The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

by Brad Stone

Bezos is a micromanager with a limitless spring of new ideas, and he reacts harshly to efforts that don’t meet his rigorous standards.

The HTML standard itself, the lingua franca of the Web, was barely half a decade old, and modern languages like JavaScript and AJAX were years away. Amazon’s first engineers coded in a computer language called C and decided to store the website in an off-the-shelf database called Berkeley DB that had never seen the levels of traffic to which it would soon be exposed.

we don’t make money when we sell things. We make money when we help customers make purchase decisions.”

The foursome had a steak dinner at Seattle’s famous Dahlia Lounge, on Fourth Avenue near the Columbia Building, an iconic Seattle restaurant with a memorable neon sign of a chef holding a strung-up fish.

Based on my knowledge of other Bezos lore, I suspect he is a big fan of Tom Douglas.

“It was a pretty friendly dinner. Other than the threats.”

Inside Amazon, the shareholder letter became the equivalent of holy scripture. Bezos rereleases the letter each year with the company’s annual report, and the company has hewed remarkably close to the promises and philosophies laid out in it.

Wright asked who he needed to show the plans to and what kind of return on investment he would have to demonstrate. “Don’t worry about that,” Bezos said. “Just get it built.” “Don’t I have to get approval to do this?” Wright asked. “You just did,” Bezos said.

Bezos had imbibed Walton’s book thoroughly and wove the Walmart founder’s credo about frugality and a “bias for action” into the cultural fabric of Amazon. In the copy he brought to Kathryn Dalzell, he had underlined one particular passage in which Walton described borrowing the best ideas of his competitors. Bezos’s point was that every company in retail stands on the shoulders of the giants that came before it.

It's interesting to learn where Bezos got a lot of his leadership ideas from. When you are inside Amazon the leadership principles are like air, its all around you but you don't think about where they came from.

Bar raisers at Amazon—the program still exists today—are designated employees who have proven themselves to be intuitive recruiters of talent. Dalzell and Bezos handpicked the original leaders of the program, one of whom was Shaw veteran Jeff Holden. At least one anointed bar raiser would participate in every interview process and would have the power to veto a candidate who did not meet the goal of raising the company’s overall hiring bar. Even the hiring manager was unable to override a bar raiser’s veto.

Bezos announced that employees could no longer use such corporate crutches and would have to write their presentations in prose, in what he called narratives. The S Team debated with him over the wisdom of scrapping PowerPoint but Bezos insisted. He wanted people thinking deeply and taking the time to express their thoughts cogently.

Every time a new feature or product was proposed, he decreed that the narrative should take the shape of a mock press release. The goal was to get employees to distill a pitch into its purest essence, to start from something the customer might see—the public announcement—and work backward. Bezos didn’t believe anyone could make a good decision about a feature or a product without knowing precisely how it would be communicated to the world—and what the hallowed customer would make of it.

They would let other, more experienced retailers sell everything on the site via Amazon’s Marketplace, and Amazon would take a commission. Meanwhile, the company could watch and learn. “That was something we did quite well,” says Randy Miller. “If you don’t know anything about the business, launch it through the Marketplace, bring retailers in, watch what they do and what they sell, understand it, and then get into it.”

Amazon employees had to seek approval to attend trade shows and were told to avoid activities that involved promoting the sale of any products on the Amazon website while on the road. They couldn’t blog or talk to the press without permission, had to avoid renting any property on trips, and couldn’t place orders on Amazon from the company’s computers. They could sign contracts with other companies, such as suppliers who were offering their goods for sale on the site, only in Seattle.

Color-coded maps were widely distributed to employees at headquarters in Seattle. Travel to green states like Michigan was okay, but orange states like California required special clearance so that the legal department could track the cumulative number of days Amazon employees spent there. Travel to red states, like Texas, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, required employees to complete an intensive seventeen-item questionnaire about the trip that was designed to determine whether they would make the company vulnerable to sales-tax collection efforts

Can confirm.

The people who do well at Amazon are often those who thrive in an adversarial atmosphere with almost constant friction.

This matches my experience. People either harden up and become better or they get burned out and feel pushed out. It will be interesting to see what happens as time goes on, as Amazon reaches a point where their desire to grow as a company grows beyond the number of people on the earth who have the skills to work there. Eventually they are going to run out of people to employ who can help fulfill their big ambitions.

Employees typically get 5 percent of their shares at the end of their first year, 15 percent their second year, and then 20 percent every six months over the final two years. Ensuing grants vest over two years and are also backloaded, to ensure that employees keep working hard and are never inclined to coast.

When a new hire joins the company, he gets a backpack with a power adapter, a laptop dock, and some orientation materials. When someone resigns, he is asked to hand in all that equipment—including the backpack.

I did not have to give back my backpack.

I found myself thinking about what it takes to accomplish things as big as they both did, when a lot of what you are doing is unconventional. It may very well be that the absolute intensity of drive and focus is essential and incompatible with all of the nice management thought about consensus and gentle demeanor. I think about how effective and quick Jeff was and how important it was that he didn’t slow down too much or modify his ideas to make others feel comfortable.