Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon and the owner of The Washington Post, defended his decision to end presidential endorsements at The Post and expressed optimism about a second Trump administration at the DealBook Summit on Wednesday. But he also delved into his personal philosophy in his discussion with Andrew, including how he approaches entrepreneurship and leadership.
Why to run a ‘messy’ meetingIn a discussion about how Bezos views his influence, Bezos said he considers himself a wanderer. He added that he applies this mind-set to meetings, and that he is on time only to his first meeting of the day because “I won’t finish a meeting until it’s really finished.” Of this approach, he said:
I try to teach, like, really wander in the meetings. There are certain kinds of meetings that are like a weekly business review or something where it’s a set pattern and you’re going through it — that can have an agenda and it can be very crisp. That’s a different kind of meeting. But for most of the meetings that are useful, we do these six-page memos, we do a half-hour study hall, we read them. And then we have a messy discussion. So I like the memos to be like angels singing from on high, so clear and beautiful. And then the meeting can be messy.
About the value of running meetings this way, he said:
You don’t want the whole thing to be figured out and then presented to you. You want to be part of the sausage-making. Like, show me the ugly bits. And I always ask, are there any dissenting opinions on the team? You know what? I want to try and get to the controversy.
How to take a leap of faith as an entrepreneurAndrew asked Bezos where he gets the confidence to create a business that requires as much scale as Amazon or Blue Origin, where at the beginning it can be difficult to see how the full vision could materialize. Bezos said:
I think it’s generally human nature to overestimate risk and underestimate opportunity. And so I think entrepreneurs in general, you know, would be well advised to try and bias against that piece of human nature: The risks are probably not as big as you perceive, and the opportunities may be bigger than you perceive.
And so you say it’s confidence, but maybe it’s just trying to compensate for that — accepting that that’s a human bias, and trying to compensate against it. The second thing I would point out is that thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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