Fmr Amazon Exec Stacy Saal on her New Venture, and What Makes Amazon Tick | builders podcast

0:00Anytime anybody's seeking mentorship, the best thing you can do is come prepared. Otherwise, it's just a conversation. And while conversations can be fun and interesting, they probably won't get you the directed support you're looking for if you can't clearly ask for it.

0:21It's our 51st episode back after a break from the holidays, and this is a really good one. I speak with former Amazon exec, Stacey Saul, about her experiences running billion-dollar businesses there for over a decade. We discuss what makes Amazon tick and also her new startup studio and venture fund called Jelly Collective, which launched earlier this month. In the first segment is my weekly chat with Marty Beckerman, where we discuss how cities are reusing vacant office space and a new trippy type of corporate retreat. And lastly, if you're interested in other episodes pertaining to experiences at large tech companies, check out episode 18 about launching the Xbox with former Microsoft VP Rick Thompson.

1:11I'm here as always with editor-in-chief of the B Newsletter, Marty Beckerman. We've had a bit of a hiatus due to the holidays. Good to see you, Marty. What'd you do over New Year's and the break? I took down my Christmas decorations just for this podcast. Okay, good. I kind of believe that. You were late taking them down? It was a good excuse to finally go ahead and do it. We looked this up. Apparently, you can do it until January 6th, and it's socially acceptable because of the 12 days of Christmas. Oh, all right. Yeah, that makes sense. The 12 days of Christmas start on Christmas. I never knew that.

1:46And after that, you have to get your decorations down. All right. Especially if you're doing a podcast. You complied. I remember back when the pandemic started and we were all working from home and then working from home in remote work, hybrid work has become a real thing. And I thought, like many folks, what's going to happen to all the office space that's downtown? Certainly many companies are coming back, but not all of them. How are cities adapting to this? You write about this in the latest installment of the newsletter. Right. It's interesting because 90 % of companies now are back at the office, but there's all this empty corporate real estate still sitting without any companies in them.

2:33And so a question is, why is that? Apparently, a lot of companies need less space now. They're doing hot desking, and they're not in five days a week. So they need less space. They still have some hybrid workers. And also, modern companies want modern buildings. They don't want buildings from the 1950s, 60s, 70s. And so there's a lot of empty offices. What cities are starting to do is trying to knock out two birds with one stone because there's a housing crisis. Rents and real estate have gone through the roof. There's a homelessness crisis. There's not enough housing. And so you have all this empty office space.

3:16every major city is now looking at converting these office buildings into apartments and homes rezoning. And the White House has actually pledged billions of dollars to help cities do this. So soon we might all be actually literally living at the office. Okay. So something else you were covering in the newsletter is unique. I've been on some cool company retreats, but nothing like the one that you talk about that's hot with Silicon Valley these days. Right. So apparently the new hot benefit, you know, nap pods are so 2010s and ping pong tables. Nobody cares about that. The new hot benefit is doing ketamine with your co-workers and having psychedelic retreats.

4:07There's a company that caters to putting together these retreats and these events. Tech is certainly having a bit of a psychonaut period. So you can either do it locally or you can fly your team to Peru for an ayahuasca, a week of ayahuasca. So yeah, I don't know. I don't know if we're planning one of those, but you know. If we are, Marty, you're invited. What will it run us to take the entire B newsletter crew to Peru? I'll have to do the math on that. So, OK. All right. That sounds good. Good to see you. And we'll turn in next week. All right. Thanks a lot, John.

4:59Hi, Stacey. How are you? Good to see you. Thanks for being on the pod. Hi, John. Nice to see you too. I'm excited to talk to you today. And I really want to start with Amazon, where you spent a decade or maybe a little over a decade running a number of billion dollar businesses. What an opportunity. Kitchen you ran, Prime Now, Wireless, Prime Air. And I want to get into in the beginning of our conversation, things that really make Amazon tick and how they've been able to just grow and grow all these years. I'll tee things up with one of my own experiences. I think it was my first day in the office or second day in the office.

5:39And I'm in a meeting to review the monthly numbers of Amazon Fresh, where we work together. I sit down and there's a document waiting for me, or maybe it was being passed out on a comfort room table. And it was about 10 pages long. The document was quantitative. It was descriptive. It was qualitative. And everyone spent the first 15 or 20 minutes reading the document and then had an organized and thoughtful discussion about his contents. And I just remember being totally blown away by this and saying Amazon is different and this is really cool. So that's one of my many stories about the time that I was there.

6:24Tell me from your perspective what makes Amazon tick. Yeah, I mean, I think what you just described, the document, the narrative, the six pager goes by many names, but it is part of the process of what makes Amazon tick and operate. And I think Amazon, my synthesis of what makes Amazon Amazon is what makes any company successful is when they have a clear drumbeat, heartbeat and brain. I've recently coined this sort of framework for thinking about it. And the drumbeat is the clear operating rhythms, how things get done within a company. And Amazon has very hardened processes for how they operate from their OP1 and OP2 process, their WBR, QBR, MBR process, the weekly business review, monthly business review, quarterly business review, the process for reviewing each of the businesses, the narrative process, as you described, are good examples of just the drumbeat.

7:21beat the rhythm of the business and the structure. The heartbeat is really the culture. And I think Amazon has culture very well wired. Their leadership principles are far more than words on the wall. They're deeply codified and they drive both the language for how the company operates and really define sort of how people work together to get things done. And then the brain. For me, the brain of the company, and I don't mean Jeff Bezos' brain or Andy Jassy's or Jeff Wilkie's, although they have remarkable brains. I think it's really the collective brain of the company, these clear and common goals that allow people to really understand where they're trying to go and then can empower them to deliver against those.

8:05And that, of course, that the people have the right wisdom and skills to get things done to solve new and novel problems, but that it's more of a framework and a set of processes than somebody who's done it before because oftentimes at Amazon, they're solving problems that have never been tackled before. Yeah. I want to go into each of those. It's a really cool framework for thinking about that. Maybe we can start with the heartbeat and the leadership principles. For those listening who don't know, you can search Amazon leadership principles and you can read them. They're free for everybody to see.

8:41They're ones like dive deep, invent and simplify bias for action. And in my experience, it was really cool because you could, if you were trying to hire for a position and you're like, what are we looking for? Everybody would name the specific leadership principles you're hiring for. Or when you're talking about what somebody's strengths are or where somebody's areas of improvements are, you say, oh, they're really strong at dive deep. And everybody in Amazon knew what that meant and what somebody would be really good at. I just thought that was very, very cool. Anything to add there in terms of your experience?

9:16Well, I would start with, because it always hurts my heart when people don't start with customer obsession. So I think one very common... Oh, gosh, I should have started with that one. No, you're okay. One common trait of all Amazonians, and I tell people that my blood runs yellow. I really pride myself on the leadership principles being core to the fabric of my being, a big part of my ethos. But the one that resonates with me the most is customer obsession. We work for our customers and to bring value to customers. And then, like you said, there's 14 others. Some come, some go over time as the company has evolved.

9:52They've expired some and introduced new ones. But they really, unlike many other companies, not all, but many, really absorbed them. And they really, at least, I left Amazon in 2021, but Amazon leadership principles were still really core to the way the company operated. And one of the things that really set sort of its ability, its heartbeat to continue to scale and grow and propagate more Amazonians as it continued to scale. And one of the things I remember you doing specifically in Amazon Fresh, and it probably happened in many places, were have meetings where leaders would talk about specific customer issues, whether it was like an email or whether it's a phone conversation to understand at a micro level why a customer might not be as happy as they could be.

10:45and people would actually take real actions on these things and follow up to satisfy a specific customer is really cool. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. It's very easy for real information to be lost in data and an anecdote listening to a real customer's voice and understanding their actual problem and pulling on that thread and seeing if there's something there often uncovers something much more important to customers than what you see in the sort of graduated aggregated metrics. Yeah, related to back to heartbeat is how do you reflect on the Amazon hiring process? It's very robust. What would you say about it?

11:26Yeah, I think that's great. I think Amazon's bar raising process or hiring process is just one of many virtuous cycles that you see at Amazon. So Amazon has a principle that we raise the bar, they raise the bar, I still say we raise the bar with every hire. That means that for each person that comes in, they should be as good or better than the halfway mark of the team. That effectively raises the bar of the overall organization if you're only bringing people in at the top half and above. And then that has a knockdown effect on the review process, which is now the whole population has gotten better and people that might have met the bar before no longer do.

12:07And so that's part of the top grading or review process that comes out the other side. As you said, the hiring process is about hiring for leadership principles and fit for Amazon from a cultural perspective, as well as a match on skills and experience. And that's what allows people to come into Amazon and be Amazonian and be successful. The bar raising process has sort of a trying to think of the right phrase and it's not coming to me, but this sort of cultural nuance, which is there's always a bar raiser. There's somebody who is responsible from another organization for making sure that even if the team really wants to fill the job and wants to fill it quickly, that they're really waiting for a candidate that's going to raise the bar and make not only the team better, but the overall organization better.

12:51Yeah, I remember early on when I brought in a resume, I think, to be discussed in the bar raiser for something I was hiring for. And the bar raiser was in the room. The bar raiser started asking me questions about whether or not this person was qualified and what to interview for based on the resume. And I was like, wow, this person is taking this really seriously. And it upped my game. I was obviously taking the position seriously, but this brought it to a whole other level about how there was some there was some phrase where where it's it's like it's sort of like about you don't want to be risky when you're hiring somebody.

13:33Yes. We'd rather risk passing on a great candidate than risk bringing in somebody who doesn't raise the bar. Because the penalty or the sort of challenge of dealing with a poor performer or having to manage somebody either up or out is far higher than continuing the interview process. Yeah. And for anybody who's kind of interested in this, who's listening, I highly recommend you read about this. It was really fascinating to see how Amazon did that at scale. Talking about the brain part of the framework, could you describe how ideas are vetted at Amazon? because we all had ideas in the grocery business, which is where I spent my time at Amazon.

14:23And with a company so big, how do you choose which ideas to execute on? Yeah, I mean, the ideas and the ability to bring them forward and then how do you choose are almost two different questions. The doc writing process and the ideation process is available to anybody at Amazon. Anybody can, at least the time I was there, again, I'll have to keep those with a caveat on anything I say. I'm no longer at Amazon and haven't been, but I think a lot of this still prevails, which was the process for writing a document and generating an idea and getting feedback is the standard Amazon six page document.

14:58Write up the document, get lots of feedback, get as much data as you can, and then expose it through your organization to get additional feedback and support. And if there's support, continue to run it up the chain for funding. Now, I joined Amazon in 2008. And so the hurdle for ideas in 2008 was we were looking for$100 million ideas. As we were in fresh in our time there, the ideas had to be billion-dollar ideas, right? Really, really big total addressable market. Now, Amazon's a global company. So good ideas often can get to a billion dollars. But big ideas within each of the verticals. And of course, Amazon has expanded, you know, well beyond consumer and AWS and Alexa and, you know, sort of deep tech sort of other areas.

15:47But, you know, it's not hard to get an idea in front of either your S team member or in some cases in front of the full S team to get feedback and to, you know, get funding. And one of the other things that I would often say about Amazon is it's. And this is something I would explain to people because they'd say, tell me about working at Amazon. I would say Amazon is an umbrella of a bunch of startups, right? That's really, especially in the time I was there, some of the businesses now are really big businesses. But when I was there, none of the businesses by themselves were particularly like industry driving.

16:22We were rarely the number one, occasionally we were the number two, right? We were often the underdogs. And that depends a little bit on how you frame the industry, right? When you say e-commerce, okay, Amazon's a winner in e-commerce. But when you say kitchen, we were not the most dominant player in kitchen. When you say wireless, we were pretty small. When you say books, now Amazon's a much bigger bookseller now, but even back in the day, there was still Barnes & Noble and many, many other local bookstores, etc. Cloud, like a dominant player in cloud, but there's plenty of very, very relevant, incredible competitors in the cloud space with Microsoft and Google and many others.

17:04So, you know, when you get into Amazon Video and Prime and sort of those things, like there's a lot of really great innovation on behalf of customers. But again, none of them, you know, particularly at the time I was there, were necessarily the biggest in their field. So, again, those all of these small businesses were sharing sort of the common infrastructure, the common processes around, you know, how do we do things? What are our leadership principles? How do we get things done? and then the sort of mechanistic ways of working to run the business that allowed each of these smaller startups and smaller businesses to run independently and move really fast.

17:43Yeah, that totally makes sense. And I want to talk about something else before I do. I can't skip over the drumbeat part of what you were saying with the framework. So in your time at Amazon, you worked on a lot of businesses that are pretty different from each other. And probably one of the ways that you were able to do that is that each, each businesses run the same in, in some form. Could you talk about a rotation at Amazon, like what that concept is and why it's so important to Amazon and rotation is moving from, you know, from, from job to job where some companies really struggle with that.

18:25It's like a turf war about who gets the best people. And that just is not what happens at Amazon. At least that wasn't my experience. No. In fact, we encourage the best people to rotate and to go make their mark in other businesses. So there are a couple of things that make Amazon really different. And I think it does go back a little bit to the ways of working are the same. It's not uncommon in other companies to have different organizations run their business rhythms even completely different, which makes rotating jarring and a bit of a tax. It's almost like you're changing companies even when you're rotating within the same company.

18:59So the other components of the drumbeat, the heartbeat, and the brain having common ways of operating make for really efficient rotations and allow somebody to hit the ground running pretty fast and taking on a new challenge. I'm a big believer that But over time, you have a lot of energy. At the beginning, you have a lot of energy for solving whatever the biggest problems are that you have on your plate. And you pull everything off the back burner and everything comes up and you turn it all on hot. And then you start having your pots boil over and you have to start pushing some of them to the back.

19:34And you make some progress, some great progress on certain things. But your energy and enthusiasm for some of the bigger problems that got pushed to the back sort of wanes. And you have either, you know, I'm going to switch analogies here. You run against that brick wall a couple of times and you run out of energy and willingness to do it. And so part of the rotation process or one of the things that I really love about it is the person who comes in behind you grabs those pots off the back and they bring them forward and they make incremental progress on it. And then over time, they get a little sailor, a little tired, or they, you know, are ready for a new challenge and they can go pull different pots off the back of some other stove.

20:12and you get sort of the rotation process is not just about making it interesting for the human that's rotating. It means the new person comes in with new energy and new enthusiasm for solving either the problems that the previous leader wasn't able to solve or new and different problems or wants to take the business in a different direction to continually innovate on behalf of customers. And so I think the rotation process for me was great because I got to tackle and lead so many different kinds of businesses and learn all kinds of different things, operate different businesses at different sizes.

20:45And so for me, that's really around a framework of how do I solve problems and how do I apply those problem-solving skills to any business? And probably as a consequence, direct or indirect, is you also become crazy networked because you're working with all these different people at a global company. And my last question about Amazon, I promise, one of my experiences working with you there is you are a very, very active mentor at Amazon. I think that's probably fair to say. And in your mind, what was the role of mentorship for you? And what would you recommend to someone who doesn't have a mentor?

21:25I mean, I'm sure some of it was about navigating Amazon, which for all its benefits can be complex and challenging sometimes. And then also just having someone to talk to. Yeah, no, thanks. First, thanks for recognizing it. I do. I love mentoring people. I love helping people. I love helping them grow, helping them flourish, giving them permission to be themselves, which I think is what most people really need from a mentor is helping to shape their best selves. And so, you know, I think that is super important. And for any leader out there to really actively visit themselves on, are they doing their part?

22:02Are they doing their job to make sure that the people around them have the support they need outside of their own organization? I mean, some of the most common questions I would get, as you mentioned, were around navigating Amazon, career development. How do I sort of get where I want to go? How do I think about where I should want to go? And then one that I would get a lot as a woman in business is how do I manage work-life balance? And I would get that, frankly, probably equal parts from men and women. Now, I recently did an audit of my network, and there's about my entire LinkedIn network. Just a little over 10 % of my network is female.

22:39So I think the fact that my mentees are somewhat balanced is that there's a disproportionate number of men in my network. And that has always made me think about my responsibility for making sure that the women and underrepresented minorities, the people that are less likely to be able to have seen success or know what success looks like or how to navigate the success that I am available to them. and my own responsibility and my self-dubbed responsibility has grown over the years as I have come to better understand and recognize that it is and was a challenge for me and it is and continues to be a challenge for anybody.

23:18And I strongly encourage everyone to have a mentor, multiple mentors if possible, because there's few people that are going to have superpowers in the areas that you're trying to develop. And I think it is really important that people identify mentors that they think are particularly good at the thing or things that they're trying to develop in themselves. So I think that's one thing. I think the other piece is I think most people need to sponsor, particularly the women and underrepresented minorities, but anybody that thinks they could be advantaged and everybody is advantaged with somebody who says, I take as part of my responsibility to make sure you get where you want to go in your career.

23:56And that when the opportunity to bring your name up in a room comes up, I bring your name up and I suggest you for projects and opportunities. And that can be anything from, you know, your boss, you know, your boss's boss, a leader in another area of your company, or even just somebody broader in the industry that they know who you are. They know what you want and they're willing to, again, bring your name up. For those folks that you mentored, that got the most out of their relationship? What was their focus? I guess, how would I prepare to get the most out of working with Stacey or anyone as a mentor?

24:40Yeah, again, I think it's being clear on what are you trying to develop? So what are the areas? Where are you trying to go? Or what are you trying to develop? Or what are you trying to get better at? Be as transparent and honest as you can about that and then ask for their support there. I would say anytime anybody's seeking mentorship, the best thing you can do is come prepared. Otherwise, it's just a conversation. And while conversations can be fun and interesting, they probably won't get you the directed support you're looking for if you can't clearly ask for it. So are you looking for support and career guidance and advice?

25:15Are you looking for support in how to get the promotion you're looking for? Are you looking for support and having a difficult conversation, conversation around compensation, considering changing jobs and want to think about what are the things you should be weighing, work-life balance? And I am going to just, because you have an audience and the opportunity to maybe just address that one head on. Companies are not people. Companies are machines and they will take everything you give. So the best advice I can give anyone and everyone on establishing work-life balance or balance in your life. Some people don't like the phrase work-life balance.

25:48It's all life. Working is life. Home is life. Kids are life. Working out is life. Sleep is life. And all of these things are important. You are the human in the relationship. It is incumbent on you to establish your priorities and what you are willing to give in the patterns. Amazon and any other company will take, take, take, take, take. They're rarely going to say thank you. It's just part of working at a company, right? You get paid. So that is your thanks. Like good managers, good leaders will say thank you, but you're working for your paycheck. Most people are. If you overown business, maybe you're getting more satisfaction out of it.

26:26But you have to define what the priorities are in your life and how much you're going to give and then work around those constraints. I think that is superb advice. And hopefully everybody takes that to heart. I want to shift gears and talk about your new venture, which I know you're really pumped up about. It's called Jelly Collective. What's behind the name? And for those who don't know, what is a startup studio? Yeah. Well, I'm going to go back to the question you skipped, if I can. Do we have enough time to do that one to talk about sort of my in-between time? Oh, yeah. Just because it does lead real.