Ethan Evans
Former Amazon VP, sharing how I succeeded so that you can too.
“Jeff said between data and anecdotes, trust the anecdotes. His reasoning was, even at Amazon's scale, let's say 99% of packages get to houses on time and right. Well, yeah, but 1% of Amazon scale still means like 25 million packages a day not getting there right. And so when somebody calls up to say, I didn't get my thing, that's a real story from that 1%, which is still huge.”
My First Million · Startups & Venture · October 2026
Context
The former Amazon VP was explaining how Bezos stayed in touch with customers by reading complaint emails. Bezos would forward them to the responsible team with a single question mark, which meant they had 24 hours to explain what went wrong.
Transcript
…my life? You know, like I have gardeners. I hate mowing. So I don't. Well, everyone else who's like fighting with their lawnmower, you know, different experience. I think reading those emails and hearing the complaints of actual people helped a lot. That was a big Jeff trick for a long time. Which
is, which is pretty crazy, isn't it? That a company as powerful as Amazon, which has billions of data points, you can get one or you could read a email and you read that same email five times in a week and you're like, I see a trend. That's A, a magic power and B, really interesting. Yeah,
Jeff, Jeff said between data and anecdotes, trust the anecdotes. His reasoning was even at Amazon's scale, let's say 99% of packages get to houses on time and right. Well, yeah, but 1% of Amazon scale still means like 25 million packages a day, not getting there right. And so when somebody then calls up to say, like, I didn't get my thing and blah, blah, blah, that's a real story from that 1%, which is still huge. And there was this whole process you may have heard about. If you haven't, it's fun. He was very, very busy. So what he would do when he got one of those complaints from one of your air. Of course, he knew everybody's area. You'd get an email and it would be a forward of that complaint with just a single question mark at the top. And everybody, we called these question mark mails, emails, and everybody knew what that meant, which is it meant you have 24 hours to get back and explain what's going on. So you'd scramble around and try and figure out what the hell happened to this customer. And then the biggest thing was, could you show it was a weird exception and no big deal? Or second best, that it was a problem, but you had a solution and it was…
He just got done watching season one of Entourage and trying to like implement some Ari Gold stuff.
Yeah, just euthanize me. But that's how he scaled that process was you'd send these question. He'd send out these question marks and he'd get back his answers. Everyone from Amazon can tell a question mark email story like I just did. They all have their own version. And that's a way to scale that…
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