Lessons from Amazon shareholder letters, Canva's founder on rejection, and YouTube early days

Welcome back to the Z Fellows newsletter! Every Monday we share 3 ideas - to help you build companies, ship products, and create your life's work.

1: Lessons from Amazon shareholder letters

• Customer obsession drives everything - "There are many advantages to a customer-centric approach, but here's the big one: customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great."

• Embrace failure as part of innovation - "Given a ten percent chance of a 100 times payoff, you should take that bet every time. But you're still going to be wrong nine times out of ten."

• High standards are contagious - "I believe high standards are teachable. In fact, people are pretty good at learning high standards simply through exposure. High standards are contagious."

• Maintain distinctiveness requires constant effort - "The world will always try to make Amazon more typical – to bring us into equilibrium with our environment. It will take continuous effort, but we can and must be better than that."

• Be driven from within to be at your best - "When we're at our best, we don't wait for external pressures. We are internally driven to improve our services, adding benefits and features, before we have to."

Source: https://quartr.com/insights/business-philosophy/collection-jeff-bezos-shareholder-letters

2: Melanie Perkins on rejection

Melanie Perkins is the founder of Canva, a $40B browser-based design tool:

“I was pitching. I was taking any meeting that I could. Constant rejection.

I think what was important and is important regardless of what you're doing is to have a really clear picture of what it is that you want to achieve. And it was inevitable in my head that this was the future, and the question was whether or not I got to build it. And so I wanted to figure out some way to make that happen.

One of our values is to set crazy big goals and make them happen. And I think inherent in a crazy goal is you don't know how to achieve that crazy big goal by a matter of fact. And so I think that's really important to continue to have outsized dreams. Dreams that are way bigger than what you know how to achieve. Because without that personally, I'm not as inspired.”

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e31uR1WhrEQ

3: YouTube early days

Steve Chen, cofounder of YouTube on May 2005, three months into YouTube’s founding: “I was getting pretty depressed towards the end of last week. I was like, dude, we have like 40, 50, 60 videos on this site?“

YouTube currently has over 1 billion hours of content watched by over 2.53 billion users daily.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2Pt4KR8Rco

Best of The Week

See you next Monday,

- The Z Fellows Team

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