Daniel Schoone

Jeff Bezos reveals the moment an early Amazon executive told him he had enough ideas to destroy Amazon: "Early in Amazon's history, Jeff Wilke came to me one day and said, Jeff, you have enough ideas to destroy Amazon. You have enough ideas per minute, per day, per week to destroy Amazon." "I was like, what do you mean?" "He said, you have to release the work at the right rate that the organization can accept it." "Every time I released an idea, I was creating a backlog, a queue, work in process. It was just stacking up, it was adding no value. In fact, it was creating distraction." "So I started prioritizing the ideas better, keeping lists of them, keeping them to myself until the organization was ready for the ideas."

Totally with Garry here. I'm 58 and still building stuff at 2am. I was similarly obsessed when building for the early web in the 1990s. But this is way more fun.

I came back to code because AI made it possible for me to build at a level I couldn't before. I'm not coding despite being CEO of YC. I'm coding because this is the most important technological shift since the internet and I'd be an idiot to experience it from the bleachers. I'm 45, running the most important startup institution in the world, and I can ship production software at 2am. That's not a distraction from the job. That is the job understood correctly.

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