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کتاب: فروشگاه همه چیز / فصل 12

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CHAPTER 11

The Kingdom of the Question Mark

As it neared its twentieth anniversary, Amazon had finally come to embody the original vision of the everything store, conceived so long ago by Jeff Bezos and David Shaw and set into motion by Bezos and Shel Kaphan. It sold millions of products both new and used and was continually expanding into new product areas; industrial supplies, high-end apparel, art, and wine were among the new categories introduced in 2012 and 2013. It hosted the storefronts of thousands of other retailers in its bustling Marketplace and the computer infrastructure of thousands of other technology companies, universities, and government labs, part of its flourishing Web Services business. Clearly Jeff Bezos believed there were no limits to the company’s mission and to the variety of products that could be sold on the Internet.

If you were to search the world for the polar opposite of this sprawling conglomerate, a store that cultivated not massive selection but an exclusive assortment of high-end products and thrived not on brand loyalty but on the amiable personality of its proprietor, you might just settle on a small bike shop north of Phoenix, in Glendale, Arizona. It’s called the Roadrunner Bike Center.

This somewhat grandiosely named establishment sits in a shoe-box-shaped space in an otherwise ordinary shopping center next to the Hot Cutz Spa and Salon and down a ways from a Walmart grocery store. It offers a small selection of premium BMX and dirt bikes from companies like Giant, Haro, and Redline, brands that carefully select their retail partners and generally do not sell to websites or discount outlets. Many customers have patronized this store for years, even though it has moved three times within the Phoenix area.

“The old guy that runs this is always there and you can tell he loves to fix and sell bikes,” writes one customer in a typically favorable online review of the store. “When you buy from him he will take care of you. He also is the cheapest place I have ever taken a bike for a service, I think sometimes he runs a special for $30! That’s insane!”

A red poster board with the hand-scrawled words Layaway for the holidays! leans against an outside window of the store. It is no different than any mom-and-pop shop anywhere in the world that’s been carefully tended and nurtured by its owner over the course of thirty years. Except in this case, the store offers more than just a strong contrast to Amazon, and the evidence hangs inside, under the fluorescent lights, next to the front counter. Framed on the wall is a laminated old newspaper clipping with a photograph of a sixteen-year-old boy sporting a flattop haircut and standing up on the pedals of his unicycle, with one hand on the seat and the other flared daringly out to the side.

I found Ted Jorgensen, Jeff Bezos’s biological father, behind the counter of his store in late 2012. I had considered a number of ways he might react to my unannounced appearance, but I gave a very low probability to the likelihood of what actually happened: Jorgensen didn’t know who Jeff Bezos was or anything at all about a company named Amazon.com. He was utterly confused by what I was telling him and denied being the father of a famous CEO who was one of the wealthiest men in the world.

But then, when I mentioned the names Jacklyn Gise and Jeffrey, the son they had during their brief teenage marriage, the old man’s face flushed with recognition and sadness. “Is he still alive?” he asked, not yet fully comprehending.

“Your son is one of the most successful men on the planet,” I told him. I pulled up some photographs of Bezos from the Internet, and, incredibly, for the first time in forty-five years, Jorgensen saw his biological son, and his eyes filled with emotion and disbelief.

I took Jorgensen and his wife, Linda, to dinner that night at a local steakhouse, and his story tumbled out. When the Bezos family moved from Albuquerque to Houston back in 1968, Jorgensen promised Jackie and her father that he would stay out of their lives. He remained in Albuquerque, performing with his troupe, the Unicycle Wranglers, and taking odd jobs. He drove an ambulance and worked as an installer for Western Electric, a local utility.

In his twenties, he moved to Hollywood to help the Wranglers’ manager, Lloyd Smith, start a new bike shop, and then he went to Tucson, looking for work. In 1972 he was mugged outside a convenience store after buying cigarettes. The assailants hit him with a two-by-four and broke his jaw in ten places.

Jorgensen moved to Phoenix in 1974, got remarried, and quit drinking. By that time he had lost touch with his ex-wife and their child and forgotten their new last name. He had no way to contact his son or follow his progress, and he says he felt constrained by his promise not to interfere in their lives.

In 1980, he put together every cent he had and bought the bike shop from its owner, who wanted to get out of the business. He has run the store ever since, moving it several times, eventually to its current location on the northern edge of the Phoenix metropolitan area, adjacent to the New River Mountains. He divorced his second wife and met Linda, his third, at the bike shop. She stood him up on their first date but showed up the next time he asked her out. They’ve been married for twenty-five years. Linda says they’ve talked privately about Jeffrey and replayed Ted’s youthful mistakes for years.

Jorgensen has no other children; Linda has four sons from a previous marriage, and they are close with their stepfather, but he never divulged to them that he had another child—he says he didn’t think there was any point. He felt it was a “dead-end street” and was sure he would never see or hear anything about his son again.

Jorgensen is now sixty-nine; he has heart problems, emphysema, and an aversion to the idea of retirement. “I don’t want to sit at home and rot in front of the television,” he says. He is endearingly friendly and, his wife says, deeply compassionate. (Bezos strongly resembles his mother, especially around the eyes, but he has his father’s nose and ears.) Jorgensen’s store is less than thirty miles from four different Amazon fulfillment centers, but if he ever saw Jeff Bezos on television or read an article about Amazon, he didn’t make the connection. “I didn’t know where he was, if he had a good job or not, or if he was alive or dead,” he says. The face of his child, frozen in infancy, has been stuck in his mind for nearly half a century.

Jorgensen says that he always wanted to reconnect with his son—whatever his occupation or station—but he blames himself entirely for the collapse of his first marriage and is ashamed to admit that, all those years ago, he agreed to stay out of his life. “I wasn’t a good father or a husband,” he says. “It was really all my fault. I don’t blame Jackie at all.” Regret, that formidable adversary Jeff Bezos worked so hard to outrun, hangs heavily over the life of his biological father.

When I left Jorgensen and his wife after dinner that night, they were wistful and still in shock and had decided that they weren’t going to tell Linda’s sons. The story seemed too far-fetched.

But a few months later, in early 2013, I got a phone call from the youngest son, Darin Fala, a senior project manager at Honeywell who also lives in Phoenix and who spent his teenage years living with Jorgensen and his mother.

Jorgensen, Fala told me, had called a family meeting the previous Saturday afternoon. (“I bet he’s going to tell us he has a son or daughter out there,” Fala’s wife had guessed.) In dramatic fashion, Jorgensen and Linda explained the unlikely situation.

Fala described the gathering as wrenching and tear-filled. “My wife calls me unemotional because she has never seen me cry,” Fala says. “Ted is the same way. Saturday was the most emotion I’ve ever seen out of him, as far as sadness and regret. It was overwhelming.”

Jorgensen had decided he wanted to try to reach out to the Bezos family and reestablish contact, and Fala was helping him craft his letters to Bezos and his mother. They would send those letters via both regular mail and e-mail in February of 2013, and would end up waiting nearly five months for a response. Bezos’s silence on the topic of his long-lost biological father is unsurprising: he is far more consumed with pressing forward than looking back.

During the phone call, Fala related a discovery of his own. Curious about Bezos, he had watched several clips on the Internet of the Amazon CEO being interviewed, including one from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. And Fala was startled to hear Bezos’s notorious, honking laugh.

It was the same unrestrained guffaw that had once echoed off the walls of Fala’s childhood home, though over the past few years it had gradually been inhibited by emphysema. “He has Ted’s laugh!” Fala says in disbelief. “It’s almost exact.”


Bezos undoubtedly received and read Jorgensen’s e-mail—colleagues say that, with his personal assistants, he reviews all the messages sent to his widely known e-mail address, jeff@amazon.com. In fact, many of the more infamous episodes inside Amazon began with unsolicited e-mails from customers that Bezos forwarded to the relevant executives or employees, adding only a question mark at the top of the message. To the recipients of these e-mails, that notation has the effect of a ticking time bomb.

Within Amazon, an official system ranks the severity of its internal emergencies. A Sev-5 is a relatively inconsequential technical problem that can be solved by engineers in the course of the workday. A Sev-1 is an urgent problem that sets off a cavalcade of pagers (Amazon still gives them to many engineers). It requires an immediate response, and the entire situation will later be reviewed by a member of Bezos’s management council, the S Team.

Then there’s an entirely separate kind of crisis, what some employees have informally dubbed the Sev-B. That’s when an e-mail containing the notorious question mark arrives directly from Bezos. When Amazon employees receive one of these missives, they drop everything they are doing and fling themselves at whatever issue the CEO is highlighting. They’ve typically got a few hours to solve the problem and prepare a thorough explanation for how it occurred in the first place, a response that will be reviewed by a succession of managers before the answer is presented to Bezos himself. The question mark e-mails, often called escalations, are Bezos’s way to ensure that potential problems are addressed and that the customer’s voice is always heard inside Amazon.

One of the more memorable recent episodes at Amazon began with such an escalation in late 2010. It had come to Bezos’s attention that customers who browsed—but didn’t buy—in the lubricant section of Amazon’s sexual-wellness category were receiving personalized e-mails promoting a variety of gels and other intimacy facilitators. Even though the extent of Bezos’s communication to his marketing staff consisted of a single piece of punctuation, they could tell—he was pissed off. Bezos believed the marketing department’s e-mails caused customers embarrassment and should not have been sent.

Bezos likes to say that when he’s angry, “just wait five minutes,” and the mood will pass like a tropical squall.1 When it comes to issues of bungled customer service, though, that is rarely true. The e-mail marketing team knew the topic was delicate and nervously prepared an explanation. Amazon’s direct-marketing tool was decentralized, and category managers could generate e-mail campaigns to customers who had looked at certain product categories but did not make purchases. Such e-mails tended to tip vacillating shoppers into buying and were responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars in Amazon’s annual sales. In the case of the lubricant e-mail, though, a low-level product manager had clearly overstepped the bounds of propriety. But the marketing team never got to send this explanation. Bezos was demanding a meeting to discuss the issue.

On a weekday morning, Jeff Wilke, Doug Herrington, Steven Shure (the vice president of worldwide marketing and a former executive at Time Inc.), and several other employees gathered and waited solemnly in a conference room. Bezos glided in briskly. He started the meeting with his customary “Hello, everybody,” and followed that with “So, Steve Shure is sending out e-mails about lubricants.”

Bezos didn’t sit down. He locked eyes with Shure. He was clearly fuming. “I want you to shut down the channel,” he said. “We can build a one-hundred-billion-dollar company without sending out a single fucking e-mail.”

There was an animated argument. Amazon’s culture is notoriously confrontational, and it begins with Bezos, who believes that truth springs forth when ideas and perspectives are banged against each other, sometimes violently. In the ensuing scrum, Wilke and his colleagues argued that lubricants were available in grocery stores and drugstores and were not, technically, that embarrassing. They also pointed out that Amazon generated a significant volume of sales with such e-mails. Bezos didn’t care; no amount of revenue was worth jeopardizing customer trust. It was a revealing—and confirming—moment. He was willing to slay a profitable aspect of his business rather than test Amazon’s bond with its customers. “Who in this room needs to get up and shut down the channel?” he snapped.

Eventually, they compromised. E-mail marketing for certain categories such as health and personal care was terminated altogether. The company also decided to build a central filtering tool to ensure that category managers could no longer promote sensitive products, so matters of etiquette were not subject to personal taste. E-mail marketing lived to fight another day.

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.

Many Amazon employees are all too familiar with these fire drills and find them disruptive. “Why are entire teams required to drop everything on a dime to respond to a question mark escalation?” an employee once asked at one of the company’s all-hands meetings, which by 2011 were being held in Seattle’s KeyArena, a basketball coliseum with more than seventeen thousand seats.

“Every anecdote from a customer matters,” Jeff Wilke answered. “We research each of them because they tell us something about our metrics and processes. It’s an audit that is done for us by our customers. We treat them as precious sources of information.”

Amazon styles itself as highly decentralized and promises that new employees can make decisions independently. But Bezos is capable of stopping any process dead in its tracks if it creates a problem for even a single customer. In the twelve months after the lube crisis, Bezos made it his personal mission to clean up the e-mail channel. Employees of that department suddenly found themselves in the hottest possible spot at Amazon: under the withering eye of the founder himself.

Despite the scars and occasional bouts of post-traumatic stress disorder, former Amazon employees often consider their time at the company the most productive of their careers. Their colleagues were smart, the work was challenging, and frequent lateral movement between departments offered constant opportunities for learning. “Everybody knows how hard it is and chooses to be there,” says Faisal Masud, who spent five years in the retail business. “You are learning constantly and the pace of innovation is thrilling. I filed patents; I innovated. There is a fierce competitiveness in everything you do.”

But some also express anguish about their experience. Bezos says the company attracts a certain kind of person who likes to pioneer and invent, but former employees frequently complain that Amazon has the bureaucracy of a big company with the infrastructure and pace of a startup, with lots of duplicate efforts and poor communication that makes it difficult to get things done. The people who do well at Amazon are often those who thrive in an adversarial atmosphere with almost constant friction. Bezos abhors what he calls “social cohesion,” the natural impulse to seek consensus. He’d rather his minions battled it out in arguments backed by numbers and passion, and he has codified this approach in one of Amazon’s fourteen leadership principles—the company’s highly prized values that are often discussed and inculcated into new hires.2

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.

Some employees love this confrontational culture and find they can’t work effectively anywhere else. The professional networking site LinkedIn is full of executives who left Amazon and then returned. Inside the company, this is referred to as a boomerang.

But other escapees call Amazon’s internal environment a “gladiator culture” and wouldn’t think of returning. There are many who last less than two years. “It’s a weird mix of a startup that is trying to be super corporate and a corporation that is trying hard to still be a startup,” says Jenny Dibble, who spent five months there as a marketing manager in 2011, trying, ineffectively, to get the company to use more social-media tools. She found her bosses were not particularly receptive to her ideas and that the long hours were incompatible with raising a family. “It was not a friendly environment,” she says.

Even leaving Amazon can be a combative process—the company is not above sending letters threatening legal action if an employee takes a similar job at a competitor. It’s more evidence of that “fierce competitiveness” mentioned by Faisal Masud, who left Amazon for eBay in 2010 and received such a legal threat (eBay settled the matter privately). This perpetual exodus of employees hardly seems to hurt Amazon, though. The company, aided by the appeal of its steadily increasing stock price, has become an accomplished recruiter of new talent. In 2012 alone, Amazon’s ranks swelled to 88,400 full-time and part-time time employees, up 57 percent from the year before.

The compensation packages at Amazon are designed to minimize the cost to the company and maximize the chances that employees will stick around through the predictable adversity that comes with joining the firm. New hires are given an industry-average base salary, a signing bonus spread over two years, and a grant of restricted stock units over four years. But unlike other technology companies, such as Google and Microsoft, which spread out their stock grants evenly, Amazon backloads the grant toward the end of the four-year period. 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.

Managers in departments of fifty people or more are required to “top-grade” their subordinates along a curve and must dismiss the least effective performers. As a result of this ongoing examination, many Amazon employees live in perpetual fear. A common experience among Amazon workers is a feeling of genuine surprise when one receives a good performance review. Managers are so parsimonious with compliments that underlings tend to spend their days anticipating their termination.

There is little in the way of perks or unexpected performance bonuses at Amazon, though it has come along since the 1990s, when Bezos refused that early suggestion to give employees bus passes because he didn’t want them to feel pressure to leave at a reasonable hour. Employees now get ORCA cards that entitle them to free rides on Seattle’s regional transit system. Parking at the company’s offices in South Lake Union costs $220 a month and Amazon reimburses employees—for $180.

Still, evidence of the company’s constitutional frugality is everywhere. Conference-room tables are a collection of blond-wood door-desks shoved together side by side. The vending machines take credit cards, and food in the company cafeterias is not subsidized. 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. The company is constantly searching for ways to reduce costs and pass on those savings to customers in the form of lower prices. This also is embedded in the sacrosanct leadership principles:

Frugality

We try not to spend money on things that don’t matter to customers. Frugality breeds resourcefulness, self-sufficiency and invention. There are no extra points for headcount, budget size or fixed expense.

All of this comes from Bezos himself. Amazon’s values are his business principles, molded through two decades of surviving in the thin atmosphere of low profit margins and fierce skepticism from the outside world. In a way, the entire company is scaffolding built around his brain—an amplification machine meant to disseminate his ingenuity and drive across the greatest possible radius. “It’s scaffolding to magnify the thinking embodied by Jeff, to the greatest extent possible,” says Jeff Wilke when I bounce that theory off him. “Jeff was learning as he went along. He learned things from each of us who had expertise and incorporated the best pieces into his mental model. Now everyone is expected to think as much as they can like Jeff.”

Bezos’s top executives are always modeling Bezos-like behavior. In the fall of 2012, I had dinner with Diego Piacentini at La Spiga, his favorite Italian restaurant in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. He graciously insisted on picking up the tab, and after paying, he almost theatrically tore up the receipt. “The company is not paying for this,” he said.

The rhythms of Amazon are the rhythms of Bezos, and its customs are closely tuned to how he prefers to process information and maximize his time. He personally runs the biannual operating review periods for the entire company, dubbed OP1 (done over the summer) and OP2 (done after the holiday season). Teams work intensely for months preparing for these sessions, drawing up six-page documents that spell out their plans for the year ahead. A few years ago, the company refined this process further to make the narratives more easily digestible for Bezos and other S Team members, who cycle through many topics during these reviews. Now every document includes at the top of the page a list of a few rules, called tenets, the principles for each group that guide the hard decisions and allow them all to move fast, without constant supervision.

Bezos is like a chess master playing countless games simultaneously, with the boards organized in such a way that he can efficiently tend to each match.

Some of these chess games get more attention than others. Bezos spends more time on Amazon’s newer businesses, such as Amazon Web Services, the company’s streaming-video initiative, and, in particular, the Kindle and Kindle Fire efforts. (“I don’t think you can even fart in the Kindle building without Jeff’s approval,” quipped one longtime executive.) In these divisions, stress levels are high and any semblance of balance between work and home falls by the wayside.

Once a week, usually on Tuesday, various departments at Amazon meet with their managers to review long spreadsheets of the data important to their business. Customer anecdotes have no place at these meetings. The numbers alone are a proxy for what is working and what is broken, how customers are behaving, and, ultimately, how well the company overall is performing.

The meetings can be intense and intimidating. “This is what, for employees, is so absolutely scary and impressive about the executive team. They force you to look at the numbers and answer every single question about why specific things happened,” says Dave Cotter, who spent four years at Amazon as a general manager in various divisions. “Because Amazon has so much volume, it’s a way to make very quick decisions and not get into subjective debates. The data doesn’t lie.”

The metrics meetings culminate with the weekly business review every Wednesday, one of the most important rituals at Amazon, run by Wilke. Sixty managers in the retail business gather in one room to review their departments, share data about defects and inventory turns, and talk about forecasts and the complex interactions among different parts of the company.

Bezos does not attend these meetings. But he can always make his presence felt anywhere in the company. After the lubricant crisis, for example, e-mail marketing fell squarely under his purview. He carefully monitored efforts to filter the kinds of messages that could be sent to customers and he tried to think about the challenge of e-mail outreach in fresh ways. Then, in late 2011, he had what he considered to be a significant new idea.

Bezos is a fan of e-mail newsletters such as VSL.com, a daily assortment of cultural tidbits from the Web, and Cool Tools, a compendium of technology tips and product reviews written by Kevin Kelly, a founding editor of Wired. Both e-mails are short, well written, and informative. Perhaps, Bezos reasoned, Amazon should be sending a single well-crafted e-mail every week—a short digital magazine—instead of a succession of bland, algorithm-generated marketing pitches. He asked marketing vice president Steve Shure to explore the idea.

Shure formed a team and they spent two months coming up with trial concepts. Bezos gave them little direction, but their broad mandate was to create an entirely new type of e-mail for customers—the kind of personal voice that Amazon had lost more than ten years ago, when it downsized its editorial division after the acrimonious intramural competition with P13N and Amabot.

From late 2011 through early 2012, Shure’s group presented a variety of concepts to Bezos, including one that revolved around celebrity Q and As and another that highlighted interesting historical facts about products on the site. The project never progressed—it fared poorly in tests with customers—but several participants remember the process as being particularly excruciating. In one meeting, Bezos quietly thumbed through the mockups, styled in the customary Amazon format of a press release, as everyone waited in tense, edge-of-the-seat silence. Then he tore the documents apart. “Here’s the problem with this, I’m already bored,” he said. He seemed to like the last concept the most, which suggested profiling a selection of products on the site that were suddenly hot, like Guy Fawkes masks and CDs by the Grammy-winning British singer Adele. “But the headlines need to be punchier,” he told the group, which included the writers of the material. “And some of this is just bad writing. If you were doing this as a blogger, you would starve.”

Finally he turned his attention to Shure, the marketing vice president, who, like so many other marketing vice presidents throughout the company’s history, was a frequent target.

“Steve, why haven’t I seen anything on this in three months?”

“Well, I had to find an editor and work through mockups.”

“This is developing too slow. Do you care about this?”

“Yes, Jeff, we care.”

“Strip the design down, it’s too complicated. Also, it needs to move faster!”

Faster was one way to describe 2012 and the first half of 2013. Over those months, Amazon’s stock rose 60 percent. The company issued a total of 237 press releases—an average of 1.6 announcements for every two weekdays. Since the company was now beginning to collect sales tax in many states, it didn’t have to sidestep nexus issues and so opened more than a dozen new fulfillment and customer-service centers around the world. It acquired Kiva Systems, a Boston company building mobile robots meant to one day replace the human pickers in fulfillment centers, for $775 million in cash. It renewed its push into apparel with its dedicated website MyHabit.com and opened a new store for industrial and scientific equipment, Amazon Supply.

Amazon also expanded a service that allowed advertisers to reach Amazon customers on all of the company’s websites and devices. Run by business-development chief Jeff Blackburn, advertising at Amazon is a highly profitable side business that helps subsidize free shipping and low prices and funds some of the company’s expensive long-term projects, like building its own hardware.

To distinguish its growing digital ecosystem from rival platforms offered by Apple and Google, Amazon spent millions to acquire and create new movies and television shows to add to its free Prime Instant Video catalog, and through Amazon’s publishing divisions, it funded the publication of many exclusive books for the Kindle. Amazon’s chief rivals, Apple and Google, are arguably better positioned in this burgeoning digital world and have considerably greater resources. So Bezos is hedging his bets; if customers choose Apple iPads or Google tablets, they can still shop on Amazon and play their music collections and read their Kindle books on a variety of applications that have been rolled out for its rivals’ devices.

In the fall of 2012, hundreds of journalists turned out at an airplane hangar in Santa Monica to watch Bezos unveil a new line of Kindle Fire tablets, including an iPad-size jumbo version and the $119 Kindle Paperwhite, a dedicated e-reader with a glowing, front-lit screen. “This achieves our original vision,” Bezos told me in an interview after the event, referring to the latest dedicated reading device. “I’m sure we’ll figure out ways to continue forward, but this is a step-change product.”

Earlier that same week, a federal judge had approved a settlement with three of the major book publishers in the Justice Department’s antitrust case over agency pricing. (The other two publishers targeted in the investigation would settle within the next few months.) Amazon was now free to resume discounting new and bestselling e-books. I asked Bezos about it but he didn’t care to gloat. “We are excited to be allowed to lower prices” was all he said.

In December, Amazon held its first conference for customers of Amazon Web Services at the Sands Expo Center in Las Vegas. Six thousand developers showed up and listened intently as AWS executives Andy Jassy and Werner Vogels discussed the future of cloud computing. The size and passion of the crowd was an emphatic validation of Amazon’s unlikely emergence as a pioneer in the field of enterprise computing. On the second day of the conference, Bezos himself took the stage and in a freewheeling discussion with Vogels gave a rare window into his personal projects, like the Clock of the Long Now, that mechanical timepiece designed to last for millennia that engineers are preparing to build inside a remote mountain on Bezos’s ranch in Texas. “The symbol is important for a couple of reasons. If [humans] think long term, we can accomplish things that we wouldn’t otherwise accomplish,” Bezos said. “Time horizons matter, they matter a lot. The other thing I would point out is that we humans are getting awfully sophisticated in technological ways and have a lot of potential to be very dangerous to ourselves. It seems to me that we, as a species, have to start thinking longer term. So this is a symbol. I think symbols can be very powerful.”

On the stage, Bezos then predictably unleashed a steady tide of Jeffisms, about long-term thinking, about a willingness to fail and to be misunderstood, and about that shocking revelation so many years ago, in the very first SoDo warehouse, that it might be a great idea to add—He’s not really going to tell that story again, is he?—packing tables!

The packing-table anecdote may be showing its age, but Bezos is trying to reinforce the same values. Like the late Steve Jobs, Bezos has gradually worn down employees, investors, and a skeptical public and turned them toward his way of thinking. Any process can be improved. Defects that are invisible to the knowledgeable may be obvious to newcomers. The simplest solutions are the best. Repeating all these anecdotes isn’t rote monotony—it’s calculated strategy. “The rest of us try to muddle around with complicated contradictory goals and it makes it harder for people to help us,” says his friend Danny Hillis. “Jeff is very clear and simple about his goals, and the way he articulates them makes it easy for others, because it’s consistent.

“If you look at why Amazon is so different than almost any other company that started early on the Internet, it’s because Jeff approached it from the very beginning with that long-term vision,” Hillis continues. “It was a multidecade project. The notion that he can accomplish a huge amount with a larger time frame, if he is steady about it, is fundamentally his philosophy.”


By 2012, Amazon had completed its move to its new office buildings in Seattle’s South Lake Union district. Another transition occurred at around this same time, though it was evident only to employees at first. In signs around the new campus, and on the rare tchotchkes like mugs and T-shirts that were available to employees after the move, the company’s name was represented as simply Amazon, not Amazon.com. For years Bezos had been adamant about using the longer version, part of an effort to engrave the Web address on customers’ minds. Now the company produced so many things, including cloud services and hardware, that the anachronistic original moniker no longer made sense. The name on the website was abbreviated in March of 2012. Few people noticed.

Amazon, it seemed, was a company in constant flux. Yet some things remained the same. On a cold, wet Tuesday morning in early November 2012 at around nine o’clock, a Honda minivan pulled up to Day One North, on the corner of Terry Avenue and Republican Street in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood. Jeff Bezos, sitting in the passenger seat, leaned over to kiss his wife, MacKenzie, good-bye, got out of the car, and walked self-assuredly into the building to start another day.

In many ways, Bezos’s life has become as complicated as Lee Scott’s was back in 2000 when Bezos visited the former Walmart CEO and marveled at the security around him. Bezos may not get ferried to work in a black sedan, but Amazon still spends $1.6 million per year on personal security for him and his family, according to the company’s financial reports.

His small domestic scene with MacKenzie speaks to at least one normal routine he has managed to preserve amid the unimaginable complexity that comes with Amazon’s towering success. The family can hire drivers; they can buy limousines and private airplanes. Yet they still own a modest Honda, albeit a larger model than the Accord of a decade ago, and MacKenzie often delivers their four children to school and then drives her husband to work.

There is nothing modest about their wealth, of course. Bezos’s fortune is now estimated at $25 billion, making him the twelfth-richest person in the United States.3

The family is exceedingly private, yet their lives cannot be completely hidden from view. Their lakefront mansion in the wealthy residential enclave of Medina, near the home of Bill and Melinda Gates, was renovated in 2010 and sits on 5.35 acres. It has 29,000 square feet of living space across two buildings, according to public records, and that’s not including a caretaker’s cottage and a boathouse—the site where Bezos first organized the team that would build Amazon Prime.4

In addition to the primary residence, the Bezos family owns homes in Aspen, Beverly Hills, and New York City, plus the sprawling 290,000-acre ranch in Texas, where Blue Origin has a facility and where its rockets will begin their trips to space. MacKenzie rents a one-bedroom apartment near their home in Medina that she uses as a private office to write. She is the author of two novels, including Traps, published in 2012. “I am definitely a lottery winner of a certain kind,” she told Vogue magazine in a rare profile in 2012, referring to her husband’s success. “It makes my life wonderful in many ways, but that’s not the lottery I feel defined by. The fact that I got wonderful parents who believed in education and never doubted I could be a writer, the fact that I have a spouse I love, those are the things that define me.”5

Bezos and MacKenzie seem to share the skill of efficiently dispersing their time across many personal responsibilities and multiple projects. For Bezos, in addition to his family and Amazon, there’s Blue Origin, where he typically spends each Wednesday, and Bezos Expeditions, his personal venture-capital firm, which holds stakes in companies such as Twitter, the taxi service Uber, the news site Business Insider, and the robot firm Rethink Robotics. Since August of 2013, Bezos has owned the Washington Post newspaper and has said he wants to apply his passion for invention and experimentation to reviving the storied newspaper. “He invests in things where information technology can disrupt existing models,” says Rodney Brooks, the MIT robotics professor behind Rethink Robotics, which aims to put inexpensive robots on manufacturing assembly lines. “He’s certainly not hands-on but he has been a good person to talk to when various conundrums come up. When we go ask him questions, it’s worth listening to his answers.”

Bezos coordinates closely with the creators of the Clock of the Long Now and oversees its quarterly review sessions, which the clock engineers call Ticks. “He’s hell on the details and in the thick of the design and very strict on where costs are going,” says Stewart Brand, the cochairman of the Long Now Foundation.

Bezos and MacKenzie are personally involved in the Bezos Family Foundation, which doles out education grants and mobilizes students to help other young people in impoverished countries and disaster zones. The foundation is run by Jackie and Mike Bezos, and Christina Bezos Poore and Mark Bezos, Jeff’s siblings, are directors. The family has imported a little Amazon-style management to their philanthropy. In the main conference room of the foundation’s office, a few blocks from Amazon’s headquarters, is a rag doll that they often prop up in an empty chair during meetings. The doll is meant to represent the student they are trying to help—just as Bezos once had a habit of keeping a chair empty in meetings to represent the customer.

The Bezos family is unusually close-knit and focused on the future. But occasionally the past does catch up with them. In June 2013, on a Wednesday evening close to midnight, Jeff Bezos finally responded to the messages sent by Ted Jorgensen, his biological father. In a short but heartfelt e-mail, sent to Jorgensen’s stepson because Jorgensen himself does not use the Internet, Bezos tried to put the old man at ease. He wrote that he empathized with the impossibly difficult choices that his teenage parents were forced to make and said that he had enjoyed a happy childhood nonetheless. He said that he harbored no ill will toward Jorgensen at all, and he asked him to cast aside any lingering regret over the circumstances of their lives. And then he wished his long-lost biological father the very best.


When you have fit yourself snugly into Jeff Bezos’s worldview and then evaluated both the successes and failures of Amazon over the past two decades, the future of the company becomes easy to predict. The answer to almost every conceivable question is yes.

Will Amazon move to free next-day and same-day delivery for Prime members? Yes, eventually, when Amazon has so many customers in each urban area that placing a fulfillment center right outside every city becomes practical. Bezos’s goal is and always has been to take all the inconvenience out of online shopping and deliver products and services to customers in the most efficient manner possible.

Will Amazon one day own its own delivery trucks? Yes, eventually, because controlling the so-called last-mile delivery to its customers can help fulfill that vision and improve the company’s ability to meet the precise delivery promises it relishes making to customers.

Will Amazon roll out its grocery service, Amazon Fresh, beyond Seattle and parts of Los Angeles and San Francisco? Yes, when it has perfected the mechanics of profitable storage and delivery of perishables, like vegetables and fruit. Bezos does not believe Amazon can grow to the scale of Walmart without mastering the science of groceries and apparel.

Will Amazon introduce a mobile phone or an Internet-connected television set-top box? Yes (and possibly before this book is published), because the company wants to offer its services on all the connected devices that its customers use without having to rely entirely on the hardware of its chief competitors.

Will Amazon expand beyond the ten countries where it currently operates retail websites? Yes, eventually. Bezos’s long-term goal is to sell everything, everywhere. As Russia, for example, develops a stronger shipping infrastructure and a more reliable credit card processing system, Amazon will introduce its e-commerce store and digital services there, perhaps by acquiring local companies or by seeding the market with the Kindle and Kindle Fire, as it did in Brazil in 2012 and in India in 2013.

Will Amazon always buy its products from manufacturers? No; at some point it might print them right in its fulfillment centers. The evolving technology known as 3-D printing, in which microwave-size machines extrude plastic material to create objects based on digital models, is just the kind of disruptive revolution that fascinates Bezos and could allow him to eliminate more costs from the supply chain. In 2013, Amazon took the first step into this world, opening a site for 3-D printers and supplies.

Will antitrust authorities eventually come to scrutinize Amazon and its market power? Yes, I believe that is likely, because the company is growing increasingly monolithic in markets like books and electronics, and rivals have fallen by the wayside. But as we have seen with the disputes over sales tax and e-book pricing, Amazon is a masterly navigator of the law and is careful to stay on the right side of it. Like Google, it benefits from the example of Microsoft’s antitrust debacle in the 1990s, which provided a powerful object lesson of how aggressive monopolistic behavior can nearly ruin a company.

These are not fever dreams. They are near inevitabilities. It’s an easy prediction to make—that Jeff Bezos will do what he has always done. He will attempt to move faster, work his employees harder, make bolder bets, and pursue both big inventions and small ones, all to achieve his grand vision for Amazon—that it be not just an everything store, but ultimately an everything company.

Amazon may be the most beguiling company that ever existed, and it is just getting started. It is both missionary and mercenary, and throughout the history of business and other human affairs, that has always been a potent combination. “We don’t have a single big advantage,” he once told an old adversary, publisher Tim O’Reilly, back when they were arguing over Amazon protecting its patented 1-Click ordering method from rivals like Barnes & Noble. “So we have to weave a rope of many small advantages.”

Amazon is still weaving that rope. That is its future, to keep weaving and growing, manifesting the constitutional relentlessness of its founder and his vision. And it will continue to expand until either Jeff Bezos exits the scene or no one is left to stand in his way.

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