YouSaid · the spoken record

Dave Clark

lines on the record: 52
first: 2023-07-17
most recent: 2023-07-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Happy to do it. If you need some follow up on your relationship advice, I'm happy to have follow up sessions with you for nominal price.”
2023-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Top Three Lessons from Working with Jeff Bezos for 23 Years at Amazon, How the Best Leader Hire, Fire, Prioritise and Make Decisions & How to Be Responsible for 1M Employees and Be a Rockstar Husband and Father with Dave Clark @ Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it was going to be sent down in 2028 saying a massive portion of the world's goods move on Flexports technology stack and that there's been a massive amount of waste taken out of the environmental footprint of the world and how small business is growing faster than it's ever grown before because it has the ability to be competitive in ways at cost that it's never been able to be competitive and how many people are part of the Flexport universe”
2023-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Top Three Lessons from Working with Jeff Bezos for 23 Years at Amazon, How the Best Leader Hire, Fire, Prioritise and Make Decisions & How to Be Responsible for 1M Employees and Be a Rockstar Husband and Father with Dave Clark @ Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ooh, that would be fun. Locky Martin, or like some weird defense. I want to go to a defense contractor where I can get into all the deep, most secret government files and access and just go crazy for a little while.”
2023-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Top Three Lessons from Working with Jeff Bezos for 23 Years at Amazon, How the Best Leader Hire, Fire, Prioritise and Make Decisions & How to Be Responsible for 1M Employees and Be a Rockstar Husband and Father with Dave Clark @ Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quite honestly, I grew up in a way where I didn't care about school. I just wanted work. My mother passed away when I was a junior in high school. My dad passed away when I was in grad school. And it was a very painful to lose your parents early. But I don't think I would be who I am had I not gone through that. I tell my kids a lot, I hope I had the need to die for them to feel the need to be really successful over time. But it was very painful, but transformative in a way that I think shaped my independence and self-reliance and desire to succeed in a very powerful way early in life.”
2023-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Top Three Lessons from Working with Jeff Bezos for 23 Years at Amazon, How the Best Leader Hire, Fire, Prioritise and Make Decisions & How to Be Responsible for 1M Employees and Be a Rockstar Husband and Father with Dave Clark @ Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Honestly, I think coming to work for me, I view it as a gift. The people on my team right now could be anywhere on the planet. Most all of them could be running their own company if they wanted to be. They're brilliant, creative, fun people. And they took a leap to come do this crazy ride with me. And there's not much more they could give me than that. And I take it as a gift and I view it as a lot of responsibility as a result.”
2023-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Top Three Lessons from Working with Jeff Bezos for 23 Years at Amazon, How the Best Leader Hire, Fire, Prioritise and Make Decisions & How to Be Responsible for 1M Employees and Be a Rockstar Husband and Father with Dave Clark @ Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Single biggest bet is probably where I went to school because I didn't know where Auburn was when I went there, moving to Delaware with my later to be wife and then maybe leaning Amazon.”
2023-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Top Three Lessons from Working with Jeff Bezos for 23 Years at Amazon, How the Best Leader Hire, Fire, Prioritise and Make Decisions & How to Be Responsible for 1M Employees and Be a Rockstar Husband and Father with Dave Clark @ Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can't remember the name of the book right now, but when I was in high school, I was in band and I was really fortunate that my high school band director was guy named Burke Creswell. He was a big leadership guy. And he did leadership books. And we did every year these big leadership sessions where you learn how to be a leader in high school. And it was a gift. And I remember one of the exercises I did, and this is so corny and cheesy, but I remember it like it was friggin' yesterday. He had this pink heart. So you got to imagine like 200 high school kids from his pink heart. He folded in half and he's like, you're a jerk, you know, you're ugly. He pulls off all these pieces of it. And then he starts apologizing and taping it all back together. And he holds it up and he's like, it's back, it's a heart still, but it's not the same. And so there's a lot of leadership training. And then this moment of realizing that you can say all the things you want and do all the things you want, but Paul, after you've done it, it's still never the same. So you best not do it in the first place.”
2023-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Top Three Lessons from Working with Jeff Bezos for 23 Years at Amazon, How the Best Leader Hire, Fire, Prioritise and Make Decisions & How to Be Responsible for 1M Employees and Be a Rockstar Husband and Father with Dave Clark @ Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My kids are fully aware that if they want to enjoy this lifestyle after they leave the house, they're going to have to figure out how to work. If you teach them to be good people and respect others, whether it's the person at the bank teller or the drugstore or the grocery store or the person who is doing whatever the waiter at the restaurant and whether or not it's a CEO who's coming over the house for dinner, they've got to learn that all those people are phenomenal people and they've got to treat them all with dignity and respect and that they have responsibility to the communities they live in. Then kind of the rest I think they'll figure out.”
2023-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Top Three Lessons from Working with Jeff Bezos for 23 Years at Amazon, How the Best Leader Hire, Fire, Prioritise and Make Decisions & How to Be Responsible for 1M Employees and Be a Rockstar Husband and Father with Dave Clark @ Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is a lot of people who sort of say they sacrifice their own, like, I view it as I've worked really hard. I'm not finding copes so that my kids can learn to respect coach. But they've got to learn to have societal responsibility and they do things with school and other things to help and to learn those skills. If you're very wealthy and flying coach, your kids still know you're very wealthy.”
2023-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Top Three Lessons from Working with Jeff Bezos for 23 Years at Amazon, How the Best Leader Hire, Fire, Prioritise and Make Decisions & How to Be Responsible for 1M Employees and Be a Rockstar Husband and Father with Dave Clark @ Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We talk about it a lot. My wife and I both come from backgrounds that certainly look nothing like the lies we have today. And it's a challenge. We have two rules in our house, which is basically do the best you can and don't be an hassle. And so we want to like our kids when they're 30. I don't want my kids to be hash. I want my sons to be happy, polite, good to people, caring, empathetic, well-rounded human. And if they do that and they don't want to go to Harvard, I don't care. I was a terrible student in life. I mean, I hated school. School was the most boring pedestrian. Like, check the box. I hate it. I did terrible right up until I had to be good at it. And then I did really good in grad school and went to Amazon. I'm personally not a big believer that you need to go to Harvard to be successful in the universe. And so mostly want my kids to be curious and learn and be nice, well-rounded humans. I want to like them. I want to have dinner. I want to live to when they're 30 and I want to be able to have dinner with them and enjoy it.”
2023-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Top Three Lessons from Working with Jeff Bezos for 23 Years at Amazon, How the Best Leader Hire, Fire, Prioritise and Make Decisions & How to Be Responsible for 1M Employees and Be a Rockstar Husband and Father with Dave Clark @ Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The phone was like the worst. So, largely, it's like trying to be very conscious of what am I doing with my phone at this moment while I'm engaging with this person. I had an Apple Watch for a while. I was trying to wear it because I was trying to do sleep trying and stuff. And I realized that it was making me not present because you would engage me in lots of very different ways. And so I just stopped where distraction.”
2023-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Top Three Lessons from Working with Jeff Bezos for 23 Years at Amazon, How the Best Leader Hire, Fire, Prioritise and Make Decisions & How to Be Responsible for 1M Employees and Be a Rockstar Husband and Father with Dave Clark @ Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would be more present wherever I was, whenever I was there over time. It's very easy to fool yourself that you are present when you're not. Kids become good truth tellers at that. They're like, Dad, you've been on your phone the whole time you've been sitting here. You start to recognize things you're doing that you didn't realize you were doing. So I think presence is so important to people, whether it's people at work or people at home or your kids. And I wish I had learned to be more present with everyone I was with in the moment.”
2023-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Top Three Lessons from Working with Jeff Bezos for 23 Years at Amazon, How the Best Leader Hire, Fire, Prioritise and Make Decisions & How to Be Responsible for 1M Employees and Be a Rockstar Husband and Father with Dave Clark @ Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'm only 11 and 8, so I can only speak to that part of it. And I can just say that the hardest part for me is that, you know, there's never anybody in your life that you're more willing to go crush somebody into a million bits for hurting someone than when they hurt your child in some way. And it's like a different level of anxiety and a different level of protective sort of instinct, if you will. And it helps, at least for me, it helped soften me, I think, in a bunch of ways and helped me think about, you know, the whole person. And I thought about the world in a different place after that. Because when something goes bad, you're only as happy as you're happiest child is a pretty common phrase that I hear a lot and it's pretty darn true.”
2023-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Top Three Lessons from Working with Jeff Bezos for 23 Years at Amazon, How the Best Leader Hire, Fire, Prioritise and Make Decisions & How to Be Responsible for 1M Employees and Be a Rockstar Husband and Father with Dave Clark @ Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think mostly it just made me more patient. One, I think you see yourself in your kids. You see your behaviors in your children. They don't fall far from the treaty. You see some stuff and you're like, oh, you said that's annoying. I should stop doing that. And you just learn to be patient with people because you can't, they're kids. Like, what are you going to do? It's also very humbling. Nothing keeps you humbling like wiping somebody's butt. I wiped a lot of butt, a lot of poop in my house. So I've done a lot. It keeps you humble. And that's helpful. I mean, it just keeps you connected to the real world. Right. People are a composition of everything in their life. Their kids, their family, their work, and all those things make them great and come in and out of challenges and good stuff. And I think I just have a deeper appreciation of the whole person having now have kids.”
2023-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Top Three Lessons from Working with Jeff Bezos for 23 Years at Amazon, How the Best Leader Hire, Fire, Prioritise and Make Decisions & How to Be Responsible for 1M Employees and Be a Rockstar Husband and Father with Dave Clark @ Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're better than when maniacally focused. I suspect that it's true that the company and the people you work with would be better off with some of you than none of you and that some of you is still better than the replacement. Because I also view it as like, well, who would do this if I didn't do it? And would they be better than me right now with what time I spend? I mean, I still think I spend a lot of time with what time I spend, would they be better than me? And if they would, then I should go, then they should take that job. And I would do that and feel fine about it. But I don't think that's true today. I feel very imbalanced on that. And I suspect we're”
2023-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Top Three Lessons from Working with Jeff Bezos for 23 Years at Amazon, How the Best Leader Hire, Fire, Prioritise and Make Decisions & How to Be Responsible for 1M Employees and Be a Rockstar Husband and Father with Dave Clark @ Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This will really turn into a therapy session for you. It's good. I like it. Let me see if I can help you. You know, here's the way I would put it I'm a better leader and partner to my teams when I'm at full patience and where I have clarity of thought and I am in that condition best when my home life is also in balance, at least a respectably good way. And so if the choice is that the company and the team can have me, and I'm unwilling to sacrifice my. It's too important to me. It's a piece that I view as a requirement for me being happy. And so it becomes a decision, which is, does the company want me in that capacity? You get this much of me and you get me in a healthy, happy state, and then my family gets the other part, or you can have none of me. And the sum of me, I think, is better than the none of me. And I suspect the same is true for you that in a well-rounded way.”
2023-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Top Three Lessons from Working with Jeff Bezos for 23 Years at Amazon, How the Best Leader Hire, Fire, Prioritise and Make Decisions & How to Be Responsible for 1M Employees and Be a Rockstar Husband and Father with Dave Clark @ Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wish that I was that sophisticated in my thought and language in those moments. For me, it's just always been try to be as open in communication as we can be. Except that I grew up a lot and we're heading the same journey. It's like everything else. You just try to be committed and try to make it better tomorrow than it was yesterday. I wish it was like that clear, but when you're in the shit, you often don't realize that you're in the shit. If you work until 11 o'clock night, you kind of don't even recognize that you're doing it to a degree or that you don't recognize that you're not engaging. You're in the shit.”
2023-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Top Three Lessons from Working with Jeff Bezos for 23 Years at Amazon, How the Best Leader Hire, Fire, Prioritise and Make Decisions & How to Be Responsible for 1M Employees and Be a Rockstar Husband and Father with Dave Clark @ Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I think about that 2020 and 21 of Amazon, we doubled the size basically of the entire operating footprint for Amazon in like 18 months. And everything that happened with employees and sort of trying to keep people safe. I mean, that two years of COVID, I think, for everybody that was in operations at Amazon was like a decade. It's like a weird sadistic blur at this point.”
2023-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Top Three Lessons from Working with Jeff Bezos for 23 Years at Amazon, How the Best Leader Hire, Fire, Prioritise and Make Decisions & How to Be Responsible for 1M Employees and Be a Rockstar Husband and Father with Dave Clark @ Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To me, and they can have the most impact. It's like the simplicity thing. I only have a limited amount of time, so I want to spend it on the 10% that gets the maximum impact between my job and my kids and my wife. And hopefully all those things make me happy too.”
2023-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Top Three Lessons from Working with Jeff Bezos for 23 Years at Amazon, How the Best Leader Hire, Fire, Prioritise and Make Decisions & How to Be Responsible for 1M Employees and Be a Rockstar Husband and Father with Dave Clark @ Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For me, it's been about, like Leanne and I, we're on the same journey together, we recognize that I'm not successful without her. She's not successful without me. We accept that about each other and we want the same things. We're on the same journey in life. Our base desires are aligned. Then you got to figure out how to balance the time and the commitment. That answer is different for every person. I've always said I could only be good at two things and that's work in my family and sometimes I'm not even good at two things because one takes place over the other. The key I've found is just becoming more and more aware of what I'm doing with my time more and more realizing I think the older I get, I recognize that only thing of true value I have is time. And so I become much more protective of it than I was a decade ago. As a result, I structurally reserve in my calendar and with my assistant making sure that I have more structural basis for spending the time in the places that matter.”
2023-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Top Three Lessons from Working with Jeff Bezos for 23 Years at Amazon, How the Best Leader Hire, Fire, Prioritise and Make Decisions & How to Be Responsible for 1M Employees and Be a Rockstar Husband and Father with Dave Clark @ Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I wish I could say I've always done that, but I don't think that's true. There's certainly been moments where I've been out of balance on that”
2023-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Top Three Lessons from Working with Jeff Bezos for 23 Years at Amazon, How the Best Leader Hire, Fire, Prioritise and Make Decisions & How to Be Responsible for 1M Employees and Be a Rockstar Husband and Father with Dave Clark @ Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, we want everybody to stay. We try to convince people that it's the right thing, and here's why it's a good thing. But if it's not for you, it's okay, no hard feelings. Not everything is for everybody. There are lots and lots and lots of places to work in the world. And you should find the one that makes you happy. And if it's not us, it's okay.”
2023-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Top Three Lessons from Working with Jeff Bezos for 23 Years at Amazon, How the Best Leader Hire, Fire, Prioritise and Make Decisions & How to Be Responsible for 1M Employees and Be a Rockstar Husband and Father with Dave Clark @ Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My own experience, the thing that is waiting too long to hit the ground running and to just make the moves to integrate. Harish and team are a great group in the team from Shopify is a great group, but they're Flexport people now. We're all going to be one team. I want to get through that quickly. And I think folks should be excited about the journey we're going to be on and part of the new company they're part of. But is there not? It's okay. It's fine. I'd rather them decide that sooner rather than later, and I'd rather more quickly all become part of one team than drag it out and try to tiptoe around which companies what and try to be overly sensitive about everything. When the only thing that really matters is that we need to go build stuff for customers.”
2023-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Top Three Lessons from Working with Jeff Bezos for 23 Years at Amazon, How the Best Leader Hire, Fire, Prioritise and Make Decisions & How to Be Responsible for 1M Employees and Be a Rockstar Husband and Father with Dave Clark @ Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Went something like that. Toby knows Ryan because they invested in our round in early 22. And so Ryan and Toby have a relationship. And so he reached out and said, hey, we're thinking about this. We think you all might be an interested party in this. Would you be? Ryan and I talked and agreed we would be. And we started engaging in conversation. It made a ton of sense for us to acquire. We viewed it as it would be a pretty effective acquisition and accelerant to our overall plan and getting to be Shopify's preferred logistics provider or official logistics provider and provider for Shop Promise is a great thing for us as a company and gives us just that much more access to help merchants and sellers even faster than you'd plant.”
2023-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Top Three Lessons from Working with Jeff Bezos for 23 Years at Amazon, How the Best Leader Hire, Fire, Prioritise and Make Decisions & How to Be Responsible for 1M Employees and Be a Rockstar Husband and Father with Dave Clark @ Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was a great opportunistic moment, and we had kind of viewed it as not particularly a land rush in this year. And so we were going to start a team later in 2023 to build that. When we started having conversations with Shopify about the idea that they were going to sell or they were looking to potentially sell Shopify logistics and deliver.”
2023-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Top Three Lessons from Working with Jeff Bezos for 23 Years at Amazon, How the Best Leader Hire, Fire, Prioritise and Make Decisions & How to Be Responsible for 1M Employees and Be a Rockstar Husband and Father with Dave Clark @ Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like to hire entry level jobs out right out of college, isn't it? You haven't learned any bad behavior. You haven't gone to a company that's not very good at things and learned a bunch of foundational elements that are role culturally in our world. And so where we have opportunities to do it, I really like hiring people who are like day one in their career because you have more attrition in that because people are still discovering themselves and discovering what they want to do. You hire somebody out of college in the flexport. They're a flexport. They're here for 10 years that they're tried and true flexport employee and they know the culture or they're part of building it. There's no better evangelist for it. And they learn what we're all about, you're not bringing in some other company's culture with them.”
2023-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Top Three Lessons from Working with Jeff Bezos for 23 Years at Amazon, How the Best Leader Hire, Fire, Prioritise and Make Decisions & How to Be Responsible for 1M Employees and Be a Rockstar Husband and Father with Dave Clark @ Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My preference is to hire internally. If the talent is available and matches the need, but in fast growth environment, I was in at Amazon and like we're in at Flexport, you often have to intersperse more senior external talent. The people who grew up internally don't have exposure to the business you're becoming. And so you need to hire some people from the outside who understand the business you're becoming to help teach everybody that's being developed underneath. External talent is really coming in to teach the people who are developing internally something that the fastest path to learn is by having somebody who's already seen it be present to model that behavior and help give them guidance on how to lead in that new way.”
2023-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Top Three Lessons from Working with Jeff Bezos for 23 Years at Amazon, How the Best Leader Hire, Fire, Prioritise and Make Decisions & How to Be Responsible for 1M Employees and Be a Rockstar Husband and Father with Dave Clark @ Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we're not a family because we're all here to do a job and we have a set of roles and responsibilities. You have to deliver on performance. It is a team. I think that's a much better way of framing it. It doesn't mean that you don't have personal relationships with people. Family's family. There's no getting out of your fam. It's permanent. Jobs aren't permanent.”
2023-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Top Three Lessons from Working with Jeff Bezos for 23 Years at Amazon, How the Best Leader Hire, Fire, Prioritise and Make Decisions & How to Be Responsible for 1M Employees and Be a Rockstar Husband and Father with Dave Clark @ Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am far from perfect, especially younger in my career. I was less patient. Maybe didn't have enough appreciation for, to some degree didn't have enough appreciation for sort of the impact of broader life in the moment, what was the whole person and not just who they were at work early in my career, I think that was learning to understand who people were as a whole person in and out of the office and how those things interplay with their performance was important.”
2023-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Top Three Lessons from Working with Jeff Bezos for 23 Years at Amazon, How the Best Leader Hire, Fire, Prioritise and Make Decisions & How to Be Responsible for 1M Employees and Be a Rockstar Husband and Father with Dave Clark @ Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think of it as especially at big C suite jobs or big executive jobs. I think there's a lot of mutual trust and mutual accountability in that hiring decision. I'm placing a big bet that you're going to come in and do the things you need to do to deliver in the company and you're placing a bet that I'm going to support you and that I'm going to live up to my end of the deal with help and support and resources and guidance and whatever is needed to enable you to be successful. And it's a two-way street, especially at a senior level because those are marriages in my view. Those aren't short-term hires. I mean, you're hiring somebody that's going to decide who these big teams are for the company.”
2023-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Top Three Lessons from Working with Jeff Bezos for 23 Years at Amazon, How the Best Leader Hire, Fire, Prioritise and Make Decisions & How to Be Responsible for 1M Employees and Be a Rockstar Husband and Father with Dave Clark @ Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think people emotionalize it too much. It's less about trust and more about ramping up on knowledge and experience. It just becomes a bit of like, hey, we've been doing this for a long time. You've been doing this for now two days. If you don't have all the keys to the car in the house yet, it's just because you've been here for two days. We hired you, which, by the way, is like among the most trusting things you can do is to hire somebody and give them a big role. And sometimes people conflate ramping into things with trust. And I think that's just a bad sort of misnomer. But for me, whoever starts on my team starts with trust, I assume you're going to be great and I assume you're going to have all positive intent in what you do. And my job is to help you be successful.”
2023-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Top Three Lessons from Working with Jeff Bezos for 23 Years at Amazon, How the Best Leader Hire, Fire, Prioritise and Make Decisions & How to Be Responsible for 1M Employees and Be a Rockstar Husband and Father with Dave Clark @ Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You earn trust in people and you earn trust in customers. And it's easy to say something or make a promise and not live up to. Flexport right now has got a very aggressive roadmap of products we're building for late 23 and 24. And we're going out. We haven't always historically delivered on them, but we put the pieces in place and we're going out and telling customers this product is coming in 23 and 24. And if you'll sign up to be part of this and be part of helping us develop it, you're going to get that those are hard promises because there are a lot of work and there's a lot of dependencies between here and there. But if you deliver on it, you earn an immense amount of trust. You get a lot of credit for committing to deliver something that they know requires a lot of work. And then when you actually do, just following through on doing what you mean, meaning what you say is where trust is built. And the more you're willing to lean out on that for people and for customers, the more trust you build.”
2023-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Top Three Lessons from Working with Jeff Bezos for 23 Years at Amazon, How the Best Leader Hire, Fire, Prioritise and Make Decisions & How to Be Responsible for 1M Employees and Be a Rockstar Husband and Father with Dave Clark @ Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think when I look at cultural history for me, I think, I mean, Amazon's a fairly intense place. Amazon, I think you're as good as what you did yesterday kind of thing. There's not a lot of longitudinal stickiness in that way. And I'd like to think that what we're bringing is the intensity for customer, the intensity for process with a little more empathetic and a little more collaborative type of approach to engaging together.”
2023-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Top Three Lessons from Working with Jeff Bezos for 23 Years at Amazon, How the Best Leader Hire, Fire, Prioritise and Make Decisions & How to Be Responsible for 1M Employees and Be a Rockstar Husband and Father with Dave Clark @ Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think about it as a damage or a return for many customers right now. If you get an item, you say it's damaged. As soon as it registers that you printed the label, you see the back, we give you your money back. That's expensive. And there's fraud in that, but it's super positive for the customer from an Amazon perspective to be able to drive that efficiently. From a flex board standpoint, we've had the same thing. Like, you know, hey, this trailer got held up at the port for some duration of time. A typical forwarder would say, well, it doesn't matter why or how we're going to send you a bill for that. We're looking at that and saying, hey, these days of this, we really should have gotten it out that we're not going to build a customer for that. That's on us. That's an operational defect we need to resolve going forward. It's really these tension points to where you could choose in the customer probably wouldn't know the difference or it would be equal to what competitors do, but you know you can do something substantively better for the customer, but it's going to cost you money.”
2023-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Top Three Lessons from Working with Jeff Bezos for 23 Years at Amazon, How the Best Leader Hire, Fire, Prioritise and Make Decisions & How to Be Responsible for 1M Employees and Be a Rockstar Husband and Father with Dave Clark @ Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You really only know if your customer centric in a very, very hard moment where you're faced with doing something that the customer would like, but it's going to cost you a lot of money that you really, really, really don't want to spend. And that's when you discover whether you're customer-centric. And Amazon was that or is that. And we're going to make Flexport that. That's how we operate today. That's how we're going to build the culture.”
2023-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Top Three Lessons from Working with Jeff Bezos for 23 Years at Amazon, How the Best Leader Hire, Fire, Prioritise and Make Decisions & How to Be Responsible for 1M Employees and Be a Rockstar Husband and Father with Dave Clark @ Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it started changing for me a lot probably around 2015 or 16 when I took over leading the global ops team around 2011 or so in their sort of big elbow in the curve around 2010 and 112 where FBA growth really took off the fulfilled by Amazon where third party merchants were moving their products into the company really took off in that time period and so we grew a lot over the next decade and so we were an enormous operating company by 2015 or 16. We were starting to build out transportation networks. It really came to a place to where my life became much more about delegating and managing a lot of global issues and less about building.”
2023-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Top Three Lessons from Working with Jeff Bezos for 23 Years at Amazon, How the Best Leader Hire, Fire, Prioritise and Make Decisions & How to Be Responsible for 1M Employees and Be a Rockstar Husband and Father with Dave Clark @ Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She said it's about time, in all honesty. I consider it a sign I married the right woman, which is probably most important decision I've ever made. But I was in a place where I just wasn't happy with what I was doing. Of the people I was working with, it's an incredible problem, but I had moved into a role where mostly I was a bureaucrat in a lot of ways. I was basically talking to government and PR and managing my boss. I was not in a place where I was spending my time building. Amazon's still a builder-oriented company, but I personally was not in a place where I was getting to do that anymore. And I didn't start at Amazon with the intention of having a 2 million person workforce running one of the largest companies in the world. It wasn't my plan. I like working closely with the team and getting into the creative work and building.”
2023-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Top Three Lessons from Working with Jeff Bezos for 23 Years at Amazon, How the Best Leader Hire, Fire, Prioritise and Make Decisions & How to Be Responsible for 1M Employees and Be a Rockstar Husband and Father with Dave Clark @ Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's going to vary by company that's going to kind of depend. People who will make it will have tremendous scale and have customers who are sort of inelastic and spend and can eat the fees and the subscription fees and the convenience and time are worth more than the money. Or they actually value that. They actually put a financial value on their time and they've done some sort of trade-off. And the people without scale just won't make it. They'll go away.”
2023-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Top Three Lessons from Working with Jeff Bezos for 23 Years at Amazon, How the Best Leader Hire, Fire, Prioritise and Make Decisions & How to Be Responsible for 1M Employees and Be a Rockstar Husband and Father with Dave Clark @ Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In my personal opinion, yes. The closest I think it gets to working as a model is if you can get to subscription and ad, you're not going to, like just product cogs and margin with delivery cost. It's very hard to get the density you need if you're paying net averaging $20 or $25 an hour for delivery or an hour for somebody who's doing deliveries in the US. You really need to net five or six deliveries an hour to get good scaled costs there. It takes a lot of scale, takes a lot of density to make that happen. And so in order to, the economically make it work, there's companies who do it, right? But there's a lot of ads. There's a tremendous amount of fees. My kids love Chick-fil-A and they get $30 Chick-fil-A sandwich and fries on a regular basis by the time you pay the fees and the delivery fees and the tip. It's an expensive proposition.”
2023-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Top Three Lessons from Working with Jeff Bezos for 23 Years at Amazon, How the Best Leader Hire, Fire, Prioritise and Make Decisions & How to Be Responsible for 1M Employees and Be a Rockstar Husband and Father with Dave Clark @ Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sometimes, you know, there are a lot of people who say they do things really, really fast, but that's really a small subset of what gets done, but it's a marketing message and customers start to believe, have a perception of speed about you as a company. And there was a period of time there where Tude was like, you could get anything you want in the world basically in two days or less. And like nobody was really competitive. And then all of a sudden there were all these companies that were like, well, two days for boomers. Like I'm going to get it to you in 15 minutes. And that was where all the VC money went. It's where all the eyeballs went. And because of that, it made two-day the impression of two-day slow. And because we didn't have the other offer, I feel like it made customers think we weren't cutting edge anymore.”
2023-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Top Three Lessons from Working with Jeff Bezos for 23 Years at Amazon, How the Best Leader Hire, Fire, Prioritise and Make Decisions & How to Be Responsible for 1M Employees and Be a Rockstar Husband and Father with Dave Clark @ Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To make it, but the piece I didn't put enough weight in was how much doing the effort actually sent a message to customers about the company and velocity. And so I think I held us back from that. We launched Pran Now we were late to it, I think, because in part because I was conservative on this isn't going to work long term”
2023-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Top Three Lessons from Working with Jeff Bezos for 23 Years at Amazon, How the Best Leader Hire, Fire, Prioritise and Make Decisions & How to Be Responsible for 1M Employees and Be a Rockstar Husband and Father with Dave Clark @ Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've made lots of wrong decisions over time. I think my bouting average is pretty good, but I've certainly struck out plenty of time. I personally don't mind any of the mistakes I've made, the ones where we did something and screwed it up. The ones that linger with me are the ones where we didn't do it, where my gut was we should have done this thing and overthought it or I was too cautious and I didn't do it. It's the errors of omission to me ring much louder than the ones where I did it wrong. And if I think about the things that we omitted, I think we were late getting to the ultra-fast shipping piece when we were at Amazon. And I think some of that was a decent amount of that was probably on me and looking at the cost and there's not a real feasible like one-hour delivery profitable bottle despite all the subsidized funding processes to the contrary. There's not a lot of great profitable models for that. And so I was always like, well, this isn't going to.”
2023-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Top Three Lessons from Working with Jeff Bezos for 23 Years at Amazon, How the Best Leader Hire, Fire, Prioritise and Make Decisions & How to Be Responsible for 1M Employees and Be a Rockstar Husband and Father with Dave Clark @ Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First, I do the things that will get me fired, and second, I do the things that get me promoted. So on a straight up prioritization mechanism, do the promotion list last.”
2023-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Top Three Lessons from Working with Jeff Bezos for 23 Years at Amazon, How the Best Leader Hire, Fire, Prioritise and Make Decisions & How to Be Responsible for 1M Employees and Be a Rockstar Husband and Father with Dave Clark @ Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the world tends to think of Jeff as like Moses coming down from the mountain with Ten Commandments and like Shazam, here is what we shall. And it's not like that. I think what Jeff is good is particularly skilled at. Well, I mean, he's brilliant. Table stakes is like he's just a brilliant guy. But he is one of the best simplifiers, if not the best simplifiers I've ever met, which is he can context shift incredibly well. You can have a meeting, you know, this hour on AWS the next hour on the consumer business the next hour on labor and be perfectly in the mode in the moment, which a lot of people have trouble doing. And he can quickly sort out the 90% that isn't hard. He doesn't need to worry about because somebody will figure out and he can very quickly narrow down to the 10% or whatever it is, the small slice that requires sort of his level of intellect or senior level intellect to figure out how to solve and what's most important. So he's hyper efficient.”
2023-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Top Three Lessons from Working with Jeff Bezos for 23 Years at Amazon, How the Best Leader Hire, Fire, Prioritise and Make Decisions & How to Be Responsible for 1M Employees and Be a Rockstar Husband and Father with Dave Clark @ Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My favorite hires I'm a little afraid that they're going to be way better than me. Hires I feel best about are the ones I feel the most nervous about being additive to helping. You know, like this person is going to make me have to work harder because they're going to be challenging. And I think too many people look for somebody who's going to do what they're told. You know, they want somebody who's going to fill the job of the now. And what I want is somebody who's going to fill the job that's going to be the job three years from now or five years from now. And that is going to be very unhappy if their world is just me telling them what to do on a regular basis.”
2023-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Top Three Lessons from Working with Jeff Bezos for 23 Years at Amazon, How the Best Leader Hire, Fire, Prioritise and Make Decisions & How to Be Responsible for 1M Employees and Be a Rockstar Husband and Father with Dave Clark @ Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like increasing pressure, you basically start at one level load. If you can handle it, then you get more and then you get more.”
2023-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Top Three Lessons from Working with Jeff Bezos for 23 Years at Amazon, How the Best Leader Hire, Fire, Prioritise and Make Decisions & How to Be Responsible for 1M Employees and Be a Rockstar Husband and Father with Dave Clark @ Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there's people on your team where you're like, hey, I've got this idea. And it's going to sound nutty. And I'm going to tell you, we're going to do this, that, or the other. We're going to go to the moon next week. And there's the one person who starts and goes through an hour-long all the things that are going to go wrong in very complicated ways of every little nuance that could happen of why that's the dumbest idea you've ever had in your life. And then there's the other person who's like, well, that's...”
2023-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Top Three Lessons from Working with Jeff Bezos for 23 Years at Amazon, How the Best Leader Hire, Fire, Prioritise and Make Decisions & How to Be Responsible for 1M Employees and Be a Rockstar Husband and Father with Dave Clark @ Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. I haven't had the boring anecdote that's interesting. What I find to be most consistent is that the three biggest traits and maybe in order, there's simplifiers. They have great grit and they're”
2023-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Top Three Lessons from Working with Jeff Bezos for 23 Years at Amazon, How the Best Leader Hire, Fire, Prioritise and Make Decisions & How to Be Responsible for 1M Employees and Be a Rockstar Husband and Father with Dave Clark @ Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One, I measure on progression. So I look at it as how far down the path did we get. Almost no matter where you're going to miss a number of goals, almost no matter what you set them up. If you say, I want to go 100 yards, most of the time, at least some percentage of the time, 10, 15, 5, you're going to come short of 100. If you say we're going to go 150 yards, you may miss the 150 yards by 30% of the time or even 40% of the time. But you're far more likely to have 100% over 100 yards. Your net gain of stretching farther is much better than setting something you think is a more real stick target. The key is you can't beat everybody up over not achieving those big hairy goals. Now, if you set a 150 yard goal and you go 50, then that's different. Usually the people you take bets on, my experience has been that people take bets on get much closer to that unless something really goes sideways. And probably at least half the time.”
2023-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Top Three Lessons from Working with Jeff Bezos for 23 Years at Amazon, How the Best Leader Hire, Fire, Prioritise and Make Decisions & How to Be Responsible for 1M Employees and Be a Rockstar Husband and Father with Dave Clark @ Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, some would say, you know, is this a fulfillment center? We're picking and packing boxes. And there's a very clear, defined process on how to do it. It needs to be done the same way every time. And in order to be safe for the employee and high quality for the customer. And you really don't want to be going crazy experimentation on that every day and throwing big risk at that. The other is a big new project. It's a thing that you want to try. It's a thing you want to build. It's not existential to the today. It's optimistic for the future. And those are great places to invest in people. You just set a big audacious goal for what's possible and let them go off and run.”
2023-07-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Top Three Lessons from Working with Jeff Bezos for 23 Years at Amazon, How the Best Leader Hire, Fire, Prioritise and Make Decisions & How to Be Responsible for 1M Employees and Be a Rockstar Husband and Father with Dave Clark @ Flexport · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source