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And, Hyatt, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. It's a huge pleasure. Thanks for having me. You know, I'd love to get more background on you because I don't know how many people know you yet, but I know everyone is going to know you in the future. Now, you're good friends with my friend Scott commoners, who's a professor at Harvard Business School, he's, recently been on the NFX podcast as well.
And, you know, we asked him, you know, if we could interview anybody on our podcast, who would it be? And he said, number 1, by far, Man Hyatt And so, you know, we're a seed stage investor. We are trying to help early stage founders, and we're looking for these unseen drivers of startup greatness. Startup excellence.
And you have been able to work with some of these great startup founders who have then gone on to build the giant companies of today, whether it's Google or Amazon or Yahoo, and your intimate conversations with those leaders, I think, could really help our early stage founders understand, you know, what they should be doing as mental models, what they should be doing as patterns, and we could help founders everywhere all over the world. You're currently Spain. I am.
Just outside of Valencia and Spain on the east coast. That's right. About the most polar opposite place you could move to after Silicon Valley, I think. Got it. And you were here in Silicon Valley for how long? 15 years. A little bit more. Yeah. I'm originally from Seattle. So I did my foundational education there undergrad there before moving to Silicon Valley, but, yeah, I've been in Spain for three and a half years now. And when I say home, I still mean California. Oh, that's nice.
And so you were the right hand of Jeff Bezos at Amazon, Eric Schmidt, when he was CEO in the early years of Google, and then Marissa Meyer at Yahoo. I mean, who came first. How did you get into this? You graduate university of Washington in 2002 or 3. Yeah. Well, how did this all come about? Very unintentionally. I would love to say it was a master plan of mine to take over the world, but, no, it just sort of evolved step by step. A lot of luck and a lot of hard work and long nights.
Was very unexpected. Like I say, I went to University of Washington as undergrad, like you said, and I graduated in 2002. And it turns out that the combust of the early 2000s was the best thing that ever happened to me because while I my family moved to Redmond, Washington, in 19 5. We were a military family for the 1st part of my early life, but then my dad got a job in Seattle, and they didn't wanna live in the big city. My parents are both from Idaho, Morgan, and raised on farms.
And so Seattle to them seemed like an intimidating place, and they didn't wanna raise family and city. So they moved to Redmond where they could get a big plot of land and our neighbors had horses and my mom planted an enormous garden, but they didn't expect that just literally less than 5 minutes from our front door, that house that they still live in today, would be Microsoft headquarters, and they would start this personal computing revolution.
And that changed the course of my life, that single decision of theirs. My very first job at 16 was working at a startup before I think technically that term was even coined working for 2 brothers who had started a software company, but I didn't end up studying anything related to tech or engineering. I focused on international studies at UW. And then the dot com bust happened just before I was graduating, and I and none of my friends on graduation had any job offers.
I think I sent out 50 resumes, and they didn't even get a single phone interview. And at the time, I was working a student position at the European Union Center on campus. And the new director of my program heard that, you know, this economic situation of graduating students. And he volunteered. His wife was working at recruiting at Amazon, and he if I'd considered applying there, I had not. I was not interested in tech at the time, but I thought, why not? It couldn't hurt.
And so that is literally the only reason I submitted my resume. And, it's a long story of a hiring process, but 9 months later, I was sitting at the desk closest to Jeff and the company in 2002 in the foundation of Amazon. And what job did you apply for? Well, typical to tech, I didn't apply for any specific role. They were still just hiring smart people and figuring out what to do with them to teach them to do it. And I think it was the nature of how early tech was.
You know very well how quick moving everything was back then. So they're just hiring smart people and finding the right places for them. So I got on the track to just be basically like an intern level admin kind of a role. And I scored really well on some of their very non unconventional hiring questions and got chosen to fill a vacancy. The head just come up in Jeff's office, but that process altogether was really, really long before I sat down at that desk that first day.
And what superpower did you discover you had that made it so that you sat down at that desk and then stayed in that C Pete helping? If I had to guess, I really wish I had asked Jeff why he took a chance on hiring me, but knowing him as well as I do now, I think it was two things. One was he only asked me 2 interview questions. Now this was after 20 other people had fully vetted me, but he only asked me 2 and one was a brain teaser.
And the second was my motivations for why I wanted to work there. And I think in those answers, the way I answered the brain teaser really showed him that I could break down a very complex problem into manageable steps, and I wouldn't lose momentum along the way to getting a result. Probably another thing was I was not starstruck by him. He had been Time Magazine's person of the year in 1999, and Seattle's kind of a small big city. So he was on the cover of every newspaper pretty much every day.
He was a known celebrity figure. And I talked to him in that interview just like a normal person. I pushed back on some of his ideas clarifying questions. And as a twenty year old, I think one is an unusual experience probably for anyone he interviews, but 2, for someone so young to be unintimidated by him was exactly what was looking Morgan. And I demonstrated an extreme enthusiasm for what they were doing.
I had over the long course of interviewing for that job really changed my tune and felt like Tech was exactly where I wanted to be next, and it was the adventure I wanted to have before my plan a, which was to go to grad school and become professor. But I think it was the enthusiasm for what they were building and recognizing that this was an irreplaceable moment in time and opportunity And I wanted any seat on that rocket ship that they would give me. That's just fascinating.
So why weren't you intimidated by him? What about you? What about upbringing? What about your worldview? What mental model do you use so you're not intimidated when you sit down at age twenty with Jeff Bezos? That's a great question. I think what led to me not being intimidated by him was really coming from the academic background. I was used to being surrounded by highly intelligent people Growing up in Redmond, by the time I was in high school, Redmond had changed a lot since 1985.
All of my friends in high school, their parents were executives at Microsoft or other technology companies. So I kind of knew that character, that drive, that energy, that relentlessness. And so I was comfortable in that space. To my upbringing, my dad was a fighter pilot in the air force. As I mentioned, he grew up on a farm. He spent his early life milking cows at dawn and dreaming of flying a fighter jet even before he'd ever seen one in person. And so I'd seen it modeled for me.
The ordinary people can create extraordinary results through big dreams and lots of hard work. And so I think because I've been modeled for me and my family, for my early childhood, if anything is possible and ordinary people can be extraordinary, and being surrounded by this kind of special way that technology people, especially in the early 2000s thought, I felt very much at home being next to Jack. That makes a ton of sense.
You are essentially in the tech network, and you are in the network of excellence modeled by your father and brothers and sisters And so for you excellence was a way of life already and tech was a way of speaking and thinking. And so for you, it was a very comfortable environment. I mentioned this just because I am always encouraging start up founders to look at the network in which they sit because by choosing your network, you're, in a sense, choosing your destiny.
This is why we say, look, if you're a founder, get to a tech city, get to a tech center, immerse yourself with those people and with that language and with those conversations, and, you know, gain to the cultural comfort to understand how to navigate there because it moves quick. It takes a lot of energy and determination to make these things happen, and you can't do it. From too far outside the zone. So that's fascinating that you are already there.
So once you're sitting next to him, what starts happening? Because over the next 3 years, you are helping Jeff and people around him like Jeff Wilkie who we've also had on this podcast who's an old friend of mine from college. You're helping them do something. What are you helping them do? I think that confidence of not being starstruck by Jeff wore off very quickly.
Beller I wasn't intimidated by him as a person, I was quickly aware of how underqualified I was to have an impact in that environment. And so being the eternal natural student that I am, I started giving myself self imposed homework every day because not only was this my very first job out of undergrad and working for a character like Jeff who is relentless, but I had no idea what we were doing. I didn't understand the tech space. Now to give myself a little leeway, nobody really did.
We were inventing the few every day, doing things that no one had ever done before. So it was okay that I didn't know how to anticipate the needs. But, yeah, I think Jeff Wilkie and I actually started within just a few months of each other. And the task that we were given every day was really to invent that future. So I kept a notebook.
I wish I had kept it to this day because I would love to see it, but I remember madly scribbling notes of all the acronyms I didn't understand, the tech terms, the of characters, the people at play, the conferences we were talking about that I'd never heard of. And I would just and this is pre Google being what it is now. I would just do all my research myself of trying to get ahead of it being able to anticipate what all these things mean and guess what might be coming across my desk next.
Now one of the biggest breaks of my career actually came through the very worst day of my professional life, just a few months after I started at Amazon, with the very first project Jeff himself ever gave me. I don't think he'd even spoken directly to me since he hired me before giving me this project, but this is one of Scott's favorite stories about me is how I almost killed Jeff Bezos just a few months after starting to work for him. Okay. Let's hear it.
Before you jump in, essentially, what's happening is you've been invited into the middle of the spider web And you're essentially trying to help glue things together. That's a great way of expressing it. In fact, Eric Schmidt often calls people in these roles, the glue people it's funny that you mentioned that.
Yeah. It's very much because all the executives at the time were heads down focused on insane deliverables, and they needed these smart connectors to know how to cross pollinate ideas, anticipate needs, which team needs more resources, which teams are off track or demotivated or burning out.
And that was really my job was to keep my eye on the horizon and anticipate that so that Jeff could be the most effective executive he could possibly be while everyone else was just running a million miles an hour off the edge cliff. So another way I'm thinking about it is that the startup CEO and the executive team, they are on an hourly basis needing to deal with what's in front on a daily basis.
They also have to maintain this big vision about where we need to go in 4 or 5 years, but there's this intermediate gap 3 months out, 6 months where it's often hard for them to focus their attention. And maybe that's where you also help is to say, oh, we got this conference coming up in Europe 4 Morgan, and we're gonna need to do x, y, and z before we get there. Let me start working that the kind of thing that you're working on? That's exactly what I'm doing.
Yeah. Anticipating the shorter term deliverables that have a 1,000,000 manageable steps in between. Got it. And I bring that up again for founders who are listening so that they can start to see how you might need people to help you with these as your company grows. Okay. So let's get back to story. We almost killed Jeff Bezos. How'd that happen? I did. So my very first assignment that Jeff ever gave me was to help him do a trip down to Texas.
He wanted to go down there and look at a particular list of properties. He dropped this paper on my desk with a long series of numbers on it, I at first thought, is this another brain teaser? Is he testing me again? But then I figured out maybe from my Air Force childhood upbringing that they were GPS coordinate. I thought, well, that's a weird way of giving me these locations, but it was because it was lots of land giant ranches in the middle of nowhere, Texas.
And so I figured out where they were. And I determined that it was actually impossible for him to visit all the properties that he wanted within the time frame he had given me. I went to my manager, John, and said that it was impossible and that we either needed to narrow down the list or add a day. And John didn't even look up. You just said, well, no. It's not an answer. Figured out. So I go back to my desk and I think, okay. We can't move the jet that we've chartered. There's no runways.
It's too far to drive. How do I get between that? And so I thought, okay, a helicopter. Now I'm twenty years old. I've never hired a helicopter. I don't have a rolodex that resembles anything like a helicopter. But I give that idea to John, and he says, good. Go do that with no instruction. So I figure out how to hire my very first helicopter. I did it through the charter company. I did all security beddings and off he went on that first trip.
He came back so excited like a kid on Christmas Morgan, and I and nobody, in fact, knew what he was doing in Texas So then he was very, very excited about the properties he'd seen, and he wanted to go back. He'd narrowed it down to 2 favorites, and he was gonna decide which one to buy. I think at this point, great. I have a helicopter guy. I know how to put this together. I'm no longer intimidated by a trip to Texas and off he went.
And early one morning, I was in the office hours before anyone else doing myself imposed homework. And I got a call on my desk phone, and it was the charter pilots. And they said, Anne, I don't want to alarm you, which, of course, instantly alarmed me, but they said, and we've heard an emergency beacon go off, and there's been a helicopter crash. Woah. My hand start shaking so much that I can't even hold a pen to write what they're telling me. And I just think I just killed Jeff Bezos.
And not only Jeff Bezos, but the entire company, because this is early 2003, just to the 1st few months of 2003. And at that point, as you know, Amazon was not yet profitable. They had a had a single profitable quarter, not yet a profitable year, and all of the value of a the stock was based on faith and Jeff and his crazy vision for his long term strategy of growing Amazon. And so I called my manager John at home, and I said told him what was happening.
And suggested we call emergency board meeting to be ready just in case. I was still hoping it was not him, but just in case I wanted to be ready for statements of if he was dead, if he was injured, if it wasn't him, etcetera. So I assembled my very 1st emergency board meeting, and then I started calling Local not using his name because I didn't wanna be the one to create a press story if there was no press story.
And, after several hospitals answering very confusingly when I asked if they'd had anyone come in from a helicopter crash, I finally had one that asked me if I was family. So I found him. It was him. He did crash in the helicopter I had hired for him. But as you all know, that story, didn't end there and neither did my career because he was fine. He I have a feeling he probably enjoys telling this story because he is a superhero.
He single handedly got out of a helicopter, saved all three people inside, climbed to the hill next to where they had crashed, and called using the satellite phone.
I had did he take, and he used his real name, which is the only reason I can tell this story today was because many months later, almost a year later, journalist was researching the private space tourism space race which was then the X Prize and figured out that Jeff was in Texas buying property for the rocket testing facility that he's now using blue origin from which he's about to blast himself off into space in just a few days. So I feel like this is a full circle moment.
That is a great story. Amazing. And in the end, his vision was already back there in 2003 to build the origin and launch himself. And now he's doing it. Long term vision. Oh, you have no idea. I still cannot talk about the things we were working on back then because he's launching them now. He thinks so far in the future, these ideas I saw sketched out in his thinking of retreat notebooks and the most kind Novak he always kept in his back pocket are happening today.
That's how long term he thinks. I had no idea back then in this very junior role that that story would now come around for me 17 years later with him about to accomplish his goal of going to space. Which he was already making plans for even before he had a profitable quarter. 100%. Because he could see that it was inevitable that he would. Jeff is an incredible visionary. In fact, in his valedictorian speech of high school, he told his classmates that he was going to space.
Not that he wanted to, but that he was going to go. And when Jeff sets his mind to something, he does it. There you go. I mean, so that's obviously one of the things you have to do as an early stage founder is your mind is something and make sure that it happens. So you did that for 3 years and then somehow you get connected to Eric Schmidt over at Google. How'd that happen? I did. Yeah. So 3 years into working at Amazon, I loved every second of it.
It was my elite business school, my privilege to sit closest to Jeff and the company and treat that like my personal apprenticeship. But I had always had the stream of being a professor. Academics was still calling me, and I thought that it would take a couple years to get matched with the right program as it usually does. But in my very first application cycle, I got accepted into my dream program at Berkeley, and Jeff was like, you have to go.
I mean, this was your original dream you told me about the day we met. So off I went to California, not knowing a soul, and started my PhD program at Berkeley and really, really enjoyed it. But I had anticipated that I was going to miss the adrenaline pace of Amazon, you know, in this, kind of record scratch change of pace into academics. And so my very last email that I had sent from my Amazon work account was to Udi Mamber, who was then the CEO of Amazon search company a 9 based in Palo Alto.
And so I said, hey, Udi. I'm coming down. If you ever need any special project, or, you know, your own personal Jeff whisperer, because by then, I learned how to anticipate everything that Jeff would ask or like or hate and he wrote back immediately saying as soon as you settle in, come and see me. So as I started my PhD, I kinda kept one toe into onto and that crazy world of Amazon working with Udi doing special projects. About a year into my PhD program, Google started recruiting.
They called me to see if I would be interested in coming to campus, And if I might be interested in working there, and I said, thank you very much. I really enjoyed my time and tech, but I am very happy in academics. And, you know, I'm not interested, and they kept calling. So I think it was on the 4th phone call when finally the recruiter's like, well, don't you just wanna see campus? Don't you wanna have a tour and just Pete what all the hikes about. And that was really smart because I did.
You know, it was already famous. You know, the campus, you can bring your dogs to work. Here's volleyball courts. There's free that all these parks, I kinda wanted to see it for myself and see how anyone got anything done in that environment. And either by design or incredible Universal intervention.
I found myself in the middle of that day in my campus tour sitting in the cafe surrounded by a former teammate of Lance Armstrong who had raced with him in the Tour de France, a former astronaut, not just astronaut, but had been to space, the astronaut, and Vince Surf, one of the original founders of the internet. The recruiter looked at me and he said, tell me again why you don't wanna leave academics.
And I said, well, I really enjoy working on global projects with the smartest people in the world. And he literally laughed at me and said, I think you'll be pretty happy here. And I knew in that moment that he was exactly right. So I joined Google not anticipating that I would stay for 12 years, which I did.
And I started my actual first roles on the product team reporting to Marissa Meyer while she was a VP over search products, which meant she was in charge of just making really cool things that brought in as many eyes as possible. And I worked for her for the 1st 3 years I was at the company. This is before she went on to become CEO of Yahoo. And before I was recruited, to be chief of staff or Eric Schmidt. Got it. And so the recruiter kept calling you because why?
What had they heard and from whom that had caused you to become this person that they needed? I think, honestly, it goes back to that helicopter story.
Nobody had that time had ever heard that story, but I think it goes back to Beller my role that I was originally hired for to do for Jeff was very small entry level you know, 1st job out of university typical stuff because of that experience with a helicopter crash, something really important happened is 1, Jeff no longer saw me as the junior most person in the company who didn't know what she was doing.
Both of those things were true, but he also saw that I could be trusted in stressful situations. In fact, when he called into that emergency board meeting that we had assembled, talked them out of issuing any kind of proactive statement, He then asked to talk to me. And he said to me, probably the nicest thing that anyone has ever said to me professionally. He said, and I hear you're really good under pressure. And that moment, he might have said more, but I think I blacked out.
I was just so relieved. I thought I was gonna be fired for almost killing him. But I think that changed everything. So I no longer saw myself as this person who had no business having this job, but I saw myself as I can trust my instincts and I can at least ask the right questions and keep my cool no matter what happens. And even now, you know, almost 20 years later after that experience, when I have a really bad day or I feel like I just can't handle this.
Now as a startup founder myself, that's my mantra. I was like, not a helicopter crash. Everything's fine. And so I did these projects at Amazon that really exceeded my job description. In fact, so many people now ask me, What was your title? What did you do there? And it's really hard for me to answer because the projects I worked on had nothing to do with what I had been hired to do, helped early launches, like the jewelry launch when Paris Hilton was a big thing.
And she had this jewelry Flint, and we are launching that for the first time. Or when we started launching the sporting goods store. And we did this event with Anna Kornikova who had just signed this deal with sports bra where the slogan was only the ball should bounce. Like, I was just in random projects like that, or wouldn't we launch beauty? And I mean, it's forgettable stuff, but I sat myself in war rooms where some of the most critical things happening in the company Pete.
Even if I was just the guy, you know, making sure that at 3 AM, the heating wasn't turned off and we were doing food orders or just got myself into the rooms where some of the most critical moments and decisions of the company were happening and absorbing that through osmosis. So then could then represent that. And eventually, at Google, run those rooms myself. Got it. So detail orientation, anticipation, and then calm under pressure.
Yeah. Where the sort of personal attributes that you developed in yourself, despite the fact that your palms were sweaty and still are today when you tell these stories, despite the fact that you're feeling fear, your Currier, and your clear headedness would overcome that. It's not that you didn't have fear. It wasn't that there wasn't a nervous situation. Just that you overcame that. And in doing so, became incredibly valuable to the most powerful people running tech.
That's a great indication to so many people who could be in startups helping startups even if they're not founders to actually make these things grow. It's a wonderful perspective. Okay. So you're now over at Google. It's an incredible campus Surrounded by top people and you finish your PhD at Berkeley and No. I'm a PhD dropout, like many Googlers. Got it. They recruited me mid program. I fully intended to go back. In fact, I promised my dad I would, and he still asked me about it today.
But, no, I'm a dropout. Got it. Okay. And so then you start going in and you start jumping working with Marissa in the same sort of role, helping her anticipate common to pressure, detail orientation, making things work, and then you get recruited to Eric Schmidt's office. How'd that go? I did. So there was an opening in his office.
1 of his staff had transitioned into the comms team, and so they needed someone to come into the team to supplement that role, and really they were looking to uplevel it. He had one senior glue person who was really like the chief of staff type role. This long before that title even existed. And then she had some junior people reporting to her, and they were really looking to up level the level of talent and experience on his direct team.
What none of us knew at the time was Eric was looking to uplevel this because in just a few years, he was going to transition from being CEO to executive chairman, and he was going to then redesign his entire team from the ground up. So I worked for him for almost 3 years while he was still CEO.
I owned several projects that really Beller me understand the strategy of the company, build up core relationships of trust with his SVPs and our board members, and then I was ready for what was I can only assume his master plan all along, which was everyone else in the company was then reassigned to new roles when he became executive chairman, and it was just the two of us.
And our first task was to invent what this job description was gonna be, what was his impact of the company, or the major deliverables, and the most strategic ways of using him now that he was untethered from the day to day requirements of being CEO. And so we've spent that 1st year together doing a listening for. Globally, both within the Google offices, I counted once.
I think it was, like, 40, 45 or something offices we visited, but also with thought leaders of every type of possible field and expertise we could think of. And what we were looking for was trends for what our users needed and then anticipating the needs of those who are to come online for the very first time. Got it. And what was extraordinary about, Eric? I am a big fan. He is remarkable.
One of the things that struck me most when I very first joined his office was the way in which he managed a company that was not his own. So he wasn't the founder, and he never forgot that. He had this artful way of maximizing Larry and Sergei. He had this catalytic effect around them. He would let them spin on their visionary ideas. They are incredible vision and then he would be the perfect synthesizer.
He would find that nugget of gold in what they had done, and then he could mobilize the entire company very, very fast to seize on the opportunity. So I think that dynamic, I mean, if you were designing the perfect team, you probably wouldn't be Hey. Let's have 3 co chairs of a fast moving company, but somehow he made it this perfect dream team by bringing out the best in each So that was the first thing I noticed among many. Got it. So he has a lot of empathy for Larry and Sergei.
He has a lot of knowledge about how things actually get done operationally. And then he would distill something down, make it actionable, and they give it to the rest of the team, and the company could move forward that way. Exactly. Larry and Sergei famously, you know, called him the parental supervision when they first hired him. But beyond that, you're right.
He absolutely had the operational experience from being CEO at 2 big companies before, but he also had this special factor that made him a really, really good fit for them. One thing that stood out in the original interview was that He also attended Burning Man regularly, and Eric is a teetotaler. I mean, he doesn't participate in any of those things. He's just insatially curious. And he thought that was a really weird experience that he wanted be part of it.
And he also does for hobbies thinks that people do professionally. And so he was a certified jet pilot on, I think, 5 jet aircraft at the time. And so he was just that kind of larger than life person that not only did he have this all consuming job, but when he realized as a CEO, professionally, that he's in life was gonna be spent on an airplane. He decided he wanted to do the fun part, which is fly it. I think they just really liked that and that resonated.
And later as I went on and in my Currier, Google Knight probably interviewed thousands of candidates who were applying to work at Google. That's the kind of we call it googliness that which is one of the most important scores you can get in an interview at Google is do you have that quirk factor? Are you insatially curious about something than maybe nobody else cares about or would even attempt. And so Eric definitely had that googly factor. Got it. And how is it different?
The culture and the way things ran over at Google and Amazon. What was some of the because both of them incredibly successful, right, but different. Very different. I think that really highlights the difference of the personalities of the founders Beller I admire so much. And I also don't want this any of this to be interpreted while I'm a huge fan of both companies and all these executives I'm talking about.
I don't want it to be misinterpreted as hero worship either because I probably better than anyone. Also know their flaws and the downsides of them. And I know better than to say that they are perfect to pretend that they are. And it's interesting because they also had another common denominator, which was John Dorr was an early investor and board member at both companies. So John and I saw each other once a quarter for like 17 years straight.
And John was really influential in building some of those core practices that were pervasive at both companies. The OKR system chief among them where that's the goal setting system for keeping us, you know, as Jeff would put it still in day 1 and just disrupting yourself and to make sure that we were really insatiable disruptive and willing to kill our own projects for the better good of the of our projects.
And so while the OPR system and the board member was similar and kind of the pace and energy of the companies were very, similar. The personalities of the founders really do come through in the working environment. And I think Jeff's core leadership principles, which he developed to that 1st year I was at the company, Originally, there were only 10. Now I think there's 16 as of 2 weeks ago. That is very pervasive in how things get done at Amazon. It's part of the dialogue.
I think I have those original 10 memorized. I mean, not because anyone asked me to memorize them, but because it was recited in every single meeting, we would go back to those foundational values.
And so when you have cultures that are so pervasive of Google being very quirky and weird and approaching things from unconventional ways and just methodology so ingrained in each employee's brain that it just takes on a different character, even though they're both remarkably similar in terms of audacious goal setting and impact. The approach can be different. You're listening to the NFX podcast.
If you're enjoying this episode, feel free to rate and review our channel and this conversation was someone you think would benefit from these insights. Follow us on social, add n effects, and visit nfx.com for more content. And now back to the show. And so the mental models It's interesting that you said that, you know, people have their flaws.
I bring this up not to necessarily bring out the flaws of the people you worked with, but You know, I remember I had a co founder who was really into journey, the Brock band journey, and he would play journey music, and he would talk about the eighties and how great it was. And the teams kind of made fun of him for that, but they actually loved him for that, and it made him more human.
So it was sort of a flaw that ended up becoming this really great rallying can you talk about that for a second? Because I think a lot of founders feel as if they're not worthy or they're flawed or they're worried about their flaws how would these great people that have been so successful work on their flaws? How do they accept their own flaws?
How do the people around them accept their I think that's something that I love most about tech is that your quirk factor, what makes you different, not only qualifies you to be in the room, but makes you worthy of a seat at the table because you offer a unique perspective. And the execs I've worked with both directly for and those who have been the cast of characters that circled around them, I think that is a common character.
They are the ones who embrace their differences and their different approaches, and they're comfortable in that skin. Now to say that they always were, I definitely saw the journeys of them getting comfortable with that.
But probably the question I'm asked the most is what are the commonalities between these highly successful now celebrity CEOs I work Morgan I think my answer sometimes surprise people because one my first one, I think, is expected, which is insatiable curiosity which I've already mentioned. They're voracious readers. They are curious about everything. They say yes to invitations.
They seek out rooms where they're no longer going to be the smart person in the room, which is very hard to find because they're extremely intelligent about so many things. But the second part I think is what surprises Pete. And I really think that common factor is humility. And humility might not be the first word you think of when you see them because you've seen them on stage and owning their you know, celebrity status as they grew in impact and scale.
But what I mean by that is the way that they manage their teams. Jeff, as you know, famously had this role called The Shadow this is now part of the daily dialogue because Andy Jassy, who is shadow number 1, and shadow when I joined the company, has just become just successor CEO of Amazon.
And the shadow, I think, is a great example of humility because Jeff not only encouraged or tolerated, dissenting opinions, but he sought it out so much that he created an entire job description or someone's full time job was to poke holes and all his favorite ideas challenge him, make sure he was seeing around buying corners and helping him see things from different perspectives and making sure all the voices in the room And Andy's impact obviously
was enormous enough that he went on to then run AWS multi $1,000,000,000 subsidiary company and now to become a and similarly, Eric was the same. I have this terrifying habit of calling on the quietest person in the room, and that really scared me at first I wasn't expecting it. I would be in the room for some other purpose, and then he would call on me the end for summary remarks.
Often because I was the non expert in the room, and I maybe would ask questions someone else wouldn't or clear ask for clarification on a particular term or strategy that would help the experts in the room hone in on a core part of their solution that hadn't been fully fleshed out.
And so I gave them inviting these different voices and not tolerating other Pete, not challenging their ideas or coming out from a different perspective that really push them to be the innovative thinkers that they are. Such high confidence that they're seeking dissension to test their own ideas to make sure that they're right.
Yeah. When I look at the CEOs who've had some very public downfalls, recently, I think that is an interesting common denominator is their senior execs weren't keeping them to account. And I think it kind of became status quo for all their ideas to be good and all their jokes are funny. And that is the sign of a sinking ship, I think. Yeah. I I'm almost imagining a medieval court where you had to gesture Yeah. Who would come in and sort of break things up so to keep the king a little bit.
Mhmm. You know, a little more humble. Over there, some moments where this played out where they were, let's say, under fire. Where either Eric or Jeff was under fire and and what mental models they used to deal with that adversity. One of my earliest memories of being under fire at Amazon was when so they had launched super saver shipping just before I joined. That model was still being perfected and tested.
The board was still a little skeptical goal about how this would convert to long term, faithful, loyal, daily users as we all are now. Jeff described it as digging a moat around the customer because people are still super nervous about putting their credit card online or ordering from this unknown thing instead of a human that you know, is on their in their corner market who knows them. And so we were still in this uneven footing of e Commerce.
And then an employee had an idea that then was taken to the s team's leadership off-site at Jeff's Boathouse and became Amazon Prime. And Amazon Prime went from idea to board approval launch, I think, in a, like, a 6 week span, and they were not not convinced that this was gonna work. They meeting the board. So Jeff had to stand up there in this board meeting and literally do the math. He had figured out the equation for how this was gonna work in a way that wouldn't bankrupt the company.
And it really came down to, 1, how efficient could we be, is what Jeff Wilkie was tasked to do is figure out how do we build in the efficiencies in the ordering system and anticipating orders and what fulfillment centers these different products should be in because shipping by air was ten times more expensive than shipping by ground. And so if people were able to order toothbrush with, like, guaranteed at the time it was 2 day shipping.
That could be very, very expensive, prohibitively expensive. So the second element, once we got the efficiency into the order cycles and anticipating what fulfillments that are should be carrying what was then the shipping costs. And that's the part that Jeff took on himself. And he had to stand up there and be like, okay. Here's the 2 critical pinpoint issues we to solve for this formula to work.
Jeff Wilkie got 1, and Jeff Bezos himself went to negotiate the shipping prices, which he did by deferring all of our ordering traffic from our usual supplier into a smaller supplier at great cost, but to show them how much business they would lose if they didn't negotiate with him. And back then negotiating shipping costs just not done. It was kinda like going into Whole Foods and trying to haggle over the price of your apples. They were just looking at you like, what are you doing?
That's not how we do things here. But he made it hurt enough for long enough they were willing to do that for the very first time, and that's how he was able to get Amazon Prime to work. But that was definitely a sweat at moment. Like, I think if had that not worked out, that would be the moment when they would have been like, alright. We maybe need to bring in a professional CEO to rein in these crazy growth strategies that Jeff has got, but we all know it went the other way.
And It did accomplish what he was looking for, which was super saver shipping was serving those customers who had more time than money. And prime is for those who had more money than time. And that was the way he captured the entire market Beller in this loyalty experience. Prime, we saw immediately, like, I don't remember the exact statistic, but a significant pull in engagement and spend by Prime members. That model proved itself to be worthy very, very quickly.
Yeah. That's also interesting that this was an idea that came from somebody Beller. That Jeff and the team recognized, and they hadn't thought of it in 1998, but I guess they just had the faith in 2000 and 2002 that something like that would come up that they would then seize on and make it work, and then everything would be okay. Yeah. Exactly.
And even back then, in the very foundational years of Amazon, Jeff had Probably the most coveted award given was called the Just Do it award, which was awarded to an employee who had good idea and just took action on it. It didn't actually have to work. For you to qualify to earn this award, by the way. You just had to have a really good idea and opportunity that was in line with the leadership principles given and just take action.
Not wait for bureaucracy or permission, you just kind of jump in. And I love the example. My first year I was there, the woman who won the Just Do It award, with someone working in a fulfillment center, and she'd actually noticed this glaring lights coming from the vending machines. And she thought, well, that's a giant waste of energy. So she just reached in and turned half of them to reduce energy costs. It was significant enough.
They got noticed by management of, like, what happened to our energy costs in this fulfillment center, and she won the Just Do it award by just reaching in and turning those bulbs. That was the kind of behavior that was really rewarded and encouraged to Amazon from every level of the company from fulfillment centers all the way on up. Nice. And you keep next thing this is his long term vision. I know Eric did as well. Mhmm. Keeping the teams aligned around that or the vision. It's hard to do.
I've we talked with Jeff about that. What did you learn from these folks that you think early stage founders could do about, you know, keeping people aligned This is at the heart of what most of my consulting work is on now. So after leaving Google and moving myself to the other side of the planet. I founded a consulting firm, and I have clients now on 5 different continents, every single one in a different industry and in a different growth stage.
And what consistently we have to come back to whenever something's breaking or they have a a problem, whether it's hiring or scaling or whatever it might be, it always comes down to foundational issues of is your mission statement very, very clear. Are you hiring for value alignment more than quote, unquote, culture Flint. And that is what Amazon and Google do very Beller, I think. You know, exactly what you're there to do.
Every single employee can tell you what the mission statement of the company is. And most importantly, every single employee from your interns on up know exactly what they're doing today is correlated and tied the success of that mission of the company at a whole. And that is the secret sauce when you get incredible grit and inefficiencies coming when every person knows exactly how their individual deliverables contribute to the whole.
And so I think it goes back to those leadership principles and the mission statements that are very, very clearly outlined. And then your hiring gets an alignment. You've got the right people who have the same motivations instead of having to push them.
The mission itself holds them forward, and that value exchange is really to print and very important, as you know, in those critical scaling stages where everyone's running in the same direction, and you don't have to waste energy hurting the cats. You know, we always hear about culture and values alignment and all that. And what you're saying is, you know, what we heard from Jeff as well is that it really does work and it really does make a difference and you do need to spend time on it.
And if you see it diverging from what you wanna to be, you need to stop it right then every day ten times a day with different people to get it back to where it's all aligned. Is that how you experienced Beller said. That's absolutely right. When a company comes to me now with a problem, it's often because they waited too late to address a problem that they've already self identified.
They have hired people just because they needed to fill seats, but they don't have the right people in the right places. They haven't hired for that value alignment. How do you hire for value alignment then? Well, I think what a lot of companies don't do in the early stages is convert your value statements into your hiring questions. What your scorecard should actually be focused really on the value alignment rather than core competencies.
I think core competencies, if you're hiring smart enough people, you can teach them to do anything. Course, like, don't hire me to be a computer scientist. I can't code. But aside from that, once you've fulfilled those basic checklists, most of the evaluations need to be those interview questions are directly correlated to the values and the output you wanna see because it really comes down to those motivations. When you want people to be running We're really sprinting a marathon.
You need them to be self motivated to do that because you can't push anyone. They will burn out, or they'll become irrelevant. And so you really need the motivation so I always go back to the hiring questions if they're seeing this misalignment of motivations or expectations or pace. Got it. So this is perhaps what startup founders don't know or don't see, which is that you actually need to focus more on values than on core competencies Yeah. And if you wanna build a really important company.
100%. And I don't think most people would believe that. Like, we gotta get this thing done. We need someone to do this thing. They're so focused on the doing rather than the being, rather than who that somebody is. Oh, I couldn't agree more, James. I think that's such an important point. A lot of people when they're sketching out their business plan or their strategy focus on the what and the how, but for me, it's a 100% about the who.
Who are we serving and who is gonna get us there and the who I've seen a lot of, like, really, really good ideas fail, like, go down in flames because they didn't hire the right people who are aligned on their single mission. And I've also seen some mediocre ideas take the world by storm because they had the right level of talent who were all running in the same direction. If I had to bet on one of those 3, it would be on the who.
Yeah. Well, we heard the same thing from Jeff that the recruiters and the team at Amazon was relentless in trying to recruit him. And then the same thing happened with the Google recruiter they knew you were the right person for that role. Yeah. And they weren't gonna let you go. And I think that both those companies have become $1,000,000,000,000 companies focusing in on the who, not on the what.
And I don't think most founders think that way, and I think that's a big for a lot of people to hear that from you. Now you've gone on to write a book called Beller Yourself. Yeah. What's in that book? So it's a long time in the making. It actually took a lot of years of convincing for me to write it. I know a lot of people have it on their bucket list that they wanna be a published author. That is not me. I actually was convinced to write this.
I started the process right before the pandemic, but for me, it's even more meaningful now because I feel like I want to get these incredible lessons learned from my CEO mentors into his many minds and entrepreneurs as and so the book is really it can be read in two ways. It's story driven. So there's some very fun stories from the foundation of the internet and these now companies that we now have used in our everyday lives.
But then most important to me and what motivated me to finally write it was the lessons that I have distilled from those experiences And I want it to directly translate into actionable steps that people can take today. Regardless of their industry, their career stage, their seniority, I think there's a lesson everyone. I feel so privileged to have had this elite education, this business school, this apprenticeship from sitting next to these in credible visionary thinkers for so long.
And so the book is my attempt to bring these best practices from these superstar performers for us normal people. I think when other people look at Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt or Google and Amazon, they kind of self opt out because they think it would only work for him, or it only worked there. But I saw them before they are who they who they are now. I saw them in those messy middle stages.
I them figuring out their leadership voice, and I can now translate those best practices for really any career stage or any person of the ambition. The ambition I think you have to have yourself. I can't give you that. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make a drink. Right? I can't make you thirsty for this. But if you've got that thirst, I wanna give you every possible advantage to being successful that I can.
And I think in post pandemic, that's especially important because we're seeing this need in our communities for these traditional businesses needing to pivot for people providing their families, careers disrupted, I want to help give this playbook of best practices. Fantastic. And so that's gonna be a combination of stories, mental models, some 2 by 2 matrices, I hope. Yeah. And I wrote it with 3 kind of career stages, particularly in mind.
One is those who are coming out as did I graduating after a major economic event. So mine was after the dot com bust. I saw that. Then I saw the pivots of 2, 2008 economic crisis while I was working for Eric. And now myself is a founder, not knowing that I founded my own consultancy company just months the pandemic hit. I wanna help people through those pivot moments when their original plan a is no longer available.
The second person I'm thinking about is that ambitious person who wants to be recognized as a leader who's looking to level up and own that big client account or the big project launch, and you're trying to teach people to see you and your capabilities in a different light and knowing when to raise your hand and how to create those opportunities for yourself.
And then third are for my fellow entrepreneurs who are out there in the trenches every day and really having to pivot fast hire Beller, and they don't have time to reinvent the wheel, and I want to give that wheel. Got it. And why the title bet on yourself? Where'd that come from? Well, it wasn't the first title, but it's definitely the one that stuck because if I look back on my career, people ask me all the time.
How did I have going from probably the junior most title, the lowest opportunity for impact title I started with the Amazon to owning major projects and being one of the original chiefs of staff at Google, they asked me how I did that. And my answer to that in a nutshell was I just bet on myself. I raised my hand to do things before I was ready to do them perfectly. I created a career plan for myself that I think came at it from a different perspective than most people do.
When people are very naturally ambitious, they kind of set their sights on a particular title they wanna have. I wanna be CEO or I wanna be VP of this particular company or industry. And I came on a little differently. I bet on myself by writing what I call my dream resume, or I've also heard it referred to as, like, a future resume where I imagined myself in the future 10 plus years from now.
And I wrote down for myself, not what titles did I wanna have, but I wrote down What projects do I wanna be owning? What skills do I want to have mastered? What challenges do I want to have as part of my daily practice? And going back to the who with whom do I wanna share the journey. And then I just watch for those rooms. And then I volunteered to get in that room even if it was just picking up all the coffee cups or doing the, 3 AM meal orders for a war room.
I wanted to just see what it's like in that room so that then I can learn their practices and learn to own that room in the and then, you know, run a company of multiple war rooms. And so I think betting on yourself is about the slow, thoughtful, methodical, incremental growth and being willing to take whatever job will give you access to those rooms and those people. Oh, I love it. I think that's such great advice. I'm so glad you've written this book.
He's coming out in sort of October 2020 Exactly. October 12th. It's available for presale now, so you don't have to wait. Oh, okay. Go down. Go to Amazon. Presale now. That's awesome. Well, it is just a delight to talk to you, Anne. Thank you so much, and thanks to our friend, Scott, for introducing us. And thank you for doing what you're doing. Wonderful. Thank you so much for having me and for sharing all these lessons with your audience. I am a big fan, and it's a real honor to be here.
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