Former Amazon VP Ethan Evans on working with Jeff Bezos: criticism, the Fire Phone, and the 'question mark' emails

The episode opens with Shaan Puri and Sam Parr introducing Ethan Evans as a former Amazon VP who spent about 15 years there. Puri recalls that when Twitch joined his company's executive team after the acquisition, Evans was the person assigned to oversee the deal on Amazon's behalf, and he was described to Puri as 'the adult in the room.'

Evans confirmed that this description was largely accurate. He said that early on there was a strong rumor that he was a spy whose job was to shadow Twitch's leader and then remove him. In his words: "Early on, there was a huge rumor that I was just a spy, that my job was to shadow Emmett and then take him out." He said that a replacement role was never the actual plan, but that it was hard to convince people of that.

The hosts also discuss the price. Evans noted that Twitch was bought for $970 million rather than a full billion dollars, and that the mental win of not paying the full billion was one way of seeing the deal.

Asked what Bezos's main weakness was, Evans said he did not praise enough. He described the pattern: a strong result would be met with a short acknowledgment, followed by a list of things to fix. In his words: "He just would come in and be like, 'Okay, I see your idea. Here's the three things to fix. Get moving.'" Evans said that praise sometimes came only as an afterthought, such as a quick 'You're doing great' on the way out, and that Bezos improved at this over time.

Evans also gave an example of a sharp public remark. He recalled a meeting where Bezos did not like a team's presentation and asked whether the A team was available for the project, adding that this was clearly the B team. Evans said that Bezos could be very cutting, and that he had seen the change since Bezos left Amazon.

Evans said that Bezos 'fell into the flaw of every great man.' In his explanation, having been right many times led Bezos to believe his vision was perfect, and that belief was what led to the Fire Phone disaster. In his words: "Jeff fell into the flaw of every great man. Having been right a lot, he started to believe his vision was perfect. And that's what led to the Fire Phone disaster."

Evans said that many people told Bezos the Fire Phone would not succeed. Bezos had been right about earlier products that people had doubted, so he did not accept the criticism this time. Evans compared trying to change his mind to telling a new father that his baby is ugly, and said he did not know how to fix the problem.

Evans also described a trust exercise at a Twitch offsite. Participants were asked to walk to the part of the room representing the most important variable in trust, and most, including Evans, went to integrity, while one person went to intimacy and Bezos's Amazon colleague went to credibility.

Evans described a type of colleague Bezos depended on: someone who was above average and very good, though not the smartest person in the room, and who had a gift of loyalty. Bezos could turn his back on a fire, Evans said, because such a person would 'throw his body on it and roll around and take the burns until the fire's mostly out.'

Evans said Bezos had a couple of these people. They never became top leaders, but they kept being moved to new roles and rewarded. Evans said he understood this, because at a certain point he needed to stop worrying about certain problems himself.

Asked about working with colleagues who became very wealthy, Evans said one such colleague was probably worth about $75 million at the last time he knew, which he described as generational wealth. He also said he calculated that Amazon's stock rose 9,082% from his first day to his last, and said he was afraid to estimate what his own holding would be worth today.

Sam Parr asked about the idea of being strategically patient but tactically impatient, and Evans described the approach as a 10-year view with a 24-hour clock. He said important things take a long time: putting people in space, for example, takes years of rocket design, base building, and software. Prime's shipping speed also developed over many years, from two-day to one-day to same-day.

Evans said that a five-year project is an accumulation of 20 quarters, and that no quarter can be lost if the goal is to be reached. Each day, he said, you should make every bit of progress you can.

Evans also described Bezos's process for handling customer complaints. Complaints were forwarded with a single question mark, which the staff called 'question mark emails.' The recipient had 24 hours to explain what happened. The best answer was that the case was a weird exception and no big deal; the second best was that there was a problem with a solution already implemented or underway; the worst was a problem that would take a while to fix. Evans recalled a case where Bezos wrote, 'Please tell me we're not doing this,' and when told that they were, replied 'euthanize me.'

Evans said that Bezos wanted people 'busting our ass every day,' and that Amazon used a number of euphemisms to describe that demand in a more acceptable way, which he summed up as 'Yes, we're a sweatshop.' He noted that he could not say all of them came directly from Bezos.

One example was the term work-life harmony, used in place of work-life balance. Evans explained that if you enjoy your work, a lot of hours may still mean your life is in harmony.

Another saying was 'work long, hard, and smart. Two out of three don't count.' Evans said working smarter did not reduce the expectation to work harder: a good idea did not let you go home early, and you were expected to produce another idea by 7:00 and another by 10:00.

Evans also said Amazon described careers as having seasons, and that Amazon might not be the right place for certain seasons, such as for parents who did not want to miss their children's lives. He added that it was often said Amazon was a place where high performers went to feel bad about themselves, because of its relentlessly high bar.

Puri invited Evans to critique him, saying he had been at Amazon in his late twenties or early thirties. Evans said that he had learned from Puri the value of 10-year plans and 10-year goals, and that after discussing them he dug out his own old 10-year plan, which he had never acted on, and began paying more attention to it.

Evans offered a criticism: that Puri did not fit at Twitch, let alone at Amazon, and was clearly entrepreneurial, like a round peg in a square hole. He said this made Puri smart but less useful inside a corporation, because 'keeping it real' does not change a machine; a real rock inside a machine just stops it. He also said Puri quickly learned that at Twitch it was acceptable to mail it in.

Sam Parr and Shaan Puri asked whether the great figures they studied would have succeeded anyway. Evans said he thought about how much of Bezos's success was inevitable and how much was a matter of circumstance. He noted that Bezos worked as a trader at D.E. Shaw and talked about an 'everything store' before loading up his car and driving to Seattle to build it.

Evans said Bezos would very likely have been successful in any case, but that timing mattered. He referred to Naval Ravikant's idea that you can live so that you are wealthy in 99 of 100 parallel lives, while acknowledging that you will not be equally wealthy in each. Evans said there was a realistic life in which Bezos founded a few companies, some succeeding and some failing, ending with perhaps $100 million, but not being Bezos. He said Bezos's signature insight was that the internet would be a huge opportunity.

Evans said that greatness requires a great person but an equally great opportunity, and that the opportunity is probably easier to change than how great you are. He used his own early Amazon career to illustrate this. Two weeks into the job, he asked his boss what he should do, and was offered either a video team or a shared ingestion platform. He chose the video team, but another colleague started the following week and had apparently been told he would lead video, so Evans received the ingestion platform instead.

Evans said the two careers turned out to be very different, and that he could not tell how much was his own ability and how much was that he was there a week earlier and took the seat another person wanted. He said he could not test that, but thought about the opportunity he effectively took from his colleague.

Puri added that Bezos had retired and then returned when the AI window opened, with a new company, and Evans said Bezos understood when there was a big pitch to swing at.

Evans described how access to Amazon's leaders narrowed as the company grew. Early on, a single security guard sat at a desk, and reporters slipped past and walked into Bezos's office and questioned him. The next day, a new firm arrived with gates and badge-in and badge-out. Later, the executive floor could be reached only with permission, and in newer buildings an elevator used by Andy Jassy could be stopped with the rider left inside, which Evans compared to Fort Knox.

Evans said leaders became progressively isolated. He recalled that they tried to stay normal early on: Bezos came to the annual picnic at a farm outside Seattle and played broomball, a game with squishy exercise balls and brooms that injured several people. As the company grew, the picnics moved to a stadium with food trucks and 10,000 people, and Evans said only about 2% of attendees would ever speak to Bezos, so Bezos stopped attending.

Asked to tell the story of Amazon Prime, Evans said he joined just after it launched. He said an engineer named Charlie Ward, who later became a VP, claims that as a principal engineer he invented the idea. Evans believed Bezos also claims to have invented it, and said he did not know whether they had the same idea at the same time or whether one was appropriating the other.

Evans said that Prime originally had no perks. It was purely a fast shipping program. He said Bezos was about to have a poor quarter, after the internet crash and during the bubble, and could see the quarter would not meet Wall Street's expectations, so he said the company needed something. The program was first called Project 100, because it had to be announced and started within 100 days.

Evans said the name was deliberately 'two-day delivery' rather than 'two-day shipping,' because Amazon could later offer one-day delivery through the post office or its own trucks without disclosing the method. He said the program began with a lot of FedEx two-day shipping behind it.

Evans said that everything at Amazon was A/B tested, and that the winning version drove sales. The testing program was called Web Lab, and it ran thousands of competing experiments at the same time, with a system that could separate the results of each one. He said the company was data driven and profit driven, and that 'nobody cares about the pixels as long as they sell.'

Several design VPs were hired and pushed for prettier pages, but Evans said the biggest measure was not what appeared on the page but how fast it loaded, because Amazon grew up when the internet was slow and slow loading was the biggest reason people abandoned pages. Adding a feature required keeping load time unchanged.

Evans said the hidden design principle was that speed equals sales, and that clarity, a consistent buy box, a clear buy button, and low prices mattered most. He said Bezos figured out that low price drove business, and that Amazon froze hiring for a while during the 2007-2008 recession.

Evans said Bezos was largely a free-market believer who thought customers should be given choice and would do the right thing. He also said Bezos would accept that many people buy things that are not wise, and would say that if Amazon did not sell those products, competitors would. Evans said Bezos often quoted Benjamin Graham's line that in the short term the market is a voting machine and in the long term a weighing machine.

Evans said Bezos had a variation of this idea. A 10% rise in Amazon's stock did not make the company 10% smarter, and a drop did not make it 10% dumber. Bezos prioritized free cash flow over optimizing for quarters, and Amazon was profitable for one quarter and then went negative again, which Bezos later saw as a mistake.

Asked about his next few years and his ten-year goal, Evans said he left Amazon to help others succeed and to pay forward his good fortune, by helping people achieve career success and career satisfaction. He said he helps people reach financial security, and then asks what they will do with it, because many people focus only on growing savings, paying off a mortgage, or paying for college.

Evans said his social impact includes running a charity in Poland that catches people displaced by the war in Ukraine as they cross the border and re-homes them. He said he gets too many coaching requests, so he plans to start a small coaching community and bring people together in masterminds to scale his work.

He summed up his ten-year vision: "My vision is create more people who have the money and the confidence to then do something good in the world."

Puri recalled that Tony Robbins, who later sold out stadiums and coached presidents, started out by calling radio stations and saying his name. Robbins would claim he could cure any phobia or trauma in seven minutes, even if it had lasted 17 years. When people called him a charlatan, he invited them to meet him at the mall on Westridge by the fountain.

Puri said that only two people sometimes showed up. In one case Robbins helped a man stop smoking, which took about 70 minutes in practice. He kept checking back and repeating the work the following weeks, performing at malls for roughly his first three years.

Evans said his early days on Twitch were grim, and that he had to learn many things, including how to deal with trolls, which are part of social media. He said he had done many reps, and that people wonder why he cannot be thrown by most questions. He said it is because he has answered 10,000 questions live, so a career question is unlikely to be one he has not heard before.

Puri said Evans always tells the truth without making the other person feel bad, even when it is not what they want to hear. Puri asked Evans for a tip on how to do this, and the transcript ends as Evans begins to refer to a lesser-known book, Leadership and Self-Deception.