[imagesource: John Locher / AP]

If you want to learn, learn from the best.

Jeff Bezos is certainly not a beloved character, but he did found Amazon in 1995, and the company has done alright over the years.

Amazon started with 10 employees, and later today, Bezos will step down as CEO with the company employing around 1,3 million people across the globe.

What advice does he have for us mere mortals? In 2019, reports Business Insider, he spoke at Amazon’s re:MARS conference in Las Vegas.

He was asked what advice he would give to anyone looking to start their own business:

“Take risk. You have to be willing to take risk. If you have a business idea with no risk, it’s probably already being done,” he said at the 2019 conference. “You’ve got to have something that might not work. It will be, in many ways, an experiment.”

Many of those experiments will fail, but “big failures” are a necessary part of the journey toward success, he said…

“We take risks all the time, we talk about failure,” he said. “We need big failures in order to move the needle. If we don’t, we’re not swinging enough. You really should be swinging hard, and you will fail, but that’s okay.”

Your stock standard answer from the world’s richest person there.

At this stage, I feel I should chime in with something that wasn’t mentioned above, via CNBC:

In 1994, Jeff held 60 meetings with family members, friends and prospective investors to get them to each invest around $50,000 apiece in Amazon and help him raise $1 million. Only 20 said yes, a group which included his parents.

He asked for a cool $50 000 from family members and friends, and only 20 said yes. Not everyone can rustle up a cool $1 million to ‘take risks’.

His parents alone ended up investing $245 573 in Amazon in 1995, which would be worth tens of billions of dollars now.

I guess one tip is to have parents and a network of people that can invest a huge sum of money in your venture, and even if it fails, that’s okay.

During that same Las Vegas speech, Bezos also said entrepreneurs should be “customer-obsessed” and “passionate”.

Over the years, a few other pearls of wisdom have emerged, with this Business Insider piece featuring these.

Make key decisions before the afternoon

“When Jeff Bezos came to visit me here at my home [in May 2019] — he was here for three days — he shared something with me that I really liked,” Bezos told Italian fashion designer Brunello Cucinelli, Cucinelli told The Wall Street Journal’s Lane Florsheim in 2020.

“He said, ‘Normally, I make important decisions around 10:30 a.m. I’ll discuss it the day before, I’ll sleep on it, and in the morning I’ll actually make the decision.'”

Work and life shouldn’t be a balancing game

“I get asked about work-life balance all the time, and my view is that’s a debilitating phrase because it implies there’s a strict trade-off,” Bezos said during an April 2018 awards event…

Bezos says people should look at “work” and “life” as integrated instead of two separate entities. “It actually is a circle. It’s not a balance,” Bezos said.

Fear your customers instead of your competition

“Be afraid of our customers, because those are the folks who have the money,” Bezos once said during an all-hands meeting, he told Julia Kirby and Thomas A. Stewart for the Harvard Business Review in 2007.

“Our competitors are never going to send us money.”

That’s especially true in the age of social media.

Oh, and don’t forget another tip – be sure to minimise the taxes both you and your company pay at all times.

I think that’s enough from Bezos, who is currently focusing on jetting off into space in what can best be described as a monumental waste of money.

Perhaps he will heed the will of the people and stay there.

[sources:businsider&cnbc&businsider]