The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

by Brad Stone

In Taleb’s book—which, incidentally, all Amazon senior executives had to read—the

Black swan

Lovejoy had been working a modest thirty-five hours a week, playing ultimate Frisbee, kayaking, and hanging out with his girlfriend, and Bezos was imagining a different culture for Amazon, one where employees worked tirelessly for the sake of building a lasting company and increasing the value of their own ownership stakes.

if the potential employees made the mistake of talking about wanting a harmonious balance between work and home life, Bezos rejected them.

The assumption was that no one would take even a weekend day off. “Nobody said you couldn’t, but nobody thought you would,” says Susan Benson. Eric Benson adds, “There were deadlines and death marches.”

Breier’s tenure at Amazon was short and rocky. Bezos wanted to reinvent everything about marketing, suggesting, for example, that they conduct annual reviews of advertising agencies to make them constantly compete for Amazon’s business. Breier explained that the advertising industry didn’t work that way. He lasted about a year.

During one memorable meeting, a female employee pointedly asked Bezos when Amazon was going to establish a better work-life balance. He didn’t take that well. “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.”

So as the FUD accumulated, it started to stall large parts of the facility. Rachmeler’s team worked to clear up the backlog but eventually it became evident that there was one item in particular that was causing the distribution center to go haywire—a missing pallet of Pokémon Jigglypuffs. The Amazon database insisted that the Jigglypuffs had been delivered to the facility, but if so, they were either misplaced or stolen. Although Rachmeler put together a search team, the task seemed nearly impossible. The group was looking for a single box inside an eight-hundred-thousand-square-foot facility. “It was very much like that scene at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark,” Rachmeler says. She dashed out to a nearby Walmart to buy a few pairs of binoculars and then passed them out among her group so they could scan the upper levels of the metal shelving. After three days of exhaustive searching, at two o’clock in the morning, Rachmeler was sitting, spent and dejected, in a private office. Suddenly, the door flew open. A colleague danced in, and Rachmeler briefly wondered if she was dreaming. Then she noticed that the woman was leading a conga line of other workers and that they were jubilantly holding above their heads the missing box of Jigglypuffs.

At the same time, rising investor skepticism and the pleadings of nervous senior executives finally convinced Bezos to shift gears. Instead of Get Big Fast, the company adopted a new operating mantra: Get Our House in Order. The watchwords were discipline, efficiency, and eliminating waste.

But not Jeff. “I have never seen anyone so calm in the eye of a storm. Ice water runs through his veins,”

“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,”

“The number of employees at that point other than Jeff who thought he could turn it into an eighty-billion-dollar company—that’s a short list,” says Doug Boake, who departed for the Silicon Valley startup OpenTable. “He just never stopped believing. He never blinked once.”

He gave Blue Origin a coat of arms and a Latin motto, Gradatim Ferociter, which translates to “Step by Step, Ferociously.”

“Communication is a sign of dysfunction. It means people aren’t working together in a close, organic way. We should be trying to figure out a way for teams to communicate less with each other, not more.”

Bezos’s counterintuitive point was that coordination among employees wasted time, and that the people closest to problems were usually in the best position to solve them.

All new hires had to directly improve the outcome of the company. He wanted doers—engineers, developers, perhaps merchandise buyers, but not managers.

Bezos believed that method concealed lazy thinking. “PowerPoint is a very imprecise communication mechanism,” says Jeff Holden, Bezos’s former D. E. Shaw colleague, who by that point had joined the S Team. “It is fantastically easy to hide between bullet points. You are never forced to express your thoughts completely.”

Wilke and Bezos dug into the details, asking their inhumanly prescient questions. It was both inspiring and terrifying. “Those guys could be brutal,” says Mark Mastandrea. “You had to be comfortable saying, ‘I don’t know; I’ll get back to you in a couple of hours,’ and then doing it. You could not ever bullshit or make stuff up. That would be the end.”

At the same time, Bezos became enamored with a book called Creation, by Steve Grand,

As Bezos proclaimed at the time, according to numerous employees: “Developers are alchemists and our job is to do everything we can to get them to do their alchemy.”

It is not hyperbole to say that AWS, particularly the original services like S3 and EC2, helped lift the entire technology industry out of a prolonged post-dot-com malaise.

“Here’s my scenario, I’m going to the airport. I need a book to read. I want to enter it into the device and download it right there from my car.” “But you can’t do that,” Hobbs replied. “I’ll decide what I can do,” Bezos said. “I’ll figure this out and it is not going to be a business model you understand. You are the designers, I want you to design this and I’ll think about the business model.”

Amazon had an easy way to demonstrate its market power. When a publisher did not capitulate and the company shut off the recommendation algorithms for its books, the publisher’s sales usually fell by as much as 40 percent. “Typically it was about thirty days before they’d come back and say, Ouch, how do we make this work?” says Christopher Smith, a senior book buyer at the time.

“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.”

Amazon had avoided sales-tax collection for years with various clever tricks. In states where it had fulfillment centers or other offices, like Lab126, it skirted the definition of what constituted a physical presence by classifying those facilities as wholly owned subsidiaries that earned no revenue. For example, the fulfillment center in Fernley, Nevada, operated as an independent entity called Amazon.com.nvdc, Inc. These arrangements were unlikely to hold up under direct scrutiny, but Amazon had carefully negotiated with each state when opening its facilities, securing hands-off treatment in exchange for the company’s generating new jobs and economic activity.

In 2009, Blackburn ominously informed the Quidsi cofounders over an introductory lunch that the e-commerce giant was getting ready to invest in the category and that the startup should think seriously about selling to Amazon. Lore and Bharara replied that they wanted to remain private and build an independent company. Blackburn told the Quidsi founders that they should call him if they ever reconsidered. Soon after, Quidsi noticed Amazon dropping prices up to 30 percent on diapers and other baby products. As an experiment, Quidsi execs manipulated their prices and then watched as Amazon’s website changed its prices accordingly. Amazon’s famous pricing bots were lasered in on Diapers.com.

The story highlighted one of the contradictions of life inside Amazon. Long past the era of using the editorial judgment of employees to drive changes to the website, the company relies on metrics to make almost every important decision, such as what features to introduce or kill. Yet random customer anecdotes, the opposite of cold, hard data, also carry tremendous weight and can change Amazon policy. If one customer has a bad experience, Bezos often assumes it reflects a larger problem and escalates the resolution of the matter inside his company with a question mark.

Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. Leaders have conviction and are tenacious. They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly.