Tamar Yehoshua: evaluation

Transcript context

…The Everything Store. Yeah. There's so many good books and there's so much to learn about how he works. So I won't try and cover those things. The things that stood out to me from the meetings I had with him were a couple of things. One, a lot of people have written about these six pagers, so he doesn't believe in PowerPoint. You write a six pager about ... It's like studying for the final exam is writing these six pagers. So you go into the meeting and there's the people around the table, his executive team and him. First he does not speak until everybody around the table speaks. So he goes around to all his leads and said, "What do you think? What do you think? What do you think?" And I'm sitting there like, "I don't care what anyone think. I just want to hear what Bezos thinks." But he wants to make sure that it's a team effort and that he's listening to what everybody in his organization thinks. And he always spoke last. He is by far the smartest person I've ever met in my life. I've worked with a lot of smart people. But his ability to go deep in any domain and nail the core issue, and remember. We would've quarterly meetings and from quarter to quarter he would remember things that he had talked about before and then he would go into the architecture of search and why are you doing it this way or that way? And you're just blown away that he knows that. For me, the biggest takeaway from those meetings was his consistency, which is he had principles that it made it easier for you to operate in his company because you knew what he cared about because he always had these principles. Everything had to be customer driven, everything had to be relevant for the customer. He hated icons. That was just the thing. You had to write what they were because people couldn't figure out what they are. So anytime you showed an icon, he would get annoyed. But you would go in and after a couple of meetings you're like, "Okay. I know what he's going to ask about. I know how he's thinking and I know what his principles are." And I think that consistency enables you to operate a large organization more effectively. And then there's one other thing that I really remember was one of the few really small meetings I was in with him and we were presenting working on a new product, and I was like, "Our competitors have 10 times as many people as we do on this." And he looks at me and he said, "That is your advantage." And then he goes into his talk about how it's a hill and it takes seven years to build a product. You can't look at it in the near term. You have to be in it for the long term. You can be sure I never went in and said, "I need a lot more resources." So that was Bezos. Awesome.…

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