Should You Be More Like Bezos?

As the Amazon founder exits the CEO role, he leaves his successor a set of rules that might be helpful to any entrepreneur bent on conquering the known universe.

- By Jason Aten

EMPEROR OF E-TAIL

Jeff Bezos

When he told his (then) wife, MacKenzie, that he wanted to ditch his Wall Street job to move to Seattle and start a business on the internet, she asked the same question he got from anyone he told about his plan: “What’s the internet?” In a letter announcing he was stepping down as Amazon’s CEO, Bezos remarked, “Blessedly, I haven’t had to explain that in a long while.”

Given what we know now, the trajectory of Jeff Bezos seems almost inevitable. The founder and CEO of Amazon has been relentless in his pursuit of building the most dominant, customer-focused enterprise in modern history. It’s fitting, considering he first thought to name his company Relentless.com.

Looking backward, however, it can be easy to forget that relentless did not mean inevitable, at least not in the early years. But as Amazon’s execution began to match

Bezos’s vision, an extraordinary company emerged—one that changed our lives. Bezos leaves his CEO role as one of the most important business leaders of his generation, having taken his company from zero to nearly $1.7 trillion, the market value of Amazon today. Along the way, the man behind “The Everything Store” gave us some of the most important lessons on entrepreneurship, innovation, and customer experience. Here are 11 principles every entrepreneur can learn from Jeff Bezos.

1 USE THE REGRET MINIMIZATION FRAMEWORK