A Contract with the Future
Most CEO letters are forgotten the week they’re filed.
Jeff Bezos wrote one in 1997 that Amazon still publishes verbatim every year. Twenty-eight years and counting.
It’s a short list of operating principles, in plain language, that the company has had to clear every quarter since.
Five of them still work as a checklist any founder can run their business against today.
1. Obsess over customers.
Pick the one metric that proves you actually do, and review it weekly. Repeat purchase rate. Time to first value. Net promoter score. If you can’t see it improving, you’re customer-curious at best.
2. Think in years, not quarters.
Before every meaningful decision, write down where you want the business to be in five years. Make the choice that gets you there, even if this month looks worse. The hard part is convincing your team that ugly short-term optics are the price of compounding.
3. Make calculated bold bets.
List the three biggest bets you’re running right now. Rank them by upside, downside, and reversibility. Most founders kill the bold ones to protect a quarterly number. The 1997 letter argues for the opposite: take the asymmetric bet, accept the loss, redeploy.
4. Treat cash flow as the scoreboard.
GAAP earnings can flatter a broken business. Free cash flow can’t. Build the dashboard your CFO would build if they had to defend the company in front of Bezos.
5. Set the hiring bar painfully high.
Bezos called hiring the single most important element of Amazon’s success. The actionable version: before every new hire, write down what you’d lose by hiring no one for another month. If the honest answer is “not much,” you’re hiring out of habit.
The reason the letter still works isn’t that the principles are unique. Plenty of founders believe in long-term thinking and customer obsession.
It works because Bezos wrote them down, attached them to the public record, and made the company keep clearing them every year.
Most founders skip that last part.
Write your principles this quarter. Publish them.
A contract with the future starts the day someone else can hold you to it.
