18 Years at Amazon Gave Me a Swiss Army Knife. Now I Know Which Blade to Use.
As a tenured Amazonian, I had a favorite answer when people asked about Leadership Principles. Building a startup changed that answer completely. Here are the three LPs I think about practically every day now — and why founders who came from big companies are more prepared than they realize.
As a tenured Amazonian, I was always asked about my favorite Leadership Principles.
My answer reflected my strengths: Ownership, Hire and Develop the Best, Deliver Results. These were the LPs that showed up in my performance reviews, that shaped how I built teams, that I could point to when someone asked what kind of leader I was.
Building my own startup? That knife looks completely different now.
What disappears when the infrastructure does
At Amazon, you have support functions. Colleagues who are specialists in things you'll never need to understand deeply. You can be a sharp blade in one place and trust that the rest of the knife is covered by people who are sharper than you in those areas.
Bootstrapping takes all of that away.
You're the CEO, the sales team, the product manager, the customer success function, and on some days the person figuring out why the invoicing software broke. The LPs I relied on at Amazon were still valuable. I just kept reaching for ones I'd barely touched before.
Customer Obsession hits differently without the buffer
At Amazon, Customer Obsession was table stakes — a principle everyone understood that shaped product decisions at every level. But there were mechanisms between me and the customer. Research teams. Data. People who specialized in synthesizing customer insights so that leaders could act on them.
Out here, I am the research function.
I have to get close to customers myself, listen harder than feels comfortable, and separate what they say they want from what they actually need before building anything.
The feedback loops are short and unforgiving in a way they never were inside a large org. Customer Obsession at Amazon mattered. As a founder it's existential in a different way — because if I miss it, no one's catching it downstream.
Learn and Be Curious
At Amazon, curiosity was a trait people noticed. A positive signal in a performance review, something that opened doors to interesting work. I was curious, I learned constantly — but mostly within my domain.
Out here I'm learning things that were never in my job description. Marketing. Finance. Legal. Employment law. Customer acquisition economics.
The breadth of what I don't know is genuinely humbling for someone who spent nearly two decades at one of the most demanding companies on earth.
What I've found: curiosity compounds differently as a founder. Every domain I understand well enough to not be dependent on someone else is one less vulnerability. Every hour spent learning something outside my native competence shows up later as better judgment on a decision that actually costs money if I get it wrong.
At Amazon, curiosity kept me growing. Out here it's the only reason I'm keeping up.
Right A Lot
This one surprised me.
At Amazon, Right A Lot operated within a large system with multiple review layers. The cost of being wrong was cushioned by organizational depth — there were checks, there were recoveries, and the wrong call in a given meeting didn't usually break anything permanently.
In a startup, the cost of being wrong is paid immediately and in full.
The decisions I make in a given week about where to spend time, which customers to prioritize, which features to ship next — those have consequences in a way that's categorically different from being wrong inside a large organization.
What I've learned is that Right A Lot as a founder requires brutal honesty about the difference between conviction and wishful thinking. Amazon trained me to seek disconfirming data. That habit, more than any other, has saved me from expensive early mistakes.
What Amazonians thinking about going out on their own should know
The foundation Amazon built is real. You know how to write. You know how to work backward from the customer, think in mechanisms, disagree and commit, operate under ambiguity. That's not nothing — it's actually a lot.
What you don't know yet is how much you'll need the principles you used to take for granted.
The blades you reached for constantly are still sharp. But the ones you barely touched at Amazon — the judgment calls made with no review layer, the obsessive proximity to individual customers, the willingness to learn something completely new every week — those end up being the difference.
The knife is complete. You already own it. Now you just have to figure out which blade fits the moment you're actually in.
Mario V. Adoc is co-founder and CEO of Halogen. He spent 18 years at Amazon, where he launched Twitch Prime and built the operational platform for Prime Video's live sports portfolio.