Kindling a Passion for Innovation
Bill Carr ’89, a 15-year veteran of Amazon, returned to campus to share lessons about entrepreneurship
Nowadays, the Amazon Kindle is practically a household staple—one that’s found on nightstands, tucked into airplane carry-on bags, and in any other location where an avid bookworm would enjoy a lightweight e-reader with access to a gigantic virtual library.
But years ago, when the Kindle was just a tiny gleam in the eye of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, it took an enormous investment of time, ideas, and trust in the process to make it come to life.
Bill Carr ’89, who worked for Amazon for 15 years and spent over a decade of that time as vice president of digital media, was part of the team that made it happen. He spoke at the Halloran Lab for Entrepreneurship’s Back of the Napkin Challenge: Live Pitch Finals and Innovation Workshop, held last week at the Greene Block + Studios in downtown Waterville.
The student entrepreneurs and others who crowded the room listened avidly as Carr, an economics and English double major during his time at Colby, shared insights and stories from the development process at the trillion-dollar technology company.
“I was fortunate enough to be in the right place at the right time and to have been one of the people to spend a lot of time in a room debating and discussing things,” said Carr, who joined a growing network of Colby alumni offering expertise to students engaged in Halloran Lab activities.
The Halloran Lab for Entrepreneurship had its one-year anniversary this month, and the chance to learn from Carr was a great way to mark that milestone, according to Jeremy Barron ’00, the lab’s director.
“It’s an incredible asset for Colby to have an innovation expert with unbelievable real-world experience at one of the most groundbreaking companies of our time,” Barron said. “Bill is a tremendous resource, and that he’s willing to share with us what he’s learned from 15 years on the job is just amazing.”
“Working backwards”
Like everything worthwhile, the Kindle started with a great idea. But getting to the right great idea is not easy, Carr said. A common pitfall of entrepreneurs is to get stuck on the first idea they come up with, or on every single idea they have.
That won’t work.
“The reality is that not all ideas are created equal. What you want to do is figure out early in the process which of your ideas are the best ones,” he said. “You can work super hard, have the most amazing team, have tremendous operational excellence, but if you’re working on a crappy idea, it doesn’t matter.”
The development process for the Kindle began in 2005. Back then, Amazon’s $4 billion in annual revenue mostly came from selling physical books, CDs, and DVDs. Still, Bezos and others at the company saw trouble ahead in the growth of disruptors like Apple’s iPod, a digital music player, and Napster, which allowed users to share and download music for free.
“It did not look like it was going to be a good future for our company since we were completely dependent on selling media,” Carr said. “We were trying to figure out, well, how do we avoid being Kodak? For those of you who are old enough to remember, that company used to be a very big, profitable company in the photography world, and it doesn’t exist now because it did not make the leap to digital photography. So, how do we go from analog to digital successfully?”
The Amazon team didn’t want to copy Apple. Instead, they wanted to build something completely new. Carr spent almost a year in meetings with Bezos and a few other people trying to figure out what that should be.
“We tried to just focus on the customer, figuring out the problems that were relevant to them, and work backwards from there to invent a solution,” he said.
“Working backwards” is a phrase that has resonance for both Amazon and Carr. In 2021 he and another Amazon veteran, Colin Bryer, published a book called Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon. It’s also the name of the company they founded to teach other people how to build their own “invention machine.”
The importance of wandering
The creative path to building the Kindle was not straightforward or linear, Carr said, but instead involved lots of wandering.
“When I sit down to work on a problem, I know I don’t know where I’m going,” he said. “Efficiency and invention are sort of at odds. Because invention, real invention, not incremental improvement … requires wandering. You have to give yourself permission to wander.”
Although many people may see wandering as inefficient, it is invaluable, Carr said.
“I think there’s really nothing more fun than sitting at a whiteboard with a group of smart people and spitballing, coming up with new ideas and objections to those ideas, and solutions to the objections, and going back and forth,” he said. “Sometimes you wake up with an idea in the middle of the night, and sometimes you sit down with other people and go back and forth. Both things are really pleasurable.”
A classic way to develop a new business idea is for a company to focus on its own strengths, and on its competitors’ weaknesses. This kind of thinking asks companies to look at what they’re really good at today, find some things that are similar to that, and move forward in that direction. But that approach doesn’t take the customer into consideration, and Amazon wanted to do something different.
“We tried to figure out how we work from a customer-backwards way,” he said.
For Barron, hearing about the value of wandering aligned with his own experience as an entrepreneur, and it is something he hopes will have relevance for students.
“I like the idea of how true innovation comes not from a linear path. It comes from wandering and exploring, looking at many things, and drawing on many life experiences,” the director said. “I think that’s what’s great about the liberal arts. You are exposed to so many disciplines. Oftentimes, the biggest breakthroughs happen when a person is able to look at something with a new perspective.”
