Jeff Bezos: But you can wax on about that if you like.
Male Audience: I’d like to know please what is the role of risk in your life and risk in the success of what you’ve done with Amazon.
Jeff Bezos: So what is the role of risk in life? It’s hard to do anything I think — whatever it is that you want to do, there is going to be risk in your life and risk is a necessary component of progress. So there are different kinds of people that want to do different kinds of things in their life. I like exploration, and in fact, I think that — I’m little stymied because I like to be a physical explorer. I like to — I would’ve loved to have been Sir Richard Francis Burton or something like that, how much fun would that be to go search for the source of the Nile and have people throw spears at you and stuff. And that’s just — that just sounds great. Obviously it involves a lot of risks. You find most geographical exploration, not all to be sure, but most geographical exploration on earth today is somewhat contrived. It might be something like circling the earth in a balloon, or something like that.
And there are some very deep spots where you can still do that. And there are — and then of course there’s space. I am personally very interested in space and have been all my life and would love some day to do that. All of these things involve risk. I don’t know how you can make any pioneering movements in the world of any kind whether they be the geographical physical exploration that I have just been talking about, or whether it be a more cerebral exploration of a scientific field or I bet you could ask that question of every speaker here and I bet that every speaker here has taken substantial risks whether it be intellectual or otherwise to achieve what they have done.
And Amazon.com as a company — what you do, in fact, the early stage of the company are all about eliminating risks, you take those precious early startup dollars, in my case it’s $300,000 from my parents and then we raised a million dollars from 20 angel investors. You take those precious early dollars and use them to systematically eliminate risks one after the other. And what you hope is that you get to a company of a scale where the company doesn’t need that kind of planetary alignment that it needs in the early days, but that instead the company has more control over its own destiny. And then that actually by the way creates more pressure for that team of people who represent that company. In our case the 7000 folks at Amazon.com that we have more pressure today than we did six years ago because now our destiny is in our own hands. And we’ve systematically eliminated those risks, to where we have the assets we need to build an important and lasting company. So now if we don’t do it, shame on us.
Thank you.
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