Suppose you could go back in time to before Amazon existed. You get to keep all your technical skills and knowledge of software development. You know what Amazon is today, from e-commerce to AWS.

Could you have been Jeff Bezos instead?

Then why aren’t you Jeff Bezos?

(Unless you are, of course. In which case, thanks for finding this humble newsletter, I’m not trying to usher in the downfall of Amazon, and please don’t raise my Prime subscription rate. This is just a thought experiment).

Joking aside, seriously, why aren’t you the name that so many curse, and why don’t you own WaPo?

You had technical skill as unicorns have come and gone. Why aren’t you a threat to Google? Why didn’t you create GitHub? Or Twitter?

Is it because the technical skill is the easy part?

Let’s face it. Most of us don’t work in “high tech.” Most of us put things in databases, retrieve them, and put them on buggy web UIs.

The challenge is knowing what to build. The challenge is validating real problems your customers have and validating solutions with them.

I’ve never come across a better way to do that then to get things in front of customers quickly, get feedback from them, and then incorporate that feedback into the next round of what I get in front of them.

Sometimes that’ll even be software.