4 Business Thoughts from Jeff Bezos for Young Entrepreneurs

As we all know, Jeff Bezos, once started a book store - Instead of a brick and mortar store, he preferred something new then — The Internet and his company was one of the few that survived the Dot-com bubble and Today Jeff Bezos is racing to be the World’s richest man while owning Amazon Inc. (the used to be Bookstore), Blue Origin, The Washington Post.

While I was watching his recent Fireside chat at Internet Association’s 2017 Annual Charity Gala, Jeff B threw a few thoughts that would be very valuable for Young Entrepreneurs, hence listing it down:

4. Customer Obsession vs Competitor Obsession!

Businesses are primarily built for the purpose of serving consumers, hence it’s wise (but also risky) building a Customer-obsessed Vision. Jeff B himself acknowledges that Businesses that are Competitor-obsessed or Product-obsessed can/will work but it’s not the ultimatum that can save any business, but if your business is focused on what your consumers want rather than what your competitors are building (who in turn are building for your consumers), you can be resilient for a catastrophic failure.

3. Failure : Experiment / Operational Excellence:

When you’re building a Costumer-obsessed business, It’s not just good enough to stay ahead of your competition, But you’ve got to stay ahead mulling what your consumers want. As Malcolm Gladwell once said,

‘No one knows what they want; The mind knows not what the tongue wants’

But to produce what your consumer wants, you need to invent and to invent, you need to experiment. According to Jeff B,

If you know that it’s going to work, then it’s not an experiment.

So, don’t worry while experimenting on something that you’re very sure about its success.

Meanwhile Jeff B draws a fine line between Failure (while experimenting new) and Bad Operational Excellence (Failure in existing process). And Failure during experimenting is acceptable (even though Jeff B feels its embarrassing) but the unexpected outcome (aka Failure) during a well-set process, isn’t exactly Failure rather ‘Bad Operational Excellence’ and the example he referred to is that if Amazon’s new Fulfilment Center Setup (after setting up thousands of Fulfilment Centers) doesn’t go well, it’s not a failure but Bad Operational Excellence which must be penalized.

2. Disruption:

Running a Regular Expression search for keyword ‘disrupt’ on every Business Plan or Pitch Presentation these days would always return TRUE. Because Entrepreneurs inherently believe that their idea or what they’ve come up with is Disruptive. Jeff B breaks it for them:

Invention is not disruptive; Only Customer Adoption is disruptive!

And he’s absolutely right because no invention is disruptive until people who use it make it disruptive. Smartphones weren’t disruptive, Apple and Android made it such a way Mass adoption made it disruptive. Jeff B went on saying that Amazon made so many inventions and those weren’t disruptive because customers didn’t like them.

1. Overnight Success:

Success is one of the most argued events in our life. Most people still believe Success happens in a whim and that’s a fallacy even Entrepreneurs who are known for taking risk fail to realise. Most people still talk as if AWS became a market leader in Cloud Business *just like that*. Taunting that, Jeff B says its another Overnight success,

Any overnight success takes 10 years of time!

As Malcolm Gladwell nicely puts,

“Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for twenty-two minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after thirty seconds.”

Thus, Jeff B, currently the world’s second richest man, debunks this myth of Overnight success which is one of the biggest pitfalls a lot of Young entrepreneurs falls (wondering a quick turn around in their business, they just started).

Watch Full Interview here: