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**Steve Yegge:** ...who had better offers. Yeah. Batting a thousand. And then one day somebody said, "No." This is what happened to Amazon, too. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Did you just like try and pay them up, like "Listen, I've got a perfect record. You're ruining my perfect record"? What's the situation here? |
**Steve Yegge:** No, no, I was just like "Why? Why?" There was one dude I was trying to get; he was really good... And I went golfing with him. Him and our mutual buddy. And I even had a deal with him that if I beat him on this one hole, then he had to come work for me. It was a par three, and I got two feet from the p... |
**Jerod Santo:** Wow. That only happens in the movies, Steve. That's not how it works out in real life. |
**Steve Yegge:** Yeah, it was wild. We both tried really hard. I guess he really wanted to go to Facebook. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. I mean, he could have just disagreed... I mean, it's his life, right? \[laughs\] |
**Steve Yegge:** But I mean, I come up with compelling arguments. I'm making a convincing story. Okay, here it is - you've got to be a storyteller. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** This is something Jeff believes in, I believe. I'm pretty sure that was in -- I think it was in the Working Backwards book, potentially... Just like the concept and ability to tell a story. Because that's kind of, I think, what they did with some of the reverse -- the working backwards with the Prim... |
**Steve Yegge:** \[34:21\] I mean, it's important. Of course. I mean, every company should be doing it. Your story for your users. It's your user story. And we often make the mistake of putting something out there without a story, but it's like a lot of cool, flashy tech, or this or that. Jeff usually didn't make that ... |
Eric Schmidt was the CEO when I joined, and he was a good CEO. I really liked working for him. And he was the let 1000 flowers bloom type. He wanted us to sort of be an innovation factory. Basically, you put a bunch of brains in a jar and see what they come up with. There were problems with that approach. One was that ... |
Jeff would put stuff out there, and it would be awful. It would be awful. Did you ever read about the time the guy got evicted from his apartment because we shipped him that book? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** No. |
**Steve Yegge:** It doesn't ring a bell? |
**Jerod Santo:** No. |
**Steve Yegge:** Would you like to hear that story...? |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] Well, I definitely want to now... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Please tell us... |
**Steve Yegge:** So the most eye-opening thing that you can do is go work the customer service queues at your company. It doesn't matter where you work. That's part of the story -- because you're gonna get the tail end of the story from them. And Bezos was obsessed with this, and he would have a weekly meeting that I w... |
There was one bucket for happy stories, which was positive feedback, and that was usually the lowest... But it was in the top 10. And then there was -- the number one was always "Where's my stuff?" Bezos had this idea, which I think every leader in every company should emulate, which is "Get your people--" Grab had thi... |
And so we got on these field trips, and one day -- and every single time I went out, there was some crazy emergency, which suggests that they're happening all day long at Amazon. So I'm reading this mail from this guy, and he's like "Dear Amazon - you know, longtime shopper, first-time caller... I just wanna let you kn... |
And then on the same day, there was an -- so that one actually led to me walking by a room with a bunch of VPs where there were ants written in giant letters on the board, right? |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. |
**Steve Yegge:** The reason for that one was that somebody had been eating food while they were packing the box, and food would fall in, it would sit in the post office, and ants would go in the box. So they'd put food away. This was at the beginning of taking everything away from the workers. It's horrible. |
The other thing that happened was that this guy goes -- I mean, the long story short, man... We had an off bug with the bank, where we went into a retry loop where we would reauth -- like, you know on auth they put a dollar charge or whatever on your card... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. Then they revert it. |
**Steve Yegge:** \[38:00\] And then you don't charge until shipping time. But you auth, and it does actually like freeze up a tiny amount, right? But if you get stuck in a loop -- and the auth at the time was probably more like three bucks, or something. So this guy got like just enough in our loop that -- he was using... |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay... |
**Steve Yegge:** And he called us. And the weirdest thing, guys, is that the people who get shafted the worst, the ones who get really, really, really hit hard by our bugs - they're always the nicest. And the ones who are screaming at us over a nickel, with froth coming out of their mouth... It's just so interesting to... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Don't say "at gunpoint". You almost said "at gunpoint", didn't you? \[laughter\] |
**Jerod Santo:** He stopped himself. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So close! |
**Steve Yegge:** You know, to make sure that they got this dude back into his apartment. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So you saved the day. Or proverbially, the you, the Amazon you, saved the day. |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, they also caused the problem. |
**Steve Yegge:** We ruined it in the first place... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, exactly. |
**Steve Yegge:** But this is the key, is they did this over and over again, on purpose... Because you'd call Amazon and you'd be like "You guys screwed me, and I'm mad!" And then we would say, "Oh, we are so, so, so sorry." And we had a pyramid of professional ass-kissers to deal with journalists, and stuff, that would... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. |
**Steve Yegge:** And it was because we had no QA. It was like "What was he thinking?" and yet it worked. It was just the most bizarre loyalty creation thing. But by being customer-first, it meant that if they had a problem, he would fix it. And sometimes the problem was pretty terrible. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, I think getting evicted from your apartment because you bought a book is pretty terrible... That's a bad outcome... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Ants? And frozen accounts? I mean, that's a double-whammy. |
**Steve Yegge:** Yeah... I mean, we would do simpler stuff, like -- in the early days, the distribution center was just a big hash table, because you have way more skews than you have space, and so you have random items sitting next to each other on shelves. And so inevitably, statistically, some religious family gets ... |
But you know, stepping back, the way Bezos ran the company - I've talked about him over the years... He did so many things right, and then he did so many things that I've found just personally, just morally objectionable. It's nuanced. Same thing with Bill Gates. Bill obviously did a lot of stuff that even the governme... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. Yeah, it's tough, because especially when you do it -- if you do it publicly, or in the "town square", you have a lot of... When you speak with nuance, and you speak highly of certain aspects of a person, like you are... You know, like, this was really good for the company; this aspect of him. |
\[42:04\] There's nuance there. Like you said, you're not just with a broad brush saying "Therefore Jeff Bezos is awesome in every way, and I love him, and I want to be just like him in every single way." But it's hard to get that across sometimes, and you can receive criticism as if you're lionizing the man because yo... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, you have to be binary on these decisions, Jerod. That's how it is these days. If somebody's a villain in one way, shape, or form, villain in all the ways. There's no coming back. |
**Steve Yegge:** We do tend to get that way. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** We do, yeah. |
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