Ethan Evans (ex-Amazon VP, @EthanEvansVP) on getting caught empire building by Jeff Bezos: Me: Because you had so much success as a VP, did you do empire building? Ethan: "The human mind is great at rationalizing. I think in hindsight, I for sure did some empire building. But at the time, you probably don't tell yourself you're empire building. What you tell yourself is, with all these people, I could do so much more, right? You frame it as, man, I have all these great ideas. We've got a big backlog. If only I had 375 more people, imagine what we could do. And it's not your budget. So why not ask for it? So I got totally burned on this. When we were growing Amazon Appstore, we had launched the store and we had our annual meeting with Bezos. We took him this huge ask for all these people. I think we had nobody in marketing. We had no dedicated marketers because we had started this lean team. It was something absurd like we need 25 marketing people. And, this is not exactly right, but it's like we need 5 PR people. We had this idea: we're operating in 5 countries, we need 1 PR person per country. Well, Jeff tore into us. He asked a couple questions like, what are these people going to do? What are they actually going to do? And our answers fell apart. He asked one question, we gave a crappy answer, and you could tell he's like, hmm. A second later he asked another question, and we gave another crappy answer. And he's like, 'Okay, I don't believe any of your numbers from here on. I've asked you two questions. They were both nonsense. Go back and bring me a sheet where the maximum size of any bucket of anything you're asking for is two or three people, and it says exactly what they're going to do. And I will go through that line by line and tell you what you can have.' And that's what he did. He just literally, with a red pen, with all of his direct leaders watching: no, 3, none, 2, okay... and just took us over the coals. He wasn't wrong. He was actually right. I was relatively newer. One of my managers was newer. We had gotten big eyes because we'd launched the project and thought, well, let's see what we can do with this. It's a good project. Let's see what they want to do. And what we found out was not very much. They wanted us to be lean."