Strategic Intuition

This past week an ex-Amazon/current Google engineer, Steve Yegge, accidentally posted an internal memo he had written to his external blog. It has blown the socks off everyone in the tech industry, myself included (I am the mirror image of Yegge, an ex-Googler about to embark on a career at Amazon.)

In the blog post, Yegge extols how Google, a company that does an immense number of things incredibly well, has thus far really missed the boat on building a platform. Given that platforms are probably the holy grail in the technology world right now (Apple, Facebook, and Amazon are all fighting for dominance), this is a pretty big deal. Yegge writes insightfully about the engineering and culture challenges that have held Google back. But more interesting perhaps is how he describes a spark of strategic insight that Amazon’s fearless leader, Jeff Bezos, had that has helped the company pull ahead. Here is how he describes it:

“Bezos realized long before the vast majority of Amazonians that Amazon needs to be a platform. You wouldn't really think that an online bookstore needs to be an extensible, programmable platform. Would you? Well, the first big thing Bezos realized is that the infrastructure they'd built for selling and shipping books and sundry could be transformed into an excellent repurposable computing platform. So now they have the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, and the Amazon Elastic MapReduce, and the Amazon Relational Database Service, and a whole passel' o' other services…I'm not really sure how Bezos came to this realization -- the insight that he can't build one product and have it be right for everyone. But it doesn't matter, because he gets it…”

Yegge writes that he doesn’t’ know how Bezos came to this insight – but if we use some of the tools that innovation theorists use to understand creative thinking, it begins to become clear. In his description, Yegge points out several things that Bezos did: He learned from his company’s history, made a connection between seemingly disparate businesses (online book sales and cloud computing) and was willing to completely change his strategic vision and viewpoint that he could build one product for everyone. Bingo! There’s a reason why he is being hailed as the next Steve Jobs.

Yegge also goes on to tell incredibly interesting and personal anecdotes about the daunting task of presenting ideas to Bezos, a man he describes as a “ hyper-intelligent alien with a tangential interest in human affairs.” While at Amazon this summer, I saw people literally shaking in their Tevas preparing to present to Bezos. His inscrutable strategic intuition, his laser-focused, take no prisoners, iterate until perfection leadership style permeates all of Amazon culture. And when I saw that, I knew I wanted to work there. It might not always be fun, but it is a hell of an education.

Yegge blogpost links:

https://plus.google.com/112678702228711889851/posts/eVeouesvaVX

https://plus.google.com/110981030061712822816/posts/AaygmbzVeRq

image courtesy of cnn.com http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/27/tech/innovation/jeff-bezos-next-steve-jobs/index.html