Bold (20 page)

It's also in the above passage that Bezos raises the second secret to his success: radical customer-centrism. This too has been there since the beginning. To return to his 1997 letter to shareholders, we can find the idea encapsulated in one of his bullet points: “we will continue to focus relentlessly on our customers,” and then reinforced at the letter's close:

From the beginning, our focus has been on offering our customers compelling value. We realized that the Web was, and still is, the World Wide Wait. Therefore, we set out to offer customers something they simply could not get any other way, and began serving them with books. We brought them much more selection than was possible in a physical store (our store would now occupy six football fields), and presented it in a useful, easy-to-search, and easy-to-browse format in a store open 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. We maintained a dogged focus on improving the shopping experience, and in 1997 substantially enhanced our store. We now offer customers gift certificates, 1-Click shopping, and vastly more reviews, content, browsing options, and recommendation features. We dramatically lowered prices, further increasing customer value. Word of mouth remains the most powerful customer acquisition tool we have, and we are grateful for the trust our customers have placed in us. Repeat purchases and word of mouth have combined to make
Amazon.com
the market leader in online bookselling.

But it's the combination of long-term thinking and customer-centrism that has helped Amazon extend their reach far beyond books. Bezos has ventured into music, movies, toys, electronics, automotive parts, and well, just about everything. They have also continued to surround their original market, moving from books into ebooks and ebook readers (with Kindle), and most recently, publishing itself. Meanwhile, Amazon Web Services—their cloud business—has become a beast in its own right (worth nearly $3 billion, according to a November 2013
Business Insider
analysis).
²⁸
As Morgan Stanley analyst Scott Devitt told
the
New York Times
:
²⁹
“Amazon is marching to a different drumbeat, which is long term. Are they doing the right thing? Absolutely. Amazon is growing at twice the rate of e-commerce as a whole, which is growing five times faster than retail over all. Amazon is bypassing margins and profits for growth.”

Bezos also understands that the only way to really succeed with his long-term customer-centrism is via experimentation. He also knows that this approach will occasionally produce spectacular failure. As he recently said to a group at the Utah Technology Council Hall of Fame
³⁰
dinner: “The way I think about it, if you want to invent, if you want to do any innovation, anything new, you're going to have failures because you need to experiment. I think the amount of useful invention you do is directly proportional to the number of experiments you can run per week per month per year. So if you're going to increase the number of experiments, you're also going to increase the number of failures.

“And if you're going to invent, you've got to be willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time. Anything new and different is initially going to be misunderstood. It will be misunderstood by well-meaning critics, who are worried that it might not work out. It will be misunderstood by self-interested critics, who have a profit stream connected to the old way. Either way, if you can't weather this kind of misunderstanding and criticism, then whatever you do, don't do anything new.”

Bezos, though, can't get enough of the new. His sideline aerospace business, Blue Origin,
³¹
is trying to solve the long-standing rocketry puzzle of vertical takeoff and landing, and, in a sort of an aerospace-meets-Amazon cross-pollination, in December of 2013, Bezos announced that some time in the next five years, drones will be delivering packages for Amazon,
³²
enabling both half-hour delivery and Bezos's big dream of getting into the food market and thus finally being able to unseat Walmart from its throne position and turning Amazon into the most successful “Everything Store” in history.

Bezos discussed his drones in his 2014 shareholder letter,
³³
hitting again on his theme of experimentation and rapid iteration: “Failure comes part and parcel with invention. It's not optional. . . . We understand that and believe in failing early and iterating until we get it right. When this process works, it means our failures are relatively small in size (most experiments can start small), and when we hit on something that is really working for customers, we double down on it with hopes to turn it into an even bigger success.”

At TED 2014, when I asked Bezos what advice he would give to exponential entrepreneurs, he, like Musk, counsels a focusing on passion, not fads.

“It's so hard to catch something that everybody already knows is hot,” says Bezos. “Instead, position yourself and wait for the wave to come to you. So then you ask, Position myself where? Position yourself with something that captures your curiosity, something that you're missionary about. I tell people that when we acquire companies, I'm always trying to figure out: Is this person who leads this company a missionary or a mercenary? The missionary is building the product and building the service because they love the customer, because they love the product, because they love the service. The mercenary is building the product or service so that they can flip the company and make money. One of the great paradoxes is that the missionaries end up making more money than the mercenaries anyway. And so pick something that you are passionate about, that's my number one piece of advice.”

In November 2004, about a month after the Ansari XPRIZE was won, I found myself at the Googleplex, making a presentation to a couple of thousand Googlers on the future of space travel. Afterwards, I was flooded by people wanting to continue the discussion. Last in line was a young guy in his early thirties, wearing a black T-shirt and carrying a backpack. “Hi,” he said. “I'm Larry Page, want to have lunch?”

During lunch, we covered everything from robots to space elevators to autonomous cars. Immediately clear was Larry's intense curiosity about all things technical and his insatiable desire to push boundaries. His favorite questions were “Why not?” and “Why not bigger?” Clearly I was dealing with someone unaccustomed to limits. That conversation took place almost a decade back and little has changed, except the fact that, well, everything has changed.

Born March 26, 1973, in East Lansing, Michigan, Page had a hereditary predilection for computers.
³⁴
His mother, Gloria, was a computer science professor at Michigan State; his father, Carl, was a pioneer in both computer science and artificial intelligence. Not surprisingly, Larry became the first kid in his elementary school to turn in an assignment from a word processor.

Page went on to get a degree in computer engineering from the University of Michigan—where he famously created an inkjet printer made of LEGO bricks—then went off to Stanford for a PhD in computer science. While searching for a theme for his dissertation, Page got curious about the mathematical properties of the web, specifically the idea that its link structure was based on citations and that these citations could be represented as a huge graph. This led to a partnership with another Stanford PhD student, Sergey Brin, and a research project nicknamed BackRub, which led to the page-rank algorithm that became Google. Not surprisingly, neither Brin nor Page ever finished their PhDs.

Instead, in 1998, they dropped out and started up and changed history. The PageRank algorithm democratized access to information, or as a recent article in
Wired
put it: “Search, Google's core product, is itself wondrous. Unlike shiny new gadgets, however, Google search has become such an expected part of the internet's fabric that it has become mundane.”
³⁵
Meanwhile, YouTube became the dominant video platform on the web, Chrome the most popular browser, and Android the most prolific mobile phone operating system ever. To put this in perspective, today a Masai warrior in the heart of Kenya who has a smartphone and access to Google
has—at his fingertips—access to the same level of information that the president of the United States did eighteen years ago.

And it's this kind of world-changing impact that especially interests Page. In an impromptu speech given at the Singularity University founding conference, Larry stood up in front of an audience of some 150 attendees and said: “I have a very simple metric I use: Are you working on something that can change the world? Yes or no? The answer for 99.99999 percent of people is no. I think we need to be training people on how to change the world.”

Today Larry's desire to make good on this promise and Google's vision for the future have become indistinguishable, and his actions have pushed the company to new heights and riches. In the three years following Page's promotion from copresident to CEO in 2011, the company's value has doubled to $350 billion (with Page's 16 percent worth about $50 billion), its cash war chest has risen to $75 billion, and its annual research and development budget increased to $8.5 billion.
³⁶
And Page, as visionary CEO, can spend that money almost anywhere he pleases. Autonomous cars, augmented reality, ending aging, ubiquitous Internet—clearly, what pleases Page is the big and bold.

In 2012, I presented at Google Zeitgeist, their annual customer conference. The organizers had slotted me at the end of the second day, asking me to give an uplifting speech with my
Abundance
message. Afterward, Page followed me onstage to deliver closing remarks, which was when I learned the origin of his appetite for bold. “When I was a student at the University of Michigan,” he said, “I took this summer leadership course. Their slogan was: ‘Have a healthy disregard for the impossible.' That's stuck with me all of these years. I know it sounds kind of nuts, but it's often easier to make progress when you're really ambitious. Since no one else is willing to try those things, you don't have any competition. And you get all the best people, because the best people want to work on the most ambitious things. For this reason, I've come to believe that anything you imagine is probably doable. You just have to imagine it and work on it.”
³⁷

What helps Page imagine the impossible is a fervent belief in rational
optimism.
³⁸
The term, borrowed from author Matt Ridley, refers to the exact kind of optimism we advocated for in
Abundance
. It does not mean pie-in-the-sky daydreaming. It means rather a sober review of the facts, which include the fact that technology is accelerating exponentially and transforming scarcity into abundance, that the tools of tomorrow are giving us ever-increasing problem-solving leverage, that the world—based on dozens of metrics (see the
Abundance
appendix)—is also getting exponentially better, and finally, as a result, that small teams are now more empowered to solve grand challenges than ever before. And it's these reasons that make rational optimism such an important strategy for thinking at scale. Or as Larry Page famously said in his I/O 2013 keynote: “Being negative is not how we make progress.”
³⁹

This is not a passing sentiment for the Google chief, it's a core philosophy. “I'm tremendously optimistic,” says Page. “I'm certain that whatever challenges we take on, we can solve with a little bit of concerted effort and some good technology. And that's an exciting place to be. [It means] our job is really to make the world better. We need more people working on this. We need to have more ambitious goals. The world has enough resources to provide a good quality of life for everyone. We have enough raw materials. We need to get better organized and move a lot faster.”

Speed is of the essence for Page, which is why he backs up his rationally optimistic view of the future with an extraordinarily healthy appetite for risky, bold innovation. He has become famous for pushing people far beyond their comfort zones. When he recruited Sebastian Thrun to develop their autonomous car, Page declared that 100,000 miles was the incredible target for how far that car was supposed to be able to drive on its own (today the car has driven well over 500,000 miles).
⁴⁰
When Google wanted to do simultaneous translation between languages, they found some machine-learning researchers and, as Page explains, “We asked them, ‘Do you think you can set up an algorithm to translate between any two languages and do it better than a human translator?' They laughed at us and said it was impossible. But they were willing to try. . . . And now, six years later we can translate between
sixty-four different languages. In many languages, we're better than an average human translator and we can do it instantly and for free.”
⁴¹

Or, to offer an even more colorful example, in a Steven Levy story for
Wired
, Astro Teller talked about wheeling an imaginary time machine into Page's office, plugging it in, and then demonstrating that it works. “Instead of being bowled over,” says Teller, “Page asks why it needs a plug. Wouldn't it be better if it didn't use power at all? It's not because he's not excited about time machines or ungrateful that we built it. It's just core to who he is. There's always more to do, and his focus is on where the next 10x will come from.' ”
⁴²

So where does the next 10x come from?

For Page, like Musk and Branson and Bezos, that answer always sits at the intersection of long-term thinking and customer-centric thinking:

We always try to concentrate on the long term. Many of the things we started—like Chrome—were seen as crazy when we launched them. So how do we decide what to do? How do we decide what's really important to work on? I like to call it the “toothbrush test.” The toothbrush test is simple: Do you use it as often as you use your toothbrush? For most people, I guess that's twice a day. I think we really want things like that. We use Gmail much more than twice a day. And YouTube. Those things are amazing. Yet, when we first looked at YouTube, people said, “Oh, you guys are never going to make money with that, but you bought it for $1.4 billion. You're totally crazy.” And, you know, we were reasonably crazy, but it was a good bet. We've actually been doubling revenue on YouTube every year for four years. And if you're doubling things, no matter where you start from, it starts to add up pretty quickly. Our philosophy is that the things that people use often are really important to them and we think that over time, you can make money from those things.
⁴³