Andy's playbook and write a press release for it. Get your team involved. You might be surprised how that exercise sharpens your thinking and gets things moving in the right direction. So do you want to know how leaders lead. What we learned today is the great leaders start with the customer and work backward. Coming up next on how leaders lead is Scott Boatwright, the CEO of Chipotle. So be sure to Subscribe on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss it. Thanks again for tuning in to another episode of how leaders lead, where every Thursday you get to listen in while I interview some of the very best leaders in the world. I'm making a point to give you something simple on each episode that you can apply to your business, so that you'll become the best leader you can be.