i don't know i i think it's always hard to know
why you're drawn to a particular thing i think part of it is if you have a
facility with that thing and of course it's satisfying to do it and so in the
way that self reinforcing
uh... and i and and and certainly i always
had a facility with computers i always got along well with them and
uh... and it was it was they're such extraordinary towards them and you can
you can't teach them to do things in the mid that connection to do them i mean
it's a kind of a an incredible tool that we've built here in the twentieth
century
that was they uh... uh... a lot of for that really did start a fourth grade
uh... and then when i look but i got to high school uh... i think when i was in
eleventh grade i got an apple to plots
and uh... india continued for computers and
for the time i got
prints and i was
uh... you know taken all the computer classes and actually not just learning
how to act but learning about algorithms and and you know some of the mathematics
behind computer science
and it's fascinating and it's really
of very involving and fun subject
site twenty with the idea i i have uh... of starting a company and and uh...
uh... even
talk to couple friends about starting a company and
ultimately decided
it would be smarter
to weight and learn a little bit more
business and the way the world works unit one of the things that it's
very hard to believe when you're
twenty two or twenty three-years-old is that you don't already know everything
cut
it turns out i mean
uh... as i suspected
uh... you know
people were more and more as they get older that you seem to work mission to
realize that you know lesson last every year that goes back in a way imagine
that by the time im
you know seventy l realize i did not fit
uh...
so that was uh... i a very good decision to not do that i went to work for
start-up company uh... button unit uh... one in new york city that was building a
network
uh... for helping brokerage firms clear
uh... trades with the kind of an obscure thing it's every interesting to go into
but
used my technical skills and it was very fun work and i love the people i was
working with
and then
uh... that sort of
from then on i started working stripped intersection of computers in finance
uh... and stayed on wall street for a long time also only works for a company
that um... to distinguish quantitative hedge fund treating i was we were
we will need to sweep program the computers and the computers made stock
trades
uh... and that was very interesting too
uh... and
that was where i was working when i uh... when i came across the fact that
the web
was growing at twenty three hundred percent a year and that's what led to
the the forming of amazon dot co
so you want to start a company balked the first thing you do
is used to write a business plan
so i did that i wrote about it
three page business wrote a first draft factor for the first draft of the car
trip
uh... from you know
from from the east coast to the west coast
and that was
uh... that is very helpful in the business plan what survived its first
encounters with reality unto always be different the reality will never be the
plan
the discipline that
of writing the plant forces you to think through
some of the issues and to get her mentally comfortable in the space
miniature research understand
you know to push on this now this will move over here and so on
so that's the first step
wants you
are looking at the bars in a realistic way it's very important for cartridge to
be realistic and so if you believe
on that first day while you're right in the business plan
but there's a seventy percent chance that the whole thing will fail you know
e
that kind of relieves the pressure of of self-doubt i mean this early
i don't have any doubt about whether we're gonna feel that's the likely
outcome
no
and and that just isn't to pretend that it's not will lead you to do strange in
you know
uh... unnatural things
so week uh... uh... into edmund in what you do with those early investment
dollars you know so if you have three hundred thousand dollars when you have a
million dollars
what you do with that early precious capital resources if you go about
systematically trying to eliminate risk
c pick whatever the you know you think the biggest problems and try to
eliminate the more time
that's uh... that's how small companies get a little bit bigger than a little
bit bigger little bit bigger
finally
at a certain stage
you reach a transition where u
have with the company
has more control over its future ghastly
the first
through initial start-up capital for amazon dot com came primarily from my
parents and they invested
a large fraction
of their life savings uh... in
what became amazon dot com
and yup that is a
uh...
uh... was a very
uh... bolden trusting thing for them to do because they didn't
and my dad's first question what's what's the inner
so this he wasn't making abet on this company or this
concept
he was making a bet on his son
as well as my mother
so
uh... and and i told them that i thought there was a seventy percent chance that
they would lose
their whole investment which was a few hundred thousand dollars
and
uh... and they did anyway and uh... and and and you know and i i thought i was
given myself triple the normal arts because you know
it's really hard to look at the odds of a startup companies succeeding at all
it's only about ten percent here i would give myself a thirty percent chance
i uh...
went to my
boss and said to him
you know i'm gonna go do this crazy thing
and i'm gonna start this
and this company selling books online
and missus supply or even talking to about
uh... in this report general context but then he said let's go on a walker will
work to our walk in central park in new york city
and the conclusion of that was this he said you know this actually sounds like
a really good idea
but it sounds like it would be a better idea for somebody
who didn't already have a good job no
uh... and he convinced me to think about it for forty eight hours before making a
final decision and so
i would away in and been was tried friend right
framework
in which to make that kind of
big decision and
you know i already talked to my wife about this and she was very supportive
in said look you know
uh... you can count me in one hundred percent
uh... whatever you want to do it's true she had married this kind of univ
really stable guy
stable career path and now he wanted to go do this crazy thing but she was a
hundred percent support it
so it really was a decision that i had to make for myself
the in the framework i found which made the decision incredibly easy
was
uh... what what i call the literally and heard would call regret minimisation
framework
so i wanted to project myself for decades eighty
it's okay now i'm looking back on my life
i want to have minimize the number of regrets i have
at what i knew that when i was eighty i was not going to regret having
tried this i was not gonna regret
wanted eunice trying to protest the paid in this thing called the internet but i
thought was gonna be a really big deal and identify
i wouldn't regret that
but i knew the one thing i have my could correct
ever having try
and i knew that that would harm me
everyday
uh... and
so when i thought about it that way it was an incredibly easy decision
uh... and i think that's a very good
it's if you can project yourself out
to a j_d_ its roots think what life think at that time
it sure way from some of the daily
pieces of confusion you know left
uh... this wall street firm in the middle of the year when you do that you
walk away from your annual bonus that's the kind of thing
in the short term can confuse you
but if you think about
the long term
uh... then you can
really make good wife decisions that you won't regret later
i remember in uh... force grade we had this
wonderful
contest which uh... was
uh... the people in the class will hurt me there are some prize everett was
whoever convert read the most newberry award winners in the year
uh... and i read through it in in the winning you know i think i read like
thirty newberry award winners that your but somebody else read more
no
and that and that you know that stand out there it's the old classic that i
think
so many people have read and write a wrinkle in time and i just remember
loving
uh... loving that book uh...
uh... intern later i was always a big fan of science fiction
even from
when i was innum in elementary school
reading various things and uh... world of course the hob dayton
and uh... and tokens trilogy that follows on from that in
this little taro
uh... where my uh... grandfather lived uh... and the summer's where i spent my
time this summer
uh... had eight unit tiny little new andrew carnegie style library that work
all the books have been donated for the local citizens
and uh... i found in this is a very small libros more than the room or
setting in now
and it had uh... the
but it had an extensive sites fiction collection is just so happened one of
the residents of the street dousing person town
besides fiction friend tony did their whole collection
and that started love affair for me with you know people like
highland and
as a marvin you know all of the the well-known science-fiction authors that
persist to this day
if you look over
uh... uh... over long periods of time to look over hundreds of years
and look at the
every sort of life cycle of a new technology what you find
it's getting compressed and compressing compressor the rate of change is getting
faster and faster
every decade that goes by
they're sure more important discoveries per unit time than there were in the
previous decade
uh... and get a lot of these discoveries
tend to
uh... uh... you know have
to uses i mean technologies singer unit tend to be agnostic with with respect
whether they could be used for good
were used for evil
and
i think that you know over the next fifty years
uh... we're gonna
face a lot of free tough decisions
as a society
and in and how we make sure
that we are harnessing
those technologies
for good purposes
stress primarily comes
from not taking action
over something that you can have some control over
so
if i find that some particular thing
is causing me to have stress that's a uh... awarding flack for me what it
means is
there's something
that i have it completely identified perhaps of my conscious mind
that is
bothering me
and i haven't yet taking any action i'd find as soon as i
identify it and make the first phone call or send up the first email message
or
whatever it is that we're going to do to start would dress that situation
even if it's not solved
the mere fact that we're dressing
dramatically reduces the stress that might come from so stress comes
from in norinko things that you shouldn't be ignoring
uh... i think in large part
as just doesn't come people get
stress uh... and wrong all the time my opinion
stress doesn't come from
hard work
for example any commit working incredibly hard and loving it
and likewise you can be out of work
incredibly stressed over that
and likewise if you can diffuse the you know used as an analogy for what i was
just talking about
if you're out of work
but you're going through you know a disciplined approaches you know
the series of job interviews and so on and working to remedy that situation
there could be a lot less stressed
than if you're just worrying about it than doing nothing
i think that faith the one thing i'd find very motivated
and it's encrypt and i think this is probably very common
form of motivation or motive for cause motivation
p isle of people county
and
so
you know today
it's so easy
to be motivated because we have
millions of customers counting on us than amazon dot com we've got thousands
of investors
counting on us
and uh... we've got your work team of thousands of employees or counting on
each other and so
it's uh... in that's fine
think people
uh... chin peter carefully reread the first part of the declaration of
independence
because
i think sometimes we as a society start to get confused i think that we have a
right to happiness
but if you read the declaration of independence
trucks what want
liberty and the pursuit
of happiness
nobody has a right to happiness
he should have a right to pursue it and i think the court that it's liberty
we all get to the side
how we're going to go about making our own living and so on and so on
that happens to also be a very effective way
of deploying
an economy
so that you get that economy which
mostly makes sense and things mysterious leak of that invisible hand
uh... tend to work out ever but there was a time and they had the statistics
that we're on the that fifty years ago
there was a heat wave in the south the killed three percent of chickens
andy egg prices doubled
because there were three percent fewer chickens
so that means that the number of chickens is roughly right
uh... even though there's nobody deciding how many chickens there should
be
but so that
uh... a very interesting
uh... fact i think that
but the the the free market economy
which has a lot of which by the ssd involves a lot of liberty just happens
to work well
enters a allocating resources
but imagine a different world
imagine a world where
uh... you know some incredibly artificially intelligent computer could
actually do a better job than the invisible hand of allocating resources
and were to say
you know there shouldn't be this p chickens there should be
despite
just a few more if you less
that might even lied to
more
aggregate well so it might be x society
that if you give up liberty
everybody could be a little wealthier
now the question that i would poses
if that turned out to be the world
is that a good trade
percent i don't think so percent to be a terrible trade
and i sometimes
uh... worry about that because i think it's a coincidence that you know that
liberty tends to
to such a good job of
to creating
an economy that functions well