Brad Feld

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Bezos Annual Letter

Apr 14, 2017
Category Management

I just sent this note out to our CEO list. I was going to write a different post today about The Founder Wellness Pact: How Accelerators are Addressing Depression Among Founders but I’m going to save it for next week. After sending this note out, I decided it was the clearest thing I could add to your world today going into the weekend. 

Jeff Bezos’ annual letter is now up there with Warren Buffett’s annual letter as must reads for me. However, it is a lot shorter (5 minutes vs. 20 minutes).

You’ve probably seen lots of techy news, tweets, and medium posts about this. Don’t read them. Just read the letter. It won’t take long, and if you think about it while you are reading it, it will mean something that sticks.

Ask yourself several questions when you are finished:

1. Do you have a customer-obsessed culture?

2. Do you make decisions with 70% of the information?

3. Do you have a “disagree but commit” culture (especially when it’s you that is disagreeing)?