Amazon Unbound

by Brad Stone

“Every interesting thing I’ve ever done, every important thing I’ve ever done, every beneficial thing I’ve ever done, has been through a cascade of experiments and mistakes and failures,”

My Amazon had under 150,000 employees. By the end of 2020, it had an astounding 1.3 million employees.

“The biggest needle movers will be things that customers don’t know to ask for,” he would write years later in a letter to shareholders. “We must invent on their behalf. We have to tap into our own inner imagination about what’s possible.”

Most importantly, Bezos didn’t penalize Ian Freed and other Fire Phone managers, sending a strong message inside Amazon that taking risks was rewarded—especially if the entire debacle was primarily his own fault.

George instead reorganized Alexa around the Amazonian ideal of fast-moving “two pizza” teams, each devoted to a specific Alexa domain, like music, weather, lighting, thermostats, video devices, and so on. Each team was run by a so-called “single-threaded leader” who had ultimate control and absolute accountability over their success or failure. (The phrase comes from computer science terminology; a single-threaded program executes one command at a time.)

Alexa execs, like leaders elsewhere in Amazon, became frequent recipients of the CEO’s escalation emails, in which he forwarded a customer complaint accompanied by a single question mark and then expected a response within twenty-four hours.

Later, Alexa execs would say that Bezos’s close involvement made their lives more difficult but also produced immeasurable results. Jeff “gave us the license and permission to do some of the things we needed to do to go faster and to go bigger,” Toni Reid said. “You can regulate yourself quite easily or think about what you’re going to do with your existing resources…. Sometimes, you don’t know what the boundaries are. Jeff just wanted us to be unbounded.”