The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

by Brad Stone

“If you’re not good, Jeff will chew you up and spit you out. And if you’re good, he will jump on your back and ride you into the ground.”

Bezos never despaired over the mass exodus. One of his gifts, his colleagues said, was being able to drive and motivate his employees without get...

focused on his long-term goal of unlimited selection than on his short-term revenue-boosting partnerships, however lucrative.

The elevated competition between the two companies put at least one person in an awkward position: Scott Cook, Intuit’s founder, was still on the boards of both companies.

Over the years, P13N kept getting better. In 2001, Amazon started making suggestions based on the items customers looked at, not just the products they bought.

Editorial was handselling products with clever writing and intuitive decisions about what to promote. (“We ain’t lion: this adorable Goliath Backpack Pal is a grrreat way to scare away those first-day-of-school jitters,” read the home page in 1999, promoting a lion-shaped back-pack for kids.) Personalization was skipping the puns and building a store for every customer using cold, hard data to stock the shelves with the items that customers were statistically the most likely to buy. Bezos did not explicitly favor one group over the other, but he looked at the results of tests. Over time it became clear that the humans couldn’t compete.

Most editors and writers were reassigned or laid off.

Amabot replaced the personable, handcrafted sections of the site with automatically generated recommendations in a standardized layout.

In January 2002, Amazon reported its first profitable quarter, posting net income of $5 million, a meager but symbolic penny per share.

Amazon had finally shown the world that it wasn’t just another doomed dot-com. The stock price immediately jumped 25 percent in after-hours trading, clawing its way out of the single digits.

JEFF BEZOS DID more than just refute Ravi Suria and other skeptics during the dot-com bust. He soundly defeated them, and then he surreptitiously encoded his victory for posterity in a press release.

In Bezos’s case, what is undeniably true is that from his earliest years, his parents and teachers recognized that this child was different—unnaturally gifted, but also unusually driven.

Like the time three-year-old Jeff disassembled his crib with a screwdriver because he insisted on sleeping in a bed. Or the time she took him to a spinning boat ride in the park and saw that while the other toddlers were waving to their moms, Jeff was looking at the mechanical workings of the cables and pulleys. Teachers at his Montessori preschool reported to his parents that the boy became so engrossed in whatever he was doing that they had to pick his chair up, with him still in it, and move it to the next activity. But Jeff was Jackie’s first child; she thought all children were like that. “The term gifted was new to the education vocabulary and certainly to me at age twenty-six,” Jackie Bezos says. “I knew he was precocious and determined and incredibly focused, and you follow that through to now and see that it hasn’t changed.”

“There was very little he couldn’t do himself,” Jackie Bezos says of her father. “He thought everything was something you could tackle in a garage.” Bezos and Pop Gise repaired windmills and castrated bulls; they attempted to grade dirt roads and built contraptions like an automatic gate opener and a crane to move the heavy parts of a broken-down D6 Caterpillar bulldozer.

Pop Gise also inspired in his grandson a passion for intellectual pursuits. He brought him to the local Cotulla library, where over successive summers Bezos made his way through a sizable collection of science fiction books donated by a local resident.

Bezos had dreams of becoming an inventor like Thomas Edison, so his mother patiently shuttled him back and forth and back again to a local Radio Shack to buy parts for a succession of gadgets: homemade robots, hovercrafts, a solar-powered cooker, and devices to keep his siblings out of his room. “I was constantly booby-trapping the house with various kinds of alarms and some of them were not just audible sounds, but actually like physical booby traps,” Bezos said later. “I think I occasionally worried my parents that they were going to open the door one day and have thirty pounds of nails drop on their head or something.”8

his booming, uninhibited laugh occasionally caused problems. “We would trust Jeff to take them to movies,” Jackie Bezos says, “but the two of them would come back embarrassed, saying, ‘Jeff laughs too loud.’ It would be some Disney movie, and his laughter was drowning out everything.”

“He was excruciatingly focused,”

“Not like mad-scientist focused, but he was capable of really focusing, in a crazy way, on certain things. He was extremely disciplined, which is how he is able to do all these things.”

Bezos took a series of odd jobs throughout high school. One summer he famously worked as a fryer at a local McDonald’s, learning, among other skills, how to crack an egg with one hand.

Bezos’s high-school friends say he was ridiculously competitive.

He collected awards for best science student at his school for three years and best math student for two, and he won a statewide science fair for an entry concerning the effects of a zero-gravity environment on the housefly. At some point,

“The race [for the rest of the students] then became to be number two,”

“Jeff decided he wanted it and he worked harder than anybody else.”

After his greasy summer at McDonald’s, Bezos wanted to avoid another low-wage job, so with Werner he created the DREAM Institute, a ten-day summer school for ten-year-olds that explored such diverse topics as Gulliver’s Travels, black holes, nuclear deterrence, and the Bezos family’s Apple II computer.

“I got the sense that Jackie and Mike were the kinds of parents who always encouraged Jeff and nurtured his creativity,” Werner says.

In the year 2000, as Amazon was trying to restore order to its balance sheet while fighting the dot-com doubters, Bezos saw his fortune drop precipitously, from $6.1 to $2 billion.

He had seen firsthand how technology, patience, and long-term thinking could pay off.

right at the height of the world’s skepticism about the future prospects of Amazon, Bezos secretly started an entirely new company devoted to space exploration and registered it with the state of Washington.

“He absolutely thinks he’s going to space,” Hanauer says. “It’s always been one of his goals. It’s why he started working out every morning. He’s been ridiculously disciplined about it.”

an interview I conducted with Bezos in 2000, I asked him what he was reading. He talked about Robert Zubrin’s books Entering Space: Creating a Spacefaring Civilization and The Case for Mars. At the end of the conversation, I wondered when some brave Silicon Valley entrepreneur would start a private space company (this was two years before PayPal cofounder Elon Musk started his rocket company SpaceX).

Bezos later told Time magazine that his overarching thought during the accident was What a dumb way to die. It later emerged that he was looking to buy land for a Texas ranch. Bezos wanted to give his kids the same experience he’d had growing up on his grandparents’ ranch in Cotulla.

At the time of the helicopter crash, the world knew nothing of Jeff Bezos’s space-exploration company.

In a speech at Carnegie Mellon University in 2011, Bezos said that Blue Origin’s goal was to drive down the cost and increase the safety of technology that can get humans into space.

Bezos does not allow the public or media to tour his space facilities.

Setbacks are temporary. Naysayers are best ignored.

Bezos needed help taming the growing chaos inside his company’s walls.

resumed lurching into new categories, like sporting goods, apparel, and jewelry, and new countries, like Japan and China.

Size bred chaos.

The larger and more ambitious it got, the more complicated it became structurally and the harder it was to keep everyone coordinated and moving quickly.

Bezos wanted to execute several strategies simultaneously, but the company’s various interdependent divisions were wasting too much time coordinating with one other.

During these years of its awkward adolescence, Bezos refused to slow down, doubling and tripling his bet on the Internet and on his grand vision for a store that sold everything.

“Bezos wanted to do it and Wilke knew how to do it. It was a hell of a lot of fun, in a very Machiavellian sort of way.”

Jeff Wilke’s job was to fix the mistakes of his predecessor. Jimmy Wright and his cowboy crew from Walmart had designed Amazon’s nationwide logistics network in the late nineties and were the best in the world at building large-scale retail distribution. But in moving quickly to satisfy Bezos’s open-ended goal to store and ship everything, they had created a system that was expensive, unreliable, and hungry for an emergency influx of employees from Seattle at the end of every year. “It was a mess,” says Bruce Jones. “It was pretty much how Walmart did all their distribution centers, which was great if you had to send out five thousand rolls of toilet paper. But it was not well suited to small orders.”

Mark Mastandrea, an MIT classmate who would follow him to Amazon, says that Wilke “was one of the smartest people I had ever come across. He got to the answers faster than anyone else.”

Wilke was immersed in the corporate dogma of Six Sigma, a manufacturing and management philosophy that seeks to increase efficiency by identifying and eliminating defects.

Amazon needed someone who was smart enough to go toe to toe with Jeff Bezos, who delighted in questioning how everything was done.

Wilke did not immediately present the picture of a dynamic leader. “He was not a charismatic communicator,” Galli says. “He was an extremely smart and thoughtful supplychain expert who relied on fact-based analysis and wanted to zero in and do the right thing.”

He wrote down a list of the ten smartest people he knew and hired them all, including Russell Allgor, a supply-chain engineer at Bayer AG.

The factory physics were a lot closer to manufacturing and assembly than they were to retail,”