Ethan Evans

And you'd see these Jeff and everyone else with a pen making notes on the document.

But it was a way to drive deep thinking without someone at the front of the room controlling the pacing and telling you what to think.

Instead, you had to think on your own.

And that, Jeff told me once, you asked what I learned from him.

He said, whenever I read one of these documents, I stop on every sentence and ask, do I believe that?

OK, now I'd read another.

Do I believe that?

And so he was constantly questioning, like, do I believe what this is saying?

And there was no one in his ear kind of moving it along, saying, yeah, make a decision.

You can see it's going to make us money.

He could just think quietly to himself.

Good question.

There aren't different people with different roles.

Another thing I learned from Jeff, he always spoke last because he realized very quickly that even though he wanted strong leaders who would disagree with him, once the great Jeff Bezos says, I like this idea,

everyone else is more or less going to line up behind that.

And so, fun story, we used to play a game, which is, can we get Jeff to speak out of turn?

Because we knew, because we wanted our project approved or whatever, that if we could get Jeff to say something, the rest of the room would kind of quiet down.

But Jeff knew, you know, Jeff was very good at staying quiet.

And sometimes...

I'll talk about other people in the room, but sometimes the whole discussion would happen and then Jeff would come in at the end and say, I love this, we should do it.