Amazon to Startups: Lessons from 4 Former Amazon VPs
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On March 2, 2021 (Tuesday) 9-10p PT (on Clubhouse), former Amazonians Brad Porter (13 years at Amazon), Maria Renz (20 years), Sean Scott (15 years), and Maju Kuruvilla (8 years) shared their lessons from Amazon and the applications to scaling startups. Towards the end, Tom Killalea (17 years) and Steve Frazier (21 years) also joined.
This was a fascinating conversation on putting Leadership Principles to practice, effective mechanisms to build and scale culture, and superpowers to boost.
I recommend following all speakers on Clubhouse.
Below are the lessons I noted.
Lesson #1: Institutionalize Leadership Principles (link) through mechanisms to build and maintain the company culture and way of working.
Lesson #2: Amazon’s hiring Bar Raiser program is an example of an effective mechanism that brings to life the Leadership Principles.
A Bar Raiser is an interviewer at Amazon who is brought into hiring loops to be an objective third party, the role of the Bar Raiser is to be a steward of Amazon’s 14 Leadership Principles (learn more here).
Lesson #3: Great partner teams from legal, finance, and HR are a superpower that unlocks others to scale faster. Something to consider when scaling a startup.
Lesson #4: Even seasoned executives feel overwhelmed at times and feel like they are playing “whack a mole.”
Lesson #5: Learning the ability to scale a business and teams is a superpower that translates well from experience at a large company to a startup.
Lesson #6: Push yourself and your teams to have a “cowboy” mindset to build a culture of scrappiness and willingness to go fast, experiment, and fail at all leadership levels.
Lesson #7: No matter the size of the company, stay Customer Obsessed. Build mechanisms to talk and stay connected to your customers.
Lesson #8: Clearly understand what is a one-way door and a two-way door decision. Spend time debating one-way door decisions, sometimes they may not be as one-way as they appear.
“There are two types of decisions. There are decisions that are irreversible and highly consequential; we call them one-way doors, or Type 2 decisions. They need to be made slowly and carefully. I often find myself at Amazon acting as chief slowdown officer: ‘Whoa, I want to see that decision analyzed seventeen more ways because it’s highly consequential and irreversible.’ The problem is that most decisions aren’t like that. Most decisions are two-way doors.” — Jeff Bezos.
Lesson #9: Double down on your positive business surprises (e.g. Alexa). Maria mentioned the recent growth of mobile banking as an example for SoFi.
Lesson #10: An easy model for startups to be inspired by and adopt from Amazon is the document/narrative writing culture. You cannot fake prose. The 6-pager is an unsung hero of Amazon mechanisms. Writing a rigorous press release document is hard but well worth it because you are able to proactively identify unspecified customer features that lead to churn in the long-run.
“The traditional kind of corporate meeting starts with a presentation. Somebody gets up in front of the room and presents with a powerpoint presentation, some type of slide show. In our view you get very little information, you get bullet points. This is easy for the presenter, but difficult for the audience. And so instead, all of our meetings are structured around a 6 page narrative memo....If you have a traditional powerpoint presentation, executives interrupt. If you read the whole 6 page memo, on page 2 you have a question but on on page 4 that question is answered.” — Jeff Bezos.
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