Invent and Wander, page 18
To that end, we are recruiting other companies to sign the Climate Pledge. Signatories agree to measure and report greenhouse gas emissions regularly, implement decarbonization strategies in line with the Paris Agreement, and achieve net zero annual carbon emissions by 2040. (We’ll be announcing new signatories soon.)
We plan to meet the pledge, in part, by purchasing one hundred thousand electric delivery vans from Rivian—a Michigan-based producer of electric vehicles. Amazon aims to have ten thousand of Rivian’s new electric vans on the road as early as 2022, and all one hundred thousand vehicles on the road by 2030. That’s good for the environment, but the promise is even greater. This type of investment sends a signal to the marketplace to start inventing and developing new technologies that large, global companies need to transition to a low-carbon economy.
We’ve also committed to reaching 80 percent renewable energy by 2024 and 100 percent renewable energy by 2030. (The team is actually pushing to get to 100 percent by 2025 and has a challenging but credible plan to pull that off.) Globally, Amazon has eighty-six solar and wind projects that have the capacity to generate over 2,300 MW and deliver more than 6.3 million MWh of energy annually—enough to power more than 580,000 US homes.
We’ve made tremendous progress cutting packaging waste. More than a decade ago, we created the Frustration-Free Packaging program to encourage manufacturers to package their products in easy-to-open, 100 percent recyclable packaging that is ready to ship to customers without the need for an additional shipping box. Since 2008, this program has saved more than 810,000 tons of packaging material and eliminated the use of 1.4 billion shipping boxes.
We are making these significant investments to drive our carbon footprint to zero despite the fact that shopping online is already inherently more carbon efficient than going to the store. Amazon’s sustainability scientists have spent more than three years developing the models, tools, and metrics to measure our carbon footprint. Their detailed analysis has found that shopping online consistently generates less carbon than driving to a store, since a single delivery van trip can take approximately one hundred roundtrip car journeys off the road on average. Our scientists developed a model to compare the carbon intensity of ordering Whole Foods Market groceries online versus driving to your nearest Whole Foods Market store. The study found that, averaged across all basket sizes, online grocery deliveries generate 43 percent lower carbon emissions per item compared to shopping in stores. Smaller basket sizes generate even greater carbon savings.
AWS is also inherently more efficient than the traditional in-house data center. That’s primarily due to two things—higher utilization, and the fact that our servers and facilities are more efficient than what most companies can achieve running their own data centers. Typical single-company data centers operate at roughly 18 percent server utilization. They need that excess capacity to handle large usage spikes. AWS benefits from multitenant usage patterns and operates at far higher server utilization rates. In addition, AWS has been successful in increasing the energy efficiency of its facilities and equipment, for instance by using more efficient evaporative cooling in certain data centers instead of traditional air conditioning. A study by 451 Research found that AWS’s infrastructure is 3.6 times more energy efficient than the median US enterprise data center surveyed. Along with our use of renewable energy, these factors enable AWS to do the same tasks as traditional data centers with an 88 percent lower carbon footprint. And don’t think we’re not going to get those last twelve points—we’ll make AWS 100 percent carbon free through more investments in renewable energy projects.
Leveraging Scale for Good
Over the last decade, no company has created more jobs than Amazon. Amazon directly employs 840,000 workers worldwide, including over 590,000 in the United States, 115,000 in Europe, and 95,000 in Asia. In total, Amazon directly and indirectly supports two million jobs in the United States, including 680,000-plus jobs created by Amazon’s investments in areas like construction, logistics, and professional services, plus another 830,000 jobs created by small and medium-sized businesses selling on Amazon. Globally, we support nearly four million jobs. We are especially proud of the fact that many of these are entry-level jobs that give people their first opportunity to participate in the workforce.
And Amazon’s jobs come with an industry-leading $15 minimum wage and comprehensive benefits. More than forty million Americans—many making the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour—earn less than the lowest-paid Amazon associate. When we raised our starting minimum wage to $15 an hour in 2018, it had an immediate and meaningful impact on the hundreds of thousands of people working in our fulfillment centers. We want other big employers to join us by raising their own minimum pay rates, and we continue to lobby for a $15 federal minimum wage.
We want to improve workers’ lives beyond pay. Amazon provides every full-time employee with health insurance, a 401(k) plan, twenty weeks paid maternity leave, and other benefits. These are the same benefits that Amazon’s most senior executives receive. And with our rapidly changing economy, we see more clearly than ever the need for workers to evolve their skills continually to keep up with technology. That’s why we’re spending $700 million to provide more than one hundred thousand Amazonians access to training programs, at their places of work, in high-demand fields such as health care, cloud computing, and machine learning. Since 2012, we have offered Career Choice, a prepaid tuition program for fulfillment center associates looking to move into high-demand occupations. Amazon pays up to 95 percent of tuition and fees toward a certificate or diploma in qualified fields of study, leading to enhanced employment opportunities in high-demand jobs. Since its launch, more than twenty-five thousand Amazonians have received training for in-demand occupations.
To ensure that future generations have the skills they need to thrive in a technology-driven economy, we started a program last year called Amazon Future Engineer, which is designed to educate and train low-income and disadvantaged young people to pursue careers in computer science. We have an ambitious goal: to help hundreds of thousands of students each year learn computer science and coding. Amazon Future Engineer currently funds Introduction to Computer Science and AP Computer Science classes for more than two thousand schools in underserved communities across the country. Each year, Amazon Future Engineer also gives one hundred four-year, $40,000 college scholarships to computer science students from low-income backgrounds. Those scholarship recipients also receive guaranteed, paid internships at Amazon after their first year of college. Our program in the UK funds 120 engineering apprenticeships and helps students from disadvantaged backgrounds pursue technology careers.
For now, my own time and thinking continues to be focused on COVID-19 and how Amazon can help while we’re in the middle of it. I am extremely grateful to my fellow Amazonians for all the grit and ingenuity they are showing as we move through this. You can count on all of us to look beyond the immediate crisis for insights and lessons and how to apply them going forward.
Reflect on this from Theodor Seuss Geisel: “When something bad happens you have three choices. You can either let it define you, let it destroy you, or you can let it strengthen you.”
I am very optimistic about which of these civilization is going to choose.
Even in these circumstances, it remains Day 1.
Part 2
LIFE & WORK
My Gift in Life
YOU GET DIFFERENT gifts in life, and one of my great gifts is my mom and dad.
My highest admiration goes to those people—we all know some of them; I know I do—who had terrible parents but so admirably broke that cycle, pulled out of it, and made it all work. I did not have that situation. I was always loved. My parents loved me unconditionally, and, by the way, it was pretty tough for them. My mom doesn’t talk about it much, but she had me when she was seventeen years old. She was a high school student in Albuquerque, New Mexico. You could ask her, but I’m pretty sure that it wasn’t cool in 1964 to be a pregnant mom in high school in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In fact, my grandfather, another incredibly important figure in my life, went to bat for her because the high school wanted to kick her out. You weren’t allowed to be pregnant in high school there, and my grandfather said, “You can’t kick her out. It’s a public school. She gets to go to school.” They negotiated for a while, and the principal finally said, “Okay, she can stay and finish high school, but she can’t do any extracurricular activities, and she can’t have a locker.” And then my grandfather, being a very wise man, said, “We’ll take that deal,” and so she finished high school.
My mom had me, and then she married my dad. My dad is my real dad, not my biological dad. His name is Mike. He’s a Cuban immigrant. He came here as part of Operation Pedro Pan and, in fact, was put up by a Catholic mission in Wilmington, Delaware, and then got a scholarship to attend college in Albuquerque, which is where he met my mom. So I have a kind of a fairy tale story. My grandfather, possibly because my parents were so young, would take me every summer to his spectacular ranch. From age four to sixteen, I basically spent every summer working alongside him on the ranch. He was the most resourceful man. He did all his own veterinarian work. He would even make his own needles: pound the wire with an oxyacetylene torch, drill a little hole in it, sharpen it, and make a needle that he could suture up the cattle with. Some of the cattle even survived. He was a remarkable man and a huge part of all of our lives. My grandfather was like a second set of parents for me.
A Crucial Moment at Princeton
I WAS BORN IN Albuquerque but left when I was three or four, moved to Texas, and ultimately went to high school in Miami, Florida. I graduated from a big public high school, Miami Palmetto Senior High, in 1982. (Go Panthers!) There were 750 kids in my graduating class. I loved high school. I had so much fun. I lost my library privileges because I laughed too loudly in the library. I’ve had that laugh all my life. There was a multiyear period when my brother and sister would not see a movie with me because they thought it was too embarrassing. I don’t know why I have this laugh. It’s just that I laugh easily and often. Ask my mom or anybody who knows me well, and they’ll say, “If Jeff’s unhappy, wait five minutes since he can’t maintain unhappiness.” I guess I have good serotonin levels or something.
I wanted to be a theoretical physicist, and so I went to Princeton. I was a really good student, with an A+ in almost everything. I was on an honors physics track, which starts out with a hundred students, and by the time you get to quantum mechanics, it’s about thirty. So I’m in quantum mechanics, probably in junior year, and I’ve also been taking computer science and electrical engineering classes, which I’m also enjoying. But I can’t solve this one really hard partial differential equation. I’d been studying with my roommate, Joe, who also was really good at math. The two of us worked on this one homework problem for three hours and got nowhere, and we finally looked up at each other over the table at the same moment and said, “Yosanta”—the smartest guy at Princeton. We went to Yosanta’s room. He is Sri Lankan and in the “facebook,” which was an actual paper book at that time, and his name was three lines long because I guess in Sri Lanka, when you do something good for the king, they give you extra syllables in your name. So he had a super-long last name and was the most humble, wonderful guy. We show him this problem, and he looks at it. He stares at it for a while and says, “Cosign.” I’m, like, “What do you mean,” and Yosanta says, “That’s the answer.” And I’m, like, “That’s the answer?” “Yeah, let me show you.” He sits us down. He writes out three pages of detailed algebra. Everything crosses out, and the answer is cosign, and I say, “Listen, Yosanta, did you just do that in your head?” And he says, “No, that would be impossible. Three years ago I solved a very similar problem, and I was able to map this problem onto that problem, and then it was immediately obvious that the answer was cosign.” That was an important moment for me because it was the very moment when I realized I was never going to be a great theoretical physicist, and so I started doing some soul-searching. In most occupations, if you’re in the ninetieth percentile or above, you’re going to contribute. In theoretical physics, you’ve got to be, like, one of the top fifty people in the world, or you’re really just not helping out much. It was very clear. I saw the writing on the wall and changed my major very quickly to electrical engineering and computer science.
“We Are What We Choose”
ADDRESS TO THE PRINCETON GRADUATING CLASS OF 2010
AS A KID, I spent my summers with my grandparents on their ranch in Texas. I helped fix windmills, vaccinate cattle, and do other chores. We also watched soap operas every afternoon, especially Days of Our Lives. My grandparents belonged to a Caravan Club, a group of Airstream trailer owners who travel together around the United States and Canada. And every few summers we’d join the caravan. We’d hitch up the Airstream trailer to my grandfather’s car, and off we’d go in a line with three hundred other Airstream adventurers. I loved and worshipped my grandparents, and I really looked forward to these trips. On one, when I was about ten years old, I was rolling around in the big bench seat in the back of the car. My grandfather was driving. And my grandmother had the passenger seat. She smoked throughout these trips, and I hated the smell.
At that age I’d take any excuse to make estimates and do minor arithmetic—I’d calculate our gas mileage or figure out useless statistics on things like grocery spending. I’d been hearing an ad campaign about smoking. I can’t remember the details, but basically the ad said that every puff of a cigarette takes some number of minutes off your life: I think it might have been two minutes per puff. At any rate, I decided to do the math for my grandmother. I estimated the number of cigarettes per day, the number of puffs per cigarette, and so on. When I was satisfied that I’d come up with a reasonable number, I poked my head into the front of the car, tapped my grandmother on the shoulder, and proudly proclaimed, “At two minutes per puff, you’ve taken nine years off your life!”
I have a vivid memory of what happened, and it was not what I anticipated. I expected to be applauded for my cleverness and arithmetic skills: “Jeff, you’re so smart. You had to have made some tricky estimates, figure out the number of minutes in a year, and do some division.” That’s not what happened. Instead, my grandmother burst into tears. I sat in the backseat and did not know what to do. While my grandmother sat crying, my grandfather, who had been driving in silence, pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway. He got out of the car and came around and opened my door and waited for me to follow. Was I in trouble? My grandfather was a highly intelligent, quiet man. He had never said a harsh word to me, and maybe this was to be the first time. Or maybe he would ask that I get back in the car and apologize to my grandmother. I had no experience in this realm with my grandparents and no way to gauge what the consequences might be. We stopped beside the trailer. My grandfather looked at me, and after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly said, “Jeff, one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.”
What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift; kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy—they’re given, after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you’re not careful, and if you do, it’ll probably be to the detriment of your choices.
This is a group with many gifts. I’m sure one of your gifts is the gift of a smart and capable brain. I’m confident that’s the case because admission is competitive, and if there weren’t some signs that you’re clever, the dean of admission wouldn’t have let you in.
Your smarts will come in handy because you will travel in a land of marvels. We humans—plodding as we are—will astonish ourselves. We’ll invent ways to generate clean energy and a lot of it. Atom by atom, we’ll assemble tiny machines that will enter cell walls and make repairs. This month comes the extraordinary but also inevitable news that we’ve synthesized life. In the coming years we’ll not only synthesize it, but we’ll also engineer it to specifications. I believe you’ll even see us understand the human brain. Jules Verne, Mark Twain, Galileo, Newton—all the curious from the ages would have wanted to be alive most of all right now. As a civilization, we will have so many gifts, just as you as individuals have so many individual gifts as you sit before me.
How will you use these gifts? And will you take pride in your gifts or pride in your choices?
I got the idea to start Amazon sixteen years ago. I came across the fact that web usage was growing at 2,300 percent per year. I’d never seen or heard of anything that grew that fast, and the idea of building an online bookstore with millions of titles—something that simply couldn’t exist in the physical world—was very exciting to me. I had just turned thirty years old, and I’d been married for a year. I told my wife, MacKenzie, that I wanted to quit my job and go do this crazy thing that probably wouldn’t work since most start-ups don’t, and I wasn’t sure what would happen after that. MacKenzie (also a Princeton grad and sitting here in the second row) told me I should go for it. As a young boy, I’d been a garage inventor. I’d invented an automatic gate closer out of cement-filled tires, a solar cooker that didn’t work very well out of an umbrella and tinfoil, and baking-pan alarms to entrap my siblings. I’d always wanted to be an inventor, and she wanted me to follow my passion.
