Jeff Bezos

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If you are creating something of value that a lot of people love, you must create an equal and opposite force of haters. You cannot have people who love what you do without also having people who hate what you do. The only escape from that is mediocrity. If you are so boring and so uninteresting that no one gives a damn whether you exist or not, yeah, you don't get the haters, but you also don't get the impact of people who really enjoy your work. And I think Amazon is that just at the massive scale, right? They brought so much value and change to technology to commerce that they must simply have a black hole size of haters, otherwise the universe is simply gonna tip over. — Let me ask you about small teams. So you mentioned Jason a bunch of times, Jason Fried, you have been partners for a long, long time. Perhaps it's fair to say he's more on the sort of the design business side and you're like the tech, the engineering wizard. How have you guys over all these years

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creating so many amazing products, not murder each other? It's a great story of like partnership. What can you say about collaboration? What can you say that about Jason that you love that you've learned from? Why does this work? — So first I'll say we have tried to murder each other several times over the years, but far less, I think in the last decade. In the early days, our product discussions were so fierce that when we were having them in the office and there were other employees around, some of them were legitimately worried that the company was about to fall apart. Because the volume coming out of the room would be so high and sound so acrimonious, that they were legitimately worried the whole thing was gonna fall apart. But you know what's funny is that it never felt like that in the moment. It always felt like just a peak vigorous search for something better.

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And that we were able to stomach that level of adversity on the merits of an idea because it was about the idea. It wasn't about the person and it never really got personal. Not even never really, it didn't get personal. It wasn't like, Jason, you're an asshole. It was like, Jason, you're an idiot. And you're an idiot because you're looking at this problem the wrong way. And let me tell you the right way to do it. — As a small tangent, let me say this. Some people have said, oh, probably return to this, that you're sometimes can have flights of temper on the internet and so on. I never take it that way because it is the same kind of ilk. Maybe I haven't seen the right kind of traces of temper, but usually it's about the idea and it's just excited, passionate human. — That's exactly what I like to think of it as. It doesn't always come across as that. And I can see why spectators in particular sometimes

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would see something that looks like I'm going after the man rather than the ball. And I do think I've tried to get better at that. But in my relationship with Jason, I think it's worked so well because we have our own distinct areas of competence where we fully trust each other. Jason trusts me to make the correct technical decisions. I trust him to make the correct design and product direction decisions, and then we can overlap and share on the business, on marketing, on writing, on other aspects of it. So that's one thing is that if you're starting a business with someone where you do exactly the same as they do and you're constantly contesting who's the more competent person, I think that's far more difficult and far more volatile. So if you're starting a business and you're both programmers and you both work on the same kind of programming, ah, good luck. I think that's hard. I tried to pick an easier path working with a designer where I knew that at least half of the time

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I could just delegate to his experience and competence and say like, do you know what? I may have an opinion, I have an opinion all the time on design. But I don't have to win the argument because I trust you. Now occasionally we would have overlaps on business or direction where we'd both feel like we had a strong stake in the game and we both had a claim to competence in that area. But then for whatever reason, we also both had a long-term vision were I would go, do you know what? I think we're wrong here. But as I learned from Jeff Bezos, by the way, I'm gonna disagree and commit. That was one of those early lessons he gave us that was absolutely crucial and perhaps even instrumental in ensuring that Jason and I have been working together for a quarter of a century. Disagree and commit is one of the old time Jeff Bezos greats. — I'm just surprised that Yoko Ono hasn't come along. You know what I mean? Like there's so many Yokos in this world. — It might have happened. If not in part because we don't sit on each other's lap