Jeff Bezos shares the advice he received from John Doerr early on at Amazon

“When I first met John Doerr who is the partner at Kleiner Perkins who invested in Amazon, one of the things he said really stuck with me,” Jeff Bezos begins. “What startup companies do is they take their precious early-capital dollars and systematically eliminate risks. That’s what the successful ones do.”

Jeff continues:

“What people often get wrong is that when you’re a startup company, 99% of whether you make it to being a more established company is luck. At Amazon we’ve worked incredibly hard. We’ve cared for our customers. I would put us up against any company in terms of how much we have bled and sweat for our customers. But we had the planets align for us so perfectly in those early days — in terms of the timing and many other things like decisions we made that were poor decisions but turned out to be the right decision anyway — and those early days are when the company’s destiny is not really in its own control.”

As a company grows larger and becomes established, Jeff explains, you worry less about externalities.

Full video: Historic Conversations “Jeff Bezos on starting Amazon and what the company has become“ (Jun 2001)