Joy Covey - Jeff Bezos’s First CFO and the Architect of Amazon’s Day 1

Most people think Amazon’s success starts with Jeff Bezos.

But behind the scenes, there was someone who made the story believable and fundable.

Her name was Joy Covey.

Amazon’s first CFO.

In the late 1990s, Amazon wasn’t the global giant we know today. It was an unprofitable online bookstore asking investors to believe in a future that didn’t exist yet.

Covey’s job was to make that case.

In this episode, we explore how she helped take Amazon public, shaped its famous “Day 1” philosophy, and built the financial systems and investor narrative that allowed the company to scale.

We cover:

•  How Amazon’s IPO strategy was designed to attract long-term investors 
•  Why Amazon focused on free cash flow instead of profits 
•  The flywheel business model that powered Amazon’s growth 
•  How Covey raised over $1.5B in capital before the dot-com crash 

This episode draws from Brad Stone’s The Everything Store and Kevin Gee’s essay Joy Covey: The Deep Keel.

Transcript

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Today's episode starts at a funeral in twenty thirteen on Stanford's campus. Hundreds showed up and it was a who's who of current tech leaders and pioneers of the early internet. Jeff Bezos rose to speak and threw tears he said, Joy was more substance over optics. She was a long-term thinker, and then he went on to share a more personal story that they used to talk about a day in the future when they'd sit down with their grandkids and tell the Amazon story. He said he still wanted to do that despite the circumstances of the day. It wasn't surprising that Jeff thought in generations. Long-term thinking was the Amazon way. A way that didn't happen by accident and was largely architected by the person Bezos was eulogizing, Joy Covey, Amazon's first CFO and today's confidant. Much like how Johnny Ive was Steve Jobs' spiritual partner in building Apple 2.0 in episode two, Covey was that to Bezos helping to build Amazon 2.0, the public company. At a time when Amazon was losing money and easy to dismiss, her job was to convince the world it was something else entirely. Not just an online bookstore, but the foundation of what would become the everything store, a place where you could buy whatever you wanted on the internet. Where others saw fad, Covey made the case for long-term thinking, bold bets, and ignoring short-term noise. She helped define the culture and build the systems that turned Amazon into a global tech giant. This episode draws from Brad Stone's book, The Everything Store, and Kevin Ghee's essay, Joy Covey, The Deep Keel. I'll link both in the show notes. This is episode five of Confidance. Before Covey joined Amazon, the company is best known as a place to buy books on the internet. In famous early internet lore, while working as a trader on Wall Street, Bezos saw that internet adoption was growing exponentially and didn't want to miss out on this new weight of technology and the opportunities it'd bring. So he packed his bags and settled in Seattle to be close to the book distributor Ingram in Seattle's growing tech scene. By the mid-90s, he made that vision a reality and the company was growing quickly and eyeing an IPO. But there was a big problem. They didn't have a CFO. Bezos with the background on Wall Street was deliberate about the CFO role, and he wasn't just going to hire anybody and was looking to have a strategic partner in that seat. The bar was high and no one had met it yet. To make matters worse, his board wouldn't let him go public without a CFO. So no CFO, no IPO meant that this search became even more urgent. At the same time, down in San Francisco, Covey was equally picky about her next job. She had just led another tech company through a successful IPO and was looking for what would come next. She met with more than 40 companies and walked away from all of them. None of them felt just right. And it wasn't for lack of options. She had a Harvard law degree, a Harvard MBA, Wall Street deal making experience, and had already served as a public company CFO. But what she was looking for was more than a job, and she was looking for something specific. As she put it, she said, I wanted to help build something significant. I wanted to work with very high-quality teammates. I wanted to build a business with a strong, virtuous, cycle business model. This criteria was an early clue into her thinking in systems and being deliberate about everything she did. And innovations around business models would be crucial to her success at Amazon. In August of 1996, a recruiter suggested she meet Jeff Bezos and learn more about his company, Amazon.com. Seattle wasn't even on Cubby's list and she had no interest in moving out of the Bay Area. But as a favor to her recruiter, she agreed to meet with Bezos. When she sat down for lunch with him, she was upfront about not wanting to move to Seattle and this being a favor to her recruiter. There'd be no hard feelings if he wanted to cancel their lunch. Her honesty disarmed Bezos and took the pressure off the lunch, and what could have been an intense interview became more of a conversation between two curious people trying to understand what the other was building. Bezos remembers her questions. They were sharp, specific, and different from what he had heard from other candidates. He was also impressed by her background. Bezos was known for his competitive nature and was impressed that she placed second in the country on the CPA exam out of more than 70,000 people, all without studying for the exam. Aside from that, Cubby also was a high school dropout and finished her undergrad in two and a half years and earned both a law degree and an MBA from Harvard. So he picked up on a pattern with her work, and that was whatever you put in front of her, she figure it out and then move on to the next big thing. Bezos made an impression on Covey as well. Even with her hesitations about Seattle, Amazon began to meet the bar she had set out for herself in her next role. After the meeting, she couldn't stop thinking about their conversation, the company, and what Bezos was building with his team. She saw the vision that Amazon was not just this online bookstore, but was a new model for how people would buy things. And at this point in the company, they were defining a category and not just competing with existing retailers. The next day she called him and asked him if he would be open to her splitting time between Seattle and San Francisco. And they agreed to weekdays in Seattle and weekends in San Francisco. Covey always thinking ahead would take most of her compensation in stock. So after meeting each other's high bars, Amazon had its CFO and IPO champion, and Covey had her next big adventure. When Covey arrived in Seattle, she was struck by what she saw. Amazon's headquarters sat in a rundown building with broken glass scattered on the pavement outside. The block was shared with a pawn shop, a wig store, and an adult entertainment store. And inside, it wasn't much different. Employees shared cubicles, there were desks and stairwells, and every inch of space was pushed towards shipping books to customers. It was pure startup energy and chaos. And for someone who had walked the halls of Harvard Business School and the boardrooms of Wall Street in Silicon Valley, it was a different environment than the company was used to. But she didn't hesitate and rolled up her sleeves and got to work at Amazon. Planning the IPO would be her first real test with Bezos, where Johnny Ive and Steve Jobs launched products in episode two, and the Disney brothers launched films and theme parks in episode three. Here the product was the company itself, and the IPO was the launch. And the only IPO once, so this had to work. The IPO would be a capstone of Bezos' get big fast strategy. He understood that the internet was a new frontier and that success would go to the companies that could get big, scale quickly, and establish themselves early. Access to public markets through an IPO meant capital, and capital meant better supplier terms, faster expansion, and the ability to move beyond books and into new categories. Though the driving factor and timing of the IPO was less about this strategy, they had other private funding options available, and the IPO would be more about a branding opportunity for Amazon and the Internet itself. An IPO would be their way to cement their mark on the internet and plant a flag in e-commerce before incumbents like Barnes Nobles and Borders could catch up. Cubby's deepest challenge with the IPO was to convince investors to not only buy into Amazon, but also buy into e-commerce as a category that didn't fully exist yet. Because on paper, Amazon looked like a bookseller. It sold books, it lost money, and it operated in the category investors already understood. Amazon was a retailer, but that's not how Bezos saw it. Or more importantly, he wanted investors to see it. He wanted them to see Amazon as a technology platform that could expand well beyond books and sell anything. That distinction mattered. It mattered because retail companies were valued one way and technology companies were valued another way. They had higher multiples, more patience, and a greater willingness to underwrite future scale from investors. So the challenge wasn't just going public. It was to convince the market to see Amazon differently, not as what it was, but what it could in one day become. At the same time, the company itself wasn't quite ready for an IPO and had some growing up to do. The company was growing quickly, but losing money. In its first 30 months, it had lost $9 million and had just $7 million in cash left. There were no real financial controls involved, no budgeting, no discipline, and no infrastructure built for a public company. Cubby's first challenge would be to change that. She would put in systems, financial reporting, controls, budgeting to Amazon employees that weren't used to it, and gave Amazon what it needed to operate at scale. She became in many ways the adult in the room. And even more important to her credit, she moved quickly. While others had suggested that the company was scaling too fastly and needed to slow down, Cubby pushed in the opposite direction. An early Amazon accountant, Gina Myers, later said, other candidates felt Amazon.com should slow down because the company was growing too fast. Joy had the attitude of, we're going to do this tomorrow. And it was a different business model than most people were used to. Engineers also even took notice to Cubby's speed. Nicholas Love Joy was an early engineer at Amazon and said, nobody is as quick as Joy. On her second day at Amazon, she courted me and Shell, Shell's the CTO, and spent three hours with us to have an overview of the entire system. And she's not a systems person. She asked great questions and she understood every bit of it. With systems in place and the company trending in the right direction, another key part of the IPO was selecting the right investment bank to partner with. Cubby's approached this process as methodically as she approached everything else. Before starting the formal IPO process, she fielded proposals and met with teams from firms like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Deutsche Bank. She wasn't filtering for brand name or even valuation for Amazon. She was looking for judgment, rigor, and commitment. She wanted to understand how each bank thought, how they operated, and if she could trust them when it mattered. Frank Quatrin's group at Deutsche Bank passed her test and became their bank for the IPO. They shared Covey's long-term and entrepreneurial approach to Amazon. And also, most importantly, Quatron would have some personal skin in the game. Amazon would be his group's first highly visible IPO, and she knew that they would have his full attention and all eyes inside Deutsche Bank, he would be on Amazon. With the decision to go public made and banking partner selected, the next step was to shape the story for the IPO. Amazon's S1 document would be the first place to tell their story and their first real introduction to public market investors. Bezos and Kavi took an unconventional approach to their S1. They told the truth fully and directly. They acknowledged that parts of their business were still immature, their accounting and financial systems weren't fully automated, and much of the reporting was still done manually, which was uncommon for a company wanting to go public. But most importantly, they were explicit about something most companies try to avoid. Amazon was losing money, and it might not be profitable for some time. At the time, most IPOs were built around a clear path to profitability and showing that to investors. Companies would present a story showing how they could turn a corner as fast as possible and put investors in the black. Cubby deliberately avoided that framing. She wasn't trying to attract every investor. She was trying to attract the right investors. Investors willing to think long term, who understood what Amazon was trying to build, and who wouldn't force the company to think short term once it became public. Long-term thinking in Amazon wasn't a nice to have. It was embedded into the IPO itself. They weren't trying to bait and switch investors and behave differently once they had their money. They were setting expectations from the beginning and looking for partners who would align with them and wouldn't sacrifice long-term dominance for hitting short-term benchmarks. Investors, of course, had a reason to be skeptical. It's one thing to say that you think long-term, it's another to actually have to demonstrate results to investors. And as a Harvard-trained lawyer, she approached this IPO messaging the way a lawyer builds a case and would have to show why they'd be successful. While Amazon was benefiting from broader shifts of commerce moving online, her most important argument was that there were different structural effects at work for being an e-commerce-first business. So these differences showed up most clearly in both their cost structures and in their cash flow. In the 1990s, when a company like Barnes Noble wanted to grow, it required leasing a new store, hiring staff, and carrying more inventory. Each step of this process required capital, and expansion was expensive and tied up cash. Amazon scaled differently. It didn't require storefronts, it centralized its operations, and it didn't need to hold the same level of inventory as Barnes Noble had to. As they scaled, they just needed to hire more customer support and back office folks to meet the demand. But a deeper advantage in the secret sauce wasn't just these cost inputs. It was how the two different types of businesses generated and used cash. Traditional bookstores weren't that capital efficient and had to finance their business themselves. They had to buy inventory, pay for it 90 days later, and sometimes wait 150 days or more for it to sell. This meant cash went out long before it came in, leaving the retailer having to finance the gap. Amazon flipped this model on its head. Customers paid by credit cards, so cash almost immediately came into the business. They didn't hold much inventory and paid their suppliers maybe 30 to 60 days later. For Amazon, they were paid well before they had to pay anybody else. So in effect, the customers provided cash up front and the suppliers gave them time to pay, financing their business and growth. This was a huge advantage for Amazon and it created a flywheel for the company. Lower prices attracted more customers. These customers brought in cash up front, and the cash was reinvested into the business before it had to go out, making better systems, improving their selection, and enhancing faster delivery, which then attracted more customers, which created more cash and so on. The cycle spun up again. What mattered wasn't any single advantage. It was how the pieces all worked together to create this flywheel. And this was the strong virtuous cycle business model that Coveys had been looking for. It wasn't just a one-hit wonder, but was a structural business that got stronger with scale. And it actually is a callback to what we saw in episode three with Roy Disney and their film and theme park business, which created its own flywheel. At Disney, films fed the theme parks, the parks reinforced the characters, the characters drove the merchandise and future film ideas, and then the films fed another park for continuing the cycle again. Amazon's version was different, but the principles were the same. Flywheels create momentum for business, and growth doesn't just add scale, it adds strength and allows the business to compound more efficiently than its competitors, which make these companies become massive over time. Patience and vision is critical, and that was the main message Covey wanted to share with investors. If they were patient and understood Amazon's vision, they were trading patience for a chance of owning a piece of a compounding e-commerce giant. With the messaging set, Covey and Bezos hit the road to sell Amazon's IPO. They moved between New York, San Francisco, and the major financial centers of Europe, meeting with investors and making the case for a company that on the surface didn't look particularly compelling. The broader funding market didn't help their case either. In December 1996, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan had warned investors about irrational exuberance happening during this long bull market of the 90s, which led investors to be a little more skittish around investing in a new IPO. And to that point in 1997, the technology IPO market had cooled significantly that by April, only three internet companies had gone public, raising a meager $52 million. But the bigger challenge wasn't the market. It was Covey and Bezos' audience. They were walking into a room full of skeptics. Most of them didn't believe Amazon would work. Even with Bezos and Covey leading the company, this idea of around an online bookstore competing with incumbents like Barnes Noble and Borders seemed fragile at best. And Amazon made the sell even harder on itself. Bezos refused to disclose key customer and operating metrics that investors coming to an IPO roadshow came to expect and were standard practice and saw that sort of information as a key strategic property for Amazon and didn't want to create a roadmap for competitors. The underlying data, customer behavior, growth patterns, and operating insights that they had acquired were all considered strategic and proprietary to Amazon, and they refused to share them. Bezos would only disclose what was legally required. That decision did not go over well. And Cubby later described the roadshow as a lot of people said you were going to fail. Barnes and Nobles is going to kill you. And who do you think you are to have to share this stuff? And yet something unexpected happened during the roadshow. The rooms were full. Despite the skepticism, investors showed up to hear about Amazon.com. They listened, and many of them bought into the arguments Cubby was making in Amazon's long-term vision. They weren't just hearing about this online bookstore. They were hearing about a different kind of business, one built around long-term thinking and a system that could scale. Amazon went public on May 15th, 1997, at $18 a share and raised $54 million from their IPO. At first, the stock looked to be just another IPO in a cautious market and it didn't move very much. But over the next two years, as the story began to play out and the internet took off, the stock caught fire. And by 1999, Amazon's market capitalization grew to roughly $22 billion. This brings us to Amazon's famous first shareholder letter, which read less like an update on the business and more like a constitution or owner's manual on how Amazon would operate. Bezos signed the letter that was co-written with Covey. At its core, the message was simple. Amazon would continue to prioritize long-term market leadership over short-term profitability, and it would focus on free cash flow rather than reported earnings. They would rally the company behind this idea of day one, which stood for their culture of bold bets, continuous learning, and a unified push towards the frontier of technology. Bezos and Covey put this in writing as a way to remind the public that they were still the same company with the same pitch from the roadshow the year before. The shareholder letter also served as a buyer beware sign for the wrong types of investors and a declaration that Amazon would be a different type of public company. They'd be much more disciplined with their cash than the other dot-coms chasing a quick buck in the 90s. And at the same time, they would take much bigger swings at the future than a traditional retailer. At the center of that message was Cubby. She helped translate this bold vision into something that the market could understand and commit capital to. And those realities were losses. And the losses continued to mount each year, alluding to $720 million in losses in 1999. This looked reckless to a traditional investor who put profitability above all else and wasn't fully bought into Covey's thesis around free cash flow being the main metric to watch. But year after year, Cubby's job was to deflect the profitability naysayers and reorient the investment community around their core philosophy of building it for the long term. There would be no trickery to this pitch, and Cubby would be a straight shooter with Wall Street. She recalled this period saying, I learned that it does no good to tell people what they want to hear in order to get them to buy the stock. So I repeated again and again that this is for the long term and we are building an enduring company. I don't think you can get more clear than that. Another area where she'd play chief deflection officer was category expansion. Investors after the IPO wanted to know what was next after books. Publicly, they were happy with their performance with books and had few plans to expand into other categories. Privately, though, it had always been Bezos' plan to build the everything store, and they thought beyond books into different categories. But like the information from the roadshow, expansion plans were a need to know basis, and Bezos would let you know when you need to know that information. Tried to get it out of Covey, but she also held firm. The only time where she almost let anything slip about category expansion was when a clever analyst took a different approach to their roadmap and asked her directly what they would never sell on Amazon. Covey looked at him and said, cement, it costs too much to ship. What seemed like a throwaway joke actually told you a lot about how Covey operated. She didn't try to match Bezos' brainiac energy or personality. He was known for having this boisterous laugh that could disarm people. But what she brought was her own sense of control. She could control any room she was in. She could control the conversation and the message that Amazon needed to convey to the public. And during a period when Amazon was losing all that money and asking investors to not only think long-term, but also differently in how they value companies, that control mattered and it helped her build credibility with Wall Street and the media. When she wasn't preaching the importance of long-term thinking to Wall Street, she was running the day-to-day finances in Amazon. CFOs are usually known for their rigor, but Joy took it to another level with her need for precision. She didn't accept summaries or approximations from her team, and if presented with a graph, the underlying data needed to be present on the graph itself and not just the trend line. This level of rigor filtered down throughout the company, and teams knew that their numbers would be scrutinized by Joy and feed key decisions for how the business ran. Over time, this shaped the behavior at Amazon, and their reputation for being data driven wasn't a byproduct of their success, but was present at the very beginning, and it all began with Joy. At the same time, she didn't fit the typical mold of a CFO. The stereotype is mainly somebody who only plays defense, watching the company's spending and saying no to most investments and projects. Covey could do that when needed, but her approach was much broader and more dynamic. Because she understood the business at a detailed level, she was readily willing to play offense and invest when opportunities were large enough and the logic supported it. She would tell her team, I'm always telling them to spend more if they think the investment will translate to profits eventually. Our plan is basically to be growing into profitability. That balance between defense and discipline and investment and offense became increasingly important as the company scaled. One of the clearest examples of her ability to play defense, though, came from a conversation with Amazon's chief accounting officer. Together, they determined, after looking at their books, that at their current rate of spending, the path to profitability stretched out for decades, which was not going to work for the team. Kobe brought the issue to Bezos, and together they walked through the numbers and what they implied for the business. It marked a significant shift in Amazon's strategy from get big fast into let's get profitable. Bezos, with his geeky sense of humor, took a selfie with his point-and-shoot camera to memorialize this switch and strategy and taped it to his office door. By now we know that Covey was an independent banker, and in 1998 she made her boldest financial decision yet. She went to the junk bond market to raise funds for Amazon and its expansion into new products and facilities. This was a day one experiment that was bold and may or may not pay off. Amazon had a poor credit rating, and their bonds for this raise would carry a high interest rate. But Amazon needed the money, and Cubby was loyal to existing shareholders who believed in the company from the very beginning and wouldn't raise funds through a stock offering that would dilute them. So to the junk bond market, she went. She also made a deliberate decision on how she'd run the roadshow. Bezos would not be involved at all. She wanted him focused on building the business and not raising capital. So to ensure this happened, she scheduled the roadshow while Bezos was out of the country with his family on vacation. The raise was a success. She secured roughly $326 million through the junk bond offering and then doubled down and went right back with a large convertible debt raise, originally set for $500 million, but demand pushed that total up to $1.25 billion, which was the largest convertible offering ever completed at the time. The timing proved critical. It saved the company and it gave Amazon a future in an unknown tech bubble. In the years that followed, the dot-com bubble burst and Amazon's stock would collapse. But the capital that Cubby raised gave the company ballast and flexibility to continue operating during the bubble collapse while also investing in new business and working its way out of the collapse and on a sustainable footing. It was a standard cubby move, playing defense while also allowing the company to play offense. Cubby's involvement didn't stop its strategy and finance. In the same year as the junk bond raise in 1998, she uncovered an operational issue that posed a real threat to the business. She found that the gap between orders placed on the site and packages shipped to customers was growing. And for a company built around customer obsession, this was a serious problem, especially heading into their peak holiday season. She escalated this to basics immediately, and the response became known internally as Save Santa. It was an all hands effort. Employees from the corporate office were sent to fulfillment centers in Seattle and Delaware to work overnight shifts to clear the backlog. Executives ate from the food cart, brought their friends and family to help, and even slept in their cars before going into their shifts. Bezos leaned in as well, even turning parts of the process into competitions to see who could pick orders off the shelves the fastest. With Covey's foresight and the company's candy spirit, they saved Christmas that year. And in an effort to prevent a Safe Santa situation from happening again, executives, including Covey, every Christmas from here on out would have to rotate into shifts to pick orders, wrap gifts, and get them out the door. Bezos made it clear that they could never get caught flat-footed and fall behind demand like Safe Santa ever again. And Covey, with her understanding of both the numbers and underlining Amazon machine, ensured that they wouldn't. By this point, Covey's role had expanded across the company into finance, strategy, and operations. But if you had to reduce it all into one theme, it was protecting Amazon's long-term thinking. That didn't just mean advocating for the future in broad terms. It meant constantly managing the tension between what the company needed to do now versus what it was trying to become. An interaction with the Wall Street analyst covering Amazon captures that tension clearly. Henry Blodgett was a well-known analyst in the 90s and had raised his pricing target for Amazon to $400 a share. For most companies, this sort of news would have been celebrated and taken as a strong signal of market confidence and validation for Amazon's strategy. Covey, however, saw it differently. She called Bloggit directly and gave him her perspective. She thought that the rising stock guidance was creating problems inside the company, and employees were becoming distracted by the rioting stock and CNBC's coverage of what was going on on Wall Street, and their focus was away from customers and the business itself. It also made recruitment more complicated as expectations around stock pace compensation shifted with pricing guidance. More than anything, it pulled attention towards the present and away from the future and the long term. Blodgett was surprised by her reaction and told her that he thought that Amazon was a great business and would be worth a lot of money someday. Joy responded bluntly, yes, someday, but now all anyone is thinking about is today. And that's not where Covey wanted Amazon's focus to be. This tension around the present and future expectations didn't just show up in stock guidance and would show up in category expansion and decisions on where Amazon would go next with their product offerings. One category they thought of expanding into was movies, which led to a conversation with a young upstart company already doing movie deliveries called Netflix. Co-founders Reed Hastings and Mark Randolph flew up to Seattle to meet with Bezos and Covey. And by this point, Covey had built a reputation in the tech world as a CFO who had taken Amazon public on the unconventional promise that a company losing millions was actually worth billions of dollars in the long run. And this earned her a certain level of credibility and cachet in the tech world that led to an acquisition talk being interesting to Netflix. At the meeting, Bezos and Randolph connected as founders and traded war stories from the early days of their company. Hastings, on the other hand, didn't get to where he was by reminiscing and wanted to talk about the business and what a potential partnership could look like. Covey immediately recognized this gap and shifted the conversation, asking Hastings to walk through Netflix unit economics and what an acquisition might look like in practice. Her view was that Netflix could be acquired for a low eight-figure sum. Hastings disagreed and thought that a high eight-figure sum would be more in the ballpark of where they would be able to have a partnership and acquisition. No deal was made after this meeting of both companies that would go on to become massive hits, and Amazon would eventually enter Netflix's turf with streaming, but that's for another podcast. But this moment reveals something about Covey. She could move between worlds, between the vision and execution worlds, between founder energy and financial reality. And she knew how to let conversations run and when to pull it back and how to control a room and stay on message, helping Amazon reach the best outcome. Her devotion to Amazon and Bezos took a toll on her. The pace of her work and the pace of a 90s tech company was relentless. And in her short window at the company, she had taken Amazon public, led multiple capital raises, navigated safe Santa, and pushed the company into new categories. She was burned out. And after a brief stint as a chief strategist working directly for Bezos, she stepped away from the company in April of 2000. You can read more about her post-Amazon life in Kevin's essay that I've linked in the show notes. But one of the standouts that I thought was interesting was her work with a think tank, the Santa Fe Institute, and her championing of long-term thinking and flywheel thinking beyond Amazon and bringing it to the sciences and public policy as well. In 2013, Brad Stone, author of The Everything Store, exchanged emails with Covey while researching Amazon's early history. And in one of those exchanges, she reflected on Bezos' original idea and the company's trajectory so far. She wrote, Can we really think of any other company approaching Amazon's size or age that continues to move forward with the boldness, risk taking, innovation, and the long-term perspective that Amazon shows? Jeff's clarity, intensity of focus, and ability to prioritize, which has no doubt become ingrained in his key team, is unusual. And behind his ability to keep leaping forward versus protecting existing ground. This was a revealing email because, like many confidants, Cubby understates her own role. It wasn't just Jeff who built that culture of long-term thinking and innovation. It was Cubby. She built the culture that prioritized, thinking for the long-term and placing financial bets where the payoffs were large and bold, while also putting in place the financial disciplines, investor expectations, and operating principles that allowed Amazon to flourish well after she left. You can see Cubby's fingerprints on most of the Amazon blockbuster products that came out even after her tenure as CFO, including Amazon Prime in 2005, AWS in 2006, and fulfillment by Amazon in the same year. Each one of those products and services fits the Covey pattern of recognizing systems that strengthen as they scale and making bets where the payoffs are huge and may take managing the public and investors to fully appreciate what the company is trying to do. These projects were greenlit well after Covey's tenure, but they all had the hallmarks of the culture that she helped build and shape up with Amazon and Bezos. This brings us back to the beginning. Sadly, in 2013, Covey was killed in a car accident while biking in San Francisco. This news sent shockwaves through the tech community and among the people she had worked with at both Amazon and in her other pursuits. She still had so much to give. And she talked about her own limits in an email to Brad Stone before she died. And she wrote, I haven't had an insight and question about myself that maybe I haven't begun to really find my own limits, since I have not, aside from those times of highest stake and intensity at Amazon, really run free following my own insights and directions without being too accommodating to others. That email was classic covey. It was mission focused and testing limits with an eye to the potential and the future. Before I sign off, I want to leave you with the three takeaways from the episode. The first one is that long-term thinking is a discipline that has to be defended. Most people say that they think long-term or want to build something generational, but very few are able to stand up to the doubt, pressure, and ridicule of building something that may take time to pan out. What Covey understood is that long-term thinking doesn't survive on intention alone. It has to be protected against markets, against employees, and even against success. At Amazon, that showed up everywhere, selecting the right investors, setting expectations early in the S1, reinforcing the message again and again, and even pushing back when stock guidance was too rosy. Because anything that could pull attention to the present, even good news, can break focus on the long term and where they wanted to take the company. The second takeaway is to build systems where winning compounds. Covey wasn't looking for one-off wins or growth. She was looking to build a system that got stronger as it scaled, where each step made the next one easier. Amazon's advantage wasn't just lower prices or better logistics, it was how everything connected. Customers paid up front, Batcalf funded expansion, the expansion improved experience, which brought in more customers. That was their flywheel and still is. And once it's working, growth isn't just bigger, it's stronger, and it's a repeatable system. You also see this pattern around flywheels and other great businesses as well. Warren Buffett and Charlie Mungers Berkshire has their flywheel. The insurance business generates float, the float gets invested into great businesses, and those businesses generate more cash. And my favorite one is Costco. Costco keeps their prices low, the low prices drive volume, volume creates leverage, which keeps prices low and brings in more customers. With each of these examples, the goal isn't to win once. It's to build something where winning compounds over time and makes a stronger system as a result. And the third takeaway is you have to define your story or someone else will. Building the right system is only half the job. The other half is making sure the world understands it. And Covey understood that early and didn't leave Amazon's story up to interpretation. She defined it. What mattered, what didn't, what to share, and what to hold back. Where Bezos obsessed over the customer, Covey obsessed over the story and how Amazon was understood in the market and made sure that the business would live up to its reputation. I want to thank everyone for tuning into this episode on Joy Covey. Please like and subscribe the show. It really helps make it easier for others to find it. Episode six will be on Max Perkins, who was the editor for F Scott Bitch Drilled and Ernest Hemingway, and that episode should be out in a few weeks. I want to thank you all for tuning in to this episode of Confidance, and I'll be back in a few weeks.