The challenge at any established company, when you go back to this question, is how do other established companies build that other business to rival or exceed the core business that they've got, is that the demands of your core business will always soak up all of the bandwidth of your leaders. And even if one of them is assigned as a part-time job, in addition to managing some large business in the company, they'll also be responsible for some innovation. It tends not to work, to quote Dave Limp, who is the senior vice president of the Amazon device business, the best way to ensure that you fail to invent something is by making it somebody's part-time

job. Welcome to In-Depth, a new show that surfaces tactical advice, founders and startup leaders need to grow their teams, their companies and themselves. I'm Brett Berson, a partner at First Round, and we're a venture capital firm that helps startups like Notion, Roblox, Uber and Square tackle company building firsts. Through over 400 interviews on the review, we've shared standout company building advice. The kind that comes from those willing to skip the talking points and go deeper into not just what to do, but how to do it. With our new podcast In-Depth, you can listen in to these deeper conversations every single week. Learn more and subscribe today at firstround.com. Today's episode of In-Depth, I am really excited to be joined by two guests, Bill Carr and Colin Breyer. They are former Amazon execs who have written a new book that's out this week. And on the heels of last week's big news, the Jeff Bezos will be stepping down as CEO of Amazon. Their book, Working Backwards, Could Not Be More Well-Timed. It's a great read for those who are curious about incoming CEO Andy Jassy and the business practices and cultural foundation that will enable the company to continue succeeding without its founder at the helm. So just to ground our conversation, I wanted to share more details about why Bill and Colin are the perfect people to explain the underpinnings of why Amazon works. Bill started at Amazon in 1999 as a senior product manager for DVD video and went on to launch and run the prime video, Amazon Studios and Amazon Music Businesses before he left the company in 2014. He then served as the COO of OfferUp before teaming up with Colin to write this book and start a consulting business to coach executives on how to implement the management practices developed at Amazon. Colin joined Amazon in 1998 as the director for Amazon Associates and Amazon Web Services programs. Then he spent two years in an incredible role as Jeff Bezos' technical advisor or shadow, working with the Amazon CEO on a daily basis to help him with business strategy, technology and operations. In his last role at Amazon before he left in 2010, Colin was the COO for IMDB. He spent a couple years in Singapore as the COO of an e-commerce company called Redmark, which was sold to Alibaba. What stands out for my conversation with the two of them is how Bezos and the leadership team invented not just a slew of products, but an invention machine or a remarkably different way to run a company. We start off by digging into why Amazon has uniquely been able to launch so many different seemingly unrelated businesses. And how they've cultivated a culture of long-term thinking and true customer obsession. Bill and Colin tell the creation stories of the Kindle, AWS and Prime, sharing granular details about the working backwards process, which centers around the now famous press release frequently asked questions document that helps clearly define the customer problem before anything gets built. From an inside look at how players like Jeff Bezos and incoming CEO Andy Jassy operated up close to the projects that didn't work out and the inspiration Amazon's leadership team has taken from Toyota's manufacturing line. There's tons of fantastic details here to learn from. We get into what it means to be a great operator and the art of how leaders can learn to dive deep, but not micromanage, which given the name of this podcast was a topic we had to explore. In learning, we end on what it's like to be a fly on the wall during Amazon's interview process. And the mistakes Bill learned from after nearly a thousand interviews as a bar raiser. I think Bill and Colin do a particularly good job at not just sharing Amazon's practices, but highlighting what other companies can learn from them. Whether it's their lessons on why innovation can't be a part-time job, or the perils of taking a skills forward approach to exploring adjacent business opportunities, or why mechanisms are more important than good intentions.