Gala2017 Jeff Bezos Fireside Chat 대본

My wife pointed out that one thing she loves but Amazon is you can look back at your purchases yeah and it’s a really great reflection of what’s going on in your life at the time based on what you’re buying and it occurred to me that the reverse is also true is that the e-commerce journey that everybody probably this room has gone on mirrors what you and Amazon have gone through first only selling books and now selling everything is we’ve all kind of gone on that journey together and I look back at my purchase history and in 2004 I bought exactly one thing on Amazon was a book by 2006

I had a 500% increase in purchases for books and one Gillette razor and which I use tonight and hopefully the new one you’re the new one and then by 2015 a year we had just gotten married moved into a home got dogs we bought everything for our dogs we bought a TV spot a snowblower bought allergy medicine peanut butter I look these things up literally everything four days a week ordering and so the question is at what point did you realize you have the scale of success with Amazon going from book to where you are now as a company

well I have a question for you in 2004 what you know what book it was you bought.

I do remember it was writing screenplays that sell and if it’s not I was ok so

how did that work out that I like you want your money back

I could I could receive in return
I’ll take it back
because that did not work out

I’m going to keep my day job whether

your question is you know did I kind of anticipate what would happen over the last 22 years at Amazon and the answer is god no so you know Amazon started as a very small company it was me and a few other people I was driving all the packages to the post office myself in my 1987 Chevy Blazer and when I raised money for Amazon I had to raise a million dollars which I raised from 22 different investors $50,000 each they got 20% of the company for for the million dollars and it was a 40 people told me no so I did take 60 meetings to get 20 yeses the first question was always what’s the internet and I had to walk through that and this was 1994 early 95 and so did I anticipate you know fast forward to today and and the current version of it no
it has been one foot in front of the other and I think that that is true for most businesses where you kind of proceed adaptively its step by step you figure it out you have a success and then you kind of double down on that success and you figure out what what else you can do what customers want everything we’ve done in all the success we have is at its root primarily due to the fact that we have put customers first

so there’s a few people are probably kicking themselves now that well

it’s very interesting the 40 people who did not invest it’s kind of a study in human nature

I’m in touch with a few of them still and some of them take it in great stride and have they recognized that to actually have ridiculously happy lives others of them actually cannot talk about it it’s just – it is actually just too painful that’s human nature and some people are better at rolling with the punches

I would mean they do not talk about it camp probably but speaking of target I have the privilege of being able to talk to a lot people in Washington but all of our member companies and Amazon is one where I think people have a very different idea of what Amazon is some people see you as an e-commerce company or retailer others see you as an innovative tech company you have Amazon Web Services and you have original content and you have Alexa and so many other things how should we be thinking about Amazon

yeah I do get that that is something that people get confused about some time what is Amazon we do such a diverse array of things from producing original content at Amazon Studios to Amazon Web Services where we sell you know startups and enterprises you know computing infrastructure to the things that most people know about which is our our consumer offering where we deliver things in little brown boxes and these things seem so disparate how is it that we’re doing all of them and the common thread and really what it is is it’s an approach we have a very distinctive approach that we have been honing and refining and thinking about for 22 years and its really just a few principles that we use as we go about these activities at the very top of the list it’s one I’ve already mentioned but you’ll probably hear it 10 times throughout tonight because it’s so central and it is customer obsession its customer session instead of for example competitor obsession or business model obsession or a product obsession or technology obsession there are many ways to Center a business and and by the way many of them can work I know and and and have friends who lead very competitor obsessed companies and those companies can be successful you know that’s not a bad strategy you have to be really good at close following you identify winners when you watch you watch your competitors very carefully if they latch on to something that’s working you duplicated as quickly as possible it’s a very good strategy in some ways because you don’t have to go down blind alleys if you’re not pioneering if you’re only closed following and have some advantages but it has some disadvantages too and I like the customer obsession model I think it’s the right one it’s better than product obsession even a product recession is not bad but I think customer obsession gets you there in a healthier way so that’s one of the one of the principles one of the approaches that we take in every single thing that we do

the second one is that we are willing I would say even eager to invent and pioneer so that is and that goes along it marries really well with customers session customers are always dissatisfied they even when they don’t know it even when they think they’re happy they actually do want a better way and they just don’t know yet what that should be and that’s why I always warn people customer obsession is not just listening to customers customer obsession is also inventing on their behalf because it’s not their job to invent for themselves and so you need to be an inventor and a pioneer and the

third one it’s really central to the way we think about all of our business problems and a bunch of things at Amazon is we’re long-term oriented so I ask everybody to not think in two to three-year timeframes but to think in five to seven year time frames to not think about when somebody says to me congratulate Amazon on a good quarter which is very common thing to say you meet somebody they’re being nice they look at your financial results for the quarter a good quarter I’d say thank you but what I’m thinking to myself is that quarter all that those quarterly results were actually pretty much fully baked about three years ago and so like today I’m working on you know a quarter that is going to happen in 2020 not next quarter next quarter for all practical purposes is done already and it’s probably been done for a couple of years and so if you start to think that way it changes how you spend your time how you plan where you put your energy and and your ability to look around corners gets better so many things improve if you can take a long term by the way it’s not natural for humans so it’s a it’s a discipline that you have to build the kind of you know get rich slowly schemes are not big sellers on infomercials you know it’s and so that’s something that you have to sort of steel yourself for discipline and teach over time so that that’s what is Amazon I would say really it’s a collection of principles and approach and it’s an approach that we deploy and and it’s fine I danced into work

me too I’m not a good dancer we should get rich slowly as a book I probably should have gotten instead of this kind of a book

but by the way you know one of our award recipients earlier mentioned that you mentioned that you were happy you got rid of your bangs me too

yeah I hated my bangs

so it clearly clearly you do not take the success of Amazon lightly and you’re very involved in the company and one of the great things that the internet many of your competitors are in this room tonight and competitions a click away they’re probably people in garages across the country trying to start a next great Internet company like you did for sure and so what does keep you up at night when you think about the continued success of Amazon

well first of all I I’m gifted but sleeping really well so the men particular metaphor doesn’t work for me but I I know what you mean which is what could go wrong and what are you worried about and and for me the thing I worry about the most is that we would lose our way in one of those things that we would lose our our obsessive focus on customers or would somehow become short-term oriented or would you know and start to become overly cautious you know kind of failure averse and therefore unable to invent and pioneer you cannot invent and pioneer if you cannot accept failure to invent you need to experiment and if it’s if you know in advance that it’s going to work it is not an experiment and so that’s a very important thing you know it’s these they’re inseparable twins failure and invention so you have to be willing to do that it’s embarrassing to fail you know it’s always embarrassing to fail but you have to say no that’s not how this works if I said to you you have a 10% chance of a particular decision a 10% chance of a 100x return you should take that bet every time but you’re still going to be wrong nine out of ten times and it’s going to feel bad nine hundred ten times and in with technology the outcomes the results can be very long tailed they it’s very the payoff is can be very asymmetric which is why you should do so much experimentation you know everybody knows that if you swing for the fences you hit more home runs but you also strike out more but with the baseball that analogy doesn’t go far enough because with baseball no matter how well you connect with the ball you can only get four runs the success is capped at four runs but in business every once in a while you step up to the plate you hit the ball so hard you get a thousand runs and so when that when you have that kind of asymmetric payoff and you know one up one at back and get you a thousand runs it encourages you to experiment more it’s the right business decision to experiment more it’s also better for your customers customers like the successful experiments by the way this is a giant misconception in a lot of young entrepreneurs and experienced entrepreneurs that they meet one of the things that is very fashionable right now is to talk about how disruptive their business plan is going to be and the but invention is not disruptive only customer adoption is disruptive at Amazon we’ve invented a lot of things the customers did not care about at all and believe me they were not disruptive to anyone so it’s only when customers like the new way that anything becomes disruptive and so really it’s just say that you want to you know if somebody comes to you with a business plan that they claim is disruptive you should ask them to explain it to you in simpler language in the simpler language is why are customers going to adopt this why are they going to like it why is it better than the traditional way

so along those lines we have you know some press and media in the room is there something that you think people get wrong about Amazon that surprises you when you read about it or see it in media coverage

well wrong I don’t know about wrong first of all within over 20 years on balanced treated very fairly by the media and you know not every story that’s ever been written about us is the way we would have written it if we were writing it ourselves but but but on balance very fairly treated and I you know so wrong might be too strong I think there there’s a piece of our business which is probably not fully appreciated the scale of it and what’s happening and the energy and the dynamism round it which is the third party seller part of our business so you know we have today roughly half of the company really is third party sales it’s small businesses there are a hundred thousand businesses on Amazon where the businesses make $100,000 or more a year and it’s it’s turned into you know a gigantic service for them we even let them stow their products and our fulfillment centers so that their products become prime eligible which increases their sales and a lot of people make their living on that you know that way and we’ve sort of we’ve extended that into other areas too we have a platform called Kindle direct publishing so authors can write books and then publish them directly and that’s become very successful

so there are a lot of authors making plays have done that Chris Newton our economist has a book published on that right very good

and it’s it’s we get and people make they make livings I mean they’re people who I have so many emails from authors saying I know because of this program I’ve been able to quit my job and they usually come they won’t they already have like 25 rejection letters from traditional publishers and because their book didn’t fit in a category or didn’t seem right and so on but readers disagreed and so one of the things that you get when you let people when you you know I think this is more like gardening you kind of get all the nutrients right in the soil and then you see what comes up and that’s what happens with these third-party businesses you know we don’t plan which books people are going to write we just provide a service that makes it really easy for them to contact and reach readers and then they create these they create new things same thing with Amazon Web Services you know we create a set of tools and then you know software developers and companies that employ software developers they figure out surprising and amazing things to build with these tools and so empowering these third parties to do things is probably starting with our third-party sellers and authors and an AWS probably probably the biggest thing that most I would say consumers I don’t appreciate about Amazon and good investors understand it very well

love them clapping okay so ten so ten years ago you mentioned AWS so that your amazon has changed so much in ten years ten years ago you barely in cloud computing

yeah certainly not we got started

and kinda started it or certainly not another overnight success I’ve noticed all overnight successes take about ten years

that’s the right that’s the right amount of time probably so we’re five years away as a you start something and just start the clock any year now so Amazon’s changed so much over over that period of time can you preview or predict maybe what Amazon’s going to look like ten years from now

well um that’s a very good question I think on the outside you know kind of hope you know the observable Amazon could change quite a bit just as you said that you know ten years ago you wouldn’t think that AWS would be such a significant contributor to the business and there could be more things like that in a kind of 10-year time frame that we don’t know about and the one thing I hope will not change of course is that approach that I outlined at the beginning you know the customer obsession the willingness to invent the patient’s letting things develop accepting failure as a path to getting success by the way one thing I should point out about failure and this is a fine point internally we take it we know it we don’t need to talk about it much but there’s a different kind of failure which is not what you want that’s where you have operating history and you do know what you’re doing and you just screw it up so that’s not a good fair that’s not an experiment that’s just bad operations operational excellence and so like if we’ve opened 130 fulfillment centers we’re on generation 8 of our fulfillment center technology if we open a new fulfillment center and just woof it you know we have to do some internal examination that’s not an experiment that’s just bad execution so there’s different kinds of failure and you need to make sure you’re making the right kind of failure the right kind of failure should be an invention it should be something that you know it’s an experiment you don’t know if it’s going to work and you know up front that you don’t know if it’s going to work that shouldn’t be opening a new fulfillment center for us

I’m not sure I answer your question I got distracted by failure I’ve lived so comfortably with failure for so long that I you know I revert there on a dime you know

it’s an important distinction though between the queue

it is so oh but the things that will stay the same over ten years the Pope we the approach will stay the same and then the other thing I would advise any entrepreneur or large business or large organization you know like government organization is you need to identify your big ideas and there should only be two or three of them and then if a senior leader the main job of a senior leader is to identify two or three important ideas and then to enforce great execution against those big ideas and the good news is that the big ideas are usually incredibly easy to identify you shouldn’t need to think about them very much you already know what they are let me give you an example for Amazon the consumer business the three big ideas are low prices fast delivery and vast selection

you don’t need you know it’s not the kind in the way the way you know that they’re the big ideas because they’re so obvious the big ideas should be obvious and by the way it’s very hard to maintain a firm grasp of the obvious at all times so little things can distract you from the obvious but you have to back up and say these are the three big ideas how do we always deliver things a little faster how do we always reduce our cost structure so that we can have prices that are a little lower and the good thing about these big ideas is they will be stable in time so I know for a fact that ten years from now customers are still going to like low prices no matter what happens with technology and everything else no matter what happens people are going to like faster delivery
it is impossible for me to imagine a scenario where 10 years from now a customer comes to me and says Jeff
I love Amazon I just wish you delivered a little more slowly
this is so inconceivable that you have you can have great conviction as a leader to continue to put energy into driving speed of delivery and whatever you’re you know an AWS I know that customers they like low prices they like availability they don’t want the services to be down there like data security it’s not very hard to figure out what the big ideas are and then you can keep putting energy into those things and you spin up those files and they’ll still be paying you dividends 10 years from now and what I would say I’m putting it in a kind of a business context but for those of you who are in government these principles would apply identically identically to agovernment organization you should figure out what the big ideas are andjust spin up flywheels get those thingsrolling make sure that you pick things it’ll still be true 10 years from now 20years from now

so on Big Ideasartificial intelligence is something that I think has captured theimagination of Washington and probablythe rest of the country in world what is what is Amazon’s approach to artificialintelligence first of all

this isartificial intelligence artificialintelligence this is it is a Renaissance it is a golden age we are now solving problems with machine learning and artificialintelligence that were you know kind of in the realm of science fiction for thelast several decades and natural language understanding machine vision problems
it really is it is an amazing renaissance and for decades AI researchers kind of struggled andmade very very slow progress and overthe last ten years it you know it lookslike one of those s curves you’re justmaking a lot of progress for a rapidover the last ten years
the machinelearning and AI is a horizontal enablinglayer
it will empower and improve everybusiness every government organization every philanthropy every basically there’s no institution in the world that cannot be improved with machine learning
so the Amazon you know some of the things we’re doing are super obvious
so they’re kind of superficially obvious in there and they’re interesting and they’re cool and you should pay attention to I’m thinking about things like Alexa and echo you know our voiceassistant thinking about our autonomousprimary delivery drones those things use a tremendous amount of machine learning machine vision systems natural language understanding and a bunch of other techniques and those but those are kind of the shellye ones
and i would say alot of the value that we’re getting from machine learning is actually happening you know kind of beneath the surface and it is things like improved search results improved product recommendations for customers improve forecasting for inventory management and and and literally hundreds of other things beneath the surface
and then I’d say the most exciting thing that I think we’re working on in machinelearning is that we are determined to through Amazon Web Services where we have all these customers who are corporations and software developers to make these advanced techniques accessible to every organization even if they don’t have kind of the current class of expertise that’s required right now deploying these techniques for your particular institutions problems is difficult
it takes a lot of expertise and so you have to go compete for the very best PhDs in machine learning and get them and it’s difficult for a lot of organizations to win those competitions and so we’re in a great position because of the success of Amazon Web Services to be able to put energy into making those techniques easy and accessible and so we’re determined to do
I think we can build a great business doing that for ourselves and it would be incredibly enabling for organizations that want touse these these sophisticated technologies to improve their own organizations

we have quite a few policy makers and elected officials and people from the administration here
so I’ve ever missed that not to ask how do you interface with the administration and how are you working with elected officials in general

well I think probably the probably the pretty normal the normal ways we have a fantastic public policy organization here you guysalready met Brian Jay Carney we have abunch of people here in Washington we’veyou know over time we’ve grown that group
we also do things at the statelevel we’re doing a little bit atcertain municipal levels too we workhard at it it’s really important to work hard at it you can’t just pretend that one you know that everything is that people know everything and that you don’t have to educate them and and wetry to stay I would say the main thing we tried do and I think we’re pretty good at it is stay very issues focused so we try to stay you know on the things that are specific to Amazon and our our customers and our employees and and not try to we don’t need to have it as acompany our employees are free to haveopinions about every issue they choose to have an opinion aboutthey can have opinions about anythingthey want I feel like Amazon needs to bea little more you know laser focusedthan that on things that are importantto our customers or to our employees as a group and so we I think with our teamdoes that they keep us very disciplinedin that way

I agree I think you’ve a great team and just between us

thank you

yeah well cover your ears lion-o I personally get all the blushing threw off the referee is actually turning red of

a couple few more questions that knowwe’re running out of time and so you’dmentioned at a shareholders meetingmaybe last year the previous year abouthow Amazon can use its scale forsustainability yeahand environment to anything you want to treat

yeah we and so you know for us this is we have done a couple of things that I think where I think everybodyinside the organization is very proud of and it’s been hard work but it’s paying off and we have a program called frustration-free packaging we’re workingon for roughly ten years and it’s asimple idea but incredibly hard toexecute we go to manufacturers and we say look you are producing this thing ina four color printed package with a cellophane window and lots of twisty wire ties or worse case the what do they call those things the clamshell packaging where they seal it anindestructible plastic and you know Iactually looked it up there is a Wikipedia entry for packaging rage or something like that there’s a term for this and that that Wikipedia entry hasthe number I don’t remember the numbernow just thousands the number of people who go to the emergency room per year trying to open that indestructible bubble packaging that and but why do people
why do manufacturers put thingsin that packaging that kind of packaging it’s but not cheap that packaging is expensive it’s hard to recycle it has abunch of flaws but it shows off the product well so that when it’s hanging on a hook in astore shelf or something as you walk by you can actually see the product cuzit’s sealed in clear plastic and of course that Amazon that doesn’t matterat all you know we’re going to show you great pictures of the product and videos of the product and customer reviews of the product
the product can be sealed in a tiny little cardboard box that’s easy to open and and so we started this program and and we teach people how to make Internet packaging that is a very efficient easy recycle easy to open and we this something like just in the past year we have saved fifty five thousand tons of waste as a result of this program the end
and we have gone we have now started putting solar cells on the roofs of allof our fulfillment centers we’re doing15 this year these are big fulfillment centers thereare they’re about a million square feeteach and so we’re covering them with solar cells that will cover about 80 percent of the fulfillment centers energy budget on an annual basis we havebuilt we are the largest purchaser inthe world the largest corporatepurchaser in the world of renewable energy and I don’t know I’ll screw up the figure because the ground issomething like 3.6 million megawatthours per year but we’ve built solarfarms and slower wind farms and so it’s you know we keep just rolling this out and we have a goal long term of being completely renewable so it’ll take along time but the good news is these are these are not only great for you know the environment they’re good business decisions too
you know the technologies is improved to build a solar farm or wind farm now you know it you’re these are competitive technologies with natural gas power plants and other things so you can actually do it and and and and feel like you’re making asensible business decision
so I think a lot of companies will do this in the future
I think they should do it
so we’re having fun with all that

I have one final question that I that I have toask as we’re running out of time it’s ashared passion of ours I went to Space Camp as a child and and you have a rocket company

I knew I liked you rightaway

yeah we have so much we’ve so muchin common

so we’re go to Space Camp it’s my kind of person

that’s about I don’t think looks fine that’s could be 2.2 so your rocket company Blue Origin

yeah it’s really taking off doing well

how do you see that company you know evolving in the future future of space and it will share in blue

so okay first of all I love space I have been a space lover since I was a 5 year old boy and I feel like I won the lottery with Amazon I know I won the lottery and and now I’m investing those lottery winnings in Blue Origin which is the space company
we builtwe’re built we are flying a suborbital Tourism vehicle and we’ll start taking people up hopefully in 2018 that’scoming right up working out for more than 10 years hopefully this one this overnight success is taking longer than 10 years
I don’t know we’ll see you know and we’re also building an orbital vehicle called new Glen new Shepard isnamed it for Alan Shepard the first American his face he went on a suborbital journey new Glenn is named after the American hero John Glenn who was the first American to orbit theEarth and so these are both these are reusable boosters fully reusable that’sthe key to lowering the cost our visionof Blue Origin is that we want millions of people living and working in spaceand my personal hope is that I live long enough to see the kind of dynamism inspace
I want to see a whole economyentrepreneurs in space that I got towitness over the last 20 years on the internet
you know the the problem with being an entrepreneur in the space arena is that the price of admission is sodarn high so it you know to dointeresting things in space the beginning you know kind of the beginning entry level is a few hundred milliondollars
so you’re not going to get youknow two kids in their dorm room doingsomething amazing in space whereas that’s literally what happened to Facebook right so on the internetbecause the price of admission is so lowyou can get these amazing experiments where like one kid in the dorm room does something and it turns into Facebook and or you know Amazon’s case you know Istarted this thing with an incredibly small amount of capital and the you knowit was able to grow becausewe didn’t need a lot to get to beginwith the heavy lifting was in place for Amazon right so I didn’t need to build atransportation network
it existed already it was UPS and the Royal Mailand the US Postal Service and DeutschePost and so on and so on
I didn’t haveto build a telecommunications backboneto connect with my customers it wasthere it was called the Internet and infact the internet was resting on top ofthe long-distance phone network at thattime you guys remember the dial-up modems some of you do some of you weretoo young to you love you should go to a museum and see a dial-up modem

oh is that Danny yeah and so I won I Irecently showed a group of youngsters a payphone I came across one and I was like my god guys come over here this maybe the last one you have to see it and so you know the point is that Amazon was got to rest on top of we didn’t have to build a payment system it already existed was called the credit card computers were already on every desk thanks to you know Microsoft IBM an Apple and what were they being is for to play games not to buy things on Amazon and so all that heavy lifting was inplace and I want to you know my greatestI would have such a good feeling if I could be an 80 year old guy and layingthere thinking about my life if I couldsaid look there is now a bunch of entrepreneurs in space because I took my Amazon lottery winnings and built the heavy lifting infrastructure that does take billions of dollars in capex to lower the cost of access to space that’show you get millions of people living in organs and by the way we need that for those of you who like to think about the future at all you can do a simple calculation you know we can argue about you know what limited resources on earth and so on and so on but here’s thecalculation that you cannot argue with which is you take current baseline energy usage on earth compound it it’s just a few percent a year for just a few hundred years and you have to cover the entire surface of the earth and solar cells
so you have to we’re going to have to decide do we want a society of pioneering invention expansion growth or do we want a society of stasis and personally I believe because the earthis finite and if you want a society of stasis I think it’s good first of all Idon’t personally believe the stasis iseven compatible with freedom so I thinkfor me that’s a big problem

second of all it’s going to be dull stasis is going to be very dull you don’t want to live in the stasis world and so of course we’re going to continueget more efficient too we have been forhundreds of years we’ve been getting more productive more efficient that’s that trend is going to continue but even so we’re going to want to use more energy more energy per capita and also I don’t want to stabilize population
I would love for the viatrillion humans in the store system witha trillion humans we would have a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozart’s it’d be an incredible sizzle don’t you want that dynamism it’d be so much merging my this is for your great-great-great grandchildren but what kind of world you want them to live in
I want them to live in that expansive world that is you know learning more about the universe and moving out throughout the floor system so that we have to do it and anyway so it’s fun towork on that and you know I get I have aI want so many lotteries in my life I have the best parents in the worldmy mom Jackie and my dad Mike my mom had me when she was 17 in Albuquerque New Mexico she was still in high school was not cool and she did an amazing job mydad Mike is a Cuban immigrant who came here when he was 16 without his parents did an amazing job so those are thethings that are your little gifts inlife you get sometimes you get mygreatest admiration by the way is withheld for those people and I know several of them who had terrible parentsand still somehow made it through that’shard I had the opposite so I got lucky well

thank you Jeff
let’s have a round of applause for Jeff Bezos

thank you for joining equation 2017 increment in the reward charity gala proceeds from this event will benefitstem programming and after-school all thought