The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 084: Brad Stone – How To Think Like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, & Steve Jobs

Starting point is 00:00:00 I think, you know, the name of your podcast gets to the heart of it, which is, you know, there's something behind these companies where, you know, which is really worth looking at. And that's the fact that they've got, they generally, and then not all of them, but they generally have leaders that are like, yeah, they're not just learners, right? They're like organisms that draw in knowledge and retain it in a way that, like, us mirror mortals can only be joined. Are leaders born or are they made? Our host, Ryan Hawk, believes that leaders can be made through determined, focused work on learning the art and science behind the makeup of other successful leaders.

Starting point is 00:00:38 Now it's time to inhale knowledge and exhale success. You're listening to The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk. Hey and welcome to The Learning Leader Show. I am Ryan Hawk. Thrilled with tonight's feature leader. It's with the really interesting Brad Stone. Brad is a senior writer for Bloomberg Business Week in. San Francisco. He's also the best-selling author of the Everything Store, Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. That book won the 2013 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. If I spent time reading all the awards, that book is one. We'd be here for quite some time. I just encourage you to pick it up. It's really good. During our conversation tonight, we talked about a number of topics, a few of them. Common characteristics in some of the the legendary leaders that he spent time around. Like Steve Jobs, he told a funny story about how

Starting point is 00:01:46 Steve Jobs called him to yell at him about something he wrote. Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, among many others, Marissa Mount Meyer as well at Yahoo. So he spent time around these leaders, and I was really curious to learn what separates them or sets them apart from the rest. And I enjoyed his stories there. And also the no PowerPoint rule at Amazon and why Jeff Bezos instituted that and what they do instead. I think you'll find that part really interesting since a lot of us spend a lot of time in PowerPoint. And then when I asked him the question about what he first felt when I sent the initial email to him with my show titled The Learning Leaders Show, because he normally says no to these types of requests. And he explains why he said yes. And I really

Starting point is 00:02:33 thought that was an interesting part of our conversation. Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, it's Brad Stone. Brad, so excited to have you here on The Learning Leader Show. I know our listeners are in for a treat as well, and I got a quick question to get us rolling, and that's around sustained excellence. People who have achieved big things in their lives, some would say would define them as being successful,

Starting point is 00:03:06 and you have been fortunate to spend a lot of time around some really remarkable people, whether it's at Amazon or Facebook or Uber, a number of places that you've studied and you've spent time around the leaders in those businesses. And I'm curious, what are some of the common characteristics that those people who sustain excellence all seem to share? Wow, great question. Well, first time, thanks for having me on your podcast. So I've covered Silicon Valley for, boy, almost 20 years now, which is crazy. And as you say, yeah, write for Bloomberg Business Week and run.

Starting point is 00:03:46 the technology coverage for Bloomberg, and we do. We have an up-close view on, you know, not just Amazon, the company I wrote a book about, but yeah, Google and Facebook, Apple, all these companies. And I think I might draw out a couple of characteristics. And of course, this is the biggest question of all, really, like what it takes to succeed at this level. So, you know, entire books have been written about this topic. You know, one, I'd say an absolute willingness to challenge convention. So, you know, this is a world and it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, market and an economy that kind of values convention, you know, short-term thinking doesn't like risk-taking as much as it kind of pays homage to risk-taking. And yet, you know, you see Larry Page

Starting point is 00:04:31 and Sergey Brin at Google starting, you know, kind of going way outside their lanes to start something like Google X, a division that's just taking, you know, these massive risks on the next thing. Or Amazon, you know, which a lot of people for many years thought of as a retailer. And Jeff Bezos, about 10 years ago now, looks at his business and thinks, you know, what we really need is a kind of set of scalable infrastructure, you know, computer processing power that we can just spin up, you know, more so in the holiday shopping season, less so in January February. There are ebbs and flows in every week. You know, instead of like buying all this processing power, we need to be flexible with it. That's the start of a completely unconventional division called Amazon Web Services, which is now a huge and growing part of their business. So willing to think outside the lanes, obviously the raw intelligence, you know, these people who, you know, I've talked to over the years, Mark Zuckerberg, or Larry Page, or Jeff Bezos are so brilliant, obviously.

Starting point is 00:05:32 So that's, you know, it almost goes without saying. And then the last thing I'd say is a kind of ability to tune out the noise, you know, a comfort with criticism, or not a comfort with criticism, because obviously I'd see we've seen again and again and maybe we'll get to. the criticism can get to folks like Jeff Bezos at Amazon, but it's more like they don't really listen to it. They don't really care. They're going to follow their own intuition, their own instincts, and they don't let the noise kind of buffet them. So right now, we're talking, you know, on a day, as it happens, that Yahoo has completely changed direction, and it's, you know, in its direction. It's not spinning out. It's Alibaba assets. It's doing something totally different. Now, I wouldn't say Marissa Meyer, the CEO of Yahoo, is someone who listens to a lot of

Starting point is 00:06:20 the noise, but she's just in a position. She's not the founder of Yahoo where they're kind of forced to listen to these things. And so you see what the opposite side looks like. When a company is kind of buffeted by the winds and the shifting opinions of the public markets and the activist investors, you get a lot, big, a lot of different outcome than those CEOs who are kind of insulated and then have the ability and maybe the luxury of tuning out. And maybe the luxury of tuning out all the noise. And so that kind of willingness to silo away from the conventional wisdom, I think is huge. It's a huge part of success. It's interesting. I like those three qualities that you shared. And specifically, I want to hit on one of them, raw intelligence. So I was

Starting point is 00:06:59 recently having a lunch with one of my mentors, what I try to do often. And he's a very smart leader, done some big things in his life. And he said a comment to me that really caught me by surprised. He goes, you know, I don't think I've ever been in a room with with a person or a group of people who I felt just head and shoulders were were so much smarter than me from an intelligence perspective. And he's a confident guy. I mean, he's confident in what he believes in and how smart he is. When you're in a room with a Mark Zuckerberg or leaders or even Bezos or leaders like that, what is the level of intelligence feel like? Is it just not comparable to what it's like in your everyday life, depending on who you're meeting with.

Starting point is 00:07:42 Are they just at this level that is just insanely high? Well, it actually sometimes can be hard to see because, you know, I am a member of the press. And oftentimes these folks are not, they're showing you a public persona. And there's varying levels of kind of openness. You know, so I would say Bezos is someone who is enormously disciplined about the message that he wants to get across. And he's genial and he's got that awesome laugh. But he's focused. So he wants to be in that room with you and he's getting a message across.

Starting point is 00:08:20 And I think it really wasn't evident to me how much of a genius he was. And still I started doing all that work on the history of Amazon, how the chips were so against them and how he really invented their way out of a box, out of a blind alleyway. And then with someone like a Mark Zuckerberg who is actually, you know, he's the CEO of Facebook, which is all about sharing. And, you know, not just in interviews with him, but if you follow his Facebook page, you know, it's, you see his, like, the books that he's reading and it's book club.

Starting point is 00:08:52 And this is a trait that I think kind of spans across all these amazing leaders, which is their willingness to learn and their curiosity. So I think it's a key ingredient that you're, you know, they're readers. Like how many people these days are readers? And Bezos at Amazon has created a reading culture. They're reading books and groups and talking about it all the time. Mark Zuckerberg has a reading club this year. You can look at his page.

Starting point is 00:09:18 He's churning through books. So I would say it's maybe not the intelligence quotient. It's not all that evident when you're in the room with them because they tend to be more kind of discipline than crafted in their message. But then when you kind of abstract out and you watch them from afar, you talk to people and know them and you see how they're learning, and they're soaking things up and they're, you know, one of the mark of a good startup CEO right now is if they're surrounding themselves with the right mentors and going out

Starting point is 00:09:45 and kind of leaching, you know, every bit of information they can. Like I consider Silicon Valley to be a kind of learning organism where they take the, you know, through all these informal means via venture capitalist and startups who become angel investors, they take the lessons of one set of companies and transmit them to the next. So I think, you know, part of this, part of the magic here is soaking all that up and continuing to scale because, right, you know, these are rapid growth companies and you need a different skill set when you have 100 employees than when you have 1,000 or 10,000 or in the case of Amazon now, 200,000. And no normal human being can be

Starting point is 00:10:24 the right person at all those stages of companies. It takes a special kind of person who's willing to just keep learning and keep evolving. Yeah, so I'm fascinated by those guys and I could probably talk about it forever, but I want to get into you a little bit, Brad. So, You, I think, a phenomenal writer, as you mentioned, a member of the media, but you wrote a great book called The Everything Store, Jeff Bezos in the age of Amazon. It's the winner of the 2013 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year award. No small feat. Just incredible response. And it's fascinating.

Starting point is 00:10:58 That's what I initially, why I reached out to you because I was fascinated by this work and love studying people like a Bezos and like the others I've mentioned. because the one thing I've mentioned, I've learned through this. And part of, it's been kind of cool because I named the show, you know, 80, 90 episodes ago. Yet one of the common characteristics of these guys and these great, whether they're male or female, the leaders that I've studied, is that what you just hit on. They are constant learners. They're constant readers. The people who have sustained excellence over time seem to always be striving to get better, to learn. and to figure out new and creative ways to solve problems.

Starting point is 00:11:41 And that's what really juices me up to do these things. So, Brad, I want to get into how you got into this line of work of studying these people and then writing books and certainly writing articles as well. Sure. Well, I think it was a little bit of right place at the right time. I grew up, I like to say, at Newsweek Magazine, not the current incarnation, with the late grade news magazine, and it was in the 90s, and I had just graduated from college and had been familiar with the internet and was an avid PC user growing up, but I was sort of

Starting point is 00:12:19 joining an organization where, you know, the grizzled chain smoking, heavily drinking group of, you know, writers, you know, were kind of scared of technology and really weren't believers. And so I found a kind of comfortable niche for myself. I mean, everyone, all the young folks wanted to do was get their name and small, tiny print into the magazine. And I kind of found a niche writing about technology. Then lobbied to come out to San Francisco in 1998, which was the kind of beginning of the first dot-com bubble. And, you know, it have been, you know, kind of following the zigs and zags of the internet

Starting point is 00:12:54 economy ever since. It hasn't all been great. I mean, there were a couple of years where we couldn't sell a story from Silicon Valley, you know, it was just kind of not, you know, people thought it all. because of the first dot-com collapse, that it all just was going to go away. But nevertheless, it continued to infect industries and change the way we work and live.

Starting point is 00:13:16 And I kind of just continued there to ride that wave. I went from Newsweek to the New York Times where I covered Google and Amazon and Apple at different points and helped start a blog covering technology and wrote a column. And I guess I was a little bit like, you know, There's a lot of Kool-Aids swishing around out here. And as journalists, we try not to drink too much of it,

Starting point is 00:13:41 but you can't help but drink a little bit. And I think from my perch, I just saw that these companies, you know, and particularly I think Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon, are basically the kind of tent pole, you know, the pillars, let's say, of this new century. And they're not conventional modelists, you know. They're, as we see with all of them, they're so powerful. You know, they're like, I think software creates kind of natural monopolies. And I don't think we've seen any other companies like them.

Starting point is 00:14:10 And then, you know, the Steve Jobs story, obviously, with its kind of epic overtones was, you know, an amazing one to follow. I interviewed him a couple of times. You know, I like a bunch of other journalists here, I wear the badge of courage of the badge of honor, I should say, of having him like yell at me at certain points. Wait, why did he yell at you? Well, at the times, we were working on a story about. Apple and Google had been allies. And we were writing one of the first stories, my colleague Miguel Helft and I,

Starting point is 00:14:40 about how they were kind of breaking up over the iPhone and Android. And Jobs saw that as a competitive and a somewhat imitative product. And so we were writing that story, and he was super passionate about it. And I remember I was at home, I had emailed him about this thing, the story we were doing.

Starting point is 00:14:57 And I was at home feeding what were then my baby twins, who are now all grown up, But they were, my phone kept ringing and it was this number I didn't recognize. And it was, you know, I finally picked it up and it was, it was Steve. And he was just ranting, ranting. He was so incensed that Google had kind of, you know, broken this friendship to go on the offensive. So anyway, that was the beginning of this story. But, you know, I guess so in covering all those companies at the times and then I moved to the revived Business Week, which Bloomberg got acquired in 2010.

Starting point is 00:15:31 And I had had an epiphany at one point that there had been great books about Google and there had been many books about Apple. And there had even been a couple of books about Facebook in its early years, including the one that was turned into the movie The Social Network. But nobody had done the great book about Amazon. And that was because Paisos was so secretive and he lived up in Seattle and they were kind of remote. And for the longest time, people had counted them out. And it wasn't clear that they were going to be all that important.

Starting point is 00:15:57 And that was kind of the beginning of that journey. So talk to me about that process for writing the book. I mean, I know between starting it and he had an interesting way of kind of introducing your idea, your thoughts to Bezos himself with the press release. So I'd love to hear your process for getting that done. Yeah, well, I mean, I knew that he, you know, that they would resist any effort to kind of penetrate their secretive corporate culture. And so I had this, well, first of all, you know, I kind of get sort of the process going. I did a proposal and I sold it to a publisher and I started working on it and creating a little bit of an aura of inevitability around it. And then I, and you know, I had the luxury.

Starting point is 00:16:41 This is at that point an 18-year-old company that, you know, where a lot of folks, sorry for the background noise here, sitting in the Bloomberg Newsroom in San Francisco. But there had a lot of been a lot of employees who had come and gone over the years and who, you know, who were excited to share what they had. scene at the revolution. And so I knew that there was enough kind of there just to build the core of the narrative. And then, yes. And so, and then I went and I presented the idea to Bezos in the form of press release. And that was like, it's funny, it's the, it's the Amazon convention inside the company when you're proposing a new product to do it in the form of a press release.

Starting point is 00:17:24 And the idea is you're showing, you're starting from the end and working backwards. You're showing what the customer is going to see, really, at the end of the process. And so I did that, and I went in there, and I showed, you know, I gave this document. And, you know, and I had had a pretty good relationship with the company covering them for many years. And, you know, he gave a hearty laugh. And we talked about it. And I think, you know, long story short, he saw that, you know, they could probably make the book better. And they did by sharing their perspective.

Starting point is 00:17:56 So you talked a little bit about criticism. And, you know, one of, there's a couple things. And I think you did a good job of showing, you know, the good and the bad of what happens, which is obviously what people want. But then on the flip side, you got Jeff Bezos's wife, McKenzie, who writes this, what kind of went viral review of your book, is basically trying to discredit you and what you've written, because maybe she's upset about some of the things that was written about her husband, which I think we could understand, you know, that. That comes from a biased perspective, obviously, talking about a spouse.

Starting point is 00:18:33 So that was criticism that you received, and it almost created more attention, though, for the book, I would say, her having a kind of a viral response to it, a one-star review on Amazon.com of all places. Talk to me about that criticism you received directly from his wife. Yeah, sure. So, yeah, fast-forwarding now from that original proposal to Amazon, probably two years. years later. So I, you know, reported this book and they helped me quite a bit. And, and, but, you know, but it was a nuanced portrait and like all complicated things. So it's not the story of an amazing company that rises out of nowhere and defies the odds. I mean, that's partly the

Starting point is 00:19:13 story, but it's also, you know, becomes the company that is churning through tens of thousands of employees every, every holiday season. And, and, you know, is leaving, is leaving some folks, you know, along the wayside. Folks with not really great things to say about their time inside the company about the way that they were treated, and then for some of the folks who worked in the offices, you know, about the experience that they had with Bezos and with the management team. And now, look, I mean, I, you know, subsequently there's been, you know, more attention about the Amazon culture. I kind of put it in the framework of, you know, this is a high achievement culture, and it's difficult for a reason, and it's

Starting point is 00:19:50 probably succeeds because it's difficult. But nevertheless, there are parts of the account that were just unflattering. And I should say it's an aside. I also went to, the great lengths to find, to investigate some of the secrets around Jeff Bezos's personal life. And so I tracked down his long-loss biological bed, who the family had really not spoken to in 40 years, and who, in fact, didn't even know that his son had become the CEO of Amazon or who he was. So there were elements of it that were personal. There were elements of the book that were probably a little disturbing.

Starting point is 00:20:22 And there were certainly elements of the book that were probably unflattering to the Bezos family, Although, frankly, I'd like to think that with a little bit of time, they turned around and saw that overall it was a book that, you know, did a fairly good job of capturing a complicated topic and an amazing person and an amazing company. All that said. What's your relationship like now with them? Well, let me get to it. Yeah, go ahead. But so a book comes out, yeah, a couple of weeks go by and I get this, we get this review. And I like to say it's probably the most, you know, red review in the history of Amazon itself.

Starting point is 00:20:56 And it was jarring. And in the moment, it was a little disturbing because, you know, she kind of questioned my accuracy, my credibility. At the time, it was really not fun. I wrote a response. It was widely read. You know, and thank God some even keel people helped me write that. And then, yeah, as you say, it drew more attention to the book.

Starting point is 00:21:17 But, you know, we saw Amazon respond a little, a little insecurely, I think, to the New York Times investigation of its corporate culture recently. And I think I put this in the same pile. You know, like the family and the company are so impassioned about their mission. They're a little cloistered there in Seattle. And so things that are perceived as criticism, even when they're not, or even when they just try to be nuanced, I think they take pretty personally. So, I don't know.

Starting point is 00:21:44 Okay, so now to get to your next question, you know, that was two years ago, that review. I've subsequently, you know, seen Jeff a couple of times. and things are very cordial. So I think that that was a little bit of a knee-jerk reaction, and particularly with some of the more recent criticism. I would hope that they look back and see my portrait as being a little more of a balanced one. Yeah, I mean, I found that part to be pretty interesting that, you know, you guys had those conversations given some access.

Starting point is 00:22:15 You spoke with so many people. I can't imagine the amount of research and work and interviews that went into it to gather all that. and then for her to respond. And then also, you know, in August of this year, we see the New York Times article, you know, called Inside Amazon, wrestling big ideas and a bruising workplace. Right. If you go on their website, you'll see a picture of, you know, people walking in and out of the doors, I think maybe to symbolize the fact that, as you just mentioned, that there's tens of thousands of turnover at times.

Starting point is 00:22:45 And so there has been criticism of them, but I think is that part of the deal? or when you compare Amazon to a Google or a Facebook or others that you've been, that you've studied and you've written about, what is their culture like in comparison to those other really big-name companies? Well, I will say that, you know, that Amazon has had to fight a lot harder than all those other companies. I mean, it grew up in the world of retail, of real. razor-thin margins and tough competition. I mean, its competition was Walmart, the biggest company in the world. One of them, you know, Google vanquished its, you know,

Starting point is 00:23:32 competition, you know, Yahoo, very early on, and then everyone was playing catch-up. You know, Facebook's big competition was MySpace, and no one's really been able to compete with it. So, you know, Amazon had a rougher road, and, you know, and so it had to develop a lot of different habits. So retail, the core business is essentially retail, is, you know, a land of razor-thin margins and where it's really difficult to, you know, to eke out a profit. Sometimes profits in retail come from almost deceiving the customer, you know, where a piece of jewelry is marked out up by 100%.

Starting point is 00:24:07 Or, you know, there's goods from China that costs a couple cents to make, and then you're selling them for, you know, for $50. And, you know, Amazon comes into the world saying it's going to be this customer-focused company, It's kind of buck retail convention. And so it really has to design a cost structure that can allow it to do that. And so one of the big differences is, you know, is their value of frugality. And so you look at all these other tech companies, and they're the land of free lunches and desk massages and, you know, come do your laundry every morning or drop it off at the cleaners and have free daycare. And so Amazon decided to design a really different corporate culture, a more penny-pinching corporate culture, and one that makes ensures that every employee is kind of just focused on this greater good of serving the customer.

Starting point is 00:24:53 And so I think because it comes up in a different industry with a different customer set, it just designs a really different culture and may have more in common in some respects with a Walmart or a Target or Costco than it does with a Google or Facebook. It makes a lot of sense because it gets thrown in with those other companies just like I did in that question. But when you really drill down and look into it, you could sense the difference between, you know, especially I think of Apple. I mean, they just literally print money faster and more than just about anybody else in the world. It's incredible. The one I was just thinking about one of the parts in the book that I read in relating this to people who are listening who work in a company.

Starting point is 00:25:40 And one of the things that Amazon that Bezos has said is that they don't allow. powerpoints to be used in meetings that you need to instead you have to write a six-page narrative that and the reason he does this is because he believes it forces people to be creative talk me uh when you were learning that and writing about that what was the mindset of the people at the company when when because i think people listening now who work at a at a big company and they say no powerpoints are you kidding me i mean that's all like you know that's how all of our presentations are done that's how all of our meetings are run that's we we we we we we we we we live our life in PowerPoint and these decks with like, you know, way too many words per page

Starting point is 00:26:19 and things like that. What was that like learning about them as well as the people that work there and how they handled it? Yeah, it was interesting. I think it was an interesting moment for the company and the culture. And it says a little bit, a lot about how it's run. So this is probably my mic and my dates mixed up, but I think it's about 2003. So over 10 years ago.

Starting point is 00:26:42 And the company is growing rapidly, even though it's. miserably unprofitable and the stock is in it basically in the dumps and Bezos is getting, I think he's getting maxed out. I think he's getting a little stretched in terms of its time. So he, you know, not only is he attending a lot of meetings and the meetings are groaning on and he's got a lot of strategic issues on his plate. He's also has at this point started his space company Blue Origin on the side and he has started a family, so he's got kids at home. And he's looking for ways to kind of innovate against his own schedule, to be more efficient. And, you know, and he's spending a lot of time in meetings.

Starting point is 00:27:19 And he's realizing that PowerPoint and this paradigm of somebody standing up and giving a, you know, a long speech, the beginning of every meeting is kind of not the best use of time. And so he basically says, okay, you know, he bans PowerPoints at the company. And he says, we're going to start every meeting by reading a written document, a narrative. We're going to sit there in silence and do it. And then we're going to discuss it. And it's going to be like a, I think it's a six-page document, and then there can be a footnotes afterward. And it's really tuned to how he likes to process information.

Starting point is 00:27:51 He's a big reader. And yeah, and it was just like it was very controversial at a company at the time. I mean, you had, you know, you had business folks who felt like they were back in 11th grade English, you know, writing papers, you know, staying up all weekend to write these papers. And it was a tough transition. But it's become a kind of cornerstone of the corporate culture at Amazon. And it's funny because a lot of execs who have left the company have tried to institute it elsewhere, this idea of written narratives and no PowerPoint. And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

Starting point is 00:28:22 I mean, I think it's specially tuned to how Jeff Bezos and his key deputies like to digest information. And they're very good at like scanning these, you know, these footnotes full of numbers and pointing out the, you know, the weaknesses and the data, the weaknesses in the argument, it might be something that's really unique there. And it took a while for everyone to get the religion, but it feels like it's one of those things now that really differentiates the company. Meaning they start each meeting instead of by, you know, just going through the PowerPoint deck, but by reading this six-page document, everyone sits in the room in silence, reading, taking notes, and then after everyone's done reading it, they then have the conversation

Starting point is 00:29:06 based on the six-page document, correct? Yeah, absolutely. It's very strange. And, you know, I've heard people have described to me this experience of sitting at a quiet room full of people and everybody just sitting there reading quietly. It's unbelievable. And I think the documents might be distributed to folks beforehand. But Jeff, you know, he's doing so much now. It's a company with, you know, 200,000 people. He's got all the stuff on the side. He comes and he reads it fresh. And it's one of those signs of his unbelievable raw intelligence. that he reads it, digest it, identifies the holes, and has a kind of spirited discussion about it that's full of, you know, that could be full of kind of spirited, amicable combativeness, which is all, which all has the goal of kind of getting to the right answer. Really interesting. I love that, that aspect of him. And I think that's when you can really tell, I believe that intelligence, one of the ways to measure that, there's a number of ways, but one of the ways is the type. of questions that people ask and how they ask them and what they ask them about. So if you digest, you're able to read and digest a six-page paper and then ask really insightful questions that shows a really high level of a high-level thinking intelligence

Starting point is 00:30:29 to me. And so, Brad, I got a question around, I don't know if I'd say the hiring process, but when I have CEOs on my podcast, one of the questions. one of the questions I like to ask them specifically is what do they look for when they hire leaders people in big positions at their companies not you know I mean it's important to know all positions but specifically in leadership roles and I'd be curious for you again this is kind of a you know look at common characteristic type question but when you since you've met with these great great leaders visionaries people who are legends whether it's Bezos Steve Jobs

Starting point is 00:31:06 Zuckerberg those guys what are some of the things that you've learned or you've gathered from them that they look for specifically in leadership positions at their companies? Wow, that's an interesting question. And I think it probably differs. So what's top of mind right now. It's some of these newer Silicon Valley jugger events. And they tend to look for, I find it fascinating how they tend to look for different things. I mean, so at Amazon, we'll start with Amazon. So in the 90s, they were, looking for arguably the wrong thing. They were looking for retail and logistics, kind of supply chain experience. And they brought in a lot of people from Walmart. And those people

Starting point is 00:31:50 didn't last. They were kind of building systems for the last way of doing things, centralizing inventory in stores and not in fulfillment centers. And then they've gotten, you know, since then, a lot more sophisticated. And I think, you know, they look for, you know, the business is huge. So there's device people and there's enterprise computing people and there's retail people. I think they look for, you know, for experience and professionalism and people who are willing to, you know, to invest a lot of their lives and the goal of the company and serving customers. You know, some of these more recent companies like Uber, you know, they're hiring really young people who, you know, and I would say the value that they're

Starting point is 00:32:31 biasing for is kind of what they would call hustle. They're looking for people who, you know, are maybe they don't like if you look at the general managers of the local Uber businesses around the world they're not folks of a tremendous amount of experience you know particularly the early GMs and so in the hustle what is hustle it's the ability to kind of go all out and not worrying about clocking in and clocking out and like and come up with creative solutions to really hard problems to be able to kind call an audible when the city council of your local area suddenly rules that you're illegal. You know, what are you going to do? What are you going to, you know, how are you going to, like, mobilize the assets at your disposal

Starting point is 00:33:13 to go and contest that? And so they have kind of, they've hired like a bunch of really kind of street fighters out in their localities. You know, Google, so it's all different. I mean, Google tends to hire, you know, really smart computer science folks and people that can think creatively about math questions. You know, and that's not to say, I mean, Uber hires those kinds of folks, too. So there's obviously a lot of overlap.

Starting point is 00:33:35 And then, you know, and they're all kind of competing fiercely for, you know, the top graduates of the computer science schools and the business schools. You know, I'd say maybe Apple is a little bit, stands a little bit apart in terms of being. Of course, Apple is such an interesting company. It's so secretive. It doesn't make many acquisitions. You know, it obviously kind of looks, you know, it's got obviously. a big emphasis on design, as well as computer science, hardware expertise.

Starting point is 00:34:05 So I don't know. I mean, it's all different. Maybe it's not the thing, kind of my area of my foremost expertise, but maybe I give you a little bit of taste for some of the different values. Do you think, do you see Apple acquiring Tesla or do you see Elon Musk being going for that? Well, it's interesting. So, yeah. Google, maybe.

Starting point is 00:34:26 Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I think that Elon wants to go. it alone and build the next great automobile company if he can. I mean, but it, you know, and he certainly has kind of the good will of his customers and a lot of kind of goodwill from the media on the side, and investors seem to love the company. But it is a hard business, and they're taking on these massive challenges, and it's so capital-intensive. And you just wonder, you know, if we do come into some kind of economic shift where suddenly

Starting point is 00:34:58 people are looking at these companies, you know, with a different filter, you know, and the fact that Tesla, you know, I don't really cover it, but I'm pretty sure it's never made a profit. You know, if they, you know, started getting evaluated a little bit differently, then it might, who knows? I mean, this is totally hypothetical, but maybe then it does become an asset. And my, worth that considering for some of these companies. My colleague Ashley Vance wrote a great book about on Musk. Great book. Great book. Yeah. Old Elon Musk. You should check it out if you have it. And, you know, he reported in that book that Google at one point had gotten close to acquiring Tesla during one of its kind of low moments. And sure, that could happen again. Apple's trying to design a car. They're hiring people.

Starting point is 00:35:40 Currently, there's no love loss between Apple and Tesla, but you never know. But then you've got all the Detroit companies, and they probably don't have the, you know, maybe their acquisition targets. When one of these tech companies realizes, wow, it's not just software. We need a lot of kind of, you know, physical know-how to go and build an automobile that's safe and that people want to drive. So I expect that if this thing gets more serious in the race for the automated car heats out, that we will see some M&A. Well, you even got Bezos competing with Elon and when it comes to the Rockets too now, right? Oh, yeah.

Starting point is 00:36:15 It kind of came out of nowhere almost, at least maybe some of us. Well, you know, it's actually been more than 10 years in the making. So basically started Blue Urchin in 2001. Elon started SpaceX not long after. The difference is SpaceX has kind of been operating out in the open and actually doing probably a better job going a little bit faster. I mean, it didn't have limitless pockets, so it started this very practical business of launching satellites.

Starting point is 00:36:44 And Bezos, who has endless resources, has been funding Blue Origin and Secret. But, yeah, the other kind of missing element that we haven't talked about with all these guys is their competitiveness. And so there is a little bit of an arms race. It's the new space race between these guys and maybe Richard Branson and a few others to go and build a private space company. Yeah, I love it. I love reading about it.

Starting point is 00:37:09 I'm fascinated by it. So I know we're up against the clock, Brad. I got one more question for you. It's all around. I mentioned to you before, before we were even recording that I love studying leadership, the art and science of it, the fact that it's a learned skill. and you're not necessarily born with it. And like I said, you spend a lot of time around these guys. You yourself are a leader in your space

Starting point is 00:37:30 and how you've been able to accomplish some really big things and have sustained excellence over a great career. But I'm curious when you first got, maybe when you first got the email for me or the note saying that the host of the Learning Leader show wanted to talk to you for his podcast. What was the first thing that popped in your mind when you heard that specific phrase, learning leader?

Starting point is 00:37:52 Oh, interesting. Well, I guess, you know, I, if I'm honest, it's, it's that, wow, here's an opportunity to like talk about, you know, so it's been two years since the book came out. And, you know, and these things kind of tail off, and I haven't been talking about it that much. And, you know, and mostly when the requests come in, I kind of say, you know, because I'm totally, you know, crammed with other stuff and working on another. book right now, in addition to my responsibility as a Bloomberg. Except, yeah, there was something about maybe the way you phrased it, and the idea that, like, we're talking about stuff that I kind of love to talk about, right? I mean, it's interesting. How have these guys, you know,

Starting point is 00:38:38 the select group of folks pulled off really something amazing, building, you know, huge companies from nothing, and then change the way we live. I mean, it's the holiday season. And, like, I haven't gone into, you know, a store. I'm just buying everything on Amazon. They make it easy.

Starting point is 00:38:54 You know, and I'm carrying around a Google phone, and I'm writing on my Apple laptop. And so there's a lot there that's unexplored. We maybe take it for granted that we, you know, we're living our lives completely differently now than we did 20 years ago. And so it's worth exploring. And the idea of a – I think, you know, the name of your podcast gets to the heart of it, which is, you know, there's something behind these companies, which is really worth looking at. And that's the fact that they've got – they generally – and then not all of them, but they generally have leaders that – They're like, yeah, they're not just learners, right? They're like organisms that draw in knowledge and retain it in a way that like us mere mortals can only be jealous.

Starting point is 00:39:36 Love it, man. I had a feeling you'd have a really great answer to that question. I like to ask it to get some consistency and to couch an episode that way so that there's some comfort there too. But this has been really insightful, Brad, and it's even, I knew you'd be good, but it's even better than I, that I'd hope for. So thank you so much for investing your time, especially in the midst of a lot of other things going on. Are you allowed to talk about what your next book's about, or is that a secret?

Starting point is 00:40:03 Not yet, but how about this, Ryan? When it gets closer, we'll reconnect and we can have a conversation about it. I had a feeling you couldn't say yet, but I'm excited to read it. Looking forward to it, certainly. Give me a heads up, and I'd love to take a look once it's ready to go. So thanks again. Where can everyone go to find you online? Well, how about my Twitter?

Starting point is 00:40:25 It's Twitter.com slash Bradstone. Perfect. Awesome. Spell like it sounds. All right. Thanks so much, Brad. I really appreciate you being here, man. I look forward to continuing our dialogue as we both progress, man.

Starting point is 00:40:37 Okay. Thank you, Ryan. Bye. This episode of The Learning Leader Show is over, but we have plenty more to keep you locked in until next time. Head over to Learning Leadershow.com for more information and to request your favorite entrepreneur, CEO, world-class athlete or anyone else that inspires you.

Starting point is 00:40:55 You can also talk to Ryan directly by reaching out to him on Twitter at Ryan Hawk 12. Thanks again and we'll see you next time on The Learning Leader Show.

The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 084: Brad Stone – How To Think Like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, & Steve Jobs

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