Ethan Evans

No problem.

Go somewhere else.

But we're not going to slow down or lower our expectations.

We won't be, you know, we'll probably judge you a little if you leave, to be honest.

But but the truth is, like, we'd rather you leave than you stay here and complain about it.

So part of it was hard work.

The second thing, though, is Amazon was really great on.

pushing authority to do things down and giving autonomy to small teams.

They had this idea called a two pizza team.

And the idea was no team should be bigger than can be fed by two pizzas.

And that team should know what it's all about and be able to go do it itself.

So what they tried, the way to understand Amazon is not, oh, a million employees, but rather 100,000 of these little teams.

And so it was in many ways a collection of startups like my first team that built this version of Prime Video that failed at the demo was only seven people.

When it began, we were told, go figure out how to put Amazon in the online video business.

Now, that same team today, the whole team globally would be several thousand, but it's still going to be divided into these little pieces working on each individual part of the larger system now.

And that's what made Amazon strong is

you had these little teams.

Jeff, in fact, got a lot of pushback on this that's worth sharing.

We brought in a VP from Microsoft, big platform company, and that guy had an argument with Jeff who said, so many of these teams are repeating work.

this independent team is doing things similar to this one and this one's building overlapping technology.