Jeff Bezos Brings Signature Management Style To $6 Billion AI Startup

Amazon.com Inc. founder and former Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos honed his leadership philosophy running one of the world’s largest companies. Now he’s bringing his management skills to an artificial-intelligence startup with fewer than 100 employees. 

Project Prometheus, which Bezos co-founded with scientist Vik Bajaj, will use AI to accelerate engineering and manufacturing in fields like aerospace and automobiles, the New York Times reported. The startup has $6.2 billion in funding, sourced in part from Bezos himself, and employees counted in the dozens, some of whom were poached from leading AI labs like OpenAI and Google DeepMind. 

As co-CEO with Bajaj, Bezos is back in a formal executive post for the first time since stepping down from Amazon.com in 2021. He returns at a time when all the rules for managing companies seem to be in flux, as entrepreneurs like Tesla Inc.’s Elon Musk, Nvidia Corp.’s Jensen Huang and Airbnb Inc.’s Brian Chesky challenge conventional MBA wisdom about what good management looks like.

Another dramatic shift since Bezos founded Amazon in 1994 is the rise of AI-native startups built around ultra-lean teams — a reversal of the old playbook that equated headcount expansion with business growth. When Bezos left the CEO seat at Amazon he oversaw more than 1.6 million employees. On the company’s most recent earnings call, current CEO Andy Jassy attributed thousands of recent layoffs to ongoing efforts to eliminate layers of bureaucracy after years of over-hiring. 

Some parts of Bezos’s philosophies may require a reboot for the AI era. For example, his preference for lengthy memos with narratives indicating deep thinking by the author may be outdated now that workers can use generative AI tools to do the writing for them. But his Darwinian approach to work culture jibes with what’s expected now at many of the hottest AI startups. And some of his management ideals, like keeping teams lean and fast and making them exceptionally talent-dense, will arguably never go out of style.

Bezos invented or adopted a unique set of management practices at Amazon and shared them over the years in shareholder letters and interviews. Among them:

• Write a memo: Bezos was famously no fan of slide decks. He wanted memos, preferably six pages long, with an introduction, goals and plenty of data. And he wanted them read in silence, as a group, at the start of meetings. The idea was that writing a memo forced people to clearly and rigorously think through their ideas, and reading them together ensured that everyone gave consideration to the ideas.

• Keep teams small: Bezos espoused a “two-pizza rule,” which stipulated that teams should be small enough to be fed with two pizzas. The point was to minimize bureaucracy and give each team clear ownership over a single mission.

• Make two types of decisions, and understand the difference: Bezos insisted that teams make decisions quickly when stakes were low, referring to those choices as reversible “two-way doors.” He described the philosophy in his 2015 letter to shareholders: "Some decisions are consequential and irreversible or nearly irreversible — one-way doors — and these decisions must be made methodically, carefully, slowly, with great deliberation and consultation,” he said. “But most decisions aren’t like that — they are changeable, reversible — they’re two-way doors.”

• Own the process: Bezos warned that as organizations became larger and more complex, there is a tendency to fixate on processes for their own sake. “If you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing… You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you’re doing the process right. Gulp. It’s not that rare to hear a junior leader defend a bad outcome with something like, ‘Well, we followed the process,’” Bezos wrote in his 2016 letter to shareholders. “It’s always worth asking, do we own the process or does the process own us?” 

• Raise the bar when you hire: Bezos decreed that every new hire should be better than the average of the team into which they were being hired. The company used a specially trained interviewer (the “Bar Raiser”) as a kind of objective third-party to help ensure this happened.

• Pay people to quit: Bezos borrowed this policy from online retailer Zappos, which Amazon acquired in 2009. Every year, the company offered to pay new employees to quit. “We hope they don’t take the offer; we want them to stay,” Bezos wrote in his 2014 letter to shareholders. “The goal is to encourage folks to take a moment and think about what they really want.”

• Value flexibility: In his 2013 shareholder letter, Bezos recognized the high value many customer service employees placed on the flexibility remote work afforded them. “This flexibility is ideal for many employees who, perhaps because they have young children or for another reason, either cannot or prefer not to work outside the home,” he wrote.

Bezos also developed his own set of rules for how to operate as a leader:

• Dive deep: Executives at Amazon were expected to stay connected to the business, versing themselves in details and auditing a team’s work while also thinking about it strategically. It’s perhaps another way of articulating the “founder mode” mentality embraced by today’s venture capitalists.

• No sugar coating: Bezos could eviscerate his employees when he got frustrated. He was known to say things like “Are you lazy or just incompetent?” and “Why are you ruining my life?” in meetings, according to Brad Stone’s 2013 book The Everything Store. 

• Recognize collective effort: Bezos conveyed some of his management philosophy implicitly. For example, a Quartz analysis of his letters to shareholders found he mainly used the word "we" when discussing wins and vision, and "I" when he wanted to let people know what he was ruminating on personally. That choice conveyed the idea that success is a collective feat. It also suggested he understood that as a prominent business leader, it was important to communicate what he was thinking.  

When Bezos stepped down after 27 years running Amazon, he was widely lauded as one of the best CEOs in tech history. If his new startup succeeds, it will likely come down in part to how relevant his management philosophy still is — or how much it has evolved.