#105: Building the Autonomous Supply Chain with Dave Clark of Auger

for everything you built at amazon because it was it's massive fulfillment centers aircraft delivery last mile capacity Which decision, I'm pretty sure that there were several, but which of the decisions seemed the most irrational at the time, but proved to be the most transformational once implemented?

That's a good question.

What was the most irrational decision at the time? It's an interesting one.

I don't know, probably from my perspective, they probably all felt pretty rational.

But if you ask the other side, there are probably a number of them.

Yeah, the public domain, not for you guys,

because I think that you and Jeff were quite rational.

I think that

even internally, there was like plenty of times where I think I was, people thought I was crazy.

Maybe the first one was the big one was robotics.

Because we had sort of just come out of a phase where, believe it or not, Amazon operations went through a phase that was kind of anti-robotics.

not anti-software technology from like a optimization and inventory in those pieces but kind of an anti-automation framework in the physical world and sort of a very we got a little overly focused on classic kaizen auto-nomation versus automation kind of kind of deal and it was really this bet on robotics than the acquisition of kiva we worked on this like a long time trying to figure out how to get robotics to work you know we had this problem with kiva that they couldn't do I gave us one floor.

He couldn't go up.

We didn't have a good way to process it in sortation.

And it's kind of a weird story, but my wife always tells the story because she thinks it's a little nutty because I came home one day and it says massive migraine.

My head was about to explode, felt like.

And so I went and laid in bed and turned all the lights out and sat in silence for like three hours.

And while I sat there, while I was laying there, I was very focused, starting to focus on something other than my head.

And I rewrote the process design for the way we did physical sortation to tie the robotics and put it in a presentation and started pitching it the next day.

It was like sort of born out of that massive headache was like the way we do the actual physical moving from many to each is inside of a physical sortation center.

And then convincing everybody to actually go buy Kiva and start building automation.

It was a lot of internal fighting about that, like bizarrely.

and political wars.

And it was a very interesting time.

I was like fairly lowly, relatively speaking at the time.