Don Interviewed on Business Insider’s Success! How I Did It Podcast

In an interview with Business Insider’s podcast Success! How I Did It, Don discusses his time as a foreign correspondent for Rolling Stone in the ’70s, Audible’s founding and early days, the relationship with Amazon and his commitment to Newark.

My whole thing was: “What do these things mean, as opposed to what they do?” The Rolling Stone idea was you’d get close to, as I did, to terrorists, or to people throughout the ’70s who were fighting wars of liberation, willing to die for a cause. What was it like to have that happen? Then when I wrote books about business — and I wrote a book about Sears, a 600-page tome; I wrote a book about Nike. I asked: What do these companies mean to all the constituents around them and to the culture in general?

I think that allowed Audible to grow up as a company that was really consistent about opening up opportunities to consumers in particular. This weirdness of customer centricity is what I bonded with Jeff Bezos on, where you really are working backwards from a different idea. How can you actually import something profound to people, because of the power of an organization, as opposed to measuring yourself in dollars and cents or just permutations on a theme?

Listen to it or read the full transcript here.