When Jeff Bezos first envisioned Amazon Inc. (AMZN) , it was an online bookstore. Now it is an online bookstore and so much more.
Key Amazon Facts
- Founded by Jeff Bezos
- Founded in 1994 (online bookstore launched in 1995)
- Originally named Cadabra
- Current market cap of $2.4 trillion
- Over 300 million global active customers
- 2024 full-year revenue of $638 billion +11%
- 2024 full-year profit of $59.2 billion
From groceries to package delivery to autonomous vehicles to clothing to cloud computing to, yes, even books, Amazon is the go-to place for nearly everything.
While building his company into the juggernaut it is today, Bezos says he had the good fortune of hiring some of the brightest minds on the payroll. Their ideas helped save the company from disaster.
“As a founder, I had the great luxury of always being able to hire my tutors. I would hire these experienced, senior executives . . . And I would listen to them and they would teach me,” Bezos said recently.
Jeff Wilke, former CEO of Amazon Worldwide Consumer, was one of the “tutors” he was able to hire, and Wilke gave him some advice that may have saved the company, Bezos said last week at Italian Tech Week.
Image source: MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty
Jeff Bezos recounts invaluable advice Jeff Wilke gave him about Amazon
The pressure of being a founder put Jeff Bezos in a challenging situation.
“Put me in front of a whiteboard and I can come up with 100 ideas in half an hour,” Bezos said.
When Wilke joined Amazon in 1999, the company generated about $2 billion in revenue annually.
Related: Jeff Bezos sends blunt message on AI bubble
In tech, having a lot of ideas is a good thing, but Wilke provided some context that showed Bezos how an overactive idea factory could eventually hurt the company.
“Jeff, you have enough ideas to destroy Amazon,” Wilke told him.
A company needs time to implement new ideas, and if you are producing hundreds every half hour, it’s easy for a company to get bogged down in a deluge of ideas, even if they are good ones.
“Every time I released an idea, I was creating a backlog of work in process. And because it was just stacking up, it was adding no value. In fact, it was creating a distraction,” Bezos admitted.
So Wilke told him to release the work at a rate that would allow the organization to accept it. It was a solution so obvious that it left him wondering why he hadn’t thought of it prior.
“This sounds so obvious, but it was not obvious to me at the time. And this was a profound insight for me. So I started prioritizing the ideas better, keeping lists of them, and keeping ideas to myself until the organization was ready for the ideas,” Bezos said.
Bezos takes lessons from Amazon with him
Amazon is a much different company than it was when Bezos received that advice.
Through Amazon Web Services, the company has become one of the most prominent players in tech. It even has a television and movie studio with Prime Video.
But Bezos is no longer technically at the helm.
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Bezos stepped down as CEO on July 5, 2021, with Andy Jassy taking over as his successor. He is still heavily involved in Amazon as executive chairman of the board.
Wilke also left the company in 2021, just weeks before Bezos made it official.
But Bezos is now leading Blue Origin, his space exploration company, and his family office is heavily invested in artificial intelligence.
He has applied the lessons he learned in the early days of Amazon to his other business ventures.
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“I also started figuring out how to build an organization that can be ready for more ideas. That’s about having the right senior team and leadership and giving those people the executive bandwidth so they could do more ideas per unit of time,” Bezos said.
“And 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 profound for me. It made us operationally more effective while still being inventive.”
Related: Amazon made a change to Prime shopping to take on Target, Walmart
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