Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…It was many minutes. And so it dramatically made the point that something was wrong with the data collection. We weren’t measuring the right thing, and that set off a whole chain of events where we started measuring it right. And that’s an example, by the way, of truth-telling is like that’s an uncomfortable thing to do, but you have to seek truth even when it’s uncomfortable, and you have to get people’s attention and they have to buy into it, and they have to get energized around really fixing things. So that speaks to the obsession with the customer experience. So one of the defining aspects of your approach to Amazon is just being obsessed with making customers happy. I think companies sometimes say that, but Amazon is really obsessed with that. I think there’s something really profound to that, which is seeing the world through the eyes of the customer, like the customer experience, the human being that’s using the product, that’s enjoying the product, the subtle little things that make up their experience. How do you optimize those? This is another really good and deep question because there are big things that are really important to manage, and then there are small things. Internally into Amazon, we call them paper cuts. So we’re always working on the big things, if you ask me. And most of the energy goes into the big things, as it should, and you can identify the big things. And I would encourage anybody, if anybody listening to this is an entrepreneur, has a small business, whatever, think about the things that are not going to change over 10 years. And those are probably the big things. So I know in our retail business at Amazon, 10 years from now, customers are still going to want low prices. I know they’re still going to want fast delivery, and I just know they’re still going to want big selection. So it’s impossible to imagine a scenario where 10 years from now where a customer says, “I love Amazon, I just wish the prices were a little higher,” or, “I love Amazon, I just wish you delivered a little more slowly.” So when you identify the big things you can tell they’re worth putting energy into because they’re stable in time. Okay, but you’re asking about something a little different, which is in every customer experience, there are those big things. And by the way, it’s astonishingly hard to focus even on just the big things. So even though they’re obvious, they’re really hard to focus on. But in addition to that, there are all these little tiny customer experience deficiencies, and we call those paper cuts. We make long lists of them. And then we have dedicated teams that go fix paper cuts because the teams working on the big issues never get to the paper cuts. They never work their way down the list to get to… They’re working on big things, as they should and as you want them to. And so you need special teams who are charged with fixing… Special teams who are charged with fixing paper cuts.…

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