Jeff Bezos once told former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo that a good leader trusts his soul. Now, Costolo says Twitter’s newest CEO should take that same advice to heart.
Shortly after Costolo became Twitter’s CEO in 2010, his team sat down to strategize with Amazon’s billionaire founder and investor, who took a stake in the company two years ago. In the meeting, Bezos told him not to run Twitter the way “the last person or the person before” ran it.
“He looked around the table and said, ‘The thing everyone needs to remember is that there are many ways to be successful,'” Costolo recently told Kara Swisher, host of the New York Times Opinion podcast “Sway.” . “‘Trying to read any management book or biography, then running the company that way will create misery for you and everyone around you.'”
In other words, Bezos’ advice wasn’t a jab at Costolo’s predecessor, former Twitter CEO Evan Williams — it was his way of telling Costolo to run the social media platform on his own terms.
Costolo said Bezos explained how his business approach differed from that of Apple’s Steve Jobs, who was selective about the projects he took on. Bezos, in contrast, said he “loved to do everything” and that his team often “had to talk [him] out of “ideas”.
The anecdote was intended as advice to pass on to Twitter’s new CEO, Parag Agrawal, who took over the reins from founder Jack Dorsey in November. Costolo said that if Agrawal follows Bezos’ advice to “be himself” and do things his own way, “he’ll be totally fine.”
Bezos’ advice came from his own experience: He has become one of the richest people in the world by doing things his own way. He quit his job in investment banking in 1994 to start Amazon, then a virtual bookstore. Now, the market value of the e-commerce giant is at $1.49 trillion.
Amazon’s founder says he’s achieved success by taking risks in new ventures — like launching Amazon Prime, creating the Kindle and buying Whole Foods.
“If you come up with a business idea and there’s no risk involved, it’s probably already being done…[and] doing well,” Bezos said at Amazon’s re:March conference in 2019. “So you have to have something that might not work, and you have to accept that your business is in many ways an experiment and it might fail.”
While many of Bezos’s risks have resulted in triumph, some have been followed by failure.
In 2014, Amazon was hit with a $170 million fee for unsold Fire phones. The company also closed 87 pop-up stores and shut down its restaurant delivery service in 2019. Most recently, Amazon was sued by New York State in February 2021 for “gross disregard for health and safety requirements” at some of its warehouses during the Covid-19 pandemic.
But for Bezos, risk is the price of acceptance for success. “We need big failures if we’re going to move the needle — billion-dollar-scale failures,” Bezos said at re:Mars. “And if we’re not, we’re not swinging hard enough.”
Bezos did not immediately respond to CNBC Make It’s request for comment.
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