Jeff Bezos on retirement being lame, AI, the electricity metaphor for AI, the good fortune of being alive during multiple golden ages, long term life long passions, refusing to underestimate opportunity, dancing with curiosity, inventing, wandering, crisp documents and messy meetings, willing to be misunderstood, and why he doesn't do many interviews. This episode is what I learned from reading and watching Jeff Bezos at DealBook Summit and Jeff Bezos: The Electricity Metaphor.
From day one.
In his very first shareholder letter, Jeff Bezos emphasized the importance of having the very best team.
He wrote, setting the bar high in our approach to hiring has been and will continue to be the single most important element of Amazon's success.
Jeff's focus on talent is just like this quote from Steve Jobs that actually happened in an interview that very same year.
Steve gave this interview in 1997, and Steve said, I think I've consistently figured out who the really smart people were to hang around with.
You must find extraordinary people.
The key observation is that in most things in life, the dynamic range between average quality and best quality is at most 2 to 1.
But in the field that I was interested in, I noticed that the dynamic range between what an average person could accomplish and what the best person could accomplish was 50 or 100 to 1.
Given that, you're well advised to go after the cream of the cream.
You're well advised to build a team that pursues A plus players.
And that is exactly what Ramp did.
Ramp has the most talented technical team in their industry.
Becoming an engineer at Ramp is nearly impossible.
In the last 12 months, they hired only 0.23% of the people that applied.
So when you use Ramp, you now have access to top tier technical talent and some of the best AI engineers working on your behalf 24,7 to automate and improve all of your business's financial operations.
And they do this all on a single platform.
The longer you use Ramp, the more efficient your company becomes.
This is important because as Sam Walton said in his autobiography, you can make a lot of different mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation.
Or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you're too inefficient.
Ramp helps you run an efficient organization.