Before we hop into the episode, I'm going to ask you for one favor.

If you listen to Founders Journal on Apple podcasts, smash the follow button.

And if you listen to it on Spotify, smash the follow button as well.

And finally, if you love this show, please tell a friend to check it out,

wherever they listen to their podcasts. Now onto the show.

What's up, everyone? This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew.

Welcome back to Founders Journal, my personal audio diary, where I give you

the business builder, the tools you need to think better in order to build better,

whether that's building a business, a team, or a new product.

Today, I'm talking about timeless lessons learned from the letters of Jeff Bezos.

Let's hop into it.

Jeff Bezos is one of the greatest entrepreneurs of our time. He's been building Amazon

for the last 26 years. And one of the most amazing things about Jeff Bezos

is we, as builders, have the ability to study his brain from 26 years of writing letters

to shareholders of the company. I'm going to walk you through four of the most impressive lessons

we can all glean from the 1997 letter, the first public letter that Bezos wrote to Amazon shareholders.

Lesson one, the words that you use matter. This first letter written in 1997 has

1,617 words. And the most used word that isn't a preposition or conjunction is customer.

It occurs 25 times in the letter, just about 1% of all words.

What you say as a leader matters a ton. It focuses you and it focuses the people who look to you

for guidance. People may argue whether Jeff Bezos' primary goal in building Amazon was serving

customers or building the company into a trillion dollar empire. But regardless of the answer

...