Jeff Bezos on the first thing to do before starting a startup

“That blank sheet of paper stage is one of the hardest stages. And one of the reasons it’s hard is because at that stage, there’s nobody counting on you but yourself. It’s really just you. And you can quit at any time. Nobody’s going to care. And so you set about doing the simple things first. You want to start a company? Well, the first thing you do is you should write a business plan.”

Before starting Amazon, Jeff wrote a 30-page business plan. He explains why:

“The business plan won’t survive its first encounters with reality… Reality will never be the plan. But the discipline of writing the plan forces you to think through some of the issues and to get mentally comfortable in the space. You start to understand that if you push on this knob, this will move over here, and so on. So that’s the first step.”

Full video: Manufacturing Intellect “Jeff Bezos interview on Starting Amazon (2001)“ (Oct 2001)