To say that I dove headfirst into life as an entrepreneur back in October 2010 would be inaccurate. That I fell backwards, arms flailing, would be more precise.

As I’ve said time and again, choosing to be an entrepreneur is not some sort of conscious, willful decision: “Hm, yes, I think I’d like a filet mignon, or a chocolate sundae; yes, I think I’d like to become an entrepreneur today.”

No. You can no more consciously choose to be an entrepreneur than you can choose whether to be hungry: you either are, or you aren’t.

Being an entrepreneur — committing to building and running a startup — is an all-encompassing lifestyle; it’s something you do not because you want to do it, but because you’re compelled to do it.

Thing is though, what happens once you get started? How do you ensure that you continuously push forward, accelerating at a faster and faster rate, but that you continue to do so correctly, and for the right reasons, and that you ultimately succeed in your venture?

The answer is guidance. Not just by way of friends, family, and trusted advisors, but by adherence to values or principles to which your team is anchored, and from which, you derive stability, focus, and accountability.

As I think back over the last (nearly) eight years of running two startups, it’s clear to me now that I should have established, from the beginning, our own explicitly enumerated principles.

Better yet, I wish I had discovered Amazon’s (apparently now famous) 14 Leadership Principles: they’ve already done all the hard work for us.

When I first stumbled across these “LPs,” as they’re known at Amazon, I went through the following various thoughts: holy crap that’s a lot of principles; some of these sound ridiculous (“dive deep”); some are linguistically painful (“are right, a lot” — what does that even mean?!); some of these overlap; you gotta be freaking kidding me; etc.

Thing is though, the more I read these LPs, the more I started to understand them, and subsequently to accept them, in a sort of Gartner’s Hype Cycle-type process:

Gartner’s Hype Cycle representing my acceptance of Amazon’s 14 Leadership Principles

I basically went from “wow this is awesome” to “this is ridiculous” to “ok, this actually makes a lot of sense and I need to apply this to every part of my professional life now.”

It turns out that these principles are basically like the Force. Quoting Jedi Master Obi-Wan, “It’s an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us; it binds the galaxy together.”

So without further ado, let’s dive in: I’m going to walk you through each of Amazon’s 14 LPs, complete with personal examples from my previous two startups, and hope that you’ll walk away not just with 14 new things in your head, but the ability to concretely, quantitatively analyze your past behaviors, and most importantly, to apply these LPs to your startup going forward.

By the time you’re done with this, you should be able to recite all fourteen of these principles verbatim, and truly understand and internalize them, just as I can.

1. Customer Obsession

Simply put, the customer is always first. No matter what. Go above and beyond the call of duty. Work backwards from the customer. Sacrifice yourself for the customer. Like literally actually be willing to take a loss if it means giving your customer a win, even if it means violating your own terms of use or policies. Consider proactively refunding them if you know you dropped the ball, i.e., refund them before they even ask for it.

Example: We decided it was time to increase our prices by 50%. But I was determined not to do it without our customers’ blessing. So I wrote them a personal note asking permission, and promised to keep anybody who disagreed at their current price point. Incredibly, 65% of the customers who replied agreed to the price bump. Two confirmation emails later, and the price change was executed. Of course, as luck would have it, a new customer happened to sign up right after the price hike was confirmed but before we actually flipped the switch — so from his point of view it was a blatant “bait & switch.” His words. Without hesitating, I wrote him a personal email declaring the following, in no uncertain terms: not only had I personally reverted him to his original price point, I had refunded his entire first month’s payment just because. Result? He’s been a loyal customer ever since.

2. Ownership

Ownership is about two things: (1) always prioritizing long-term over short-term goals; and (2) always acting on behalf of the team and the company as a whole. Everything is “your job.”

The HashTest.io Chrome extension.

Example: We had just rolled out a super cool feature for Twibble , a tool for discovering the best hashtags for social media posts. It provided real-time color-coded results that indicated a hashtag’s popularity. Almost as soon as we launched it, it was a hit — virtually every customer we had made use of it. Then I suggested that this tool should be available for all to use, and so we built HashTest.io as a standalone site (with the obvious ulterior motive to drive new users to Twibble). But as soon as we did that, I realized what we really needed was a Chrome extension of HashTest. Nobody on the team was available to build it, and I’m not really a developer. But I was determined to find a way. So one Sunday afternoon, while sitting in a cafe, I taught myself basic Chrome extension development, and by evening, our HashTest Chrome extension was live. Today, it has 4500 installs and a 4.1 star rating.

3. Invent & simplify

The key to great success is to keep things simple, and with that in mind, to keep inventing. Constantly.

Our CrowdVitae homepage.

Example: We were in the final months of runway for our first startup. We were desperate to come up with new ideas. Ultimately, we broke into groups and had a friendly internal competition as between several products, one of which I designed to be a sort of “Quora for crowd-sourced résumé feedback.” I called it CrowdVitae, or CV. My singular mandate was: fast, simple, absolute minimum functionality, our goal simply to test the concept. While one of our engineers got to work whipping together the site nearly overnight using the then-new Google App Engine, and our designer Ryan Lum build the homepage you see at left, I got busy rounding up interested beta testers from Venturocket itself, as well as Quora, LinkedIn, ProductHunt, HackerNews, Reddit, and we even an article in the Baltimore Business Journal. Result? We were utterly blown away by the enthusiastic reactions to the platform; users’ résumé feedback and advice was far more than we could have ever imagined. Unfortunately, we eventually had to shut it down as we weren’t able to monetize it, but people still ask about it to this day. (PS. I still have the source code. Just sayin’.)

4. Are right, a lot

Let’s address the painful linguistic weirdness of this principle first: This principle should be read as “Leaders are right, a lot.” Also, this doesn’t necessarily mean what you think it means. It’s not simply about not making mistakes. Rather, it’s about being able to look at the big picture, and being able and willing to do a 180 when necessary. Steve Jobs was famous for this: one day he’d believe XYZ, the next he’d realize he was completely wrong and suddenly he was fully behind ABC. In this way, he was right, a lot.

Example: I wanted to build a new price model for Twibble. Instead of a simple subscription model — $X for this plan, $Y for that plan — I wanted customers to pay only for results. My idea was that we should price Twibble based on its actual value to users, and in our case, “value” was defined as boosting users’ metrics such as likes, retweets, new followers, even just tweet or Facebook post impressions. Put another way, the whole point of using Twibble was to increase those metrics; so if weren’t helping our customers do that, then they shouldn’t be paying us. If this sounds familiar, it should: I was modeling it after standard PPC ad models. We discussed this idea a lot, and neither one of us had backbone to disagree and commit (see Principle #13, below): we were just in a stalemate. Finally, I was presented with a compelling argument. My engineer ended up crunching all the numbers and presented me the inescapable truth: this new pricing model simply wouldn’t work — we would get essentially zero revenue from 95% of our customers, and astronomical revenue from the remaining 5%. Simply put, it wasn’t even worth trying, and so I agreed I was wrong, and by the next day, had put the idea behind me. Part of me still wishes we could have tried, but given the indisputable data, it was right for me to change my position given our limited resources.

5. Learn & be curious

This one pretty much speaks for itself. Leaders must always strive to learn more and improve themselves.

Example: I’ve always believed there are two primary motivators to learn: need, and desire. For me, Quora always satisfied the intersection of the two: I’ve always relied on it both because I needed to learn something, but also because I wanted to learn something. (And in the process, I became a 3x Quora Top Writer.) A while back I learned that Quora was an extremely powerful marketing tool, having successfully used it to drive a whopping 82.10% of our initial traffic to our first startup, Venturocket. But most recently, I realized I knew nothing about algorithms — I’m not a developer — so I basically crash-coursed myself in algorithms over a period of three days, with Quora, YouTube, and various blogs making up the majority of my study materials. The best part about Quora? The more you teach, the more you learn, so it’s a perfect feedback loop.

6. Hire and develop the best

This also kind of goes without saying, but you need to make sure not only that you always raise the bar with respect to hiring, but that, once hired, you constantly nurture and develop your employees to be the best they can possibly be.

Example: After we raised $700K for our first startup, it was (finally!) time to start hiring. My two cofounders were engineers, but we desperately needed a designer. After a few interviews, Ryan absolutely blew me away by sending an unsolicited mockup for a new homepage he’d built for us over the weekend. Suffice to say, I hired him on the spot. Then, as the months and years went by, it became very clear, very quickly, that Ryan was far more than just a designer: he was an entrepreneur through and through, and before long, became my right-hand man: while our engineers preferred to remain out of the day-to-day business strategizing and decision-making, Ryan was always ready to brainstorm ideas and work closely with me. Soon we were attending events together; working on sales pitches; and collaborating on new side projects, one of which became Twibble. Meanwhile, I realized little by little that our engineers each thrived on two different motivations: one just loved to be given an assignment, a challenge, and he’d set about doing it; the other just wanted free reign to be creative. Realizing this difference in personalities was crucial for our final months: by appreciating each team member’s personality differences, and what motivated them, I was able to light our darkest hour, during which we developed both Crowd Vitae and Twibble, the latter of which was spun out into its own company (see below for more on launching Twibble).

7. Insist on the highest standards

Great leaders always raise the bar to deliver the highest quality products and services.

Example: I worked with an engineer who was absolutely brilliant. Had no concept of “can’t be done.” Brick wall in front of him? No problem: he’d punch right through or find another way. There was just one small problem: he was often too fast for his own good: emails would get sent to the wrong customers — sometimes all of them; incorrect code would be deployed; subscription plan errors would be rolled out; etc. This was further compounded by the fact that he was located ten timezones away from me. The first few times it happened, we had discussions about it, but soon I realized we needed something more explicit: I announced that we needed an actual checklist, and nothing could proceed unless and until we had a two-way confirmation that in fact, everything was as it should be. (This is also around the time we started explicitly kanban boarding everything for prioritization, including and especially for customer support tickets.) So going forward, I basically made a checklist for everything we had to do whether it was for a mass email, a new feature going live, etc. The result was that we drastically reduced the number of avoidable mistakes going forward.

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8. Think Big

This principle isn’t just thinking about big, visionary ideas out of context; it’s about thinking big and circling back to the first “customer obsession” principle.

Example: A huge media company was interested in signing up with us; they would be by far our largest customer, and we really needed the money. They wanted a custom enterprise plan from us, a plan which we priced high not just because it was worth a lot to them, but because it was really expensive for us to provide. Being a large organization, the sale process was of course slow and laborious. But to speed things up and ensure that we landed the deal, I decided to take a massive risk: I preemptively activated their plan — no limitations — and just hoped they’d ultimately commit. Which of course, six weeks later, they did. Yes we lost six weeks of pay, but on the flip side, we still count them as one of our most loyal (and largest) customers.

9. Bias for action

So this principle often confuses people; I know it confused me a lot at first too. The idea is that since most mistakes are not irreparable, it’s okay to risk making mistakes. Therefore, great leaders need to have a bias for action: tend to move forward faster rather than getting stuck in paralysis by analysis.

Example: In the early days of our first company, Venturocket — remember, this was a job/talent matching service — we often succumbed to paralysis by analysis, but towards the end, we had become much faster with our decisions. Two examples come to mind: my hack solution to create a public web page of every single job listing and job seeker; and building a tool for recruiters to increase their email response rates from candidates. In both cases, I made sure not to overanalyze the chances of success: the first question was, how quickly can we build these tools? Once I had been assured that each was a trivial build, the next question was, well what if we’re wrong? As soon as we agreed that neither test would risk any irreparable harm (we made sure to keep the public web pages of candidates anonymous, of course; either the recruiter tool worked as intended, or it didn’t), we built them and shipped them. Result? Well, the recruiter tool did not catch on; but the index absolutely did — if you googled things like “php web developer san francisco” our job listings and candidates that corresponded to that search made the first several spots in the search results.

10. Frugality

This should be common to all startup founders: don’t spend money needlessly! Basically, do more with less. Maximize output while minimizing input. Simple.

Example: By the time we had six months of runway left during our first startup, I knew I had to plan ahead to ensure that somehow we would stay afloat. We had already been running as lean as possible — minimal salaries; minimal office expenditures; no marketing or PR spend — but no matter how I crunched the numbers, there was no way to avoid the fact that come June, we would be out of cash, absent some miracle. Without even a moment’s hesitation, I did what had to be done: I quietly cut my own salary while leaving my three team members’ salaries intact without telling them so they wouldn’t worry. Result? We survived into October, long enough to get us to pivot into Twibble (see further below).

11. Earn trust

Earning trust is a two-way street: not only do you need to earn the trust of others, but you need to make others feel trusted, as well.

Example: In the final months of our first startup, I finally got yelled at, behind not particularly sound proof closed doors, by one of my cofounders. A usually quiet, mellow guy, his anger and obvious frustration knocked the wind out of me. If this had happened several years prior, I would have probably stood my ground and yelled back. But I guess the several years of trials and tribulations, and the recognition that we were running out of runway, had given me a new perspective on things, including and especially my own team; and myself. So I sat quietly while listening intently. Like really, actually listening, absorbing, and internalizing not just what he was saying, but why he was saying them, and how he was feeling. I think I surprised both of us: until then, I wasn’t exactly known for being gentle — I was insatiably hard driving, impatient, and determined to get results. I was never rude, but I was very blunt and direct. Long story short, I assured him that I heard where he was coming from; I profoundly apologized for how I’d made him feel; I made sure to understand what he needed from me; we shook hands and made up. Result? The next few weeks were the most fun we ever had as we worked on building Crowd Vitae (see above, Principle #3) together.

12. Dive deep

Data is all that matters. When data and feelings are misaligned, be skeptical; trust the data.

Example: I was convinced that we needed to change our onboarding strategy for new customers. It doesn’t matter what it was now, but suffice to say, I wanted to collect credit cards at the start of the trial, rather than the end; how LinkedIn and others do it. I got tremendous pushback from my lead engineer who strongly advised against it: first, he said he didn’t think it would make a difference, or that, if it did, it would be a detrimental difference; second, he advised it would take too much time to implement. But still I pushed back. Finally, I suggested that we look at some data, and my mouth fell open: it turned out that virtually all paying customers signed up within the first hour of their 7–day trial, implying that there was absolutely no need to ask for payment info at the start. Naturally, I promptly changed my mind realizing that the data had spoken loud and clear, and I would have been wrong.

13. Have backbone; disagree & commit

I don’t know why this principle comes in way down at the number thirteen spot; I think it’s crucially important. Basically, the idea is this: when two people disagree, as will often happen, one of you eventually needs to put your foot down, say in no uncertain terms that you disagree, and why, but that you nevertheless will agree to try the alternative and give your full support, i.e, that you will commit (even though you disagree).

Example: So this was a big one. We were desperate to roll out some sort of viral element for our second startup, Twibble. Everything thus far had failed. Meeting after meeting of brainstorming ideas; we either couldn’t agree on a strategy, or, if we could agree, the tests would fail. So finally I announced to the team an admittedly crazy, questionable thing. So as a reminder, Twibble is a scheduling and automation platform for social media: you give it an RSS feed, like, say, a blog, and it tweets out articles or posts to Facebook. My idea was, well, we’re generating about one tweet per second — that’s around 90,000 tweets per day — and that’s a ton of marketing potential. Why don’t we just append a little “twibble.io” link at the end of all our tweets? Essentially, our version of the old “Sent by Hotmail.com” link attached to the bottom all emails. The pushback was unanimous: all three guys gave an immediate, and unambiguous “no.” Eventually, and because I always preferred to run our little startup as democratically as possible, I said in no uncertain terms: “OK, fine, we won’t do it. But for the record, I think we should at least try it and I strongly disagree with your decision not to do it. We’ll try [whatever other things they wanted to try] in the meantime.” Suffice to say, the other strategies never worked, after which, I pushed my idea again; we brought in a third party advisor to get his opinion — he agreed with me — and we rolled out our test. Almost immediately, our homepage traffic shot up by about 10x.

14. Deliver results

Basically, never settle for anything but the best, and always find a way to overcome all obstacles, no matter the odds.

Actually watch this short animation. Try not to suffer.

Example: When we spun Twibble out of Venturocket, I lost our entire development team. Reminder: I’m not a developer. Our servers kept crashing; I had no way to keep things running, let alone continue to develop the site. But I was determined, against all odds, not to let Twibble flounder. First step was to learn how to restart the servers: our former engineer was good enough to give me instructions for how to restart them via the terminal. Ultimately, it was a trivial thing to learn and perform, except that I had to do this several times per day. For the next two or three months. Incredibly, users and revenue kept growing, and support tickets were kept to a minimum. I eventually found an amazing offshore development team, and shortly thereafter, a full time dedicated engineer to join me. Unfortunately, he was a backend engineer only, so there was no way for us to update our homepage; our pricing tables; we couldn’t even A/B test anything; we couldn’t install my much desired realtime chat tool (in this case, using Olark); basically, we couldn’t do anything. Finally I said to him: let me take over development of our homepage. Reluctantly, he agreed, and I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Well, I spent the next few months brushing up on my CSS and (basic) JS skills; became best friends with the Chrome Developer Tools; and ultimately rebuilt our homepage using a heavily modified Squarespace template, having since evolved it through three or four different versions. Result? Not only did Twibble survive, we landed our biggest customers ever, increased homepage conversion rates from about 10% to over 20%, and saw our highest revenue ever several months later.

Final thoughts

So those are Amazon’s 14 Leadership Principles, with actual, real life examples pulled from my own experiences spanning my two startups over the past nearly eight years.

Some — most? — of those stories I’ve never shared publicly before, but I hope that they’ll help you to really understand and internalize those 14 LPs so that you can apply them to your startup or to any other company.

But at the end of the day, always remember: these 14 Leadership Principles really are like the Force — while they partially control your actions, they also obey your command. They’re designed to guide you and help clear your thoughts, and you should wield them accordingly.

I wish I had known about these LPs eight years ago, for I certainly intend to rely on them going forward, and I hope you will too.