Amazon | Lessons From My 15 Year Career

All right, so Life is changed Wow for those who haven't met her. This is 40 pink dragons also known as my wife uh she's hanging out with me for a little while tonight because it's celebration night and um my great team that sent me off from amazon they sent me Yeah, I'm always saying cheers. And in fact, all the subs have the cheers emote. And they sent me bubbly. So we thought we'd drink together because that's...

One of the many things my wife and I do together. We drink together. Oh, I wanted the swirly one. There you go. So we do. We think, though, that. Straight Prosecco can be made more interesting with a little limoncello in the bottom. So that's tonight's retirement cocktail. How much you want? That's good. That's good. I mean, refill is available. I know where to find it. Yeah.

Don't spill any. So we're going to talk about a ton of fun stuff tonight. I have had the most batshit crazy week I've had in a long time. And it'll be story time. but first you know champagne bottles make a sound that just has to go on air because it's special and memorable And it's wonderful all of you have shown up here. I see some of the regulars. I see Twitch staff, a good friend of mine, Kiraluta.

One of my inspirations. She's one of my inspirations to travel the world. So not the only one, but one of. And Hephaestus here. Real Jessica. Awesome. T. Weirdo, one of our other mixologists, I'm sure she would approve. I'm pretty sure T. Weirdo bought us these glasses too. Oh, well, there you go. Thank you, T. Weirdo.

Ah, yay, do it. Here we go. Yes, I hope you mean travel the world, not just drink champagne. But we're going to do both. All right, so last night I was messing around with the cork in a bottle. and asking like how much of a pop did we want and i then it just popped out oh that is the sweet sound of freedom that is the sweet sound the sweet sweet sound of freedom

I'm told the Jewish people have as a people have a saying, which is there can be no celebration without wine. I don't know, but it sure as hell makes it better.

so all right boy there's a lot left in there you may have to help me anchor that cheers cheers everyone congratulations tomorrow is a work day no no sean only for you well and for some others here um all right hey cheers everybody thank you for turning up all right i'm gonna go down and do my mod job bye everybody all right hey if if they get out of line i'll refill you and you can ban some people

When does the job hunt begin again? Oh, Jesus. My problem right now, honestly, thank you, job avoider, is keeping people away. Keeping jobs away. I have... more interest in like can you do this can you do that then then i have um yeah i don't want another job yet maybe um but not right now so

and awesome my goal is to send that my jobs to all of you so look let's talk about how the channel is going to change and then we'll talk about the batshit crazy week and then i'll go through the amazon lessons The channel is going to change slowly over the next month or two. First, there's a bunch of technology crap that my very loyal team has been nagging me to fix. Lighting.

um noise gate on the mic there's like stuff i need to fix that i have not um and so i will like now i'll have time to do that and it just hasn't been a priority um but yes that oh hey thank you yannicus for the tier one sub that stuff's gonna get fixed and then i'm gonna start uh broadcasting more jessica thank you for the tier one sub also um i'm going to start broadcasting more some of it will be from the road i actually would have broadcast last week but apologies to the discord community

We stayed at a fabulous place called Diamond Lake. It's near Crater Lake in Oregon. Hephaestus, thank you for the tier one sub and for starting the hype train. And they have no Wi-Fi at all. So you can look up Diamond Lake on a map or maybe I could do it for you. But anyway, we had to ride our bikes halfway around this lake. uh to get cell phone service so we had this little spot where we could sit on logs and be eaten by mosquitoes and uh we called it the cell phone beach and

I racked up about 110 miles on my bike last week. Feels like just yesterday I watched you on Dr. K and you gave me some really helpful career advice on biotech startups. excellent that's good to know socrates um so yeah every morning particularly our kids were eager to pedal over because they would download all the videos they could on their phones the night before and then they'd watch them all night and then they'd go over to the cell phone beach to reload in the morning all right so

Yeah, there is. I've heard there's a fire really close to Diamond Lake now. My wife, who's on, couldn't find it. So you can message. If you have a link to that fire's location, send it to 40 Pink Dragons. uh in moderation because she's she's looking to see the fire info but yeah we got the hell out of there just in time uh sinewy i have many opinions on product management

And we'll probably do a show on that soon, but not right now. So let me tell you about this crazy week, okay? First, it's my last week. It's a short week. I'm only supposed to work Tuesday and Wednesday.

monday night really um i think it was monday night i've lost track of time already which is a good sign there I live and I don't hide this so those of you who are like disclosed found whatever I live south of Seattle and there's a fire burning south of Seattle um and bob ross of the kitchen if you were sending that link you can send it you can't post links here but you can send them direct that you can um whisper them to the mods um so anyway uh

basically we had to evacuate our house because there was a wildfire burning only about a mile from our house and we got smoked out the wildfires we had wildfires at one point in three directions from our house and they cut the it cut the power So we were without power in our house for about 22 hours, which meant I'm supposed to be like in my last day of work. You got to shill the discord. Yeah, okay. I could do that. That's not a bad Sorry, we're gonna hang on you're gonna allow that

So I'm getting good advice here, which is shill discord when I tell people not to post links here. So you should join our discord. I am, by the way, behind on the discord community because we had no internet.

but i'm gonna catch up on it and then i'll be more active because hey what else do i have to do right oh lots of things but still i'm gonna catch up all right so anyway telling this story we had to evacuate our house um because we had no power we had to pack up all the shit in our refrigerator and freezer and take it up to our in-laws house and then i did uh one of my yeah i had to do one of my last two days of work basically

Tuesday, I work completely from my in-laws house. So I'm like having my last real work day because Wednesday was mostly like farewells and I did some internal teaching and training. my last real work day for my in-laws house uh oregonsmoke.blogspot.com yeah so i believe it so 40 pink dragons is it really near diamond lake because you were saying it wasn't so let me know if you see it there if you get a chance

So anyway, that's batshit crazy part of the week. Number one is I spend the week. I spend the whole day like fighting smoke inhalation and working out of the wrong house and wondering like.

is our house going to burn now i didn't really think it was but on the other hand my bedroom window is that way and out that window you could actually see the fire on a ridge line so it was right there all right so fast forward uh next batshit crazy but fun part okay my team sends me a bunch of stuff i do the farewell party

I decide to make an innocent simple post on LinkedIn. I'm going to show you because I'm always telling you guys about LinkedIn and how you need to be there. I decide to do an innocent simple post on LinkedIn.

that my wife keeps saying right you just met 40 pink dragons uh she keeps saying your post says nothing like it really doesn't have anything in it and so i'm going to pop it up on the screen real quick i made this post 24 hours ago it's showing exactly one day ago that is the whole post it reads finish today is my last day at amazon after 15 years you can read the rest of it

um you know it says i'll spend time now paying forward the good amazon brought me enjoying family travel but otherwise investing in mentoring and training which is true it's what i always do um through posting here live streaming public speaking and writing more to follow next chapter after some well-deserved days off this thing goes bananas 3800 likes as you can see

But down at the bottom is the real thing that blew me away. It's been seen 375,000 times. And know that someone's saying 71 network connections. No, no, no. um not 71 that's new since the last time i clicked on it more than a thousand so uh oh hey yannick is thank you for gifting that's really nice of you uh gifting in the channel so this was batshit crazy thing number two which is having people come out of the woodwork um you know all my old co-workers people i haven't talked to in years

uh and and seeing the the post go viral like that was really wild um and i totally was not expecting it and i will say i'm overwhelmed by the support and i'm humbled by all the people who shared their stories of how we've interacted. And I'm super eager, you know, it's really revved me up to do what I do here. And to improve, now that I have the time, to improve the quality of what I do. So...

Better sound and video and lighting. Yes, check. More broadcasting on the right topics. Better YouTube editing. Better podcast editing. More posting. Because... I'm in the lucky place where I can dedicate a lot of my time to trying to help you. So, Marksman wants FFZ. Maybe. um that's another thing on my list so maybe someone uh you know go over to discord and and give me the case in general chat or something for why i should put ffz in

But I'm open to it or better Twitch TV. I'll say Twitch has like a mixed perspective on BTTV and FFZ. Yannicus, good question. The answer is I never have, but it is on the to-do list. So this will be fun for the long-term community members. At some unannounced as yet future date, I will actually do a game stream. So that will happen. Andy, welcome. No, definitely not League.

You know, I could see a New World clan. That would be fun. New World is Amazon's title. It was just in a limited test. That would be fun. um jackbox stuff i could do uh i don't know we'll do something as a as a game stream one time um the game i considered play once so at one point in the past amazon through twitch owned the uh esports team evil genius and we owned evil genius back when they won the dodo championship

And so I had considered that it would be really funny to bring in the evil genius guys as the rest of my team and have them heavy carry me. Because, you know, somehow I would crush everyone. or my team would while i would be a complete uh you know like unable to find my way out of the lane useless you know just following along doing nothing but obviously three pros in an open match could totally carry it or four pros no matter how bad i am so um i have thought that would be fun

So that's my crazy week, driven out of my house by fire. The huge viral post, finding myself gainfully unemployed. Yeah, one pro is often enough. I agree with that, speed readers. I do admit... I'll tell another story about that, and then I'll go into these Amazon lessons learned. A few years ago at TwitchCon, my stepson was really into Rocket League.

And we were doing a Rocket League tournament there. So we had a bunch of pro Rocket League players. And between one of their matches, we got him online in Rocket League with one of the pros playing random internet matches. Now, the thing is, an 11-year-old knows no mercy. So they're up like 10 goals to nothing on this other team, but he just wants to pour it on.

And if any of you know the player, he was playing with a guy named Cronovi. And they were just smoking people. And, you know, 11 year olds, they don't have any sense of like, maybe we should let off. So it was like. He was living his best life just crushing people. So that's the one case where I have pulled the like.

So I know somebody who's pretty good at this game. Maybe we can pair you up. All right. Rico streaming live. Thank you for the prime sub. That's awesome. Kick them while they're down. Yeah, well. You know, what's the Conan quote, right, that Schwarzenegger delivers, right? You know, what is joy in life or whatever he says. to crush your enemies to drive them before you and hear the lamentations of their women so that's where he was philosophically so ah

So look, everybody, let's jump into what you're here for. You all know how questions work. What I'm going to do is I have the slideshow that I gave as my last address. At my last address. At Amazon. And I tried to summarize in a single one hour slide deck. um i need a real crown there is one back here hang on where'd it go ah here we go see i'm good

Yeah, I this is from the crown channel like our new gamer entertainment channel that I help start so Should I should I wear the crown through the hole? Through the hole see it doesn't like you got to get the points just right though so and it's it's green not blue oh i like that point the emote worthy so some of you don't know this but i got photographed a year ago i got david hasselhoff to wear a prime crown at TwitchCon in the EU. And I'm photographed next to him. So...

Anyway, we could do an emote of me and the Hoff in crowns. That would be good. That could be our prime gaming emote. That would be good. So anyway, I boiled down the best things I learned at Amazon. I have met John Kappa, actually. He was on stage at TwitchCon1. He did a live appearance as himself. um so i have met kappa he was gone from twitch by the time i was there he left pretty early but i um

I've met a lot of the people that have Twitch emotes. So Anil and Deshmond, etc. I mean, obviously, right? I worked at Twitch for four years. So any of them that were around, I know.

uh hey guys um all those folks i don't actually know what kappa did it's a good question um i don't think we have some twitch staff who were here but i don't even know if the twitch staff who are here they all like kappa was very early and was gone so i could find out but i don't know all right let's do the slides and the reason i want to do that is i do want to always give you guys value and you know how to ask questions so i'm counting on you

Let me get up the question widget. The mods will empty out any old questions. But if you have questions, bring those up. And I'll answer them at the end probably.

So you put them in through if you're new to the channel if you've never been here before we have some new people you know ask your questions was the fire emergency tier two or tier three fund we'll talk about that later what's a good these are good questions the folks the questions that some people have already put in i'm eager to answer those so feel free to vote on them

But let me run through the slides real quick. That would be good hygiene to tell you the same stuff I told everybody at Amazon on my way out. So I just have them in Google Drive. It's a PowerPoint file, and I didn't bother to convert it to anything. So let me do that. So I called it lessons learned trial and triumph in 15 years at Amazon by me and Oops, this is my history. A lot of you know this, but if you don't

I started an Amazon video. I led the software and games group. Oh, the five words that summarize what I learned. This is the whole point. Everything I learned in 15 years can be summarized as hard work, calculated risks, and patience. So if you're not a very patient person, there, you're done. How about that? You can just chat with others, amuse yourself, watch another window in parallel.

But if you want a little more detail, I'll give it to you. So my history, if you don't know it, is I started at Amazon. I built what's now Prime Video. I ran our first game team. Very few people know this. Refresh? Why do I need to refresh? It should be back. Yeah. Good old lag. It's your friend. So I ran our first game studio. I actually, while we were there, I have several million shipping games. I've never talked about that before.

Can we get access to this deck? Yes, but not right now. I'm happy to share it. I don't have it shared at the moment, but I'm happy to share it. There's nothing in it I'm afraid to share. Someone said I should plug Discord. Maybe we will post it in Discord later tonight, Andy. So if you would like it, this is your cue to join our Discord. And I will post it in the general chat.

tonight or tomorrow okay uh i ran the app store i worked at twitch which is where all of you know me from and most recently i ran prime gaming which is the job i had up until six o'clock last night I'm almost 24 hours unemployed. If you don't know the terms, L7 is senior manager. So this is inside Amazon speak. Senior manager then. director then vp the in those dates my smallest team was six my largest team was 800 and i had seven vice presidents as managers uh

Oh, Pintaquant, you're torturing him. It's true, by the way. It's about the data, not the pretty. And I worked in three different... seen under three different senior vice presidents the one remaining guy that you all know is andy jassy who runs amazon web services so one of my watch words is that results are the currency of credibility and so uh look if you want to be credible with other people you have to deliver something not just talk a good game

So I'm going to very quickly navigate away from this and see if I can show you the Amazon leadership principles, which I know I can because they're public. amazon leadership principles because i'm going to talk about these for a second and they're worth knowing because whether you ever want to work at amazon or not um amazon has done super well and we have these 14 leadership principles and they're worth at least understanding like what has helped make amazon great

So they're not complex to go find. They're at amazon.job.en.principles, which also means we probably have them in lots of other languages if you want them that way. But that's the link. quickly taking notes yeah all right so look um the real point i make in the slides is we don't talk about this as much but the amazon leadership principles are listed in kind of in order or at least a little bit in order

It starts with caring about the customer. And then at the end, the last one is deliver results. And so the idea is. You start with what the customer needs and then you do all this other stuff. And that results in you delivering a bunch of shit people can use. So that's the idea. And what I told people is, look. A lot of you probably in school or whatever have read Animal Farm. Well, if you've read Animal Farm, you know that the way the pigs rewrite the last of their rules...

it makes it the only rule that matters. Well, there was a joke in Amazon that said, not all the leadership principles are equal. It all comes down to how much results you deliver. And in a way, I agree with that. The rest of it is how you do it.

So why does that matter? If you're in your career, I talk about the magic loop all the time. Someone can pop up the magic loop in chat. But... fundamentally when i say do your job well it means deliver some valuable results for the company because in the end you're not paid to be a pretty face at work unless you work at hooters in which case you are um but otherwise

You are paid to deliver results. And in that case, you are paid. Yeah, of course, of course, deliver the right results, but you're paid to get things done on behalf of the company. There's the magic loop. um okay all right so let's go back to our slides um so story time some of you have heard this before but my very first thing i did at amazon was ship the original digital video product which had this terrible name amazon unbox but it began us on the path of what is now prime video

And by the way, if you think Unbox is a bad name, we paid these consultants to come up with names, and that was the best name of what they offered us. Another name they considered was Kazumer, K-A-Z-O-O-M-E-R. um not just zoom no no kazumer but the funniest one was rebirth media um which just if you think about it is not hey let's all watch rebirth media tonight I don't think it was McKenzie, but it was some, yeah, it was terrible.

So the fact we ended up with unbox is like that's what we call cream of the crap. It's like best of the worst So anyway, the other thing I talk about is look this last line a lot of you are software developers Or you know software developers And a lot of you are straight out of college. We actually have the data that shows the SDEs or any interns that start delivering stuff the week they arrive are most likely to succeed. And those who are like, oh, I kind of got to get to know people and learn.

learn before i can do anything they fail so it's not 100 there's exceptions to every rule but basically you're paid to get shit done And most companies aren't paying you to like, again, to look pretty. They're paying you to deliver results. And so do that. So that's part of my lessons. And here at the top, I said hard work. Well, that's the hard work part. It's part of the hard work part. All right, let's keep going. So here's some of the stuff I did in Amazon.

a lot of these were failures which is the point i want to make this is like a partial list in my history Some stuff I did that worked out. We integrated with TiVo. We built Amazon Video On Demand. I built a bunch of Kindle games. My team did when I ran games. These are the million selling games I made. uh yeah 15 years was a good run um and it allowed me to retire right allowed me to step back so all i have to do now is teach you guys and drink limoncello spiked uh

For anybody who arrived late, I'm mixing my drinks. So as opposed to two fisting, I'm pouring them together. A little mixology right here, and it's almost time for a refill. I built the app store. I built coins. There's an asterisk on merch by Amazon. Double fist, double fist. Yeah, Kindle games. And when I say Kindle games, I mean on e-ink screens. So one... All of you like to play at 60 frames per second. We were designing games that had to work at one frame per second.

tlt xxx yeah there was a point where i had 25 years to go too um i did not build all of amazon awesome i did build some chunks of it though uh man i wish um i wish i owned a rocket company that sounds like fun um no jeff's a jeff's a good guy uh someday i'll talk more about jeff here um But look, nobody's perfect, and he's always going to have critics. Everybody's going to have critics, and someone like him is going to have more than usual.

So you're too rich you're too this you're too that you don't do this you don't do that so Okay, um, I built bits So anybody who wants to take number one position on bits, it's going to cost you like one bit or 10 bits. AW1442, have I met Jeff in real life? Yes, many times. Over the 15 years, I probably had 50 or 60 meetings with Jeff. I've had the chance to sit next to him at a couple of lunches, some stuff like that. It's not like we're best friends, but I know him. He's a good guy.

there you go see tampa esports was able to collect that badge for a whopping 10 cents um so uh that's because we don't push um you know we love it when people sub here or give And thank you. But you don't need to. I'm here to try and help you. And so I very much appreciate it when you support the channel. But it's totally on you.

So this is the stuff I built. Now, I want to talk about the things that tanked. The key thing I want to point out is actually I can list at least as many failures at Amazon as successes. So the critical point is that you get some stuff done, not that everything works. So Unbox wasn't that great. I've talked about this project, Test Drive. It wasn't that great before. You can look up how much the Fire Phone was a failure for Amazon.

We built this thing called Amazon Underground that didn't work. Fuel was the code name of selling games on Twitch. So for a lot of you, oh, hey, awesome. Thank you for the Prime Gaming. Or the tier one sub where you converted from Prime Gaming. Even better. Oh, I drew a Twitch staff out of lurking. They didn't think they'd see Fuel mentioned.

Tampa Esports, thank you for the prime sub and for the second month. I'm going to make the next Amazon. It could be, although I'd have to start a little earlier or work a long time. Anyway, the point is not everything you do has to be successful. It's that you have to do some stuff and you have to learn from your failures so that your successes can be big.

So like sub-gifting, all of you know how huge this is on Twitch, right? So many sub-gifts. And Prime Gaming, obviously I hope a lot of you use it. Millions of people using Prime Gaming to get free goodies. Sean123, one of our channel VIPs stepping in with 33 cents. He's up to a third of a dollar.

um sean helps us publish our videos to youtube he's um amazing friend of mine i'm gonna see him at one of my socially distant retirement gatherings he and his wife on sunday so i'm looking forward to that So here's the key. Results don't come for free, okay? You've got to fight for them. To deliver results, this comes from that leadership principle I showed earlier. I'm just quoting here.

So when I talk about how people deliver results, I basically quoted this section. And now I'm lecturing Amazon people on how to succeed. So I've quoted stuff. But I want all of you, this stuff works besides Amazon. Leaders focus on the key inputs for their business and deliver them with the right quality in a timely fashion. So time matters. You've got to get stuff done before somebody else. It's also despite setbacks. Shit will go wrong.

Say, for example, when you're supposed to be working, instead you'll be busy packing your refrigerator to take the food to your in-laws because there's a bloody wildfire outside your house. Just as an example. I mean, I'm just saying it could happen. uh they rise the occasion and they never settle so like never settle i love that don't compromise don't be beaten down there's there's plenty of people in your life who will tell you no and

It's just so much easier to tell you no than yes. It's so much easier to say that won't work. We tried it before. We don't have the resources. The people who succeed find a way to get stuff done anyway.

sean123 by the way is still in the belly of the beast at amazon i kind of helped guide him to get a role there and now he's going to carry on my torch so here's to you sean you can be the next me and give this presentation in a few years sean was ceo of his own company so he totally has the ability to do this he was ceo of a small company and now he's in amazon he's gonna he's gonna kill it so

Look, many people with good intentions are going to slow you down. They're going to tell you why it's not going to work, which is site risk. They're going to tell you all these features your stuff needs to be successful. OK, it's got to it's got to make it's got to make turtle soup. and it's got to read email, and it's got to stream on Twitch in one click, and it's got to, you know, remove voter fraud from global elections, or it's not good enough. Well, bullshit.

sometimes you have to cut down scope and get the thing out the door um i want to know how to go from an l7 to l8 in two years i can tell you that sean hit me up uh You know, hit me up Sunday and then maybe we'll do a stream on it. But I can tell you how to do that. You know what? Actually, it's on this page, okay? Let me highlight it for you because you're watching. Right there, buddy. It's the part in blue.

Right there. You want to go from L7 to L8? It's right there. So Sean's already bucking for promotion. He's been at Amazon maybe six months. He's bucking for promo, which is good. So one of the things I put in here that's fun, you know, it's my last damn day at Amazon when I gave this. I might as well settle some scores. When I started and I was an L7 like Sean is now, my boss told me, look, I know you're in a hurry, but we have three teams and Kindle is the most important.

books and so they're going to ship first and we're going to put our design resources on that and then music they're going to ship second and your team video they're going to ship third Well, screw that. I ship first. Okay. Music fell on its ass. And Kindle, it's hardware, right? They were screwed from the beginning. Like designing hardware just takes a long time. Software is so much easier.

What are the KPIs for promotion L6 L7 put it in the tool Andy and I will ask People will pop up for you how to ask questions and I will happily and he wants to know to how to go from a basically senior individual contributor to a principal or or something like that if others want it i will do it kendall was awesome when we got it

there's a super funny story i'll tell sometime about oprah winfrey talking about kendall um uh maybe at the end if you want to hear that story you can remind me but um oprah sold a lot of kindles for us i'll just say that okay let's go on so okay deliver results is the way and by the way um You were asking about the KPI to go from six to seven. Well, it depends. KPI is key performance indicator, but at least at Amazon, if you're asking that question, it's right here again, right?

I don't know what the measurement is in your team, Andy, but it's deliver the effing results. Make your KPI go up. Kiraluda remembers. Yeah, I bet she does remember when the... kendall when oprah talked about kendall all right so how do you do this stuff are you coming to get some drinks oh all right it's refill time 40 pink dragons is back

This is your chance to go nuts and chat. The mod's up here. Oh, wait. We have a couple other mods on channel. See where it will handle it. Yeah, that's right. Well, I think Hephaestus is here too. Oh, is he? Perfect. Yeah, so they're covered. Oh, my God. Did you meet Oprah? Fighting Pickles, I did not. Bezos obviously met her. He was on the show. I was watching. Yeah, there you go. Here's to you, Hephaestus.

duke of thought i need to work tomorrow i am sorry for you follow in my illustrious footsteps take my advice and you can be freed of this burden as i am now free And look, I actually want you to do it before your hair is gray. If you want. Remember, you can still keep working if you want. You just won't have to. So that's the best place to be.

are you standing ethan or are you nine feet seated in a chair you know i am i'm seated but it it makes no difference like this is this is standing and so actually i get i get shorter seated i guess a little bit Thank you for the tier one. Tampa Esports. I was wondering the same thing. I'm 6'2 and change. For anybody who wants to know. I'm pretty tall. And generally, being tall is good. Occasionally, it kind of hoses you. Oh, no. Please don't call my wife a midget, okay? No bueno.

uh no bueno no uh she's just the right size plus women can wear heels you know So they have lots of options. All right. So anyway, let's talk about these hacks. She approved it. Yeah, that's right. You know, you will work a long time before you throw my wife off her game. All right. A long time.

yeah very uh five four that's right but she can be five eight if she needs to five nine um yeah it is true that being tall is a corporate plus there's no question um there's no question yes i'm 6'2 a little bit uh i am tall which is an advantage for sure all right so look um yeah devon i don't know how tall devon is but he's he's not as tall so how do you get stuff done well look if it's technical you

if you work at a tech company sometimes you're going to need to hack so a story i tell is when we were trying to the amazon catalog was built around retail it was built around um You know, selling books and stuff. Well, to sell TV series, if you think about it, you have a show. So you have something like Downton Abbey. And Downton Abbey has five seasons. And then each season...

has a lot of episodes, and we needed a way to represent that hierarchy. And to get the catalog changed to do all that stuff was going to take like a year. because we weren't the priority well we just figured out that like clothing worked this way because you could say like oh it's a dress it's a black dress and You know, season one is a black dress and season two is a blue dress and season three is a green dress. And then episode one is size one and episode two is size two.

And we just overloaded. We basically used dress sizes to ship the original video catalog. And this is the kind of stuff... sometimes you just got to get stuff out the door now there's a lot of engineers who aren't dead yet in chat who are rolling over in their virtual graves as i tell this story and i get it but um manager speaking here uh results matter and we didn't have time to wait for all this to get fixed so instead we hacked it um

There's another story about becoming persuasive and persistent. OK, if you want to be successful. Yeah. So somebody says that sounds like a cluster. Sure. If you haven't worked inside a large company yet, most of the technology is a cluster at all times. And you're just trying to stay one crash ahead of profitable. Perfect technology and a shrine to like CS elegance is nice. But as it says here in the first bullet, the unshipped monument to quality is useless, right?

Dead code is not as interesting as stuff that makes money and what I did makes money. Now, sometimes we had to spend a bunch of time fixing it, but it makes money. All right. So anyway, another piece of how you get stuff done is you got to be persuasive and persistent. If you want to get stuff done in any big corporate environment or even a small one, you're going to have to convince and conjole some people.

And so, yeah, fix it later maybe. That's exactly it. Perfect is the enemy of the good. That's also true. So the story here is... Jeff Bezos asked us to ship the Amazon App Store in all these different countries so it could support the Kindle tablet in all these countries globally. And I didn't have the people or the time to do it.

So I told him look we cannot do this. It's not we don't want to it's not that we don't agree with you. It's just we can't do it and He authorized us to go poach 55 engineers from other people's teams And so we went around the company with a list of names and pulled people into our team, you know, against their manager and their vice president's will. We just went in and picked good people from their teams and are like, hey, you work for us now.

And we didn't, you know, if people didn't wanna come, we didn't make them. But if their managers didn't wanna come, we said, sorry Jeff said.

so 55 was a huge number 10 years ago when i did this now amazon's bigger and like 55 wouldn't be such a big thing but basically we talked first we talked jeff into authorizing this and then we talked everyone into supporting it and then we did though this is important we shipped all the stuff and yes kira luta this has been done since then it's been done once after that um kira luda is twitch staff now but she was amazon before she was twitch and she worked on my team both times so anyway uh

point is we stole all these people but then we did ship it like the worst thing you could do to lose credibility is steal all these people from everyone else all your peers and then f up the projects you cannot do that So we have this other leadership principle. I'm going to go show it real quick called bias for action.

And the key here that's made Amazon successful is two things. It says speed matters in business, okay? You have competitors. All of you in whatever the hell it is you do, you have competitors. You have people. You have people in your job and working against your company who want to drive it under and take all your customers. So speed matters. And then...

The other thing to know, though, is many decisions are reversible. And so Amazon is very clear they value calculated risk taking. Now, why does that matter? Well, why it matters is if you look at my own record. If I scroll back up here, I can name just as many projects that didn't work as projects that did.

But what I did that made me successful at Amazon is I shipped a whole shit ton of stuff. And on average, my batting average was high enough that the stuff that did work paid for all the stuff that didn't. So that's what I want you to hear is it's not about everything you do being perfect. It's about having a high enough batting average. And by the way, if you're not putting in questions about this, you totally can. I have I have a lot of alcohol to get through.

and so um i'm totally into answering your questions after we do the slides so if you don't know how to get stuff done you um if you can't get your boss like if you're an ic if you're a new engineer if you're duke of thought at a low level um relatively new to your job and he says a truly silicon valley approach um

ask to test it if you can't get people to let you ship it say oh man i just want to test it web lab means like i just want to try it in an a b test i want to try it out i want to pilot it look can we just do a little skunk works how about we do it after hours find any way to get the results that will be proof because once you have proof it's working people shut up example by the way uh

uh i hacked the amazon career day site i don't know victor maybe um if it worked for you like what are the results you say a hack i don't know if i'm proud of you yet or not until i know whether or not you got something out of it so tell me um it's cool you hacked it what was the valuable result for you or somebody else um okay

So a lot of what I did was take risks. So if I said part one was hard work, part two was take risks. So I'm not going to like... spend all this time because you guys are going to want to ask questions about tivo but i've told this story here before the very brief version is when i ran amazon video We wanted to do a partnership with TiVo and our boss thought it wasn't a great deal. And I told him, look, I've got the resources to do this. It's only going to take 7% of my team to do it.

So it's not a huge part of my resources. And unless you, the key words I said is, unless you order me not to, I'm going to do this. Well, he decided not to order me not to. You know, he was kind of like, I'll give you enough rope to hang yourself.

and it worked out so we shipped amazon video on tivo and the reason it worked out is not only did we get a lot of tivo customers for amazon video now prime video but samsung vizio panasonic sony all came to our door and they're like hey we have these new smart tvs um can you put amazon video on those so we got into all these tvs because we had done tivo and that's actually what got me promoted the first time all right what's victor have to say here i was able to get uh a one-on-one

50-minute code review from an amazon engineer the site said it was full but there was actually one spot left the ui did not update i love it hell yeah i'm proud of you victor Way to go. Yeah, so if that's what you're saying, I totally respect that. That's winning. Good job. And I worked for Amazon until 24 hours ago. Totally support that. And by the way, the funny part is I hope you got a job or got whatever you wanted out of it. But the story you just told is why Amazon should hire you.

like the story you told is why you should get hired in my opinion i don't work there anymore so i can have that opinion and say it but i love that story and if you don't have a job at amazon and you want one Connect to me in Discord and I will tell your story to my team because that's exactly what we're looking for.

We're looking for people who don't take no for an answer and who get shit done. There should be a line of Amazon teams looking for someone who does that kind of thing. Prince Ricky Rye. is a brand new Amazonian. I helped him find his way into the company. And look, I'm not gone. Think of me as like on long-term sabbatical. I mean, I am gone, but I'm not. I will always, just like I'll always bleed purple for Twitch, I will always love Amazon. But anyway, look.

see victor tv didn't hurt anyone else and didn't he just seized the opportunity like he didn't do anything evil there was a spot left and he found a way He found himself a way to get into it. That's called fucking brilliant. So why did I leave Amazon? Because I could. It's a 60 hour a week job and I'm retired. So I could do more of this and less of that.

No, I love Amazon, but like, hey, look, let's be honest. If you don't have to work all the time, how many of you would you? Because now I can work on my own terms. You know, I love my boss at Amazon, but I had a boss. Now, I don't have a boss. Hello, upgrade. I love my boss, but come on. Yeah, that gray hat stuff is sketchy.

Yeah, Duke, and I'm going to keep working too. So yeah, the 60 hours a week is a lot. Look, I work between 50 hours a week and 60 hours a week my whole career, not just at Amazon. yeah you guys are my boss now shadow fox all right welcome in another one of our long time mods shadow shadow helped me get started streaming so i always have appreciation for her

Thank you for the congrats on retirement. That's super nice of you. You missed my face so much. Oh man, Shadow, congratulations by the way. I won't, I won't. disclose any details but shadow recently got married her wedding got all effed up by covid so none of us could go to it so she's gonna have a real wedding later

But she got married. And so congratulations to Shadow Fox in chat. And I look forward to attending her wedding in the future. So. yeah no real wedding in 2021 there's so many things that are gonna happen in 2021 uh because like 2020 hey let's let's let's list them out all right covid okay everybody knows that Up here in the Northwest, if you don't know about this, you can read about something called murder hornets.

It's like crazy. They're Asian hornets that have invaded the U S. And so now we have like two inch long hornets. And by the way, my, my, my wife, 40 pink dragons is allergic to bee sting. So yay. Kobe died protests. Yes.

the black lives matter george george floyd fire at my house right forest fires everywhere somebody i'm sure you've all seen this meme but the like congratulations you've reached level nine and jumanji that that really does feel like a lot of our lives so um anyway all right here we go let's keep going so calculator take risks look here's what i'll tell you chat straight up i regret not taking more risks in my career

occasionally i got in trouble and things didn't work out i broke shit i'm as you can see i made bezos and a guy named jeff wilkie very mad um but i did that by failing a gamble gone wrong but the key is i built enough stuff that worked and i took enough risks that worked out and i survived the risks that didn't so Do you wish you left Amazon sooner? Eh, not really. I mean, I wish, yeah, Jeff Wilkie retired also.

brow meister i understand you okay i understand why you would really dislike risk but the thing is waiting to be 100 sure makes you too slow no it was not coordinated I wish Wilkie had consulted me or something. No. Jeff Wilkie is one of the icons of Amazon much more than me. He's been CEO of North American Retail. running this giant hundred billion dollar business but yeah you've got to take risk because otherwise it's too slow waiting for certainty is too slow

And sometimes you'll never be certain. Like there's always one more thing that might go wrong. So anyway, speed matters. So when I ran Twitch Commerce is the group that brought you. all this stuff right it brought you bits it brought you the ability to use paypal on twitch if you use paypal it brought you gifting it brought you tiered subs community gifting we just shipped a lot of stuff

Some of the stuff went really well. Gifting worked really well. Community gifting worked really well. PayPal worked super well. Selling games on Twitch didn't work so well. WATEB is an acronym. It means watch ads to earn bits. We could never get it to scale. Some people liked watching ads to earn bits, but we could never get it to scale.

And tiered subs, we have not yet managed to give enough benefits so that you all feel like you should sub at $10 or $25 rather than $5. And so that's still out there. That's something we can still do. Yeah, bid ads don't work because there's a supply problem. We couldn't find enough people who wanted to provide, like pay for the advertising. And then to be honest.

for a lot of reasons it wasn't a big enough business so people didn't work on it hard i still think it has potential when i look at these things that didn't work i think fuel we're not going back to and these two could still work So, yeah, they disappeared because we couldn't find enough. We were working with a partner who sold the ads and we couldn't get enough scale. They were always sold out.

So let's talk about permission like a lot of you are gonna feel you need permission Can you talk more about watch ads to earn bits? I always have felt like this could be an approach to having a way to remove ads yeah so the problem is getting someone to sell enough of those ads what i mean by that is some advertiser has to be willing to pay enough that we can give away the bits

And we never managed to make that enough of a priority for the ad sales team and the partner companies to get enough ads. Basically, every day we'd have some amount of ad. ads that we could let you watch and they were gone like that um and so it's possible we're just not there pma dota welcome back thank you for six months of continuing subscription it's good to have you here so look i'm sad watib's not there um you know

I'd like to see it come back. It's not going to come back until we can figure out how to make it a big business. Twitch is a huge site now. Thanks to COVID. Thanks to, you know, the growth in traffic of everybody being at home. Tizzy XD, thank you for the prime sub. Obviously I built prime gaming. So prime subs, all subs are near and dear to my heart because I ran the subs team at Twitch, but prime subs particularly. So they are our love letter to Twitch. They're Amazon providing.

free money to broadcasters from prime members so that was the idea by the way if you're curious at all the idea was how can amazon support twitch and it was give twitch something in our marquee program prime so worked really well all right How do you get permission to take risks? Well, the first thing is, if at all possible, just do it. It's a lot easier to ask for forgiveness than it is to ask for permission.

It's a lot easier to just do it if you can possibly get away with it and say sorry later. And then if you can't do that, do your homework. We have this leadership principle called be right a lot. Have the proof that what the risk you want to take is a good bet. People like nice, safe bets. You know, someone here in chat earlier was saying they're afraid of risk, but people like.

nice safe bets so if you give them a chance to take a safe bet they will and so you got to make them feel like your bet is well planned and safe and if you can't do that right away say look here's how we can pilot it Or here's how we can test it and show it works. And if at all possible, show a prototype or get data somehow. And then you do have to be willing to accept the consequences.

of failure if it doesn't work out. And that's my next slide. So, if you do some stuff and it doesn't work out, don't blame others. So let me tell this story. A lot of you have heard it before. Aniwax. Yes, I have in fact retired past tense. My last day with Amazon was yesterday. So I am now gainfully unemployed.

And so far it feels good. I'm still drinking the champagne or the Prosecco that the team gave me when I left. And so, so far... fueled by a couple big glasses of champagne retirement sounds great and by retire I'm not just gonna sit on my butt no victor no unemployment check because i quit i wasn't fired you only get that if you're fired um uh if you resign you don't get jack shit but that's okay

So, anyway, I'm not just going to sit on my butt. I'm going to stream for you guys. Because this is actually what I care about. I care about helping you become good leaders. I say this on the channel only about once a month, maybe not so often. So here you go. Here's the advert. Why do I stream? Because I'm retired. I don't have to. And my ego doesn't need it. I can drink alone. It's fine. I stream here because the world has more problems than I can solve alone.

It's got the forest fires and climate change. It's got racial injustice. It's got you pick your problem. There's a long list. I'm trying to help more of you become successful so that you're. nests are feathered and so you have all the dollars euros shekels pesos rubles whatever the hell it is you want collected And then you can dedicate some of your life to fixing all the shit that's broken. So if you want to know my motive, I'm very transparent. I'm trying to help you all.

get to where you feel like you know i can do my job and make the money i need and have what i need and i can fix all the broken shit in the world so that's that's my purpose and i basically left amazon and i'm streaming because now i have more time to create help you get there and i don't have to multitask with a day job so That's the whole point. And I don't have to drink alone. That is a good point too, Aniwax. Thank you. Alright, more water though. I'm getting slightly slurry.

All right, 24-hour streams. Oh, man. I don't know if I can do it. Tony, partnered streamer. Thank you for all the great info. Congratulations on partnership, by the way, Tony. That's a tough goal. Flashbacks to tequila nights. Yes, when I start slurring, it's a good night. Water. Sanyu Kuraluda, I have never seen you drink much, so I don't know about you and water. You're welcome. Why did Twitch decide to make partnership easier? Hmm, that's a tough question.

I would say it evolved over time. It evolved over time. Partnership is still quite challenging, and part of it is gathering an audience. Yes, Saturday for my retirement gathering, there will in fact be margaritas. Sunday will be sangria. So I have like a Southern European slash Hispanic. drinking vibe for sure generally shadow I wish you could be here so some other time will it be streamed on twitch you know My Saturday party, sorry, my Sunday party is at Awesome Dave's, our producer.

And he's got his new studio set up. So I'm almost certain to go live either before, during, or after the party. It will be a surprise short stream Sunday night sometime. So... It'll just be, I don't know, it'll either be me very drunk and happy or me before the party, but we'll probably test out Awesome Dave's new setup if he's ready. And you know what? He's got a whole studio built with an audience seating capacity that fucking COVID. Look, wear your masks, people.

COVID doesn't allow us to have a live audience in studio yet because I would love that. As much as I love drinking alone here with all of you, it would be so much fun. to have a live audience who could shout out questions for me and who could be part of chat and stuff so soon uh yeah of course twitch chat will be invited at that point um so all right

What was I saying here? All right, so when you F up, when something goes wrong, I built this thing. It doesn't matter what. It was supposed to be, because I've told this story before, so I'm going to do a short version. I built this thing. It didn't work. It was supposed to be on the front page of Amazon. And Jeff Bezos was going to have a letter extolling the virtues of this thing I built. And it gets up in the morning and it's not working.

So we tried really hard to hit this date because of a marketing partnership and we rushed the testing and we blew it. So Jeff wakes up and it doesn't work and he's all mad. The bottom line, for those of you who are technical, it's this bullet that says we had a database in line with a button called to a display on the website. So every time a webpage loaded, it tried to hit the database. So if you know anything about Amazon,

That's a disaster at scale if you know anything about databases. And yes, I did get essentially the dreaded question mark email. So this was just a complete screw up.

And we also had a database design that was going to ensure locking contention. Again, for people who know, yeah, one million clicks an hour. That's exactly right, Victor. No database in the world can handle that. And we weren't... we weren't caching the result like we for the technical folks in the audience we just screwed it up it worked great in the lab right like one guy clicking on it worked great um relational database yeah exactly

yeah well this is 10 years ago right like dynamo db and stuff were new um so anyway we we totally effed this up and it was a well-intentioned engineer just He built something that worked in the lab and didn't think about scale. And then we were using Oracle, which obviously it's well known that like Amazon thinks you should use Amazon Web Services, not Oracle. And by the way, you should.

You should. So Larry Ellison, I love you. You own the island of Lanai in Hawaii, which is quite impressive, but everyone should use Amazon Web Services. So I had to own this, though, right? I had to go own it. So here's the steps, okay? You want a money slide? You want to take something away that's money for the future? When you F up, here's what you do. Number one, don't deny it. Take responsibility.

Number two, communicate clearly that you're going to fix it. Like, look, hey, yes, it's broken, Jeff. We're on it. We've brought in these people. We're gonna get help. Here's when we're gonna fix it We're gonna update you in an hour you tell them I will update you every hour until this is fixed You will get hourly updates around the clock until it's fixed

You'll get hourly updates on the impact and then do that. And if you can't stay up for 48 hours, have someone spell you, but give them hourly updates, communicate ownership. And then. Ask for help. And so PE here means principal engineer. The Amazon principal engineer community came down and saved us. And for those of you who want an AWS story, this is really funny.

victor you just talked about a million clicks an hour the way they fixed it was big iron they came in and said your database design sucks but we're just going to put so much database power Behind your crappy design that no amount of clicks can overwhelm it Hey, Brian happy you're here, too And so the Amazon

principal engineer community was like the fastest way to fix this is overwhelm it with scale and they just deployed all this aws capacity so that our shitty design worked and then we rebuilt the design in the background

Write a real COE. What does this mean? COE is cause of error. So it's an analysis of what went wrong. It's basically, if you don't know this terminology, do a post-mortem, do... an after action report if you're military it's basically saying figure out what you screwed up and be honest about it and then here's the key learn the lesson and do better so

Here's some stories. After I screwed this up, I had a chance to go to a meeting with Jeff Bezos and I was scared to go because he was mad at me. And I decided, you know what, if I'm scared to face the guy, I better pack up my desk. So I went and faced him and I sat down and he held this meeting and the meeting went by and he didn't talk to me much. But at the end of the meeting, he turned to me and said, look, how's your week been?

I bet it's taken a few years off your life. And hey, Kaval, thank you for the sub. So I knew I was OK with Bezos because he was being friendly and he was very human to me. And by the way, if you ever wondered.

this is why i'll run through walls for the guy i don't agree and i say publicly i don't agree with everything jeff does but when i had just completely screwed up he gave me a break and he didn't have to um and i that that to me shows he's fundamentally a good guy bottom line um so then my my svp was this guy jeff wilkie who's just resigned uh retired like i am he'll actually leave his job after christmas but he's announced his retirement so wilkie he was mad too because jeff was mad

and um i thought you know this is funny i thought oh i'm so smart i went and talked to jeff bezos and he was really nice to me i'll go talk to jeff wilkie it's gonna be great like it worked once why not again i go and talk to wilkie not as good wilkie says so ethan when you launched this product did you know you were gambling and i said yeah i knew i was but i thought we had to hit the date and he said

Well, that's good, because if you hadn't known you were gambling, we'd have to discuss your departure. But since you knew you were gambling, I guess you at least have a basic understanding, and you just made the wrong decision. So you can stay as long as you make different decisions. That's essentially what he said.

And I, you know, here I'm expecting this victory lap like I had with Jeff. Like, hey, Jeff, I'm sorry I screwed up. And he's like, oh, well, you know, these things happen. Jeff actually said someday we'll laugh about this. And then he goes see Wilkie, and he's like, yeah, so did you know you were gambling? If you answer wrong, you're fired. Like, ah.

A little bit good. Yeah, it is a little bit good cop, bad cop for sure. Wilkie was definitely the bad cop in that scenario. That's right. Dom Kang has it right. Wait, I'm retiring. Dude, catch up, buddy. Yesterday was my last day at Amazon. I am a... I am a free, unemployed man. I am gainfully unemployed, only streaming you guys. So, Dorino, you're not subbed to me, buddy. You got no badges. Like, this is your call to action. I need you. Because...

I'm no longer an Amazon. No, I'm just kidding. Just hang out. Full-time streamer. I don't know about that, but I don't have a different job than streaming. How about that? What made me stay after that conversation with Wilkie? Oh wow. Yannicus. So first, thank you. You're like a big gifter for us because we don't do a lot of gifting in the channel. Sometimes we do. Some people give some big gifts, but thank you for gifting.

so you ask a good question in chat though why did i stay after that conversation with wilkie well number one i'm kind of too dumb and stubborn to quit um and number two even though he was harsh It was clear that he was OK. He was OK. You know, he was he was going to be supportive. And so I had work to do and I I wanted to succeed. Amazon is a great company.

Somebody asked me last week or earlier this week, what am I going to miss most about Amazon? Here's another soundbite for you that you all should hear about what makes Amazon great. And look. Amazon has many flaws, okay? And maybe later when I'm a little bit more than one day removed from Amazon, we'll do the show of what are all of Amazon's flaws.

Because I don't have DT Twitch Talks, an intern there now, or his internship just ended. Amazon has a lot of advantages. But it does have weaknesses. And I'm not blind to them. I'm not blind to all of them anyway. But let me tell you what impresses me about Amazon. It's not driven by the quarterly bottom line of Wall Street. If you don't know Jeff Bezos' history, Bezos was working on Wall Street.

God, what's the name of that firm he was with? It starts with a D. I can't think of it now. Somebody in chat will post it. Austin will know it because he's like a... Yeah, D.E. Shaw. Thank you. So he was working at D.E. Shaw. He knows Wall Street inside out and he's played them well. He's told them what he's going to do. which is going to manage the company for long-term results. And if they want quarterly results, they should F off. And so as a result, he has freedom to make or lose money.

Jeff's on record, if you go look it up, he's on record as working on things That are going to only take shape and pay benefits for his grandchildren. So he's planning things that take 50 or 100 years to bear fruit. And let's be honest. I struggle, even though I talk to you guys about planning, to have a one-year plan. And I know most of you, you have kind of a vague idea.

of what you're going to do this year and maybe where you hope to be. No plan, just hope or think you're going to be in five years. Jeff's planning 50 to 100. I honestly, you know, I'm going to be dead in 50 years. And so I struggle honestly to give a fuck about 50 years from now. I wish that wasn't true. I wish I was more altruistic and I was like thinking about my grandkids. But yeah, and Duke's being honest, right? It bores him. But he's thinking downstream.

And so anyway, why do I like that? What makes Amazon interesting? Why I stayed at Amazon was because it was a place where I didn't have to get something done by the end of the quarter. That's a key like Duke. The key isn't the 50-year plan. It's the not being driven by, what is it? Today is September 10th.

Not being driven by, oh my God, I have 20 days until the end of the quarter and the only thing that matters are my quarterly numbers. That sucks. And that's actually, as much as I admire America, I love America. We're too quarterly driven. Too many companies are all about what are we going to report? Is our stock going to go up and down? What are we going to report?

Who cares? Life is longer than 90-day increments. Oh, yeah, you know, this is an auto post, but in the past, I've never talked about it. If you do want private help with a resume, with LinkedIn, with finding a job, I do that on a paid hourly basis. It's not because I need the money, frankly. It's because pay shows you're serious and if you pay for something, you value it.

And I only have so much time. So if I told everyone I'd help you find a job and I'd help you with your resume for free, you'd all ask. Whereas if I put a paywall in front of it, fewer of you ask. But anyway. Otherwise, if you are dead broke or need shit for free, I do it here all the time. Like I stream every week to help you. Joseph Bartley, subscribe with Prime.

uh yeah i totally have all kinds of stuff for free on youtube um and i one of the members of my support staff her resume not shadowfox Her resume got burned down on one of my streams, and she's very sad that it got immortalized. She's happy about the feedback, but she's a little sketchy about the fact that I burned it down and now it's going to live on YouTube forever. So I didn't do a resume review tonight because I'm behind on Discord. I'll catch up on it. We'll do it next week. But, you know.

It's a public life. It's okay. You're going to get great jobs and kick ass. All right. So another thing that happened is I wrote this COE, which is like the after action report, the cause of errors. I had to write this analysis of what we screwed up and Wilkie. asked me to send it to all my peers so they could learn. Man, that sucked. Rest of the slides. Let me see if I can do these really quick because we've been talking a while.

This is a fun stat, right? So I joined Amazon on April 11th. I left on September 9th. Just a fun, fun item for you. Amazon stock was at 26.2 on August 10, 2006. It's done well as a company over time. Nonetheless, I had to be patient. I had to be patient. That's 2006. A lot of you were in damn near diapers in 2006. You know, some of you may be in diapers still.

some of you may never get out of them but most of you will i was nine yeah there you go so like long ago see back in the dark ages before broadband i worked at amazon Um, so I had peers promoted before me, both to director, which is LA and VP and it sucked. When I had this big disaster we just talked about, my promotion was held back about two years.

because i had failed to deliver results with the right quality i had delivered results but not with the right quality um hey real live sports uh real live sports at amazon too I never get out of my pajamas. Good for you, man. Look, here's another place. Almost everyone lives listening here other than Ed, who works in the real world with physical stuff.

most of you are going to work in the information society realize you have become very privileged because now you can work from home and work from anywhere and work in your pajamas and most of the world basically digs in the dirt for their living and you don't have to so that's another reason i teach here because uh a lot of you aren't going to have to dig in the dirt

Duke of thought, he digs in big vats of chemicals. He's a chemie. He digs in big vats of chemicals. And so that's a little different. He works at a real plant. So that's serious work.

but most of us we get to sit in these nice offices and now in our home offices realize that we have it pretty nice and so let's help some other people you can have it nice and sit in your air conditioning and still help some other people i'm not asking you by the way to give up your shit i'm not a martyr i'm sitting here drinking champagne um but those of us who are lucky enough to be able to hang out on twitch and and

have a nice life why not help the people who have it shitty um so yam at five thank you for the sub all right no nothing is ever as fast as you want it The lesson I've taught here before is, look, all of us see our own good and we explain away our misses. The way this is normally expressed, if you want another soundbite for tonight and you're new, is... We judge ourselves by our intentions, but others by their actions. So when you look at somebody else and they drop the ball,

We don't say, oh, I was tired. Oh, I missed my coffee. Oh, my mom died last night. We say, wow, she's incompetent. But when it's us, we're like, man, my dog threw up on my homework. I had a power outage. I had to move out of my house because of fire. I was feeling down. I was feeling sick. I was off my game. My wife was mad at me.

We give ourselves excuses just understand that when you want to get promoted you need to be a little patient Because other people are seeing your misses and you're excusing them All right This is a list of great people I worked with who got promoted a lot. It's Amazon internal. It won't mean that much to you. But here's the point. It's in the headline. Let me put it this way. Devin Nash, a lot of you are Devin Nash fans.

Devin's awesome. He's one of my good friends. So we'll be sure to cross-promote him here. There you go. Devin for the win. Devin reminded me of the saying, You are the five people you spend the most time with so Work with stars If you want

Devin Nash smells like green tea. This is an obvious answer. If you want to be a star, if you want to be a high performer, go get around other high performers. If you want to lose weight, go get around skinny people. By the way, there's... evidence of that if you want to gain weight go hang around people who are heavy you want to lose weight go hang around people who are small the there is scientific evidence

That if you hang around with larger people, you will be larger. And if you hang around with smaller people, you will be smaller. And the rest applies at work too. If you hang around and surround yourself. With top performers and positive people, you will be top performing and positive. If you hang around with negative downers, you will tend to be negative in a downer. Surround yourself with the best people you can.

Can I hang out with attractive people? That's a great idea. Well, look, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy is proof that if you hang around, it won't make your face prettier, but you will become much more attractive. If you hang out with well-groomed people, there is no question it's true. Yes, that's right. LJ Looks Young says, you're the average of the five people closest to you, and that is correct.

So, all right. This was a slide for internal Amazon managers that says, do whatever it takes to keep the great people. And it's very true without great people around me, I wouldn't have done everything I did. But I wanted to talk to the ICs, the individual contributors, which is a lot of people here. You're not managers. Go work for the great people.

Go find the great managers. Go work for the best people you can find. Here's another point I told in this story. I'm almost done. I'm on page 13 of 16. I've had more managers assigned to me than I chose at Amazon. Two of the best managers I ever had were assigned to me. it's a lot easier to see the downside. Like, oh, I got reorg, it's going to suck. I'm going to get more work and less pay or whatever. Sometimes there's a lot of upside. I'll put it this way.

When you get changed around at work to a new project or whatever, there's a 50-50 chance you're better off. All of us tend to think like, oh, I'm fucked, man. I got moved off this thing. They don't know me. I'm going to get screwed. That's how our minds work. It's just as likely you're going to be better off. The boss I got reorganed under was the one who fought to get me promoted to VP. Conversely, when I joined Twitch, this is a story a lot of you don't know.

When I joined Twitch, I took a job first. Emmett Scheer is 10 years younger than I am. And the guy I took a job for at first when I started working with Twitch had been my peer. And so my coming to work to Twitch, this will shock all of you Twitch lovers, was considered a demotion. And one of my friends actually asked me like, hey, man, what did you do to get demoted?

And I told him I chose this. I wanted to work on stuff I loved. And so remember, sometimes to work on the things that are important to you, you may have to suck up some criticism from people who don't get it. yeah adreno twitch is pretty small in the larger amazon picture and so i wanted to work on what mattered to me not like if i wanted to work on the most important things and kira luta's been here all night if she's still here

She and I both had the chance to go work on Alexa. Alexa is like the sexy beast at Amazon and so are drones and a few other things. Go work on what matters. Juicebox TV. That's one of my goals now is to become a better chef. Actually, just to become a more competent cook.

How do you manage the impossible question of doing what is safe versus what is good for the world? Oh, man. Well, I can be honest about it. I try to always be honest here. What I did was do what was safe until I had enough money and now I'm doing what's good. Like that's the most straightforward, truthful answer I can give you is I did the safe thing and work for Amazon until I was okay to leave to do the good thing.

so i wish that wasn't true i wish i had been bold enough to do the good thing early and i was a little bit like i found a way to stream for you guys before i quit But what I basically did was get to where I felt I could retire safely and then switch. And what I'm trying to help you all do is do the same thing. I don't expect you. You know, it's too high of a bar. I'm never going to be a hypocrite, I hope.

And there's 170 people watching right now and I hope I'm not enough of a hypocrite to tell you, oh, you should all quit and be martyrs and join Peace Corps and go help the homeless. I get it. You want a car and to pay off your student loan and have a house and a family first. Great. My strategy is not to convince you to join the Peace Corps and starve, but rather to help you get a big enough bank account.

and enough career success that you're like okay i got it now i want to do what matters and so being very honest with you this this stream particularly i'm like three quarters of the way through the champagne is very real I'm trying to help you. Whatever your number is, whatever it is it takes for you to feel secure, Victor, I'm trying to help you feel confident enough and secure enough in your talent and your ability to make money that that's no longer what you care about.

that you don't and some of you will be like man i want to pile up i want to be bezos i want to be five times bezos i don't just want to own an island i want to own a whole continent we're going to rename antarctica victor tv land um You know, I can't help you. I don't know But for most of you, there's a point where you're gonna be like, you know, I'm good Like I've got my rent covered. I've got my car paid off

My kids, if I have kids or my wife or whatever, it's all good. I want to do something with meaning. And the fact is, selling more toilet paper isn't super meaningful. What do I want my legacy to be as a leader? My legacy as a leader, I want it to be that I help people. early in my career early in my life i practiced that exercise where you write your own epitaph or you write your own eulogy for when you die and my eulogy was going to be he stood by his friends

I wanted it to be about loyalty. Well, I broadened that a little bit. I want my eulogy to be about the people I helped. And I'm grateful that it's already turning out that way. You guys here and the people in discord, the people on my LinkedIn. uh you're very you're very positive about the impact i've had teaching you how to get a better job how to be more effective how to be more confident

You know, Dr. K fixes people's minds. I fix people's resumes and careers so that they have a job and so that they feel like they know what they're doing. You know, we haven't popped up the magic loop in a while. I have a five bloody step recipe for how to be successful in your career. Dr. K is Dr. Kanagia. He streams as a healthy gamer GG, and he deals with gaming addiction and low self-esteem. He's a great guy.

He fixes people who like are addicted to gaming and can't do anything else or who. Anyway, you can go look at him. i help people like dr k has to get your mind right if you have that problem and then i help you get your life right and that's how i see it and i talk to him about that but uh we help you get on the right track And it's also true, Yamat5 says you can do things while you work at Amazon or while you work somewhere else, and I did that.

I have the luxury of now doing it with more of my time. But you can have a good job and be earning money and still investing in humanity. And I hope some of you at least want to do that. Some of you may be jaded.

and not want to bother and i get it but i hope over time you come to see like look everyone on this channel and people get pissed off when i say this we're all pretty privileged you all have the money to afford a computer you're all well off enough you speak english or read english it may be your second language but you have enough money to be online you have time you speak english you're probably college educated

uh not all of you you're in college whatever um you're gonna do fine in life like over i talked about patience earlier you're gonna make enough money What are you going to do that helps people? What are you going to do that gives you meaning? Because in the end, money is very nice, necessary, cold comfort. I'm not against money. I like money. But, you know.

In the end, no one ever died and said, I wish I'd spent more time at work. They all say more time with family, more time with friends. I have great friends. Anyway, I'm off in the weeds. But I'm going to spend more and more time with friends, right? My party on Saturday is going to be with family. My socially distant party on Sunday is going to be with friends. Seek that.

And the money will come. You're all smart. Frankly, a lot of you, you'll get mad about this too, but I don't care. A lot of you are white. The rest of you are Asian. There's a few of you who aren't either of those, and I'm really glad you're here to put some diversity on the channel. But a lot of you are male, not all of you again. So we already rule the damn world. Right? The majority of the people in this channel were already in charge.

The money's going to come. And I know if you're dead broke right now and you're piling up college debt, you're like, easy for you to say, old man. The money's going to come. You've got it. Well. okay but it comes you work a good job it'll show up black programmer thank you you know and we have others we have uh ricky rise from a minority background there's a lot of others

They're going to do well, too, though, because you're here listening and you're working on yourself and you're hanging around with people. It doesn't matter that they're white. It matters that they're successful and driven and you're going to be very successful.

so the question is here's a good question i was asked early in my career it's not my question if you knew that whatever you were going to do was going to succeed If you at this moment had total confidence that whatever thing you tried next in your life was going to work out. What would you choose to do? Like, you know it's going to work. What would you do? Okay. Well, the truth is, probably for most of us here,

Whatever we do is going to work out. Not perfectly. There will be setbacks. There will be F-ups like what I talked about. And you'll have fancy big bosses whose names are famous and in the paper mad at you. So I've had Bezos personally mad at me. I've had Jeff Wilkie personally mad at me, angry, yelling, sending me hate mail. But I got through it. Right. These two guys like Bezos is now he wasn't then, but he's now the richest fucking man on earth. He was mad at me. He was pissed.

This is a guy who could fire me for breakfast and then again for lunch. Like I'm rehiring you so I can fire you again. But he didn't. He chatted with me, right? Like he told me like, look, I know this is hard. We'll laugh about it later. This guy's a hard ass. He could fire me for breakfast and rehire me for lunch. He could fire me again, too. He didn't. He did hold me accountable. All of this is going to happen for all of you, too.

if you just do decent work here's what's so most people don't bother to do decent work this is a secret you all know these people How many of you, and you can sound off in chat, I don't ask you to do this much. How many of you know people whose only goal at their work you're at is to do as little as possible? And to get away with as much as possible. And to screw off. And like they're proud of how little they do. Think of how easy it is to compare.

positively to those people. Think of how easy it is. For you to shine when you're surrounded by people who are like, man, I'm going to do is I want to take the longest break. I want to take the longest lunch. It's so easy to outshine these people. So. Yeah. You're all in. And so what I'm trying to tell you. with this whole point about patience if you just basically do your job and are a little bit patient you're gonna do fine

Now, what I teach in this channel with the magic loop and everything else will help you do better than fine. But understand how lousy your competition is. How many people... don't want to get out of bed in the morning. They wake up thinking, how can I con my boss into letting me F off? How can I on the sly get an extra smoke break? And if I'm not smoking this way, I want to smoke this way. And how many people can con people?

And it's funny because Duke loves to take this negative actually me thing, but he works pretty hard. I've talked to him privately. I'm outing him now. This is like his Twitch persona. NBA hits. See, that's a thing. People like NVA Hitch and like Duke of Thought, though I'm calling him out, he's going to deny it. They actually want to work. They want to do... Good work, and they want to do what's right for their people. I'm sorry Duke It's true I'm leaking his DMS

He wants to be known as the slacker, the like counterculture guy, but he's not. Hey, I'm not hating on smoke breaks. Actually, I get it. But. You know the type of people who try and drag their smoke break out for an hour, and they're the first one there and the last one back? I mean, come on, Ed. Tell me you don't know the people. who want to screw off versus the people who want smoke break taking a break is fine i support taking breaks okay but uh now it's cool i can take the jabs buddy

I don't care. The point is, all of you here who are bothering to listen to this, who've spent two hours listening to me drink and yammer, you want to do better. And as a result, you're going to get everything. I am here to tell you good news. I am an evangelist tonight. It is time for you to hear the good news, brother. You are healed.

Pretty much everyone here listening to this is going to succeed and you're going to get whatever the hell you want in life. Not because of my advice, although I hope that helps, but because you're putting in the time to try and make yourself a little bit better. and try and work fucking five percent harder than the people who don't want to do anything so you are healed all of you if i check back in with you and i'm like an old bastard on a cane

which hopefully will be a few years before I need a cane, I will check back in and you will be rolling in bank and saving the world. And I tell you that so you don't worry so much. Because when I was your collective age and I was trying to figure out my way, I was terrified I wouldn't have enough. And I had to claw and scrape. And you'll have to fight some. But...

I'm trying to give you the good news, the positive belief that if you do the work and you're a little bit patient, there will be setbacks. OK, covid and the layoffs. And I know some of you are looking for work. that kind of stuff. Um, and think ban hammers here. That's fantastic. He was Twitch as he says, and now he's here and it's fantastic. Um, But most of you are going to do great. All right. Victor got himself into auto mod again here. He's always in auto mod because he's cussing a lot.

However, you're getting. Yeah, so this is true, right? Like Victor says, basically. If you're working in an hourly job, no matter how much you work, you're never going to make it out. It seems like losing battle. I agree that's tough. It's a tough situation. The world now favors the highly educated, but I want to be careful because we have Ed here, and it favors him too. It favors the highly skilled.

If your job can be done by anybody, you're in trouble. If it requires a skill, if it requires some knowledge, some energy, you're fine. Doesn't have to be college, has to be skill. All right, we got to get done with these frigging slides. I'm going to go answer questions. This is about leading by example, right? Who you are speaks so loudly I cannot hear what you're saying.

So look, you guys should only follow me as long as you see me living up to what I'm telling you. I advise you, get the hell off this channel. if I don't live up to what you hear. And that's what this says. so do hard work take calculated risks I told the people at Amazon where to find me if you haven't found me at these other places you can and that was the end so let's get off this I've been I've been on the slides too long let's go back to here

And I'm going to pull up your question. So if you haven't voted, this is your chance. Of course I shield my own stream, dude. I'm not stupid. What is a good rate of promotion? This is the first question. We're going to do questions now. Shill the Discord. That's funny. The Discord's always here, man. You can find it. It's just scroll down and get after it. We'll turn the Discord command public so that other people can use it. There you go. There it is.

So what is a good rate of promotion? Well, look, this depends on where you're at. So let me give you the two examples I know about. Drink refill. Go get a drink refill, man. I've refilled twice. And 40 Pink Dragons is holding out. There's just enough for you, 40 Pink, if you want one more hit. But you're lighter than me, and you may not. But there is one more, and I will share. You're my bestie.

youtube and the social links yeah i should do that too um i can do that but we'll do questions oh i hear footsteps on the stairs and now i hear a giggle There's a glass coming in the curtain. Here we go. 40 PD for round three. It's going to be a good night at the Evans household.

You want to take the empties down? I'm going to put this back in the freezer too. Limoncello should be kept cold in the freezer, by the way. We brought it up here just for you. It's going to be brutal in the morning, not tonight. It's only brutal in the morning when you got to wake up. We don't. That's true. I don't. Here's to that. Here's to that. Yeah, baby. All right. Sweet. We're going to have to stand up so we can walk that off. Okay.

What's a good promotion rate? It depends on where you are. Microsoft has like a billion levels. Do we have any Microsoft people in chat? Like... Amazon only has like six levels. You can be an L4, 5, 6, 7, 8, or 10. Or you can be an 11. Or 12, which is an SVP. Or you can be Bezos. So there's 114 people. Sure. Yama at five. Alums count.

Amazon, yeah, somebody's saying they have nine levels, whatever, but they start at four and they end at 14 and they skip some numbers. So the question is, Microsoft... I don't know, like the most common level I hear about at Microsoft is 67. So they've got a lot more levels.

So the point is, at Microsoft, you should be getting promoted. Yamit, you're the expert, you tell me. But like every year, you should be moving up a level or every other year. I am not drunk, okay? Do you want me to count backwards? I can go backwards by sevens from 99. What do you want here? I can definitely pass a field sobriety test. Well, I think I can, which is what all drunks think.

I'm not drunk yet, but I'm working on it to say the alphabet by reason. I can't do that sober. It's the WXYZ doing that backwards, like ZYXW, right? It's not my... The back of the alphabet's hard. I'm not drunk. I'm just blurry. That's like all of 2020. You're right. It's also... A proven fact that my drunk streams are my most popular. Just ask anybody who has seen Margarita Night. Let's be honest. Sound off and chat. Are the best streams not Margarita Night?

anyway the point is a good rate of promotion depends on your company adreno level 69 at microsoft if that's true you're doing pretty well um congratulations so the rate of promotion depends on the company but what you want to do is find out what is the rate of promotion at your company and be moving faster than others If you can, and at least as well as others and have an understanding of what is average. What is more important. Is. How.

fast are you learning and growing your responsibilities and frankly how fast is your paycheck going up in really good years my pay um doubled if you want to talk real hard dollars not dollars not numbers every decade let me make sure I get this right so I give you good advice I'm thinking if you're really killing it Every decade, your pay quadruples. That's what I achieved. So if you want...

Devin's talking about you to U of Arizona students right now. That's cool, Pentaquant. Hey, Penta, are we talking tomorrow? I don't think I got an invite from you. So if we're talking tomorrow and you want to talk to me, let me know. So, I mean, you can email me or whatever to remind me. You have my email addresses. But we are. I'll resend your other email. Thank you. All right. I'll talk to you at 930. Anyway.

um i'll be in the car it'll be great i manage to quadruple my pay every 10 years so from 20 to 30 my pay quadrupled um from 30 to 40 it quadrupled and from 40 to 50 it quadrupled so that's if you want a benchmark shoot for that if you want to know what good promotion looks like now i have thought about i'll admit how much fun would it be to quadruple it from 50 to 60 but um

Is the quadruple a consistent light over the decade? Of course, no, no, it goes up and down. Sisney, if you can't even get a 5% increase, man, you got to come talk to us in Discord. you can get a five percent increase tomorrow by asking for it um assuming you're doing good work assuming you're following the magic loop but the point is There's a benchmark, okay? Over my 30-year career, I quadrupled every decade. So, Boatman Chosey, yes, it does seem crazy.

or remember it's not going to be even okay you got to earn this over time and you may have to make moves um you're planning on scheduling a one-on-one with me all right sounds good uh you know There's a here. If you actually want to do that and you want my time one-on-one, it's not free, but there's a way to do it. And I will do my level best to help you.

Alright, so let's move on. I've told you guys a lot. Yeah, yeah, see? Ed G's talking about it. He quadrupled from 17 to 20. Sometimes it's faster. And it's not consistent. Ed might have been constant after that, right? 20 to 25, he might have even gone down. I don't know his life. But it can happen for you at different times.

and you just keep at it that's the patience part all right let's go to the next question mods what are the biggest problems amazon the tech industry has to solve in the next five to ten years what should i be specializing in Well, obviously, privacy, I would say privacy and security is a huge issue. The tech industry is so...

At risk of screwing up people's lives and getting regulated by governments if they screw up people's privacy too much. And Dome Kang says that would cause them to be broken up. That is the risk. Basically, big tech has a PR problem where they control so much of our lives that if they do it badly, they'll get regulated like a utility. And so they have to show that they're trustworthy and that your data is yours as a citizen and safe. Rico streaming live. Yes, security. Exactly.

So, Zuck claims he is. I hope he is. But, you know, we won't know. Hey, Takimchi, good to see you here. But we won't know. I would say that's the biggest thing they need to be specializing in is the stuff that... Tech used to be... See, the geeks won. I'm a geek, and the geeks won. When I was in college, geek was a curse word. Now, like... Our art, right? We were the comic book nerds. Our art is all the movies, right? Marvel is all the movies. Gaming is what everyone does. The truth is...

Tech won, but the disadvantage of winning is now you're in the spotlight and all the politicians are after you. Here's a funny observation. Amazon and Bezos. Bernie Sanders was all about how Amazon and Bezos should be taxed. And Donald Trump is all about how Amazon blah, blah, blah. When you have both political parties shooting at you and the different extreme members, you're in the limelight and that's your danger. You better be squeaky clean.

Or the politicians can score points by playing on people's fears. So I think the biggest challenges are being good, responsible citizens. And that's what I would say you need to do. So if you want to know where in tech, it's the things that support allowing big tech to be responsible. Whether that's climate change, racial injustice, privacy, security, whatever, those are the opportunities. All right, next question.

Would you recommend people at Amazon stay for 15 years or move within the big five tech companies every three to five years? So both strategies can work. But, we have data at Amazon that shows the following. Two people at the same level. One of them leaves, one of them stays. so one of them leaves one of them stays the guy who leaves gets hired back in later the guy who stays his career goes however it goes on average the guy who stays ends up

Higher up in the company and making more than the guy who leaves and comes back. Now, this is a generalization. It's an average. One of my very early. Oh, we're buffering. What? No. Pentaquant wants you to start a company. Yeah, buffering. I had a peer early on when I joined Amazon. There was a guy, he left for Facebook. He became like...

I don't know, the number six or eight guy at Facebook in the hierarchy. He's, you know, he's worth like crazy psychopathic money. So leaving can always be great, but.

Bottom line, if you have a really good job at a really good company, keep it. And if you have a crappy job at a crappy company, leave it. So it's about how good is your job. It's not about... moving around a lot it is about okay we talk about this all the damn time why are you moving run the magic loop and if you don't have a good boss leave

But if you're not doing the system I talk about all the time, do that and you'll succeed. If you have a crappy boss who's not rewarding it, leave. All right, we're going to keep going. Next. question what if you think the KPIs which is key performance indicators are dumb and yes aw 1442 the amazon work culture is intense um but that's okay intense can be good it can also not fit you in which case go somewhere else go somewhere that fits you

This is really important. Go somewhere you can thrive. Find the environment where you can be super successful and then stay there. That's my best advice. What if you think the KPIs at your company are dumb or your project? Number one, realize someone created those with good intent. So no matter how dumb you think they are, someone tried really hard to do the right thing. They tried really hard to come up with a goal that made sense. So at least understand why.

before you shit on them at least understand why number two if you still think they're dumb and you can't find any value in them once you understand why don't just ignore them

Talk to your boss your peers somebody about why are they this way and what would be better? Make a suggestion bring a solution don't just be the person saying this is dumb these are wrong this is this is no good nobody wants to hear that they don't want to work with people who are always down on stuff they want to work with someone who brings solutions

so if you think they're dumb bring it yeah 40 pink dragons who by the way is a very successful manager in her own right a leader of a big independent warehouse um she says the right thing find who the person who made it and talk it through and then change the kpi if it's wrong

yeah the wrong answer is i'm not going to bother with them the right answer is here's some better suggestions or what if we did it this way or i have a plan i have a plan to meet your kpi but also to do something more valuable I have a way we can make even more money. Look, capitalist society. I have a way we're going to make more money. Those words are certain to get you.

uh certain to get you advantage by the way yamit five says something i want to go back to he says i thought amazon employees were notorious for the boomerang where they leave and come back to be rehired at a higher level That happens, but statistically, statistically, people who stay at the company move up levels faster than those who leave. So, Yamit, we did the research to check on that story.

And while individual circumstances differ, on average the people who stay do better than those who leave. Okay, next question. This is a fun one. I've already answered it, but since you asked it and voted on it, I want to answer again. What are your plans now? So, 40 Pink Dragons and I were supposed to be on vacation in Istanbul. We were supposed to be doing like private tours of this Hagia Sophia right now. But of course, COVID. And so we're here. And our plans.

are to invest in uh my plan has always been to give back look i'm a christian my cross is normally under my shirt You don't have to like Christians. You can hate Christians. I hope you don't. But I take very seriously the biblical saying. to whom much has been given from him much will be required and i know i've been given a lot in life and so my goal my plan is to give back to y'all

to give back and to try and help you succeed. Now, am I also going to have some fun along the way? Am I also going to go see the world and stream from some other places? ha unfollowed instantly i like that um but i take i take the responsibility of my good fortune very seriously So my plans are to spend time with my family, to see the world and enjoy it, to empty some of these glasses, which I have now achieved, and to help you.

So that's my goal. That's my plan. And my plan is to help you. And I hope I'm successful at doing that. I hope also you will invite, I haven't asked you this yet today. I'd like to reach more people. So for those of you listening who get a lot out of what I talk about. um please invite others if they're not twitch people show them youtube if they're not youtube people send them to my blog

The EthanEvansVP.com site. If they're not there, send them to LinkedIn. But connect them with me somehow so I can help them. And Vincent B., I'm glad you're getting a lot out of it. Marky Marksman, you're welcome. All right. Next question. Would you ever consider doing a talk at a university business club or organization? Yes. I love to speak in public. And I'm talking to someone about going to UCLA right now. Instagram is also true. I haven't sent out my Instagram, but we'll do that.

Yes, I love to speak in public. I would be very happy to do what amounts to a private stream for a university, a business club or an organization. Join our discord and reach out to me. How would someone reach out to me on that? Sure, Discord's fine. There is an Instagram. It should be Ethan Evan. Well, it's just my name. I don't. there's ethan evans is you can find me there so there is not a tiktok or a snapchat at this point but i have more time now anything could happen

So yes, Shadow is my social manager and I haven't had much time to support her. So now we'll be after it. Next question. Slightly off topic, but do you believe there is a continuing gold rush via the Internet? What industry do you think is going to be next? Work from home, clearly. The societal changes driven by COVID are the next gold rush. Zoom is the obvious answer, but there's so many other answers to a rich,

And by the way, in this context, all of you are rich. Most of you are the internet class that can work from anywhere, work from home. There's going to be a gold rush in the transformation of work to no longer be in cities and offices. So I think that's the next gold rush, but I think there'll be a lot of gold rushes after that.

I also think there's a gold rush around pandemic stuff, people being afraid of disease. There's a gold rush around reliable information and taking Snopes to the next level. An automatic Snopes checker for it just eliminates Nigerian Prince emails from my email and eliminates Facebook posts that are bullshit. Stuff like that. Alright, next question. How hard did you work early on in your career relative to later on and do you think it paid off? This is really funny.

So my first job, one night I worked till 18. So I was in this job like, I don't know, 60 days. And one night I worked till like 8 p.m. And I told my boss, well, I'm not sure I'll be in. You know, I've worked late tonight. I worked till all of 8 p.m. And he was like, what? Early on, I didn't get hard work. I had been a student, and in my very first job, I didn't understand it for the first six months or a year. And I didn't really understand what I was supposed to be doing. But...

About a year into that job, I got into it and I started leading projects. And then suddenly I understood like, oh, I can make shit happen. And so I started working voluntarily. But, yeah, you should have seen Drino gets it. My boss laughed his ass off, basically. Like, you know, like, oh, my God, I can't believe this kid. When I told him, like, oh, yeah, I was here late, so I might be late tomorrow. He was like, what? No, no. Late is 2 a.m. So. My work ramped up, though. Definitely I work.

harder as i got into some smaller startups and then i probably worked the hardest ever at amazon between 2010 and 2015 I was probably working consistently 60 some hours a week now a lot of you can say like oh 60 hours a week no big deal but I'm talking about 60 hours of real work. Like all the fun stuff you do and all the internet surfing and the whatever. 60 hours of actually grinding away is a lot.

It's not including all the time you spend surfing or answering personal emails or whatever. So I was at work more than that. I was online 80, 90 hours a week. But, you know, some of that's screw-off time. Hey, VictorTV, you have a good night, ma'am. Thank you for being here. And I liked your hacking trick. That was cool.

How do you balance many commitments such as work and grad school? It's tough. You've got to prioritize. You've got to decide what really matters, and you have to get good at saying no. And you can't do everything. I was going to get an MBA and it was too much and I never did as an example. So I won't go into that, but I passed, you know, I got a really high score on the GMAT and I was admitted to a good MBA program and I backed out because it was too much.

It is going to be a big transition, but that's why I'm here. MBAs are a meme. All right, next question. Was the fire emergency Tier 2 or Tier 3 fun? You know, it was kind of tier one at first. Like, for those of you who don't know, there's this idea of type one, type two, and type three fun.

type one fun is it's fun right now type two fun is it's fun over a beer a week later type three fun is you almost die and it's fun like months or years later when you can look back on it like oh yeah the great war that was us that we were good friends um yeah i got my leg blown off but i was really tight with those guys uh type three fun not good um

the the fire stuff was a pain in the ass but it was some type one fun like hey check off a bucket list evacuated house because of nearby fire um yeah so it's just uh Sisson, he has it right. The Wilkie talk where he nearly fired me, that was like type three fun. It took a while to be funny about that. What schools are I looking at? I didn't want to fly around, so I was looking at schools near where I lived. So I was looking at highly flexible MBA remote programs. All right.

But the fire was kind of cool. We had ash falling on our cars. And so having ash falling on your cars from nearby burning trees is kind of surreal. So that was pretty neat. And I knew we weren't going to die. I didn't know for 100% certain that this house I'm standing in would still be here. But that's all right. Next question.

if a company is flat in structure should i stay promotions mostly happen when someone quits or retires it depends are you being paid well do you like the work are you learning a lot are you getting rich Are you valued? Is the company growing your skills? Flat can be good if you're being very successful and learning a lot and getting paid. Well, who cares? Promotion is some fake bullshit that happens in big companies. It's about impact. It's about what are you learning? What are you developing?

All the stuff, titles, levels. I was a VP before 30 at a small company. And then I came to Amazon and I was a senior manager until more than 40 to earn the title back. Because it's different scope. So what I would really ask is, is the work aligned to your best skills and passion? Is your boss good? Are you being paid well? Are you learning? Promotion is important if you're in a company where that's the structure. In a flat company, it may not be.

Are you making money and learning things? Is your boss helping you grow? If yes, stay. If no, leave. Yeah. Edgy is very salt of the earth. It all depends on what you want, not what your buddies are aspiring to. He's very practical. And like me, Ed tells me because I've talked to him on Discord that he sometimes empties a few vessels. while we while we stream and he would say what he said he said it depends on what you want all right um

Tell the Oprah story, please. All right, here's the Oprah story. For those of you who weren't here earlier, I said when the Kindle went on sale, Oprah Winfrey sold a lot of Kindles.

you can find this i wonder if i can find it i'm going to take a quick look while i tell the story so um let's see i've had enough bubbly oprah so here's the thing when we built the kindle one oh here it is it was october 2008 uh oprah's favorite new gadget the kindle so and that's true it was in the fall of 2008 so uh kindle one e-reader image

So the first Kindle we built was like a clunky piece of crap. It was revolutionary, and I want to be clear about that, but it was also horrible design factor. I want to see if I can show it. I'm going to flip this. Let me see if I can bring this up. Not okay. Not what I wanted. So the very first Kindle sold for like 400 bucks, whereas now they're like 60 bucks So I'm gonna just flip the screen here real quick

So the very first Kindle you can see here first. It's this highlighted one. It's popped out It had this weird little thumb wheel and the keyboard buttons were angled they weren't straight they were on this weird angle and um This was like an LED strip to tell you how far through the book you were. And then this device was not square at all. It was like angular in all these different ways. Like it came down to a little point down here.

So it was this weird like trapezoidal shaped device. And it was very expensive. You know, $400 basically reader was a big deal. So. This thing didn't sell that well. But it sold okay. The people with $400 to blow on reading loved it. They thought it was fantastic. But the rest of people thought, what a strange device. BlackBerry buttons, yeah. So, bottom line is, this is long ago so I can share it.

We had way too many Kindles in stock. And we were building the Kindle, too, with all the lessons we'd learned. And Amazon was getting ready. They were trying to figure out how to get rid of all the extra Kindles they had. And they were thinking, like, should we give them to schools? Should we give them to charities? Should we give them to employees? Should we throw them in a dumpster? What should we do with them all? And then, and this never happens.

As opposed to you calling Oprah and begging her to put you on the show, she, her team called Amazon and said, we'd like to feature the Kindle. Would Jeff Bezos come on the show if we featured the Kindle? Jeff agreed to go because he's not stupid. He agreed to go on. And so Oprah is going to talk about the Kindle. Let's see if I can find this clip because it's amazing. I don't know. Can't find it quickly. So bottom line, here's what happens. He goes on Oprah in October of 2008, I think.

And we have all these Kindles in stock so much that we're trying to figure out how to get rid of them. Oprah goes live. And if you're watching the graph of Kindle sales, it's bumping along. I'm going to get I'm going to use my hand on the screen here to get it just right. It's bumping along at the bottom of the screen and it like jumps up like straight up.

And the team is like, holy shit. Well, what we didn't realize and someone's doing and they're like, yeah, we're going to sell all the Kindles. We're not going to have all this overstock. By the time the Kindle 2 comes out, we're going to be great.

then someone realizes Oprah airs an hour earlier in Chicago than anywhere else so what actually happens is the graph of sales which has gone straight up then levels out and then her show is syndicated the sales of kindle shot up but it was only in her show had only yet shown in chicago so then the show goes live for the rest of america and the graph goes off the charts well the story is we had all these we had

I won't be specific about numbers. Yes, everyone in the audience got a free Kindle. They were under the chairs. And you can see these people crying who don't even know what a Kindle is, but they're crying because Oprah gave them something. So if you go watch a YouTube video, they're all crying about having gotten a gift, and they don't even know what it is because it was new.

So we had over 100,000 Kindles in stock. Well, bottom line is, we went from having all these Kindles we were going to have to give away to charity to being out of stock in a couple days. And so we went from going into Christmas with way too many that we were worried about how are we going to sell them to being completely sold out and out of stock and screwed. Because now our most famous device that Oprah's made popular is not available.

So that's the Oprah Kendall story. The second part of the story that's really funny. No, I was vague about how many. I did it right. But Oprah is amazing at selling stuff.

the second part of the story it's really funny if you go watch this video is oprah asked jeff bezos what books he's reading and oprah's reading like her oprah book club books they're very relatable they're things like the color purple or whatever they're very dr phil jeff says well i'm reading something you know it's like the theory of astrophysics for mathematicians it's this impenetrable deep book and oprah just looks at him like you really are from mars it's

uh but overall he plays it pretty well he lets her do all the talking because he knows he doesn't relate to her audience so just let her do it and um fantastic well I love that a bunch of folks from Korea joined us I'll talk about Korea for one quick second I had the chance to visit Seoul many years ago when I worked for Amazon Video. I was there to see two of your great companies, Samsung and LG. For those here who don't know that much about Korea,

So their country is very different in that big companies build the apartment blocks. And so you can live like in a Samsung apartment and you can go to a Samsung hospital. And when they say conglomerate, man, you have mostly U.S. viewers. That's okay. Still, if your name is Korean and all your followers are chatting with Korean names, you have a bunch of people. It was fantastic for me to learn.

The mistake I made is I went to Korea in December and it's effing cold. I'm OK with cold, but I walked around. I'm a war history buff and I walked around the war museum in Seoul. outside in the winter in the cold and it was below zero below zero Fahrenheit not just Celsius so like minus 20 Celsius and um uh But you had tanks outside and you had airplanes from from the conflict. And I had to go. So anyway, so we've answered most of the questions and I've been broadcasting two and a half hours.

And I'm sure my lovely mod who helped me finish our celebratory champagne and our celebratory limoncello. uh i'm sure she's ready for us to roll over to some other activity for the night um and do something else other than moderate the channel so with that um I'm going to thank you all for showing up. I appreciate the raid. Please follow the channel. I will be back next week. If you missed anything, please join our discord or follow.

And I'm not going to answer all the little questions we have here. They only have a couple of votes, but maybe I'll get to them next week. Meanwhile, I have retired from Amazon. I'm done. It was great. I'm looking forward to being around with y'all more. Join our discord. And I want to see you all be incredibly successful. So with that, I'm going to call it a night. And please, please.

Have a wonderful evening and come back soon. Meanwhile, I hope you learned some things this evening. I appreciate all the folks who show up all the time and I thank you all for the. the congratulations uh feel free also to follow what i do on linkedin because we had a big linkedin night oh i'm sorry salsa rain there will be another chance

I know some of you just got here. But unfortunately, I've been going two and a half hours, I think. And that's a limit for me. So with that, I'm going to let it go. And I will see you all again soon.

And please tell your friends, though, my dearest hope is to help more people. So you pay me back when you help more people. And yes, Poshy, who is our main YouTube editor, he carries... most of the weight getting our videos up on YouTube you can always catch up on YouTube if you want more of what we've done and with that I'm gonna call it a night as we always end I say cheers. Cheers, everybody. Have a great night.