The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

by Brad Stone

“When I read that letter, I thought, we don’t make money when we sell things. We make money when we help customers make purchase decisions.”5

Bezos interrogated the applicants, lobbing the kind of improbable questions that were once asked at D. E. Shaw, like “How many gas stations are in the United States?” It was a test to measure the quality of a candidate’s thinking; Bezos wasn’t looking for the correct answer, only for the individual to demonstrate creativity by coming up with a sound way to derive a possible solution. And if the potential employees made the mistake of talking about wanting a harmonious balance between work and home life, Bezos rejected them.

Employees soon learned of a new motto: Get Big Fast. The bigger the company got, Bezos explained, the lower the prices it could exact from Ingram and Baker and Taylor, the book wholesalers, and the more distribution capacity it could afford.

And the quicker the company grew, the more territory it could capture in what was becoming the race to establish new brands on the digital frontier. Bezos preached urgency: the company that got the lead now would likely keep it, and it could then use that lead to build a superior service for customers.

Alberg and Bezos told the Riggios they would think about a partnership. Later Alberg and Bezos spoke on the phone and agreed that such a collaboration was unlikely to work. “Jeff was always a big believer that disruptive small companies could triumph,”

Unlike traditional retailers, Amazon boasted what was called a negative operating cycle. Customers paid with their credit cards when their books shipped but Amazon settled its accounts with the book distributors only every few months.

Unlike brick-and-mortar retailers, whose inventories were spread out across hundreds or thousands of stores around the country, Amazon had one website and, at that time, a single warehouse and inventory. Amazon’s ratio of fixed costs to revenue was considerably more favorable than that of its offline competitors. In other words, Bezos and Covey argued, a dollar that was plugged into Amazon’s infrastructure could lead to exponentially greater returns than a dollar that went into the infrastructure of any other retailer in the world.

But Bezos, characteristically secretive, divulged only the legal minimum and withheld some data, like what it cost Amazon to attract a new user and how much loyal customers typically spent on the site. He wanted capital from an IPO but didn’t want to give his rivals a road map to use to follow in his footsteps.

Later Bezos recalled speaking at an all-hands meeting called to address the assault by Barnes & Noble. “Look, you should wake up worried, terrified every morning,” he told his employees. “But don’t be worried about our competitors because they`re never going to send us any money anyway. Let’s be worried about our customers and stay heads-down focused.”

Brian Birtwistle, a student in the class, recalls that Bezos was humble and circumspect. “You may be right,” Amazon’s founder told the students. “But I think you might be underestimating the degree to which established brick-and-mortar business, or any company that might be used to doing things a certain way, will find it hard to be nimble or to focus attention on a new channel.

Could a Wal-Mart-type story still occur in this day and age? My answer is of course it could happen again. Somewhere out there right now there’s someone—probably hundreds of thousands of someones—with good enough ideas to go all the way. It will be done again, over and over, providing that someone wants it badly enough to do what it takes to get there. It’s all a matter of attitude and the capacity to constantly study and question the management of the business.

Bezos didn’t take the defeat personally. He later cast the mistake as the first step in a series of important experiments to bring third-party sellers onto Amazon.

They agreed on five core values and wrote them down on a whiteboard in a conference room: customer obsession, frugality, bias for action, ownership, and high bar for talent. Later Amazon would add a sixth value, innovation.

Assigning an experienced executive to this role helped ensure that Microsoft maintained a consistent hiring standard. Bezos heard about the Microsoft program from Joel Spiegel and David Risher and then crafted Amazon’s own version, which he called bar raisers.

Looking for a way to reinforce Walton’s notion of a bias for action, Bezos instituted the Just Do It award—an acknowledgment of an employee who did something notable on his own initiative, typically outside his primary job responsibilities. Even if the action turned out to be an egregious mistake, an employee could still earn the prize as long as he or she had taken risks and shown resourcefulness in the process.

“The reason we are here is to get stuff done, that is the top priority,” he answered bluntly. “That is the DNA of Amazon. If you can’t excel and put everything into it, this might not be the place for you.”

He reaffirmed his commitment to building a lasting company, learning from his mistakes, and developing a brand associated not with books or media but with the “abstract concept of starting with the customer and working backward.”

By relying on Amazon, the retailers delayed a necessary education on an important new frontier and ceded the loyalty of their customers to an aggressive upstart. That would be one of

many problems for Borders and Circuit City, both of which went bankrupt in the depths of the financial crisis that began in 2008.

“You don’t feel thirty percent smarter when the stock goes up by thirty percent, so when the stock goes down you shouldn’t feel thirty percent dumber,” he said at an all-hands meeting. He quoted Benjamin Graham, the British-born investor who inspired Warren Buffett: “In the short term, the stock market is a voting machine. In the long run, it’s a weighing machine” that measures a company’s true value. If Amazon stayed focused on the customer, Bezos declared, the company would be fine.

Bezos didn’t care about any of that, as long as it offered more choices to customers and, in the process, gave Amazon a greater selection of products. With a single brilliant and nonintuitive strategic move, he managed to upset almost everybody, even his own colleagues. “As usual,” says Mark Britto, “it was Jeff against the world.”

Costco’s low prices generated heavy sales volume, and the company then used its significant size to demand the best possible deals from suppliers and raise its per-unit gross profit dollars. Its vendors hadn’t been happy about being squeezed but they eventually came around. “You can fill Safeco Field with the people that don’t want to sell to us,” Sinegal said. “But over a period of time, we generate enough business and prove

we are a good customer and pay our bills and keep our promises. Then they say, ‘Why the hell am I not doing business with these guys. I gotta be stupid. They are a great form of distribution.’

“My approach has always been that value trumps everything,” Sinegal continued. “The reason people are prepared to come to our strange places to shop is that we have value. We deliver on that value ...

That July, as a result of the Sinegal meeting, Amazon announced it was cutting prices of books, music, and videos by 20 to 30 percent. “There are two kinds of retailers: there are those folks who work to figure how to charge more, and there are companies that work to figure how to charge less, and we are going to be the second, full-stop,” he said in that month’s quarterly conference call with analysts, coining a new Jeffism to be repeated over and over ad nauseam for years.

Kathy Savitt, a new Amazon publicist, told Bezos she wanted to frame some of the positive news articles and

hang them on the office walls. He told her he would rather frame the negative stories like Barron’s infamous Amazon.bomb cover. When people wrote or said positive things about Amazon, he wanted employees to remember the Barron’s article and remain scared.

Steady progress toward seemingly impossible goals will win the day.

Being an unstore meant, in Bezos’s view, that Amazon was not bound by the traditional rules of retail. It had limitless shelf space and personalized itself for every customer. It allowed negative reviews in addition to positive ones, and it placed used products directly next to new ones so that customers could make informed choices. In Bezos’s eyes, Amazon offered both everyday low prices and great customer service. It was Walmart and Nordstrom’s.

you’re retailers and I hired you because you are retailers,” Bezos said. “But I want you to understand that from this day forward, you are not bound by the old rules.”

After that meeting, Bezos invited O’Reilly to speak to a group of engineers, and later at an Amazon all-hands meeting, about lessons from computer history and the importance of becoming a platform.

The comment reflected his distinctive business philosophy. Bezos believed

that high margins justified rivals’ investments in research and development and attracted more competition, while low margins attracted customers and were more defensible. (He was partly right about the iPhone; its sizable profits did indeed attract a deluge of competition, starting with smartphones running Google’s Android operating system. But the pioneering smartphone is also a fantastically lucrative product for Apple and its shareholders in a way that AWS has not been, at least so far.)

Bezos dismissed those objections and insisted that to succeed in books as Apple had in music, Amazon needed to control the entire customer experience, combining sleek hardware with an easy-to-use digital bookstore. “We are going to hire our way to having the talent,” he

told his executives in that meeting. “I absolutely know it’s very hard. We’ll learn how to do it.”

By that time, Bezos and his executives had devoured and raptly discussed another book that would significantly affect the company’s strategy: The Innovator’s Dilemma, by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen. Christensen wrote that great companies fail not because they want to avoid disruptive change but because they are reluctant to embrace promising new markets that might undermine their traditional businesses and that do not appear to satisfy their short-term growth requirements.

The companies that

solved the innovator’s dilemma, Christensen wrote, succeeded when they “set up autonomous organizations charged with building new and independent businesses around the disruptive technology.”9

Inside the company at the time, the culture was self-perpetuating, and those who couldn’t channel Bezos’s fervor on behalf of Amazon and its customers didn’t stay with the company. Those who could do it stayed and advanced.

Amazon’s behavior was a manifestation of Bezos’s own competitive personality and boundless intellect, writ large on the business landscape.

“Jeff does a couple of things better than anyone I’ve ever worked for,” Dalzell says. “He embraces the truth. A lot of people talk about the truth, but

they don’t engage their decision-making around the best truth at the time. “The second thing is that he is not tethered by conventional thinking. What is amazing to me is that he is bound only by the laws of physics. He can’t change those. Everything else he views as open to discussion.”

Bezos’s lieutenants met with CEO Reed Hastings several times during Netflix’s formative years but they always reported back that Hastings was “painfully uninterested” in selling, according to one Amazon business-development exec. Hastings himself says that Amazon was never truly serious about an acquisition of Netflix because “the basic operating rhythms” of the DVD-rental space, which required multiple small fulfillment centers to send discs out and then receive them back, were so different from Amazon’s core retail business. “It made no sense for them to be an aggressive bidder because it didn’t really leverage their strengths,” he says. Like

Amazon had watched the explosion in popularity of Internet-connected Blu-ray players and video-game consoles in its own electronics store and knew it had to get off the sidelines.

Amazon’s founder repeatedly suggested he had little reverence for the old “gatekeepers” of the media, whose business models were forged during the analogue age and whose function it was to review content

and then subjectively decide what the public got to consume. This was to be a new age of creative surplus, where it was easy for anyone to create something, find an audience, and allow the market to determine the proper economic reward. “Even well meaning gatekeepers slow innovation,” Bezos wrote in his 2011 letter to shareholders. “When a platform is self-service, even the improbable ideas can get tried, because there’s no expert gatekeeper ready to say ‘that will never work!’ And guess what—many of those improbable ideas do work, and society is the beneficiary of that diversity.”

Many Amazon employees are all too familiar with these fire drills and find them disruptive. “Why are entire teams required to drop everything on a dime to respond to a question mark escalation?” an employee once asked at one of the company’s all-hands meetings, which by 2011 were being held in Seattle’s KeyArena, a basketball coliseum with more than seventeen thousand seats. “Every anecdote from a customer matters,” Jeff Wilke answered. “We research each of them because they tell us something about our metrics and processes. It’s an audit that is done for us by our customers. We treat them as precious sources of information.”

Despite the scars and occasional bouts of post-traumatic stress disorder, former Amazon employees often consider their time at the company the most productive of their careers. Their colleagues were smart, the work was challenging, and frequent lateral movement between departments offered constant opportunities for learning. “Everybody knows how hard it is and chooses to be there,” says Faisal Masud, who spent five years in the retail business. “You are learning constantly and the pace of innovation is thrilling. I filed patents; I innovated. There is a fierce competitiveness in everything you do.”

“If you look at why Amazon is so different than almost any other company that started early on the Internet, it’s because Jeff approached it from the very beginning with that long-term vision,” Hillis continues. “It was a multidecade project. The notion that he can accomplish a huge amount with a larger time frame, if he is steady about it, is fundamentally his philosophy.”

she told Vogue magazine in a rare profile in 2012, referring to her husband’s success. “It makes my life wonderful in many ways, but that’s not the lottery I feel defined by. The fact that I got wonderful parents who believed in education and never doubted I could be a writer, the fact that I have a spouse I love, those are the things that define me.”5