A few days later, in the middle of the month, Jeff sent the house-on-fire email and said rather than presenting the set of ideas in three weeks, we should select the best one and launch the program by the end of the year. I think at some point he had decided that it wasn’t the idea that was flawed, but the decision-making process, a process encumbered by institutional risk-aversion. The “October surprise” email arose out of his realization that you simply could not prove a priori that free shipping would work. You just had to try it.
