8/ Make magic. Syncing over WiFi without cables was innovative, and our team was proud of it. But Jeff didn’t think it was magical enough. He insisted on syncing over cellular, and he didn’t want to charge the customer for data. We told him it couldn’t be done, he did it anyway.

9/ Hardware is hard. Every software/internet platform eventually builds hardware. And they learn the same lesson every time, it’s much harder than building software. Slow iteration cycles, atoms vs bits, etc. The only way to learn is to ship. It took 3.5 years to ship Kindle v1!

10/ Be inspired. It would have been impossible for a professional CEO to build Kindle (or AWS) in 2004 at Amazon. I remember sitting in so many meetings where people questioned why we were doing this, right in the middle of a turnaround in the core business. I was inspired.

PS - Jeff almost died in a helicopter crash around the time of these stories. If he hadn’t survived, the world would look very different.