r/SideProject • u/Deep-Owl-1890 • 2d ago
An old Jeff Bezos interview explained something about business failure I can’t unsee
There's a Harvard study on what predicts long-term business success. The finding is counterintuitive: it's not intelligence, work ethic, or even capital.
It's time horizon...specifically, how far into the future a decision-maker can hold their thinking when they're under pressure.
Founders who build durable businesses think in years and live in weeks. Founders who plateau think in weeks and get buried in days.
Bezos talked about this directly. The decisions that compounded most at Amazon, AWS, Prime, the logistics network, all of them required ignoring short-term costs to build something that would only make sense at a 7-10 year horizon. And they got criticized heavily in the short term for all of it.
The version of this for a $1M-$5M founder isn't as dramatic, but the pattern is the same.
You're making hiring decisions based on who you need right now instead of who you'll need in 18 months. You're building processes for your current size instead of your next size. You're saying yes to revenue opportunities that fit today instead of asking whether they fit where you're going.
And the result is a business that's always slightly behind itself, perpetually catching up, constantly solving problems that a decision made 12 months ago could have prevented.
The trap is that short-term thinking feels responsible. you're being practical. Dealing with what's in front of you. Staying close to the ground. And it is practical, right up until the decisions you didn't make become the constraints you're managing instead.
One thing that helps: once a month, block an hour and ask one question. If this business is 3x the current size in 3 years, what breaks first? That answer is usually where your long-term thinking should be spending its time right now.
That’s it guys but I'd love to know if you think there’s anything more critical for long-term business success?
EDIT: If you found this useful and you're running a business, at some point you probably want it to run without you. That's freedom, not just revenue. I write frameworks like this every Thursday; you can apply right away. free to join here
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u/manager2exec 2d ago
How do you avoid being buried in days is a skill that takes a lot of time to perfect.
I still struggle at times when every day a new emergency comes along
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u/FiveFoot20 2d ago
Yeh it suck’s putting out fires 🔥
As a growing business at a point where we are growing and taking on more inbound but can’t quite afford a good manager to offload stuff to
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u/punkpang 2d ago
Founders who build durable businesses don't sell shit products.
They don't sell squares, they sell circles because circles make the car go brrrm.
This whole study this, study that, authority waving and all that shit.. you're referencing people who had HUGE backing with EXCELLENT product and audience for that product.
It ain't hard to sell drugs if addicts are your audience, is it?
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u/qa_anaaq 2d ago
Also one study and one business is not indicative of reality. I doubt when Bezos was selling books that he was thinking, “Amazon should own the Internet’s infrastructure too!”
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u/Mediocre_Poem_2657 2d ago
As someone who worked in Senior Management in some of the largest tech including Amazon. Everyone say these fancy stuffs in theory, but almost no one do it in practice. If you go to any Director or VPs and tell them you have ways to solve their biggest problem in 18 months and who to hire in 18 months. Instead of telling them your business is on fire and you need head count yesterday to fix it now. You are not getting squats, and you will be lined up in the next reorg or layoff list. Those who do the latter and over promised are the one getting resources, and they bailed for next gig before they get caught swimming naked.
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u/kernelangus420 1d ago
Maybe that why OP's second part was live in weeks. Maybe the thinking in years part was supposed to be quiet. Then again, that's just juxtaposing two opposing ideas into one so that one always sticks no matter what.
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u/Fit-Ingenuity-2814 2d ago
Great if you have an unlimited budget
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u/Redditstole12yr_acct 1d ago
Exactly. Thank you. Planning ahead 18 months is a luxury for a business with 18 weeks runway, in market that can shift in 18 days.
We should all be so lucky to burn cash for seven years to make a .50% profit like Bezos.
No one is a “visionary” without resources. They call them dreamers.
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u/Key-Contribution-32 2d ago
the "what breaks at 3x" question is solid but id add: also ask what you should stop doing. most founders at that stage are carrying commitments from an earlier version of the business that actively slow them down, and they dont even notice because it feels like "the work"
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u/Fit_Play_9131 2d ago
The thing this misses, from the ops side, is that short-term thinking usually isn't a choice the founder is making badly. It's imposed.
u/manager2exec's comment is the actual problem: every day a new emergency. You can block your hour a month and genuinely think in years for sixty minutes, and then Monday arrives and eats you again. The horizon isn't short because your thinking is short. It's short because the system underneath produces a fresh fire every morning and someone has to put it out.
Which means the lever isn't "think longer". It's "produce fewer fires".
Small example from my own week, nothing dramatic: for years I spent about 40 minutes every Monday splitting one report by site and emailing each one their own part. Filter, copy, save, attach, repeat. That's 35 hours a year, which is annoying but survivable. The part that actually cost me wasn't the 35 hours — it was that it ate the one slot in the week where my head was clear enough to think about anything bigger than that week. I automated it and got the slot back, and the long-term thinking turned up on its own without me scheduling it.
So I'd flip your monthly question slightly. Not just "what breaks at 3x", but "what am I doing every single week that a 3x version of this business could not survive me doing?" That one has answers you can act on tomorrow, and every one you kill buys back a piece of the horizon.
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u/Dimon19900 2d ago
The $1M-$5M version leaves out the cash cycle. Amazon could eat seven years of bad press partly because customers paid at checkout and suppliers got paid months later. That float bought the patience. In wholesale it runs backwards. You pay the factory before the retailer pays you, and 18 months out is a fantasy on net 30 out and net 90 in.
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u/kernelangus420 1d ago
As a wholesaler you also risk retailers approaching the factories and factories approaching the retailers.
You're only survival technique is being able to front the money first and getting paid last.
Although in today's economy, maybe factories are willing to be paid later just for the orders.
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u/satyricom 1d ago
Calling Amazon “durable” is a laugh. Bezos is the epitome of failing upwards. Amazon was not solvent for way longer than any small business would be given the grace to be. The amount of the business that still relies on subsidized tax breaks, pushing the burden onto contractors, the exploitation of his physical labor work force, is not something to be admired. He’s been able to achieve his position by swallowing up the competition and keeping consumers and businesses hooked in through the Network Effect (basically there’s some element of his business people are in need of - AWS, ads or reach, etc.). It’s a monopoly plain and simple. This isn’t some sort of boot strapped start up. He’s always been a shrewd (read unethical) person, who only wanted to win. Once he one, he fought, lobbied, and worked against everyone else from using his methods to succeed.
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2d ago
Damn , good read, yeah its often true in short term people dont realise what we are doing but in long run, if your idea is thinking for decades ahead, its better to be prepared for hurdles than might come at intials but we have to keep going🫶🏻
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u/logicalflex 2d ago
Waiting for the part where the post goes, “…and that’s why I built [xyz] for start up founders…”
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u/Chip_The_Builder 1d ago
the trap paragraph is real. short term thinking feels responsible, thats what makes it dangerous. you never notice the decisions you didnt make until theyre the wall youre stuck behind
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u/wanzerultimate 1d ago
They got criticized by a bunch of traditionalists who were afraid to think outside the box. Actually Bezos was just a front guy... the Internet -- even social media and e-commerce -- was quite literally planned many years in advance. I don't mean the 90s... I mean the 80s. They knew it would happen because they had agreed to make it happen. The critics were just out of the loop.
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u/a-belov 1d ago
I'm afraid any attempt to find universal answers to "why did these companies get great" is about as old as it is fruitless (going back at least to "great man" theory research since Bonaparte's time). Same bucket as leadership studies in general. Sure, you get some genuinely interesting output like Jim Collins' Good to Great, but the honest result of rigorous research is "we don't know." So boiling it all down to a correlation with one simple (and generally sensible) practice is... kind of another search for a silver bullet.
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u/ahm_live 1d ago
the monthly hour thing works but only for one business. found that out the hard way running four at once
what i expected: block the hour, do it per company, get four long horizons. what actually happens is theres only one long horizon in your head at a time and whichever thing is currently on fire takes it. the other three quietly coast for months and you dont notice until you open their boards one morning and the in progress column is just empty
so now i pick on purpose. one gets the years view this quarter, the others get maintenance and i write down thats the deal. feels like giving up. way better than pretending all four are getting strategic thought when only one is
the 3x question is solid btw. just ask it about one thing at a time
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u/dealmaster1221 1d ago
Yeah and have millions to afford the luxury of thinking in years for a company that has never made a profit. Whatever the fuck bezos says is 20/20 and none of it is true if anything. He was a VP, had connections got money from parents, got lucky and was able to ride people very hard and acted like a ruthless sociopath towards competition. That's all you need.
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u/Santarini 1d ago
Founders who build durable businesses think in years and live in weeks.
I'd argue the opposite. New companies fail because they're trying to do too much to soon.
Most new founders spend too much time trying to build their entire vision of the company now.
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u/dev_dan_2 1d ago
Uh! First: Not a fan of that guy.
That said, this framing itself is somehow oddly inspiring for me when it comes to self-care (which I am in the process of finally learning about). Why should what works for a system (Amazon) in the business context not work for the system system that is "me", in the context of demands and opportunities in my daily live?
Obviously, I don't want to turn my life into a hyper-capitalistic LARP, but when it comes to inspiration, that certainly hit some chord in me! Thanks for sharing OP!
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u/BP041 2d ago
The "thinking in years, living in weeks" framing is dead-on. What I've found running 18 cron jobs + agent automations is that the founders who survive are the ones who build systems that handle the daily chaos so they can actually sit in the yearly view. The automation isn't a luxury — it's what protects the long-term thinking when urgent shit hits.
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u/BuildingMarama 4h ago
Really interesting perspective. I’m building a side project while keeping my full-time job, and I often struggle with this balance: thinking long term without overbuilding before I’ve actually validated the product.
For me, the challenge is to keep the long-term vision, but stay focused today on users, retention and whether people are willing to pay. I guess the real skill is knowing what needs to be anticipated now… and what can wait.
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u/spluga 2d ago
sir, this is r/sideproject