Anyone who owns Amazon stock would prefer for it not to have billion dollar failures, but our prime goal is are they creating value or should we value them more highly over time?

Yes, Bezos' point is a part of that is this willingness to take risks and

do things that are not going to pan out and the scale at which you do that at which

you take those risks needs to grow with the scale of the company.

Amazon's a massive company now.

So Bezo said we should if we're not incubating multi-billion dollar failures we are not we're not being risk taking risk seeking

enough or not we're not trying hard enough to deeply innovate.

I'm Mary Long and that's Andy McAfee, a principal research scientist at the

MIT Sloan School of Management. He's also the author of multiple books, including

most recently The Geek Way, the radical mindset that drives extraordinary results.

I caught up with MacAfee to talk about why investors should pay attention to geeky companies.

We discuss how Saty Nodella saved Microsoft

from sclerosis, why communicating less

may actually be a good thing, and how Amazon's ownership

culture led to the start of an entire industry,

now worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

You describe the path to Geekdom in the book as being forefold.

It's embodied by deeply valuing science, ownership, speed, and openness.

How can investors, so outsiders to these companies, how can they spot those qualities and companies

that they're interested in.

It's such a great question because it's hard, right? Because I'm talking about a company's culture and our ways to assess and

detected companies culture are weak. And these four things that you described science, ownership, speed and openness,

...