why you're drawn to a particular thing i think part of it is if you have a

facility with that thing and of course it's satisfying to do it and so in the

way that self reinforcing

uh... and i and and and certainly i always

had a facility with computers i always got along well with them and

uh... and it was it was they're such extraordinary towards them and you can

you can't teach them to do things in the mid that connection to do them i mean

it's a kind of a an incredible tool that we've built here in the twentieth

century

that was they uh... uh... a lot of for that really did start a fourth grade

uh... and then when i look but i got to high school uh... i think when i was in

eleventh grade i got an apple to plots

and uh... india continued for computers and

for the time i got

prints and i was

uh... you know taken all the computer classes and actually not just learning

how to act but learning about algorithms and and you know some of the mathematics

behind computer science

and it's fascinating and it's really

of very involving and fun subject

site twenty with the idea i i have uh... of starting a company and and uh...

uh... even

talk to couple friends about starting a company and

ultimately decided

it would be smarter

to weight and learn a little bit more

business and the way the world works unit one of the things that it's

very hard to believe when you're

twenty two or twenty three-years-old is that you don't already know everything

cut

it turns out i mean

uh... as i suspected

uh... you know

people were more and more as they get older that you seem to work mission to

realize that you know lesson last every year that goes back in a way imagine

that by the time im

you know seventy l realize i did not fit

uh...

so that was uh... i a very good decision to not do that i went to work for

start-up company uh... button unit uh... one in new york city that was building a

network

uh... for helping brokerage firms clear

uh... trades with the kind of an obscure thing it's every interesting to go into

but

used my technical skills and it was very fun work and i love the people i was

working with

and then

uh... that sort of

from then on i started working stripped intersection of computers in finance

uh... and stayed on wall street for a long time also only works for a company

that um... to distinguish quantitative hedge fund treating i was we were

we will need to sweep program the computers and the computers made stock

trades

uh... and that was very interesting too

uh... and

that was where i was working when i uh... when i came across the fact that

the web

was growing at twenty three hundred percent a year and that's what led to

the the forming of amazon dot co

so you want to start a company balked the first thing you do

is used to write a business plan

so i did that i wrote about it

three page business wrote a first draft factor for the first draft of the car

trip

uh... from you know

from from the east coast to the west coast

and that was

uh... that is very helpful in the business plan what survived its first

encounters with reality unto always be different the reality will never be the

plan

the discipline that

of writing the plant forces you to think through

some of the issues and to get her mentally comfortable in the space

miniature research understand

you know to push on this now this will move over here and so on

so that's the first step

wants you

are looking at the bars in a realistic way it's very important for cartridge to

be realistic and so if you believe

on that first day while you're right in the business plan

but there's a seventy percent chance that the whole thing will fail you know

e

that kind of relieves the pressure of of self-doubt i mean this early

i don't have any doubt about whether we're gonna feel that's the likely

outcome

no

and and that just isn't to pretend that it's not will lead you to do strange in

you know

uh... unnatural things

so week uh... uh... into edmund in what you do with those early investment

dollars you know so if you have three hundred thousand dollars when you have a

million dollars

what you do with that early precious capital resources if you go about

systematically trying to eliminate risk

c pick whatever the you know you think the biggest problems and try to

eliminate the more time

that's uh... that's how small companies get a little bit bigger than a little

bit bigger little bit bigger

finally

at a certain stage

you reach a transition where u

have with the company

has more control over its future ghastly

the first

through initial start-up capital for amazon dot com came primarily from my

parents and they invested

a large fraction

of their life savings uh... in

what became amazon dot com

and yup that is a

uh...

uh... was a very

uh... bolden trusting thing for them to do because they didn't

and my dad's first question what's what's the inner

so this he wasn't making abet on this company or this

concept

he was making a bet on his son

as well as my mother

so

uh... and and i told them that i thought there was a seventy percent chance that

they would lose

their whole investment which was a few hundred thousand dollars

and

uh... and they did anyway and uh... and and and you know and i i thought i was

given myself triple the normal arts because you know

it's really hard to look at the odds of a startup companies succeeding at all

it's only about ten percent here i would give myself a thirty percent chance

i uh...

went to my

boss and said to him

you know i'm gonna go do this crazy thing

and i'm gonna start this

and this company selling books online

and missus supply or even talking to about

uh... in this report general context but then he said let's go on a walker will

work to our walk in central park in new york city

and the conclusion of that was this he said you know this actually sounds like

a really good idea

but it sounds like it would be a better idea for somebody

who didn't already have a good job no

uh... and he convinced me to think about it for forty eight hours before making a

final decision and so

i would away in and been was tried friend right

framework

in which to make that kind of

big decision and

you know i already talked to my wife about this and she was very supportive

in said look you know

uh... you can count me in one hundred percent

uh... whatever you want to do it's true she had married this kind of univ

really stable guy

stable career path and now he wanted to go do this crazy thing but she was a

hundred percent support it

so it really was a decision that i had to make for myself

the in the framework i found which made the decision incredibly easy

was

uh... what what i call the literally and heard would call regret minimisation

framework

so i wanted to project myself for decades eighty

it's okay now i'm looking back on my life

i want to have minimize the number of regrets i have

at what i knew that when i was eighty i was not going to regret having

tried this i was not gonna regret

wanted eunice trying to protest the paid in this thing called the internet but i

thought was gonna be a really big deal and identify

i wouldn't regret that

but i knew the one thing i have my could correct

ever having try

and i knew that that would harm me

everyday

uh... and

so when i thought about it that way it was an incredibly easy decision

uh... and i think that's a very good

it's if you can project yourself out

to a j_d_ its roots think what life think at that time

it sure way from some of the daily

pieces of confusion you know left

uh... this wall street firm in the middle of the year when you do that you

walk away from your annual bonus that's the kind of thing

in the short term can confuse you

but if you think about

the long term

uh... then you can

really make good wife decisions that you won't regret later

i remember in uh... force grade we had this

wonderful

contest which uh... was

uh... the people in the class will hurt me there are some prize everett was

whoever convert read the most newberry award winners in the year

uh... and i read through it in in the winning you know i think i read like

thirty newberry award winners that your but somebody else read more

no

and that and that you know that stand out there it's the old classic that i

think

so many people have read and write a wrinkle in time and i just remember

loving

uh... loving that book uh...

uh... intern later i was always a big fan of science fiction

even from

when i was innum in elementary school

reading various things and uh... world of course the hob dayton

and uh... and tokens trilogy that follows on from that in

this little taro

uh... where my uh... grandfather lived uh... and the summer's where i spent my

time this summer

uh... had eight unit tiny little new andrew carnegie style library that work

all the books have been donated for the local citizens

and uh... i found in this is a very small libros more than the room or

setting in now

and it had uh... the

but it had an extensive sites fiction collection is just so happened one of

the residents of the street dousing person town

besides fiction friend tony did their whole collection

and that started love affair for me with you know people like

highland and

as a marvin you know all of the the well-known science-fiction authors that

persist to this day

if you look over

uh... uh... over long periods of time to look over hundreds of years

and look at the

every sort of life cycle of a new technology what you find

it's getting compressed and compressing compressor the rate of change is getting

faster and faster

every decade that goes by

they're sure more important discoveries per unit time than there were in the

previous decade

uh... and get a lot of these discoveries

tend to

uh... uh... you know have

to uses i mean technologies singer unit tend to be agnostic with with respect

whether they could be used for good

were used for evil

and

i think that you know over the next fifty years

uh... we're gonna

face a lot of free tough decisions

as a society

and in and how we make sure

that we are harnessing

those technologies

for good purposes

stress primarily comes

from not taking action

over something that you can have some control over

so

if i find that some particular thing

is causing me to have stress that's a uh... awarding flack for me what it