084: Brad Stone – How To Think Like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, & Steve Jobs

Episode 084: Brad Stone – How To Think Like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, & Steve Jobs

Brad Stone leads a very interesting life. He has been in the room with some of the greatest visionaires of our time including: Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Marissa Mayer, and Mark Zuckerberg. We are extremely fortunate to have Molly share her message with us, the loyal listeners of The Learning Leader Show.

Brad Stone is the author of The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller and winner of the 2013 Goldman Sachs/Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award. Brad is a senior writer for Bloomberg Businessweek. Over the last few years, he’s authored over a dozen cover stories on companies such as Apple, Google, Amazon, Yahoo, Twitter, Facebook and the Chinese search firm Baidu.

Episode 084: Brad Stone – How To Think Like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, & Steve Jobs

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The Learning Leader Show

“Silicon Valley is a learning organism.”

Some Questions I Ask:

• What are some common characteristics of people who have sustained excellence?
• Why does Jeff Bezos not allow PowerPoint presentations?
• How did you respond to the harsh criticism from Mackenzie Bezos? (Jeff’s wife)
• What is it about Jeff Bezos that sets him apart from others?
• What is your process for writing a book?
• What’s it like being in the room with Mark Zuckerberg? Does he appear to be at another level intelligence-wise?
• Why did Steve Jobs yell at you?
• What is your current relationship like with Jeff Bezos?

In This Episode, You Will Learn:

• The importance of having a willingness to challenge conventional thinking
• Why raw intelligence is so valuable
• What it was like having his first meeting with Jeff Bezos
• The phone call Steve Jobs made to him and why he yelled at Brad
• The importance of writing – why we should all do it daily
• Being an evolving curious leader
• Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk racing to send rockets into space

“I finally picked up the phone and it was Steve Jobs yelling at me about something I wrote.” – Brad Stone

Continue Learning:

• Go To Molly’s website: Brad-Stone.com
• Read: "The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon"
• See why over 71,000 people follow Brad on Twitter: @BradStone

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Did you enjoy the podcast?

This was a jam packed episode full of great content. Brad Stone is a leader who is constantly learning in order to help us all live a better life. Who do you know that needs to hear this? Send them to The Learning Leader Show!

Episode edited by the great J Scott Donnell

Bio From Brad-Stone.com

Brad Stone is the author of The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller and winner of the 2013 Goldman Sachs/Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award.

Brad is a senior writer for Bloomberg Businessweek. Over the last few years, he’s authored over a dozen cover stories on companies such as Apple, Google, Amazon, Yahoo, Twitter, Facebook and the Chinese search firm Baidu. When he’s not attempting to deconstruct the high-tech firms charting our future, he has written about beleaguered domestic airlines, weaponized drone warplanes, the retail giant Costo, and traced the deceptions of an international con-artist and alleged murderer. Brad joined Businessweek from the New York Times, where he had been a reporter since 2006. He covered Internet trends, as well as Silicon Valley’s biggest companies from the newspaper’s San Francisco bureau. In addition to writing for the paper, he wrote a weekly column, Ping, and was a founding writer of the paper’s technology blog, Bits. From 1998 to 2006, Brad served as the Silicon Valley Correspondent for Newsweek magazine, writing for the technology and business sections of the magazine and authoring a regular online column.

Brad is also the author of one previous work of non-fiction, Gearheads: the Turbulent Rise of Robotic Sports. The book was a BookSense 76 pick and the San Francisco Chronicle selected it as one of the best books of 2003. It covers the emergence of what was then the new breed of robot hobbyists and hardware hackers.

Brad graduated from Columbia University in 1993 and is originally from Cleveland, Ohio. He lives in San Francisco with his twin daughters