Speaker 1You know, you asked me about flaws earlier. Like taking your CFO and bitch-slapping him in front of a room.
Speaker 2It was a message. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I can be what I want to. I put my all in it like no day's off. On the road, let's travel.
Speaker 3All right, Ethan Evans is here. Ethan, your former VP over at Amazon Prime. You're there for a long time. You're there, you're at Amazon for what? 15 years. 20 years, 200 years maybe. Yeah, well, dog years for sure. So Sam, you don't know this, but me and Ethan kind of loosely worked together. When my company got bought by Twitch, I joined what's called the ET team, the executive team. And on that team was Ethan. And I was, you know, everybody else was somebody at Twitch. Hey, this person, they work on chat. This person works on video. And then I was like, what does that guy do? Oh, he's the parental guardian. He was assigned by Amazon. Amazon bought this company for a billion dollars and they had to put an adult in the room. And so I was told you were the adult in the room. And I was like, oh, oh, okay. Gotcha. Better say smart things to this guy. Is that true?
Speaker 1That is largely true. There was, in fact, early on, there was a huge overtone that I was just a spy and that my job there was to like shadow Emmett and then take him out. So there was very much a worry that I was the replacement in waiting when they got sick of Emmett. That was never the actual plan, but you can't convince people of that. Telling them there is no conspiracy is hopeless. It only heightens it. Right. Oh, yeah, you're right.
Speaker 4Denial just makes it worse. Do you guys remember when Twitch was acquired? It was the biggest deal ever. And now thinking, like you're saying, Twitch was acquired for only $1 billion.
Speaker 1Yep. Actually 970 million.
Speaker 3So yeah, like it didn't even quite make a billion. I like the mental win of not paying the full billion because you know, at that point, like is the deal really going to fall apart over the last 30? I'm not sure, but somebody had to win at the end. And it's like, you will feel worse. If this falls apart, then I will. Right. Is what I read when I read that price.
Speaker 1Well, I think the most interesting thing is Twitch definitely had the last laugh because Amazon stock 5X'd in the earn out period for those people. So we had engineers, you know, whose market salary anywhere else was say 200, 250K back then, vesting out at 2 million a year. And of course we lost them all at the end, not because they hated Twitch, but because nobody can stand to go from 2 million to 2.5 million. Right. To 250K.
Speaker 3Right. You had to correct the salary.
Speaker 1Right. Well, and we're not going to pay them 2 million again. So there's this huge vest cliff because of the 5Xing from the big buyout. And we lost a lot of people because there's no way to make that right.
Speaker 4I'm fascinated. We are fascinated, this podcast, on greatness. And that's one of the reasons why we're so into hearing about like the Amazon mafia, Bezos, your career. You're an executive coach now and you've led hundreds of people and you were a hands-on manager. If you were giving Bezos a 360 review or like trying to say like, here's your weaknesses, what would that list look like? Because we know his strengths, which we're going to continue asking about. We know that he's smart.
Speaker 3We think we know his strengths. What would you say for both? I think both are real world.
Speaker 4Yeah, but start with the weaknesses where you're like, you know, you'd be a little bit better if you fixed blank or you tend to be blank and people don't like that.
Speaker 1Yeah, so I watched Jeff work to turn a weakness into a strength. And it was really funny because I saw a moment where he was obviously working on it. Probably a talk, he got an executive coach and it seemed like you could see the coach kind of with the puppet strings or the hand up the butt, right? Like, so Jeff was not mean, but very demanding and never said anything good. He just would come in and be like, okay, I see your idea. Here's the three things to fix, get moving. And for some people who didn't have very thick skin, no matter what results you took to him, they get like a nod and then the three things to improve. And that only criticism, only corrective feedback, that was one of his flaws. When he gave feedback, would he be correct? Was his taste good? His taste was great. It doesn't mean he didn't make mistakes. We know about the Fire Phone, $170 million of write-off just for the hardware that got thrown in a dumpster, let alone all the opportunity cost. But he was generally right. He fought the right battle on Kindle. He fought the right battle on Prime and two-day shipping becoming one-day shipping. He fought a lot of right battles. And in fact, it was annoying because he was so right. We would bust our butts preparing and we would think like, we know our business, we've got it. And he would look at our stuff and like two minutes later, be like, what about this? And he'd be like, but a flaw of his was being always critical. And I was in a meeting where he more or less, told us everything we had missed for an hour. And then stood up to leave and then literally turned back to the table and said, oh yeah, but good job, you're doing great. And walked back out. And you can just see, he was like checking off his list and he's like, oh right, the coach said praise. It was, you know, now he evolved over time, right? And got better at that.
Speaker 4Okay, so he didn't compliment enough. What else? What are some other, if you're working with him, you're gonna say needs to compliment more.
Speaker 1What else? Well, I'm gonna say, you know, give your team some sort of credit. Sort of props or support. Jeff fell into the flaw of every great man, which I think is having been right a lot, he started to believe his vision was perfect. And that's what led to the Fire Phone disaster. So he's probably learned this lesson, but I would say, realize that being really smart and really right and having the courage of your convictions can lead you as CEO to eventually drive the company off a cliff. Everyone was trying to tell him the Fire Phone was not a good product. It's like trying to tell him, that baby is butt ugly. It's just not something you can do effectively. This is really hard, of course, because he had gotten several products that people had told him weren't gonna work, and they did. Now everybody's telling him again, it's not gonna work. And it turns out that everybody's right, not Jeff. I don't know how to fix that, but that's certainly a growth area. Of course, if we look at modern Jeff, that's a whole other thing. If we come all the way to modern Jeff, I have like a list of criticisms. He seems to have changed. He's changed radically since he left Amazon. He could be very cutting. So we talked about not praising enough. One of his famous ridicules he made of a team that is well-documented is too much. There was a team in the room, he didn't like what they had presented, and he stopped the meeting and said, so is the A team for this project available? Because this is clearly the B team. Dude, did he like snap? Did that just destroys them or what? Well, I mean, that's the thing is I talked to a VP. I saw one VP get torn apart in a meeting and he went out of the meeting and called his boss and said, the SVP who worked directly for Jeff and said, it was a terrible meeting. This is what happened. You know, no one can deal with them. Jeff would get frustrated and go into attack mode. And what that really was, yes, he was frustrated with the team he screwed up, but he was also frustrated with himself that he let it get that way. But he would just be relentless. And it was like beating himself up and you with him. A case of that that I know about is one year, we had a, you know, somebody had a great idea, which is we're going to give customers an app where they can snap a price, a picture of a price in a store and send it to us to say, hey, we found this in a store at a lower price. So that sounds great. Except the way it plays out in the media is Amazon is using its customers to spy on small town America, you know, to underrate them. And Jeff, in the meeting, I talked to the woman who was in PR sitting across from him and he came into the meeting and was like, how could we be so stupid? How could anyone screw this up? And she's sitting across from him, kind of feeling like he's saying this to her, but she eventually realized he's just saying it to himself. The bottom line is, I guess he let, he's famous for his laugh. He let his emotions through on both sides. If he was unhappy, that unhappiness came out, you know, in conduct. And he was like, I don't know,
Speaker 3do you think that that thing you said, because the thing you said where you could be working, a team could be working on something for a month or three months. You come in, you present a plan. You think you've thought of everything. And here's a person who they've been in back-to-back-to-back meetings about other things. They open the piece of paper, they read the thing, and they're able to put their finger right on the key point of leverage. Maybe the key flaw in the thing or the weakness or quickly identify why this is good or why this is bad. I saw Emmett do a lot of that too. And it, it kind of, I didn't know what to make of it. I'm curious what you make of it. Is it just, these people are just smarter. That's why they're at the top. Is it that they have a lot of pattern recognition? Is that a gift or is that a learned behavior? What is that?
Speaker 4I think the best way to become successful is to see how other people did it, whether you're going to copy them or just use it as inspiration, because then now you know what's possible. So starting at the age of 24, I did this relentlessly and I was very methodical about it. And I created a spreadsheet where I tracked roughly 50 people who were uber successful. And I looked at the, the year that they were born, the year that they started their apprenticeship. And then the year that they started the first thing that made them successful. Finally, the year that they broke through. And I aggregated all this data along with the stories of what they did to be an apprentice and what they did to finally break through. And I put it together in a database and HubSpot went and found this thing that I frankly even forgot about, but it did change my life and they resurfaced it. They made it even better. And they put it into a thing that you can download for free right now. So if you click the link in the description or click the QR, code right here, you can see this database that I made when I was 24 and it changed my life. And so if you're looking to become successful or you're already successful and just want some more inspiration, check it out.
Speaker 1Well, Jeff is one of the few people, you know, we're all smart people here. He's one of the few people I sat around and thought, okay, but smarter. Like here's a guy who's clearly smarter. Emmett was somewhat that way as well. You could sit around and be like, I am smart, you are smart, but that guy's really sharp. However, I think it was pattern recognition. He did that all day. Three, four, five of those reviews a day. He did it for years. We've all heard that thing about 10,000 hours to become an expert. He literally spent 10,000 hours reading those documents and giving feedback. So sure, he also had greater context, but it was 10,000 hours of taking a business you don't really know, reading about it for 20 minutes and then having the ability to turn it into an insight.
Speaker 4Have you guys ever met someone who's successful and not smart? Yeah, I went to a real estate conference. I met a bunch of them.
Speaker 3It was great.
Speaker 4Like whatever. People call it Jeff Smart. I'm like, did you have any peers who became uber successful who were average smart?
Speaker 1Oh boy. Ah, you're putting me on dangerous ground because the peers will see this. Bro, didn't you just
Speaker 4like LinkedIn post about how like someone tried to seduce your wife? Like you don't mind revealing at all.
Speaker 1That post was a while ago, but anyway, it's obviously very memorable. Yes, there were a couple of people at Amazon, and I think, what I think is everyone who ends up rich, unless they're just lucky or inherited, has some gift. The person I'm thinking of had a gift of loyalty. If Jeff wanted it done, that guy was going to run through any wall to get there. He made a ton of money from Amazon, from Jeff rewarding him, not for him being the smartest guy, but for him being the, I will just take on any mess you give me. And I don't think Jeff gave him things expecting, brilliant, transformative results. He expected him to go in and grind away and turn a D into a B. And sometimes, this is an important point you'll like, in a business as big as Amazon, sometimes all you need is a B because there's some other A product that's going to drag through the revenue and a B product on that engine or a B support system is completely good enough. And I need a guy who's going to go take a D or an F and get it to me. I need a guy who's going to go to a B and that's all I need. And that's better than like the high beta leader who's going to try and make that thing an A, but might not get there.
Speaker 3We were at an offsite once for Twitch and this lady presented what she called the trust equation. And she had three parts of the room labeled. So one part of the room was intimacy. So it was like, how close do you feel to each other? Another one was credibility. And she said, this is saying if you say I got it, I'll take care of it. That means, that means I got it. I will actually go try to take care of it. And then the third one was integrity. It was like, does somebody have kind of your best interest or the team's best interest at heart? And she said, walk to the area of the room that you think is most important, the most important variable in the trust equation. I think there, let's say there's 20 of us, 18 of us walk to integrity, including myself, one guy, Hubert, if you remember. - Yeah, I know Hubert. - Walked over to intimacy. - Yeah, of course he did. - And then Emmett walked over to credibility and sat there. And I was like, what is going on? And to me, I couldn't even believe it. I was like, what could possibly be more important in a team working together or having trust than the integrity of the person? That's just seemed like I couldn't, and I guess 18 people agreed. And Emmett, they were like, well, that's interesting. Why are you over there? And he goes, cause you know how many times in a company somebody tells me I got this. And I think, okay, good, they got this. And I go move my attention to something else. And two months later, I come back and find out that that area is a mess. And they in fact did not got this. And he goes, I don't care how smart you are. I don't care how much I like you. I don't even care if you're a particularly good person. I just care that when you say I got this, that means you got this. And it was like such a, like a wound in the CEO. Is that, what do you make of that? -
Speaker 1Well, that's this guy who, I don't think was the smartest, but he was the, I got this guy. And he had Bezos trust that he would do an above average, very good, but not great job. And that he could then, therefore Jeff could turn his back on some fire and be like, that guy will throw his body on it and roll around and take the burns until the fire's mostly out. And he had a couple of those guys and they never became top leaders, but they kept getting moved and rewarded. And I get it because, Sam, you mentioned me leading hundreds of people. I didn't lead on the scale of Jeff himself by any means, but you get to a point where you're like, I just need to be able to get this out of my head. I can't worry about this anymore. -
Speaker 4Hey, what was it like working with coworkers who became incredibly wealthy? If I was wealthy and a boss said to me, does the, is the A team here? I would be like, I'm out. Like, I don't know if I feel like putting up with this, but what is the motivating factor for these people and what's it like working with coworkers who are generationally rich? -
Speaker 1Yeah, great question. I think the guy I'm talking about ended up, the last time I knew, is probably worth about 75 million. So clearly generationally rich. -
Speaker 3By the way, this Amazon stock price 2005, I think is like in the $2 range. It's now 248. - Oh, I have a number for you if you want it.
Speaker 1You'll love this. - Yeah, give it. - I have a number for you if you want it. - Okay. - I have a number for you. - Okay. Cause I know my exact start date, my exact stop date. So I could do the math, 9,082%. It's of course gone up more since then. But yeah, 9,000%.
Speaker 4Anyway- Had you held the whole time, what would you be at?
Speaker 1Oh, today, held even until today. Oh, hell, I don't know, 40 or 50 million, I guess. I try not to think of, I've never done that math. I'm afraid to do that math. Okay. You know, I don't want the pain of that because I went to Amazon with no real savings. Like I was 35, I was married. I had my first child adopted from China. My wife and I were kind of doing the paycheck to paycheck thing. And so I had to live on some of the stock. And, you know, I think Guy Kawasaki talks about the cost of like, you know, he talks about like a $5 million Porsche. And that was like a $50,000 Porsche bought with stock that would have been worth 5 million if only he'd have kept it.
Speaker 3Yeah. Every diaper you look at now and you're like, oh, that's a $1,000 diaper. That's a $180 diaper right there.
Speaker 1Exactly. The most interesting thing was watching people lose touch. With the super wealthy, it wasn't that they took a private jet or that they had three houses. It was watching a guy come in when we were working on a product once and suggest that we needed to prioritize automating people's whole home Sonos systems, that that was going to be a good market. And it was just this reality that like, this guy thinks lots of people have whole home Sonos systems. And that's just, you know, particularly then.
Speaker 3Is there a soul for that? You know, comedians talk about this where they, you know, why do comedians retire? They're not like athletes where they're, you know, they don't have the speed anymore. So why do comedians fall off? And the reason is they get rich. And when you get rich, you use money to solve your problems and problems are the source of all the comedy, the tragedies, the irritations of life is what's relatable. And when you're not, when you're not living a relatable life, how do you relate to the audience? How does the executive team that's worth hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars, what are they doing to actually stay in touch and understand the customer?
Speaker 1Uh, well, they, they do, you know, Jeff's email probably still, but certainly then was open to the world. So he read customer emails because anybody on earth could email Jeff at Amazon and get Jeff and complain about shit. And he read a lot of those. Eventually, of course, he had a team that told him which ones to read, but he was reading the direct complaints. I think losing touch happens over time. And I've tried to watch myself lose touch because I also do it. I have done it. And I've tried to watch like, what are the decisions in my life? You know, like I have gardeners. I hate mowing. So I don't. Well, everyone else who's like fighting with their lawnmower, you know, different experience. I think reading those emails and hearing the complaints of actual people helped a lot. That was a big Jeff trick
Speaker 4for a long time. Which is pretty crazy, isn't it? That a company as powerful as Amazon, which has billions of data points, you can get one or you could read our email and you read that same email five times in a week and you're like, I see a trend. That's A, a magic power, and B, really interesting.
Speaker 1Yeah, Jeff said, between data and anecdotes, trust the anecdotes. His reasoning was, even at Amazon scale, let's say 99% of packages get to houses on time and right. Well, yeah, but 1% of Amazon scale still means like 25 million packages a day not getting there right. And so when somebody then calls up to say, like, I didn't get my thing and blah, blah, blah, that's a real story from that 1%, which is still huge. And there was this whole process you may have heard about. If you haven't, it's fun. He was very, very busy. So what he would do when he got one of those complaints from one of your areas. Of course, he knew everybody's area. You'd get an email and it would be a forward of that complaint with just a single question mark at the top. And everybody, we called these question mark emails and everybody knew what that meant, which is it meant you have 24 hours to get back and explain what's going on. So you'd scramble around and try and figure out what the hell happened to this customer. And then the biggest thing was, could you show it was a weird exception and no big deal? And second best, that it was a problem, but you had a solution and it was implemented or going to be implemented soon. And then worst was where you're like, yeah, this is and where it's going to take a while. So I remember one of these, you like his pithy criticisms. You'll love this. He sent us an email and we got something worse than a question mark. This is when I ran Amazon's app store. He sent us an email that said, please tell me we're not doing this. Unfortunately, we had to respond and say, yeah, actually we are. And his reply to that was just euthanize me.
Speaker 4He just got done watching season one of Entourage and he's trying to like implement some Ari Gold stuff. Yeah, just euthanize me.
Speaker 1But it was, that's how he scaled that process was you'd send these question, he'd send out these question marks and he'd get back his answers. Everyone from Amazon can tell a question mark email story like I just did. Yeah. They all have their own version. And that that's a way to scale that culture across hundreds of leaders is this standardized process of customers complain to me. I send you question marks. You tell me what's going on. You better damn well fix it. You know, because Sam, Jeff viewed every customer as his customer, even, you know, he's, he still would say, well, my customer.
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Speaker 4Amazon Bezos kind of seems like a near perfect entrepreneur. I think Zuck has the takes the crown right now. One, he hasn't had too many personal scandals. And also he's right. Like all the time. And Jeff was like that. I mean, I've read the everything store. I've read some books about him. Now we're talking to you. It seems like he's just mostly nailed it.
Speaker 1Yeah, I think that's true. And look, if Jeff called me and wanted me to take a job for him tomorrow, I would stop what I'm doing. Go do it because I respect him that much and his ability. And he's the only person on earth I would take that call from. And it's, you know, to go to Sean's point in the trust equation, he has a high trust equation with me because I know he's good. I know how he thinks and that I can be successful working for him. I don't want that call in the sense that I have, you know, stuff I like doing, but you know, he's, he is that good. So you're right about that.
Speaker 3Can we talk about this idea of strategically patient, but tactically impatient? What does that mean?
Speaker 1Another Jeff idea. Basically, Jeff said, look, important things take a long time. So today he would say like putting people in space takes a long time. You can have the idea, you can have the right vision, but it's still going to take years and years to like design rockets and build a rocket base and, you know, set up or learn and build all the software. So that means you have to be on big strategic ideas. You have to be patient. Another example of that would be prime. You can have the idea of two day shipping. That's going to be great. But to really realize that and then make it one day shipping and then make it same day shipping, that's decades of work. So his point was. To do anything great, you're going to have to be patient for the end result, but every day you better be making every tiny bit of progress you can squeeze out. Like the difference between a day that's a nine and a 10 on progress, that's one thing done and three things done. That's what accumulates to ever get you there. So he was always pushing on what can you do more this quarter on this five year project? Because it's, you know, five years is an accumulation of 20 quarters. We can't lose. Any of those, or we won't get there.
Speaker 3So it's like you have this 10 year, a 10 year view with a 24 hour clock that you're giving yourself every day, 10 year view and say, oh, I got 10 years to get there.
Speaker 1You'll never, you'll never get there. Right. That he wanted us busting our ass every day. And he was very, you know, Amazon has a lot of euphemisms. I can't say they're all directly from Jeff, but a lot of euphemisms to say, yes, we're a sweatshop in a slightly more acceptable way. They would say things like, well, his biggest one was to say, I don't like the term work life balance. I prefer work life harmony. If you enjoy your work, the fact that you're working a lot may mean still mean that your life is in harmony. So that was a way of saying like, yeah, screw balance, you know, put in a lot. He would say, uh, we work long, hard and smart. Two out of three don't count. So it's great that you're working smarter, but we also want harder. So. You know, just because you had a good idea, doesn't mean you can go home at three. We still go like, great, write that one down and get me another one by seven and another one by 10 and you can go home at 10. The last one Amazon said was like, your career will have seasons and maybe Amazon isn't the right place in certain seasons. IE, if you have kids and you don't want to not see them, don't work here. Right. Like, or, you know, do work here and don't see them. That's okay too. Like go home at six, put them to bed, get back on at eight, work till midnight. No problem. And that's how his people worked. And he built a company of another saying you might enjoy. Sam is, uh, it was often said Amazon is a place where high performers go to feel bad about themselves because he had this idea of a relentlessly high bar, you know? And so great. You're super smart. You killed it. We're going to up the goal. Dude, do you ever
Speaker 4get nervous talking trash now? Yeah, no. Cause you're, you're very transparent and I dig it, but has it gotten back to you where these guys are like, what the hell, why are you talking about all of this?
Speaker 1I know that inside Amazon, like some people will watch this inside Amazon and it'll go around and they'll be like, can you believe he said that? But others will be like, yeah. And well, that's true. Or it was true. I still think about what I say. It's like when you asked me about, you know, who's, who's not as smart. I was like, oh, what do I actually want to say? Because, you know, some of the people I might've thought that of might hear this. And no, that I'm thinking of them. I try to be polite, but life's too short for bullshit. I here I'll be transparent this way. When I got to VP, I looked around at my peers and I did what all of us do. Even if we don't admit it, I evaluated now, Amazon was huge. There were about 300 VPs. And so I kind of stack rank myself. Like, where am I in the 300? Because there were only about a dozen SVPs. So if I want to be one of them, like gonna have to. Be on top of the pile of 300. And I looked at some of my peers and I thought I am better than you, but I looked at others and I thought, oh shit, I am not, I'm not punching on his level. Like, so I stack rank myself and I said, I'm kind of in the middle and I don't have any problem admitting. I feel I was like a middle VP at Amazon. I can live with that, but that's because I could see the people who are better. And I could also see some people that at least in my estimation, I could run circles around. So. Do I worry about it? I don't want to like personally name an insult. Any of the people I felt I could run circles around. I'm happy to name the ones I thought were better, but you know, unless you go super dystopian, no one can do anything to me. One of the great things about being retired. What are they going to do? Tell me I'm a bad person. Tell me I'm wrong for my coaching program. Right. Or, or here's, here's the worst thing, you know, this call, you know, this from Twitter, you know, this from Twitch, Sean, the worst thing anybody can do is respond to this podcast. It's. Say, Ethan is so wrong. Do a post or a tweet. What an asshole. He's completely wrong. Wow. What did he say? Right? Exactly. So I'm not out to insult anyone, but the only thing they can do coming after me is make me more famous, right? Like Lynn, their voice to mine. So that's the old Calvin Klein. There is no such thing as bad publicity.
Speaker 3Well, Ethan, I'll give you permission to beat me up. Cause I'm curious, you know, I was at Amazon, I was kind of a kid. I was what? 29, 30 years old. Maybe, uh, feel free to beat me up. Well, what did you, what did you think was I, maybe there was nothing notable. I'm curious. I'd love to know.
Speaker 1On the positive side, you taught me about the value of 10 year plans and 10 year list, because you and I had a discussion of you had a 10 year plan and like 10 year goals and we're checking them off. And I remember discussing with you, I dug out my old 10 year plan, which I had written, but done nothing with. And now I pay much more attention to that. The things I, if I were to criticize this, Sean, I knew then one is. You obviously didn't fit it, Twitch, let alone at Amazon, meaning you were clearly entrepreneurial driven. It was pretty obvious that like you were a round peg in a square hole and, and you weren't going to be like, oh, I'm in a corporation now I'll learn how to be corporate. So that made you smart, but kind of useless because he kept it too real. Well, keeping it real goes wrong. Well, keeping it real is great. you're inside a machine, you know, a real, like a real rock inside a machine just stops the machine it doesn't change the machine are
Speaker 3you saying i was a bad boy all i'm hearing is i was a bad boy i'm kind of loving it i'm not gonna lie uh
Speaker 1and then of course the other thing is you quickly learned that at twitch it was okay to just mail it in right the like oh twitch had this idea i guess the weirdest question i was ever asked by legitimately asked by a twitch leader as the amazon guy was you guys keep talking to us about money and profit why do we have to worry about that we're owned by amazon now can't you just pay for it and that was like the disconnect child well that was the disconnect i was fighting was oh well since amazon is a big company we never have to make money we just have to be twitch and and make gamers happy and that is our only job and the fact that we're burning a billion dollars of cash because this is another fact sam at times twitch was burning certainly hundreds of millions and over the first five years burned over a billion dollars of cash with no real sight to profitability every year emmett and team would prepare a plan that said profitable in three years and every year at the end of the year we would be in the exact same spot and turn in the same plan that said profitable in three years and for about five years andy jassy let that fly eventually he did get tired of it and emmett left and there were layoffs and you know now it's maybe somewhat different but for five consecutive years it was profitable in three years but we're going to burn 200 million this year and then we did that for five years right can i ask you
Speaker 4a question about being a small business owner now i think like you you have a coaching business um you do podcasts you're you're we're all the same here uh and yet like both sean and i we we've founded companies and i look at these guys who run these huge businesses or who are part of these huge businesses and every once in a while i feel envy where i'm like they're taking over the world and it sounds really interesting and fascinating this scale you've experienced that now you're experiencing being your own boss and having a small business and you don't have billions of dollars to play with and you're not going to change the entire world but you're going to like be the director of your own movie and you're going to be the director of your own movie and you're going to be the director of your own movie and you're going to be the director of your own movie and you're going to be the director of your own movie and you're going to be the director of your own movie and you're going to be the director
Speaker 1of your own movie and you're going to be the director of your own movie and you're going to be the director of your own movie and you're going to be the director of your own movie and you're going to be the director of your own movie and you're going to be the director of your own movie and you're going to be the director of your own movie and you're going to be the director of your own movie and you're going to be the director of your own movie and you're going to be the director of your own movie and you're going to be the director of your own movie and you're going to be the director of your own movie and you're going to be the director of your own movie and you're going to be the director of your own movie and you're going to be the director of your own movie and you're or you said former Amazon. I don't really have a good way, you know, a good current title. Sure, I'm a executive coach. You kind of feel like, we, we, wah,
Speaker 4wah, yeah, yay.
Speaker 1Because, you know, even if I'm good at what I do, you just don't have that platform. So to summarize, the thing you're envying is real. It's the platform that if I, as an Amazon VP, let alone one of the SVPs or somebody else there, wanted to talk to anyone at any company, they would generally take the call because it's Amazon calling. And that might mean a billion dollars for them. Usually it didn't, but they had that image, right? That's the loss. That said, I love working for myself much more.
Speaker 4Do you guys ever think about this? I read a lot of history, Ethan, and I like studying CEOs. I like studying personalities. Oftentimes I wonder, like, what would certain titans do if they weren't doing the thing that they are known for? And would they still be successful? Like, who's an animal that couldn't be held back? Who was just put in the perfect place at the perfect time and they took advantage of it? Do you think about that ever with some of the great guys who you've been around?
Speaker 1Yeah, of course you wonder how much was Jeff was going to be who he is no matter what and how much was.
Speaker 4Because he was like a trader.
Speaker 1Yeah, he worked at a place called D.E. Shaw and he was a trader and he used to talk about this idea of the everything store, I guess, with the D.E. Shaw guy. And then one day he loaded up his car and drove to Seattle to go build it. And of course, as they say, the rest is history. only, you know, 35 years of work or whatever to get there. I think Jeff, of course, would have been very successful, but I think of this, like, I'm sure both of you know, Naval Ravikant and his writing. Naval writes about like, how do you live so that 99 times out of a hundred, you end up wealthy, but he has an acknowledgement. You're not going to end up equally wealthy in those 99 parallel lives. I think there's a very realistic life where Jeff ends up running some company or founding a few companies, some would succeed and fail and ending up certainly with $100 million or something, but not being Jeff Bezos. He would even tell you his signature insight was the internet is going to be a huge opportunity. I have to get in on that. And so part of that tells you it was a moment in time because if he's 10 years older, he's already deeply entrenched in a partner of D.E. Shaw making $10 million a year, and he probably doesn't drop everything to go. And if he's 10 years later, he's too late. And can he find the next thing? Can he, whatever, attach to the iPhone? Or I don't know. And that's no insult to Jeff. I just think for anybody, there's something about timing. I think about it all the time.
Speaker 4Sean, I don't know if you do either, but I think about, because if it is, if what you're saying is true, that means that opportunity selection, I think, Sean, you call it something else. You say project selection is far more important than anything else. Because oftentimes I tell myself, and I think most people tell themselves, which is like, I'm already doing this thing. I'm already deep down. I might as well just keep going. Or they'll say like, oh, but I can pivot. I can make this into something else. the greatness requires a great person, but an equally great opportunity. And the great opportunity thing is probably easier to change than how great you are.
Speaker 1Well, yeah. So a story that would reinforce that, I told you when I joined Amazon, they wouldn't tell me what I was going to do. So I got to Amazon and I asked my boss, like on the second day, I said like, so I'm here, what am I supposed to do? And he said, well, I have two teams that don't have leaders yet. There's a team that's supposed to build a video product. And there's a team that's going to do a shared ingestion platform that will like, take in all the books, music, and video, and, you know, make them available to these three product teams. What do you want to do? And I said, oh, I'm a product guy. I want to do the video team. Well, lo and behold, this other guy starts the next week and he comes in and he'd kind of apparently been told you'll be the video guy, but I'm in that chair. And so he gets the ingestion platform. And if you were to look at our two careers, they're very different. Now, how much is it that I'm really, really better than him at how much is it? I was a week earlier and got to take the chair he wanted. And for that matter that my boss, whether through ignorance or low integrity gave it to me, I can't answer that. We can't AB test that, but I think a lot about the opportunity I effectively took away from him.
Speaker 3Well, even now you look at, you know, he retired, Bezos retires. I don't know, whatever, whenever he retired, but it goes to, you know, he's in Ibiza, he's taking Oyster down. He's having a good time for a period of time. He had, you know, he was in retirement mode and then the AI window opens and now he's back and he's got a new company, but he understood when the, you know, he understood when there was actually a big fat pitch to swing at and the fat pitch now with AI and what he's doing, building a sort of like artificial general engineer with Prometheus. That's his, he sees that as the, you know, the sort of bigger Amazon sized opportunity again.
Speaker 4And what's that opportunity, Sean? Is it, he's taking AI to like manufacturing companies?
Speaker 3Ethan, you might know better than me. My understanding is he says the kind of large language model approach, which is giving us awesome kind of knowledge workers will not give us awesome engineering. And so we need to build, you know, an artificial general engineer, meaning we need to build a AI specialized to actually build things, to make stuff in the real world. I don't know what that means, if it's going into robots or if it's planning tools, I'm not sure exactly what it is, but it's to build shit. You know, it's.
Speaker 1Well, with a name, Jeff likes literal names. So even though Prometheus isn't exactly literal, he clearly means, you know, building a giant worker. He liked to name things what they do. Why? Before it was Prime Video, it was simply Amazon Video and Amazon Music. So, yeah, OK, you have a great point, but he's sitting in a very different chair now. Like, let's put it this way. He can single handedly choose any swing to take. Like in my case, maybe I could have chosen a different swing, but like I didn't have unlimited job opportunities. I had to pick from the swings that were offered to me. Now, modern Jeff can just look at the world and decide when to swing. I think any baseball player, since we're using this analogy, would love new rules to baseball. Because I'm a star, I get to sit in the dugout and decide when I'll come to the plate. Oh, this pitcher, his pitch counts in the high 80s. I'm going to come take my swings now. Oh, it's a reliever. I'll sit back down and wait. He's in that situation where he can literally decide when to go to the plate.
Speaker 3It's great. Well, I think what's even more impressive, use the baseball analogy, is not swinging. So he, you know, Warren Buffett famously said, you know, there's no called strikes in investing. Meaning you could sit there and look at every possible investment and there's no penalty for not swinging. You just have to hit when you do swing. And so what's actually impressive to me isn't that, you know, he swung at the obvious pitch of AI. It's that for five years or six years or whatever in between, he didn't get itchy and swing at the wrong thing. Right. Like, you know, if you look at what he did, Amazon, Blue Origin, which is another like, you know, space travel was probably one now. It's Elon has shown with SpaceX is the second or third biggest opportunity in the world. And then and then AI. And so it's all the other stuff he didn't swing at that I think is, you know, it's the dog that didn't bark. That's actually the one that you should pay attention to, because I would say most of us spend too much of our time swinging at useless stuff at, you know, swinging at the wrong pitches to the point where we're not even available mentally or physically to swing at the big ones.
Speaker 1Well, interesting point. Jeff got pitched a lot. And I think that internally and externally to enter industries, he's always declined. So he came from D.E. Shaw. People were always pitching him. Let's go into finance. Right. We have, you know, a billion credit cards on file. We have financial relationships. We should become a bank. We should this. We should that. He always declined. And his argument was it's well served. Like there's a lot of people in that space and it's heavily regulated. And he generally tried to avoid things with lots of regulation because that slowed down. His ability to do whatever he wanted. He was pitched health care, which he's dabbled in. Certainly he was pitched travel. I was part of pitching travel to him like, oh, Amazon, you know, has all these customer relationships. We should compete with Expedia or Airbnb or whatever. He declined that. So he has some algorithm, which I don't know, is he's totally shared for deciding what to swing at. I know some of the variables he considers, like, is it highly regulated? Is it already mature?
Speaker 4So a lot of times people at the podcast, they'll reach out to me and they're wondering, hey, Sam and Sean, how do you meet all these amazing entrepreneurs? How do you find all these stories? Well, I have a hack. You see, I actually have a community called Hampton. It's a community for entrepreneurs doing at least three million in revenue, although we do on average something like twenty five million dollars a year in revenue. We have the founders of DoorDash, of Figure, of Bluetooth. All these amazing companies are part of Hampton. And what's interesting is because of the environment in Hampton, which frankly is very similar to my first million. We have a very unique. High trust environment when people apply and go through the vetting process. They're put in groups of like eight or nine other entrepreneurs and they get real about everything that's going on in their life and in their business. And sort of like when people listen to MFM, they get inspired to come up with new solutions for business. That's what happens in real life in Hampton. It's life changing. And so if you're a founder of a startup that does at least three million in revenue and you just want to go ahead, pull forward five or ten years worth of success, then check it out. The URL is join Hampton dot com. Again, the URL join Hampton. Dot com. How do as a guy like him or even the Andy Jassy, I think his name is when you're CEO of one of the largest companies and or one of the wealthiest persons on people on Earth. How do you say stay normal, like in terms of day to day activity and or do you even want to?
Speaker 1I can I can better tell the stories of watching him progressively get pushed behind the security wall. When I started at Amazon, there was one sort of slightly overweight security guard sitting at a desk. And that guy was some retired limited pro baseball pitcher. I think he pitched for like a season or something, but he was now a security guard. Well, some reporters slipped by and got straight to Jeff's office and walked into his office and was asking him questions. We had a new security firm the next day and, you know, like much tighter. We had gates all of a sudden and you had to badge in and out as opposed to just flash your badge to the to the retired pitcher. So that was phase one. Then one day we built new buildings. We built a campus and I was going to visit Jeff. And I saw this person who had this absolutely terrible cube and it sat on the elevator, like open to the elevator bay and it had a glass wall. But it was a person just sitting there. And I walked by and I thought, what a shit seat, all the elevator traffic. And then, of course, the light went off like, oh, wait, security. So I went back to the guy because I'm curious and I'm like, so you're security, right? He's like, yeah. And I'm like, so where's the panic button? He's like, oh, it's right here. And, you know, at that point, somewhere in the building, there was a SWAT team. You know, like if that guy pushed the button, the guys with the guns would run down the hall. And the last time I was in Amazon's executive suite. That was still a floor that anyone could take the elevator to in the new buildings now, like Andy Jassy. There's the Andy Jassy elevator that you don't get in without permission. And can be stopped. And then you're just stuck in the elevator. And then you end up on a floor that you can't get to without going through, you know, and it's like Fort Knox. So they became progressively isolated. Did I see them try to be normal? Yes. Jeff used to come out. We held an annual picnic in the beginning at like a big farm outside of Seattle. He would come out to the farm. There was a weird game we played called broomball. Broomball took like a one of the. Exercise balls you work out on the squishy ones, not heavy and brooms. And you kind of played soccer. Well, people got really hurt in this because you have enthusiastic engineers who have no coordination, but lots of enthusiasm swinging brooms at each other. One of my bosses had somebody else break his hand by hitting his hand. Jeff used to play broomball. I don't think he's probably been. Well, certainly since he retired, but I don't think it was at an Amazon picnic for like a shit long shit ton long time while he was still there. Because they had to become these affairs that were held in the stadium and Amazon with food trucks and 10,000 people. His presence or absence, you know, a, it was probably an unpleasant and be only 2% of those people would ever talk to him anyway. So I don't think he went. So I think he gave up being a man of the people when there were too many people to know.
Speaker 3Hey, can you tell the story of Amazon Prime? That starts somewhere. It does. It starts with an idea. So what were you there?
Speaker 1What was it? I joined Amazon right after Prime. I've met the engineer who may still be at Amazon. You can, one of you can Google in the background. His name is Charlie Ward. Charlie Ward, who became a VP at Amazon, claims that as a principal engineer, he invented the idea of Amazon Prime. I believe Jeff Bezos also claims that Jeff himself invented it. So I don't know if they had the same idea at the same time or, you know, if there's a little appropriation going on there.
Speaker 4Well, it wasn't that unique, right? Like Costco, like.
Speaker 3Well, there's, there's multiple things, right? Was the initial thing just, hey, there's a membership with perks or was it two day? Hey, what if we could do two day shipping? That'll change everything.
Speaker 1So there were originally, there was supposed to be no perks. It wasn't a perk based program. It was purely a fast shipping program. That was the initial idea. And I think the biggest thing that would be interesting is Jeff was about to have a shitty quarter. And he, he could see things lining up. It was right after the internet crash kind of instilled a bubble. He could see the quarter wasn't going to be what Wall Street wanted. And so he said, we need something. And so Prime was originally called Project 100 because they had to figure out how to announce it and start doing it in 100 days. It's not a two day shipping program. It's a two day delivery program. And you might be like, what's the difference? That's a distinction. Jeff figured out we're going to call it two day delivery. It began with a lot of FedEx two day shipping, but he knew over time he'd get down to where two days he could do often one day through the post office or one day on his own trucks. And it never told you the shipping method. So the origin anyway, was Jeff trying to have good news to tell investors in a rough time, because back then he wasn't Jeff Bezos, the inevitable. Tycoon. He was still Jeff Bezos, the dot com, maybe dot bomb guy in any case, whether it was for him or from Charlie, Charlie, there was this thing at Amazon, this is you'll love this. It was called the idea tool and anybody could put any idea into the idea tool. And, you know, Jeff would sometimes look at them and maybe others, and some of them would get done. Charlie put a description of a rapid shipping program into the idea tool. I then Presto a hundred days later, you have the launch of Amazon. Amazon Prime, the idea of adding ancillary benefits to it, perks, came later. Well, even the
Speaker 3fast shipping thing, okay, that sounds not controversial, but nobody was doing it. And I think nobody was doing it because it was going to be expensive. You'd lose money. And so there had to be some strategic rationale or some big picture vision or some clever hack to make that pencil out when you didn't, it wasn't clear that it would pencil out, right? Yeah. Well, Jeff was
Speaker 1willing to lose money for a long time, but the big joke at Amazon for a long time was, oh yeah, we lose money on every unit, but we'll make it up in volume. Which of course, on straight math, you're just going to lose more money. But of course, with economy of scale and potentially the evolution of time, things like Moore's law or whatever, you can shift the unit economics so that you can do that. Well, Prime had a trial run that you're not thinking of or recalling. And that trial run was simply free shipping. Before there was Prime, Jeff had a big argument again with this other guy, Jeff Wilkie, who was the Walmart guy, where he said, look, we have to figure out a way to do free shipping. And Wilkie said, yeah, but Jeff, shipping costs money. Like it's a thing. We actually pay for that. So Jeff said, but my customers hate paying for shipping. So we got to figure out how to do it. Well, probably from Freakonomics, you know, a lot of the story because it's been documented. But the key thing is, what they did is when that very first came out to get free shipping, you had to pay a hundred dollars. And they realized like, oh, okay, at a hundred dollars, we can put enough stuff in a box to get enough profit to give the shipping away. And then they started carving away. So if you actually look at the history, it went a hundred, seventy-five, fifty, then twenty-five. And it sat at twenty-five for many, many years. And the secret they figured out by experimentation was at that point in time, they had to figure out how to do it. And they figured out how to do it. And in time, the big things we shipped, I mentioned, were books, music, DVDs. Twenty-five dollars was this magic number that meant you had to buy two. You had to put two things in the box. And what they figured out was there wasn't enough profit in a single DVD to cover the shipping and still be in business. But if you could put two or more in the box, DVDs, CDs, some mix, there was enough profit to ship it for free. So Prime was an outgrowth already of having figured all that out and seeing like, oh, we can't do it. And so they figured out how to do it. And they figured out how to ship for free. Can I ask you a
Speaker 4question about Amazon's website? Sure. I use Amazon as an example about why bad design is better than good design. And I use the example, like, good design is used, I think, poorly. Good design means the customer does the desired action. But oftentimes, like a Brooklyn cool kid will think good design means like certain colors and flat, like whatever this bullshit is. But if you go to like Amazon Kindle, which, which is their listing page, which is like one of the top selling products, I'd imagine on Amazon, it's like thousands and thousands, or it's probably actually hundreds of thousands of words. If you add up all the reviews, it's mostly copy. It's pretty ugly. There are some photos, but it is not what a 25 year old cool kid would ever design. Can you tell me about some of the AB experiments that you guys ran or what the, what the strategy was for using copy versus like this beautiful, uh, trend has been throughout the eras of like making things pretty.
Speaker 1Yeah. Well, first everything at Amazon is AB tested and the winner is what drives up sales. It's a program called web lab and you run a web lab and there are many, they have a complicated system so that thousands of competing experiments can be running at the same time. And yet somehow they can distill the data for one experiment and tell you what it did. So it is data driven and it's profit driven. Nobody can tell you what it did. It's a data driven experiment. It's a data cares about the pixels as long as they sell. There were many pushes in Amazon to make it prettier, and there were several design VPs hired who fought for that. The actual algorithm behind the Amazon homepage and Amazon Pages for a long time was not what was on them, but how fast they load. Because Amazon came of age when internet was still somewhat slow, and they realized the biggest thing that drove abandonment was slow page load time, looking at the spinner. So the biggest single metric was not what are you putting on there, but how you militantly could not add a millisecond to load time. You know, if you wanted to add a feature, you had to figure out how to do it load time neutral. So the design, the overall design principle, I guess I'm telling you that was hidden behind the scenes, was speed equals sales. And beyond that, whatever goes on the website equals sales, and pretty pixels didn't seem to matter. Clarity, having that buy box always be the same so you could find the buy button. And what could you put in the buy box that had an attractive offer? Low price, showing a discount, showing the delivery schedule. But mostly Jeff figured out low price drove business. I was there, I said I joined in 2005, that means I was there in sort of the recession of 2007, 2008. Amazon froze hiring for a little while, and I had been in a couple startups that had run out of money, so I started looking over my shoulder like, oh, is it, you know, is it time to get the resume sharp again? Amazon profited during that time because since we had focused so much on low prices, when money got tight, more people converted to online shopping. So that low price was just, you know, a huge driver for many, many years.
Speaker 4I feel guilty sometimes shopping on Amazon because they just, A, I just buy the cheapest, dumbest shit that ends up just getting thrown away, particularly with kids. Sean and I talk about this all the time. Like, for birthday parties, it's just plastic bullshit because, and like, I'll be like, oh, someone just went on Amazon and typed in kids bike because I just got four of the exact same ones. Was there ever, like, a sentiment of like, I don't know if this is actually a net positive?
Speaker 1So obviously there was some thinking about that. You know, Jeff did the climate initiative. We've tried to do package stuff. Jeff has some environmental bones in his body, clearly. But in the end, I think he's also very much a libertarian and a free market guy. And his viewpoint is give customers the choice. It's up to them what they buy. Do I have some problems with it? Do I think Amazon is always a positive? I worry about some of that, just like you do. But I think from what I know of Jeff's views, he would say, give customers choice, they will do the right thing. So he's a free market economics believer. I think he would also say, well, a lot of people are dumb. Effectively, he wouldn't use those words. We say a lot of people buy dumb shit. Like, we are, well, am I doing wrong by letting people buy the dumb shit they want and making it easy? You know, I don't know. I think, again, he'd be like, there's always been dumb people buying dumb shit. I just want them a broader range of dumb shit to buy. And also, he would certainly say, if I don't sell them the dumb shit, you know, the Bentonville boys will. So, you know, because Walmart was a huge stalking horse and opponent for a long time. He'd say like, hmm, if people want dumb shit, we should do it best. There's an Ethan ascribing a new Amazon principle.
Speaker 3Amazon should sell the you know, he quoted a lot or he seemed to admire or, you know, was a big fan of that. We wouldn't know.
Speaker 1The big one I can't remember, but it's somebody Warren Buffett also follows. You guys will know him. The gentleman who said the market isn't a short term, it's a voting machine. Long term, it's a weighing machine. Benjamin Graham. Benjamin Graham. So Jeff quoted that a lot. He had a variation of it, which is he said, look, when Amazon stock goes up 10 percent, it doesn't mean we're 10 percent smarter. So when it goes down 10 percent, don't go around hang dog and feel like we're 10 percent dumber. Like, you know, because it's a voting machine, it's going to go up and down. What we the only thing we can do is focus on increasing our weight over time. And that will eventually, you know, eventually it'll be pulled back to the norm. He talked a lot about stock price in the sense of you've got to put up with the volatility because I'm not going to try. You know, he's got that famous statement in his letters about we'll take cash flows over short term gap results. You know, we prioritize free cash flow, not optimizing for quarters. He he did say you'll like this. If you look at Amazon's history, it turned profitable for a single quarter and then went negative again. And he definitely said back at the time in that era, letting us go profitable for a quarter was a terrible mistake because now there's a comp. Versus if we had just stayed slightly in the red, we'd have been the, you know, always losing money company until we were ready to be profitable. So he felt kind of hosed by that one profitable anchor point. I was in the room with him once when his CFO, they were having an argument about what to invest in a program. I think it was Kendall. The CFO is the previous CFO guy named Tom Skutak was trying to reel him in and said, Jeff, you know, we only have so much money in the bank. Like trying to say, cause Jeff was investing in this and investing in that. Oh, well do this, this is Jeff Sharp Edge, he turned to the CFO and said, Tom, well, how much is that, Tom? I might want to spend it. Just making clear, remember our roles here. You count the pennies, I use the pennies. So thank you for your input, but your job is to tell me how many pennies we have. I will decide what to do with them. And he definitely could put people in their place. Like taking your CFO and bitch slapping him in front of a room. It was a message. Because the CFO was trying to be pretty diplomatic, right? Like, hey, Jeff, stop wasting money like that. Would have been like, ah, f**k off. But like, hey, Jeff, you know, we only have so much money in the bank is a pretty soft way to roll out like, hey, boss, could you think a little bit before you spend another 10 million? Yeah. Because we didn't have that many at the time. You know, Jeff wasn't having any of it.
Speaker 4Dude, you're fun to talk to. You also have a great voice. Thank you. You got a great voice. You have an announcer voice. It's lovely. Wow. Appreciate that. What are you going to do in the next couple of years? What's your 10-year goal?
Speaker 1So I left Amazon to try to help other people have success. I say to pay for my good fortune, but that's specifically by helping others have both career success, and I think something you guys are more into now, career satisfaction. What's it all for? So I'm trying to help people get to financial security, but then to say, what are they going to do with that? Because a lot of people don't have any, they're so focused on, I got to get the nest egg big. I got to pay off the mortgage. I got to get the kids through college. So that's my main teaching is yes, but then what? And for me, that's meant different types of social impact. Of course, my social impact mostly is helping other people succeed. I also do, work though, helping those displaced by the war in Ukraine. I run a charity in Poland that kind of catches them as they come across the border and re-homes them in Poland. So I have a number of things that give me personal meaning. The next thing I'm going to do, I think is something Sam, you've done. I'm going to start a small coaching, a community. I get too many people asking me for coaching. I have to scale it somehow. And that really means bringing people together in small groups and masterminds. So I can scale a little, but I can do a little bit more. So that's next up on the business front. Ten-year plan is to, my vision is create more people who have the money and the confidence to then do something good in the world. I think there's a lot of people who envision that one day they'll do something good. I was one of them. I crossed that to where to some degree I'm now doing something good. I want to create more people in that situation.
Speaker 3That's pretty cool. That's actually a surprisingly good answer for a, what sounds like a simple question, that almost nobody really has a good answer to. So props to you for that.
Speaker 4Take credit, Sean. You're the one who inspired him. Yeah. Well done.
Speaker 1Well done. Thank you. Thank you, Coach Sean. Well, having the 10-year plan, I do have it written out and Bill Gates, I think said most people underestimate, I'm sorry, overestimate what they can do in one year, but underestimate what they can do in 10 years. So I combined that with what Sean said about 10-year plans. And I thought, okay, well, Gates is pretty strong. He's pretty good. He's pretty good. He's pretty good. He's smart. Is that right? And I think it is. Everybody has all these ambitions for what they're going to do this year, but they have no real plan beyond that. Better to spread it out slightly, but then stick to a long-term goal. And I want my life to mean something. And that something I think is the other people I leave behind who are equipped to do more than I did or more than I can do alone.
Speaker 4Hold up that note, Sean. I know something cool just came out of that. Ethan said something.
Speaker 3You'll see it. It's on red. Can you read it? Can you see what I drew? It's just a triangle or a funnel. It's a triangle. I drew a little like a cone, like a vision, right? So if you're looking out, I made it really broad. It was just 10 years out. It should be very simple. Something you could fit on the size of a sticky note, right? What you just said. You said, cool, 10 years from now, I want there to be a batch of people who are in a much better spot. And you defined that spot. You said people who've had the money and success so they can go do the good they've always wanted to do. That resonates with me. There's a lot. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I have that. I went out to a date night with my wife and we were talking and she had written in her college essay that she was going to start an orphanage. She was going to do something good in the world. That was something she really was impacted by, something she saw when she was younger that she wanted to always do. And she said out loud, she's like, I have no plan of how to do that. I have no idea when I'm going to do that. That's sort of just this thing I say. And there's a danger in that, in being the type of person who just has shit that they say. And so, you know, you got to pull reality, you got to pull the future forward sometimes. And I think there's a lot of people who dream of doing good that tell themselves that someday I'll do that. And that someday is completely ill-defined. And if it sounds like what you're trying to do is get people to a point where they feel, you know, they've slayed the money monster enough and the success monster enough and the I'm enough monster where they're comfortable in their own skin to go do something they actually would feel really satisfied. And really good about themselves for doing internally. Yeah. I think that's a great idea. And so I just drew this to say, Hey, I think everybody should kind of have a simple, what are these building blocks of each year? What are they building towards? Is there something, or are we just stacking Legos and we'll see what
Speaker 1happens at the end? Yeah. I'm a big believer in planning. One thing, if you want to give people sort of a tangible, you know, a lot of people are working in corporate jobs. I absolutely use Twitch to get where I am today. And the specific reason I use Twitch to get where I am today was I started broadcasting on Twitch, not as a gamer, but as a coach. And a lot of people made fun, like, what's grandpa doing here talking to us, you know, and all the usual dicks. But it gave me a chance to practice talking to random people about their careers and lives and hone my message and my answers and get comfortable on a mic and on a screen. Sam, I don't know if you ever saw this.
Speaker 3He would go live on Twitch, which is like not the place. You would, Ethan? Yeah. Ethan would go live on Twitch. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He would go live. There would be like 30 or 40 viewers in the chat, which is on Twitch, you know, not, not small, but not big for sure. Like it's not like crushing it. And it's very modest. And, you know, it's username, you know, balls, balls, 63 and balls, balls, 63 is listening to this guy's like, are you really a VP at Amazon? Like what? You're just giving career advice out here. And then he would do it. He would do it weekly. And he would, I really admired that. That takes courage and like not worrying about appearances. And you were just getting reps. I didn't know where it was going, but maybe you didn't even at the time, but I didn't know exactly,
Speaker 1but I knew generally. So fun fact though, Amazon VPs executives were not allowed to speak to the public without PR approval. So I knew that. And I'm like, that I want to do what I want to do. So before I ever did it, I sent email both to a leader in Amazon who you would have known a guy named Mike Frazzini and I was very careful. And I said, I figured like, how can I get around this stupid PR restriction? And I said, Emmett, I think it would be really valuable if I started streaming on Twitch because I need to use our product. I'm one of our executives. I want to be an expert on the product. You know, do you support me streaming on Twitch? And by the way, I don't want any special privileges. I don't want to be made a partner. You know, will you support me doing this? And of course, what's he going to do? I did a lot of this baiting people into obvious responses. Of course, he wrote back, that's awesome. You should totally do it. So fast forward, I'm doing it. It leaks back to Amazon. Some Amazon lawyer sees it. They forward it to an Amazon HR guy who works for Andy Jassy. That VP calls me up and says like, uh, seems like you're talking in public without PR approval every week. And I'm of course like, oh no. Well, first I've had PR training. And if you look at anything I've done, you'll notice I refuse to talk about the Amazon business. I only give career advice, i.e. I'm, you know, safe, but I'm using our product. I work at this company and, uh, you know, all the bullshit you'd expect me to say. Bottom line is I have my CEO's approval to use the product. And that's what I'm doing. Well, credit to this HR guy. He goes silent for about a minute at last. He's smart and says, okay, I see you've thought about this. Cause he realizes I've like, put up the shields that are going to get hard.
Speaker 4You judoed him a little.
Speaker 1Yeah. But he saw it and he's like, so what's really going on here? I envision some future where maybe I'll want to coach full time. And he's like, okay, I got it. You're, you're going out on your own soon. You're going to hang out your own shingle. Fine. Don't say anything stupid. Right. Like, you know, he, he could see like, this is a problem. I don't have to fight. Cause it's going to go away in six months when you leave or, you know, the takeaway point I think for people is how can you use what you're doing today to start building towards that good. You want to do tomorrow. I saw an opportunity to get in reps on Twitch. Well, everybody has some asset like that in what they're doing today that can become that orphanage tomorrow. I don't know what it is. And it takes a little creativity.
Speaker 3I remember Tony Robbins talked about this early in Tony's career. He, you know, now he sells out stadiums and whatever coaches presidents, but obviously you can't start there. So where did he, where did Tony Robbins actually start? I don't know if you guys know the story. He used to call into radio stations. and just say, my name is Anthony Robbins, and I'm, you know, and he would make a bold claim that he couldn't even really fully back up. He's like, if anybody's got a trauma, a phobia, I will cure it. I'll cure it in seven minutes. I don't care if you've had it for 17 years. You give me seven minutes, and I will snap you out of that pattern. And people were like, oh, this guy's a charlatan. He said, oh, you think I'm a charlatan? Wonderful. Well, why don't you say it to my face? And they're like, what? He's like, I will be here to prove it. I will be at the mall on Westridge by the fountain. And he's like, anybody can come, and you can see for yourself that this is real. This is realer than real. And then he would go to the mall, and two people would show up, and he would get some guy to stop smoking cigarettes, and he tried to do it in seven minutes. It actually took 70 minutes for him to, like, run his whole routine until he felt like he got him there. But then he would do it, and he would check back in. He'd be like, I got him. And he would do it again the next week and the next week. And he was just performing at malls, like, not even like a sanctioned thing, just. Meet me by the fountain. And he would call into radio stations with this shock value thing just to get reps. And he did that for, you know, for, like, his first three years.
Speaker 1Yeah, well, definitely my early days on Twitch were grim, right? And you had to learn all the things and all the things about trolls and whatever that are part of particularly that social media. So I did some reps. And I tell people now, people wonder, like, why can't I be thrown by most questions, right? And it's because I've answered 10,000 questions live. So if it's a career question anyway, unlikely you're going to ask me something I haven't heard before.
Speaker 4Well, thanks for doing this, man. I like talking to you. You can talk about stressful or complicated things in a way that's quite soothing. Oh, thank you. And I think it's, we enjoyed it a lot. What do you think, Sean?
Speaker 3I feel like you're always able to tell the truth without the other person feeling bad on the other side, even if it wasn't what they wanted to hear. And I thought that was pretty rare. I remember I think the first few times I interact with you when I was at Twitch and, you know, it's still the case today where you don't have to choose between, I'll just say what they kind of, what will be not confrontational here. I'll just tell them what they want to hear. But then I did them a disservice on the long run. Or I'll tell them the truth, but they're going to feel like shit walking out of here and I'm the bad guy. And that's kind of a trap I fall into a lot. And you have a gift of doing, telling them the truth, but in a way that doesn't leave them feeling bad. And I don't know exactly how you do it, but I try to, I'm trying to piece it together still. Is there a tip in how to do that?
Speaker 1There is. It comes from a book, a little bit less known, called Leadership and Self-Deception by the Arbinger Institute. But basically, you have to see the person as a human, not as a machine to fix. So I have to care about the person first. And that doesn't change what I say. It changes my tone and my body language. If I'm caring about you, Sean, as a person, or you, Sam, and I'm trying to help you, the idea that I'm trying to help you will come through more strongly than the fact that I'm saying your baby's ugly. It's like, hmm, I hate to break it to you, but you got to change the baby's outfit because whatever. It's honest empathy. That I think is the secret, is care about the person first. The message then hits less hard. The second trick, if you like it, as a coach, because I know Sam was talking about coaches and I'll quit going on about it. But as a coach, you have a different tool. As a coach, Sean, if I were coaching you, I have a signature line that then lets me say anything to you. I say, well, Sam, as a coach, it's unfortunately my job. You're paying me to give you some very difficult news. And at that point, I've set you up because you've laid down the money. You've asked for it. From that moment, I can kind of say anything. And you're going to be like, well, I did pay him to do that. And so that's another. Now. I keep the honest caring for you. But there's also this positional thing in that circumstance where I can say, you know, it's not that I want to say something mean to you. It's that you're actually paying me to give you the strongest truth I can.
Speaker 4Right. Well, thanks for doing this, dude. Yeah. I'm like looking at my computer. All these things you keep mentioning, I'm like running down. I'm like looking at leadership, self-deception. I'm like writing all this stuff down. This is a good episode because we took a ton of notes, but we appreciate you.
Speaker 1Thank you, Sam. Thank you. Thank you very much, both of you, for the invite. It's good to reconnect with you, Sean, after a few years. Happy to talk more some other time. All right. Thank you. That's it. That's the pod.
Speaker 3All right. Let's take a quick break. I want to tell you about Marketing School. It is a podcast that is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network, and it is run by Neil Patel and Eric Hsu. And these guys are both marketers who are running businesses. And so, if you want real-world tactics from practitioners who are actually out there in the field doing it, this is the podcast for you. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts.
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