- Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos have opposite approaches to business, says former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo.
- Jobs believed in saying no to most things; Bezos once told Costolo that he wants to do everything.
- But Bezos cautioned against copying any approach: “Be yourself,” he told Costolo.
Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs may be two of the most successful and well-known tech executives of all time, but they seem to have polar opposite approaches to business.
That’s according to former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, who spoke with reporter Kara Swisher on an episode of The New York Times’ “Sway” podcast published Monday.
Costolo described a meeting he had with Bezos to discuss strategy when he first became CEO of Twitter (Costolo took over at Twitter in 2009, replacing Twitter co-founder Ev Williams). As Costolo recounts, another person present at the Bezos meeting brought up the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs and his approach to running a company: Jobs famously believed that “saying ‘no’ to 1,000 things ” was the key to innovation.
Bezos, it seems, believes just the opposite.
“Bezos looked at the person and said, yeah, well, I like to do everything,” Costolo told Swisher. “And he did that big Jeff Bezos laugh that he’s so famous for and it’s so, so brilliant and infectious. And he said, look, my team has to stop me from doing things.”
Bezos is famous for taking risks and has often said that failure is an essential part of building a successful company. Over the years, Amazon has had several failures, including the infamous Fire Phone, which resulted in a $170 million write-off for unsold devices.
“If the size of your failures isn’t growing, you’re not going to invent at a scale that can actually move the needle,” he wrote in the company’s 2019 letter to shareholders.
But in the meeting with Costolo, Bezos went on to say that no one should try to copy his approach — or Jobs’s, for that matter.
“The thing everyone needs to remember is that there are many ways to be successful. And trying to read a management book or biography and then run the company that way will create misery for you and everyone around you. you,” he said. “Be yourself and don’t try to run this company the way the last person ran it or the person before that or the person before that.”
Costolo’s story is particularly relevant to Twitter’s new CEO, Parag Agrawal, who was named the company’s chief executive in November. Agrawal takes over from Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder and two-time CEO, who had led the company since Costolo stepped down in 2015. As for Costolo, he is working with startups at 01 Advisors, a venture capital firm that he co-founded in 2016 with former Twitter COO Adam Bain.
