on Why every startup should adopt Amazon’s 14 Leadership Principles, with examples

Marc Hoag
17 min readJun 7, 2018
Credit: Rahul Chakraborty

Marc is a California-licensed attorney and serial startup founder / product manager. He recently launched Future Perfect, a daily 3-minute newsletter on the top news in climate change, clean energy, and autonomous/electric vehicles. He also created Autonomous Cars with Marc Hoag, the first organic result on Google for “autonomous cars podcasts” with 199 episodes including interviews with industry leaders like founders, engineers, academics, and more.

To say that I dove headfirst into life as an entrepreneur back in October 2010 would be inaccurate. That I fell backwards, arms flailing, would be more precise.

As I’ve said time and again, choosing to be an entrepreneur is not some sort of conscious, willful decision: “Hm, yes, I think I’d like a filet mignon, or a chocolate sundae; yes, I think I’d like to become an entrepreneur today.”

No. You can no more consciously choose to be an entrepreneur than you can choose whether to be hungry: you either are, or you aren’t.

Being an entrepreneur — committing to building and running a startup — is an all-encompassing lifestyle; it’s something you do not because you want to do it, but because you’re compelled to do it.

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