SN - Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
Author: Brad Stone
Date: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00
Description: The definitive story of Amazon.com, one of the most successful companies in the world, and of its driven, brilliant founder, Jeff Bezos. Amazon.com started off delivering books through the mail. But its visionary founder, Jeff Bezos, wasn't content with being a bookseller. He wanted Amazon to become the everything store, offering limitless selection and seductive convenience at disruptively low prices. To do so, he developed a corporate culture of relentless ambition and secrecy that's never been cracked. Until now. Brad Stone enjoyed unprecedented access to current and former Amazon employees

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—ooOoo—

For Isabella and Calista Stone

When you are eighty years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices.

—Jeff Bezos, commencement speech at Princeton University, May 30, 2010[Vi]

—ooOoo—

Prologue

In the early 1970s, an industrious advertising executive named Julie Ray became fascinated with an unconventional public-school program for gifted children in Houston, Texas. Her son was among the first students enrolled in what would later be called the Vanguard program, which stoked creativity and independence in its students and nurtured expansive, outside-the-box thinking. Ray grew so enamored with the curriculum and the community of enthusiastic teachers and parents that she set out to research similar schools around the state with an eye toward writing a book about Texas’s fledgling gifted-education movement.

A few years later, after her son had moved on to junior high, Ray returned to tour the program, nestled in a wing of River Oaks Elementary School, west of downtown Houston. The school’s principal chose a student to accompany her on the visit, an articulate, sandy-haired sixth-grader whose parents asked only that his real name not be used in print. So Ray called him Tim.

Tim, Julie Ray wrote in her book Turning On Bright Minds: A Parent Looks at Gifted Education in Texas, was “a student of general intellectual excellence, slight of build, friendly but serious.” He was “not particularly gifted in leadership,” according to his teachers, but he moved confidently among his peers and articulately extolled the virtues of the novel he was reading at the time, J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit.[Vi]

Tim, twelve, was already competitive. He told Ray he was reading a variety of books to qualify for a special reader’s certificate but compared himself unfavorably to another classmate who claimed, improbably, that she was reading a dozen books a week. Tim also showed Ray a science project he was working on called an infinity cube, a battery-powered contraption with rotating mirrors that created the optical illusion of an endless tunnel. Tim modeled the device after one he had seen in a store. That one cost twenty-two dollars, but “mine was cheaper,” he told Ray. Teachers said that three of Tim’s projects were being entered in a local science competition that drew most of its submissions from students in junior and senior high schools.

The school faculty praised Tim’s ingenuity, but one can imagine they were wary of his intellect. To practice tabulating statistics for math class, Tim had developed a survey to evaluate the sixth-grade teachers. The goal, he said, was to assess instructors on “how they teach, not as a popularity contest.” He administered the survey to classmates and at the time of the tour was in the process of calculating the results and graphing the relative performance of each teacher.[Vi]

Tim’s average day, as Ray described it, was packed. He woke early and caught a seven o’clock bus a block from home. He arrived at school after a twenty-mile ride and went through a blaze of classes devoted to math, reading, physical education, science, Spanish, and art. There was time reserved for individual projects and small group discussions. In one lesson Julie Ray described, seven students, including Tim, sat in a tight circle in the principal’s office for an exercise called productive thinking. They were given brief stories to read quietly to themselves and then discuss. The first story involved archaeologists who returned after an expedition and announced they had discovered a cache of precious artifacts, a claim that later turned out to be fraudulent. Ray recorded snippets of the ensuing dialogue:

“They probably wanted to become famous. They wished away the things they didn’t want to face.”

“Some people go through life thinking like they always have.”

“You should be patient. Analyze what you have to work with.”

Tim told Julie Ray that he loved these exercises. “The way the world is, you know, someone could tell you to press the button. You have to be able to think what you’re doing for yourself.”

Ray found it impossible to interest a publisher in Turning On Bright Minds. Editors at the big houses said the subject matter was too narrow. So, in 1977, she took the money she’d earned from writing advertising copy for a Christmas catalog, printed a thousand paperbacks, and distributed them herself.[Vi]

More than thirty years later, I found a copy in the Houston Public Library. I also tracked down Julie Ray, who now lives in Central Texas and works on planning and communications for environmental and cultural causes. She said she had watched Tim’s rise to fame and fortune over the past two decades with admiration and amazement but without much surprise. “When I met him as a young boy, his ability was obvious, and it was being nurtured and encouraged by the new program,” she says. “The program also benefited by his responsiveness and enthusiasm for learning. It was a total validation of the concept.”

She recalls what one teacher said all those years ago when Ray asked her to estimate the grade level the boy was performing at. “I really can’t say,” the teacher replied. “Except that there is probably no limit to what he can do, given a little guidance.”

In late 2011, I went to visit “Tim”—aka Jeff Bezos—in the Seattle headquarters of his company, Amazon.com. I was there to solicit his cooperation with this book, an attempt to chronicle the extraordinary rise of an innovative, disruptive, and often polarizing technology powerhouse, the company that was among the first to see the boundless promise of the Internet and that ended up forever changing the way we shop and read.[Vi]

Amazon is increasingly a daily presence in modern life. Millions of people regularly direct their Web browsers to its eponymous website or its satellite sites, like Zappos.com and Diapers.com, acting on the most basic impulse in any capitalist society: to consume. The Amazon site is a smorgasbord of selection, offering books, movies, garden tools, furniture, food, and the occasional oddball items, like an inflatable unicorn horn for cats ($9.50) and a thousand-pound electronic-lock gun safe ($903.53) that is available for delivery in three to five days. The company has nearly perfected the art of instant gratification, delivering digital products in seconds and their physical incarnations in just a few days. It is not uncommon to hear a customer raving about an order that magically appeared on his doorstep well before it was expected to arrive.

Amazon cleared $61 billion in sales in 2012, its seventeenth year of operation, and will likely be the fastest retailer in history to surpass $100 billion. It is loved by many of its customers, and it is feared just as fervently by its competitors. Even the name has informally entered the business lexicon, and not in an altogether favorable way. To be Amazoned means “to watch helplessly as the online upstart from Seattle vacuums up the customers and profits of your traditional brick-and-mortar business.”[Vi]

The history of Amazon.com, as most people understand it, is one of the iconic stories of the Internet age. The company started modestly as an online bookseller and then rode the original wave of dot-com exuberance in the late 1990s to extend into selling music, movies, electronics, and toys. Narrowly avoiding disaster and defying a wave of skepticism about its prospects that coincided with the dot-com bust of 2000 and 2001, it then mastered the physics of its own complex distribution network and expanded into software, jewelry, clothes, apparel, sporting goods, automotive parts—you name it. And just when it had established itself as the Internet’s top retailer and a leading platform on which other sellers could hawk their wares, Amazon redefined itself yet again as a versatile technology firm that sold the cloud computing infrastructure known as Amazon Web Services as well as inexpensive, practical digital devices like the Kindle electronic reader and the Kindle Fire tablet.

“To me Amazon is a story of a brilliant founder who personally drove the vision,” says Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Google and an avowed Amazon competitor who is personally a member of Amazon Prime, its two-day shipping service. “There are almost no better examples. Perhaps Apple, but people forget that most people believed Amazon was doomed because it would not scale at a cost structure that would work. It kept piling up losses. It lost hundreds of millions of dollars. But Jeff was very garrulous, very smart. He’s a classic technical founder of a business, who understands every detail and cares about it more than anyone.”[Vi]

Despite the recent rise of its stock price to vertiginous heights, Amazon remains a unique and uniquely puzzling company. The bottom line on its balance sheet is notoriously anemic, and in the midst of its frenetic expansion into new markets and product categories, it actually lost money in 2012. But Wall Street hardly seems to care. With his consistent proclamations that he is building his company for the long term, Jeff Bezos has earned so much faith from his shareholders that investors are willing to patiently wait for the day when he decides to slow his expansion and cultivate healthy profits.

Bezos has proved quite indifferent to the opinions of others. He is an avid problem solver, a man who has a chess grand master’s view of the competitive landscape, and he applies the focus of an obsessive-compulsive to pleasing customers and providing services like free shipping. He has vast ambitions—not only for Amazon, but to push the boundaries of science and remake the media. In addition to funding his own rocket company, Blue Origin, Bezos acquired the ailing Washington Post newspaper company in August 2013 for $250 million in a deal that stunned the media industry.

As many of his employees will attest, Bezos is extremely difficult to work for. Despite his famously hearty laugh and cheerful public persona, he is capable of the same kind of acerbic outbursts as Apple’s late founder, Steve Jobs, who could terrify any employee who stepped into an elevator with him. Bezos is a micromanager with a limitless spring of new ideas, and he reacts harshly to efforts that don’t meet his rigorous standards.[Vi]

Like Jobs, Bezos casts a reality-distortion field—an aura thick with persuasive but ultimately unsatisfying propaganda about his company. He often says that Amazon’s corporate mission “is to raise the bar across industries, and around the world, for what it means to be customer focused.”N1 Bezos and his employees are indeed absorbed with catering to customers, but they can also be ruthlessly competitive with rivals and even partners. Bezos likes to say that the markets Amazon competes in are vast, with room for many winners. That’s perhaps true, but it’s also clear that Amazon has helped damage or destroy competitors small and large, many of whose brands were once world renowned: Circuit City. Borders. Best Buy. Barnes & Noble.

Americans in general get nervous about the gathering of so much corporate power, particularly when it is amassed by large companies based in distant cities whose success could change the character of their own communities. Walmart faced this skepticism; so did Sears, Woolworth’s, and the other retail giants of each age, all the way back to the A&P grocery chain, which battled a ruinous antitrust lawsuit during the 1940s. Americans flock to large retailers for their convenience and low prices. But at a certain point, these companies get so big that a contradiction in the public’s collective psyche reveals itself. We want things cheap, but we don’t really want anyone undercutting the mom-and-pop store down the street or the locally owned bookstore, whose business has been under assault for decades, first by the rise of chain bookstores like Barnes & Noble and now by Amazon.[Vi]

Bezos is an excruciatingly prudent communicator for his own company. He is sphinxlike with details of his plans, keeping thoughts and intentions private, and he’s an enigma in the Seattle business community and in the broader technology industry. He rarely speaks at conferences and gives media interviews infrequently. Even those who admire him and closely follow the Amazon story are apt to mispronounce his surname (it’s “Bay-zose,” not “Bee-zose”).

John Doerr, the venture capitalist who backed Amazon early and was on its board of directors for a decade, has dubbed Amazon’s miserly public-relations style “the Bezos Theory of Communicating.” He says Bezos takes a red pen to press releases, product descriptions, speeches, and shareholder letters, crossing out anything that does not speak simply and positively to customers.

We think we know the Amazon story, but really all we’re familiar with is its own mythology, the lines in press releases, speeches, and interviews that Bezos hasn’t covered with red ink.

Amazon occupies a dozen modest buildings south of Seattle’s Lake Union, a small, freshwater glacial lake linked by canals to Puget Sound on the west and Lake Washington on the east. The area was home to a large sawmill in the nineteenth century and before that to Native American encampments. That pastoral landscape is now long gone, and biomedical startups, a cancer-research center, and University of Washington School of Medicine buildings dot the dense urban neighborhood.[Vi]

From the outside, Amazon’s modern, low-slung offices are unmarked and unremarkable. But step inside Day One North, seat of the Amazon high command on Terry Avenue and Republican Street, and you’re greeted with Amazon’s smiling logo on a wall behind a long rectangular visitors’ desk. On one side of the desk sits a bowl of dog biscuits for employees who bring their dogs to the office (a rare perk in a company that makes employees pay for parking and snacks). Near the elevators, there’s a black plaque with white lettering that informs visitors they have entered the realm of the philosopher-CEO. It reads:

There is so much stuff that has yet to be invented.
There’s so much new that’s going to happen.
People don’t have any idea yet how impactful the Internet is going to be and that this is still Day 1 in such a big way.

Jeff Bezos

Amazon’s internal customs are deeply idiosyncratic. PowerPoint decks or slide presentations are never used in meetings. Instead, employees are required to write six-page narratives laying out their points in prose, because Bezos believes doing so fosters critical thinking. For each new product, they craft their documents in the style of a press release. The goal is to frame a proposed initiative in the way a customer might hear about it for the first time. Each meeting begins with everyone silently reading the document, and discussion commences afterward—just like the productive-thinking exercise in the principal’s office at River Oaks Elementary. For my initial meeting with Bezos to discuss this project, I decided to observe Amazon’s customs and prepare my own Amazon-style narrative, a fictional press release on behalf of the book.[Vi]

Bezos met me in an executive conference room and we sat down at a large table made of half a dozen door-desks, the same kind of blond wood that Bezos used twenty years ago when he was building Amazon from scratch in his garage. The door-desks are often held up as a symbol of the company’s enduring frugality. When I first interviewed Bezos, back in 2000, a few years of unrelenting international travel had taken their toll and he looked pasty and out of shape. Now he was lean and fit; he’d transformed his physique in the same way that he’d transformed Amazon. He’d even cropped his awkwardly balding pate right down to the dome, which gave him a sleek look suggestive of one of his science-fiction heroes, Captain Picard of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

We sat down, and I slipped the press release across the table to him. When he realized what I was up to, he laughed so hard that spit came flying out of his mouth.

Much has been made over the years of Bezos’s famous laugh. It’s a startling, pulse-pounding bray that he leans into while craning his neck back, closing his eyes, and letting loose with a guttural roar that sounds like a cross between a mating elephant seal and a power tool. Often it comes when nothing is obviously funny to anyone else. In a way, Bezos’s laugh is a mystery that has never been solved; one doesn’t expect someone so intense and focused to have a raucous laugh like that, and no one in his family seems to share it.[Vi]

Employees know the laugh primarily as a heart-stabbing sound that slices through conversation and rocks its targets back on their heels. More than a few of his colleagues suggest that on some level, this is intentional—that Bezos wields his laugh like a weapon. “You can’t misunderstand it,” says Rick Dalzell, Amazon’s former chief information officer. “It’s disarming and punishing. He’s punishing you.”

Bezos read my press release silently for a minute or two and we discussed the ambitions of this book—to tell the Amazon story in depth for the first time, from its inception on Wall Street in the early 1990s up to the present day. Our conversation lasted an hour. We spoke about other seminal business books that might serve as models and about the biography Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, published soon after the Apple CEO’s untimely death.

We also acknowledged the awkwardness inherent in writing and selling a book about Amazon at this particular moment in time. (All of the online and offline booksellers of The Everything Store undoubtedly have strong opinions about its subject matter. In fact, the French media giant Hachette Livre, which owns Little, Brown and Company, the house that is publishing the book, recently settled long-standing antitrust litigation with the U.S. Department of Justice and regulatory authorities in the European Union stemming from the corporation’s dispute with Amazon over the pricing of electronic books. Like so many other companies in so many other retail and media industries, Hachette has had to view Amazon as both an empowering retail partner and a dangerous competitor. Of course, Bezos has a thought on this as well. “Amazon isn’t happening to the book business,” he likes to say to authors and journalists. “The future is happening to the book business.”)[Vi]

I’ve spoken to Bezos probably a dozen times over the past decade, and our talks are always spirited, fun, and frequently interrupted by his machine-gun bursts of laughter. He is engaged and full of twitchy, passionate energy (if you catch him in the hallway, he will not hesitate to inform you that he never takes the office elevator, always the stairs). He devotes his full attention to the conversation, and, unlike many other CEOs, he never gives you the sense that he is hurried or distracted—but he is highly circumspect about deviating from well-established, very abstract talking points. Some of these maxims are so well worn that one might even call them Jeffisms. A few have stuck around for a decade or more.

“If you want to get to the truth about what makes us different, it’s this,” Bezos says, veering into a familiar Jeffism: “We are genuinely customer-centric, we are genuinely long-term oriented and we genuinely like to invent. Most companies are not those things. They are focused on the competitor, rather than the customer. They want to work on things that will pay dividends in two or three years, and if they don’t work in two or three years they will move on to something else. And they prefer to be close-followers rather than inventors, because it’s safer. So if you want to capture the truth about Amazon, that is why we are different. Very few companies have all of those three elements.”

Toward the end of the hour we spent discussing this book, Bezos leaned forward on his elbows and asked, “How do you plan to handle the narrative fallacy?”[Vi]

Ah yes, of course, the narrative fallacy. For a moment, I experienced the same sweaty surge of panic every Amazon employee over the past two decades has felt when confronted with an unanticipated question from the hyperintelligent boss. The narrative fallacy, Bezos explained, was a term coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his 2007 book The Black Swan to describe how humans are biologically inclined to turn complex realities into soothing but oversimplified stories. Taleb argued that the limitations of the human brain resulted in our species’ tendency to squeeze unrelated facts and events into cause-and-effect equations and then convert them into easily understandable narratives. These stories, Taleb wrote, shield humanity from the true randomness of the world, the chaos of human experience, and, to some extent, the unnerving element of luck that plays into all successes and failures.

Bezos was suggesting that Amazon’s rise might be that sort of impossibly complex story. There was no easy explanation for how certain products were invented, such as Amazon Web Services, its pioneering cloud business that so many other Internet companies now use to run their operations. “When a company comes up with an idea, it’s a messy process. There’s no aha moment,” Bezos said. Reducing Amazon’s history to a simple narrative, he worried, could give the impression of clarity rather than the real thing.[Vi]

In Taleb’s book—which, incidentally, all Amazon senior executives had to read—the author stated that the way to avoid the narrative fallacy was to favor experimentation and clinical knowledge over storytelling and memory. Perhaps a more practical solution, at least for the aspiring author, is to acknowledge its potential influence and then plunge ahead anyway.

And so I begin with a disclaimer. The idea for Amazon was conceived in 1994 on the fortieth floor of a midtown New York City skyscraper. Nearly twenty years later, the resulting company employed more than ninety thousand people and had become one of the best-known corporations on the planet, frequently delighting its customers with its wide selection, low prices, and excellent customer service while also remaking industries and unnerving the stewards of some of the most storied brands in the world. This is one attempt at describing how it all happened. It is based on more than three hundred interviews with current and former Amazon executives and employees, including my conversations over the years with Bezos himself, who in the end was supportive of this project even though he judged that it was “too early” for a reflective look at Amazon. Nevertheless, he approved many interviews with his top executives, his family, and his friends, and for that I am grateful. I also drew from fifteen years of reporting on the company for Newsweek, the New York Times, and Bloomberg Businessweek.

The goal of this book is to tell the story behind one of the greatest entrepreneurial successes since Sam Walton flew his two-seat turboprop across the American South to scope out prospective Walmart store sites. It’s the tale of how one gifted child grew into an extraordinarily driven and versatile CEO and how he, his family, and his colleagues bet heavily on a revolutionary network called the Internet, and on the grandiose vision of a single store that sells everything.[Vi]

—ooOoo—

PART I

Faith
Niềm tin

—ooOoo—

CHAPTER 1

The House of Quants

Before it was the self-proclaimed largest bookstore on Earth or the Web’s dominant superstore, Amazon.com was an idea floating through the New York City offices of one of the most unusual firms on Wall Street: D. E. Shaw & Co.

A quantitative hedge fund, DESCO, as its employees affectionately called it, was started in 1988 by David E. Shaw, a former Columbia University computer science professor. Along with the founders of other groundbreaking quant houses of that era, like Renaissance Technologies and Tudor Investment Corporation, Shaw pioneered the use of computers and sophisticated mathematical formulas to exploit anomalous patterns in global financial markets. When the price of a stock in Europe was fractionally higher than the price of the same stock in the United States, for example, the computer jockeys turned Wall Street warriors at DESCO would write software to quickly execute trades and exploit the disparity.

The broader financial community knew very little about D. E. Shaw, and its polymath founder wanted to keep it that way. The firm preferred operating far below the radar, deploying private capital from wealthy investors such as billionaire financier Donald Sussman and the Tisch family, and keeping its proprietary trading algorithms out of competitors’ hands. Shaw felt strongly that if DESCO was going to be a firm that pioneered new approaches to investing, the only way to maintain its lead was to keep its insights secret and avoid teaching competitors how to think about these new computer-guided frontiers.[Vi]

David Shaw came of age in the dawning era of powerful new supercomputers. He earned a PhD in computer science from Stanford in 1980 and then moved to New York to teach in Columbia’s computer science department. Throughout the early eighties, high-tech companies tried to lure him to the private sector. Inventor Danny Hillis, founder of the supercomputer manufacturer Thinking Machines Corporation and later one of Jeff Bezos’s closest friends, almost convinced Shaw to come work for him designing parallel computers. Shaw tentatively accepted the job and then changed his mind, telling Hillis he wanted to do something more lucrative and could always return to the supercomputer field after he got wealthy. Hillis argued that even if Shaw did get rich—which seemed unlikely—he’d never return to computer science. (Shaw did, after he became a billionaire and passed on the day-to-day management of D. E. Shaw to others.) “I was spectacularly wrong on both counts,” Hillis says.

Morgan Stanley finally pried Shaw loose from academia in 1986, adding him to a famed group working on statistical arbitrage software for the new wave of automated trading. But Shaw had an urge to set off on his own. He left Morgan Stanley in 1988, and with a $28 million seed investment from investor Donald Sussman, he set up shop over a Communist bookstore in Manhattan’s West Village.[Vi]

By design, D. E. Shaw would be a different kind of Wall Street firm. Shaw recruited not financiers but scientists and mathematicians—big brains with unusual backgrounds, lofty academic credentials, and more than a touch of social cluelessness. Bob Gelfond, who joined DESCO after the firm moved to a loft on Park Avenue South, says that “David wanted to see the power of technology and computers applied to finance in a scientific way” and that he “looked up to Goldman Sachs and wanted to build an iconic Wall Street firm.”

In these ways and many others, David Shaw brought an exacting sensibility to the management of his company. He regularly sent out missives instructing employees to spell the firm’s name in a specific manner—with a space between the D. and the E. He also mandated that everyone use a canonical description of the company’s mission: it was to “trade stocks, bonds, futures, options and various other financial instruments”—precisely in that order. Shaw’s rigor extended to more substantive matters as well: any of his computer scientists could suggest trading ideas, but the notions had to pass demanding scientific scrutiny and statistical tests to prove they were valid.[Vi]

In 1991, D. E. Shaw was growing rapidly, and the company moved to the top floors of a midtown Manhattan skyscraper a block from Times Square. The firm’s striking but sparely decorated offices, designed by the architect Steven Holl, included a two-story lobby with luminescent colors that were projected into slots cut into the expansive white walls. That fall, Shaw hosted a thousand-dollar-a-ticket fund-raiser for presidential candidate Bill Clinton that was attended by the likes of Jacqueline Onassis, among others. Employees were asked to clear out of the office that evening before the event. Jeff Bezos, one of the youngest vice presidents at the firm, left to play volleyball with colleagues, but first he stopped and got his photo taken with the future president.

Bezos was in his midtwenties at the time, five foot eight inches tall, already balding and with the pasty, rumpled appearance of a committed workaholic. He had spent five years on Wall Street and impressed seemingly everyone he encountered with his keen intellect and boundless determination. Upon graduating from Princeton in 1986, Bezos worked for a pair of Columbia professors at a company called Fitel that was developing a private transatlantic computer network for stock traders. Graciela Chichilnisky, one of the cofounders and Bezos’s boss, remembers him as a capable and upbeat employee who worked tirelessly and at different times managed the firm’s operations in London and Tokyo. “He was not concerned about what other people were thinking,” Chichilnisky says. “When you gave him a good solid intellectual issue, he would just chew on it and get it done.”[Vi]

Bezos moved to the financial firm Bankers Trust in 1988, but by then, frustrated by what he viewed as institutional reluctance at companies to challenge the status quo, he was already looking for an opportunity to start his own business. Between 1989 and 1990 he spent several months working in his spare time on a startup with a young Merrill Lynch employee named Halsey Minor, who would later go on to start the online news network CNET. Their fledgling venture, aimed at sending a customized newsletter to people over their fax machines, collapsed when Merrill Lynch withdrew the promised funding. But Bezos nevertheless made an impression. Minor remembers that Bezos had closely studied several wealthy businessmen and that he particularly admired a man named Frank Meeks, a Virginia entrepreneur who had made a fortune owning Domino’s Pizza franchises. Bezos also revered pioneering computer scientist Alan Kay and often quoted his observation that “point of view is worth 80 IQ points”—a reminder that looking at things in new ways can enhance one’s understanding. “He went to school on everybody,” Minor says. “I don’t think there was anybody Jeff knew that he didn’t walk away from with whatever lessons he could.”

Bezos was ready to leave Wall Street altogether when a headhunter convinced him to meet executives at just one more financial firm, a company with an unusual pedigree. Bezos would later say he found a kind of workplace soul mate in David Shaw—“one of the few people I know who has a fully developed left brain and a fully developed right brain.[Vi]”N1

At DESCO, Bezos displayed many of the idiosyncratic qualities his employees would later observe at Amazon. He was disciplined and precise, constantly recording ideas in a notebook he carried with him, as if they might float out of his mind if he didn’t jot them down. He quickly abandoned old notions and embraced new ones when better options presented themselves. He already exhibited the same boyish excitement and conversation-stopping laugh that the world would later come to know.

Bezos thought analytically about everything, including social situations. Single at the time, he started taking ballroom-dance classes, calculating that it would increase his exposure to what he called n+ women. He later famously admitted to thinking about how to increase his “women flow,”N2 a Wall Street corollary to deal flow, the number of new opportunities a banker can access. Jeff Holden, who worked for Bezos first at D. E. Shaw & Co. and later at Amazon, says he was “the most introspective guy I ever met. He was very methodical about everything in his life.”

D. E. Shaw had none of the gratuitous formalities of other Wall Street firms; in outward temperament, at least, it was closer to a Silicon Valley startup. Employees wore jeans or khakis, not suits and ties, and the hierarchy was flat (though key information about trading formulas was tightly held).[Vi]

Bezos seemed to love the idea of the nonstop workday; he kept a rolled-up sleeping bag in his office and some egg-crate foam on his windowsill in case he needed to bunk down for the night. Nicholas Lovejoy, a colleague who would later join him at Amazon, believes the sleeping bag “was as much a prop as it was actually useful.” When they did leave the office, Bezos and his DESCO colleagues often socialized together, playing backgammon or bridge until the early hours of the morning, usually for money.

As the company grew, David Shaw started to think about how to broaden its talent base. He looked beyond math and science geeks to what he called generalists, those who’d recently graduated at the tops of their classes and who showed significant aptitude in particular subjects. The firm also combed through the ranks of Fulbright scholars and dean’s-list students at the best colleges and sent hundreds of unsolicited letters to them introducing the firm and proclaiming, “We approach our recruiting in unapologetically elitist fashion.”

Respondents to the letters who seemed particularly extraordinary and who had high enough grade point averages and aptitude-test scores were flown to New York for a grueling day of interviews. Members of the firm delighted in asking these recruits random questions, such as “How many fax machines are in the United States?” The intent was to see how candidates tried to solve difficult problems. After the interviews, everyone who had participated in the hiring process gathered and expressed one of four opinions about each individual: strong no hire; inclined not to hire; inclined to hire; or strong hire. One holdout could sink an applicant.[Vi]

Bezos would later take these exact processes, along with the seeds of other Shaw management techniques, to Seattle. Even today, Amazon employees use those categories to vote on prospective new hires.

DESCO’s massive recruitment effort and interview processes were finely tuned to Bezos’s mind-set; they even attracted one person who joined Bezos as his life partner. MacKenzie Tuttle, who graduated from Princeton in 1992 with a degree in English and who studied with author Toni Morrison, joined the hedge fund as an administrative assistant and later went to work directly for Bezos. Lovejoy remembers Bezos hiring a limousine one night and taking several colleagues to a nightclub. “He was treating the whole group but he was clearly focused on MacKenzie,” he says.

MacKenzie later said it was she who targeted Bezos, not the other way around. “My office was next door to his, and all day long I listened to that fabulous laugh,” she told Vogue in 2012. “How could you not fall in love with that laugh?” She began her campaign to win him over by suggesting lunch. The couple got engaged three months after they started dating; they were married three months after that.N3 Their wedding, held in 1993 at the Breakers, a resort in West Palm Beach, featured game time for adult guests and a late-night party at the hotel pool. Bob Gelfond and a computer programmer named Tom Karzes attended from D. E. Shaw.[Vi]

Meanwhile, DESCO was growing rapidly and, in the process, becoming more difficult to manage. Several colleagues from that time recall that D. E. Shaw brought in a consultant who administered the Myers-Briggs personality test to all the members of the executive team. Not surprisingly, everyone tested as an introvert. The least introverted person on the team was Jeff Bezos. At D. E. Shaw in the early 1990s, he counted as the token extrovert.

Bezos was a natural leader at DESCO. By 1993, he was remotely running the firm’s Chicago-based options trading group and then its high-profile entry into the third-market business, an alternative over-the-counter exchange that allowed retail investors to trade equities without the usual commissions collected by the New York Stock Exchange.N4 Brian Marsh, a programmer for the firm who would later work at Amazon, says that Bezos was “incredibly charismatic and persuasive about the third-market project. It was easy to see then he was a great leader.” Bezos’s division faced constant challenges, however. The dominant player in the space was one Bernard Madoff (the architect of a massive Ponzi scheme that would unravel in 2008). Madoff’s own third-market division pioneered the business and preserved its market lead. Bezos and his team could see Madoff’s offices in the Lipstick Building on the East Side through their windows high above the city.[Vi]

While the rest of Wall Street saw D. E. Shaw as a highly secretive hedge fund, the firm viewed itself somewhat differently. In David Shaw’s estimation, the company wasn’t really a hedge fund but a versatile technology laboratory full of innovators and talented engineers who could apply computer science to a variety of different problems.N5 Investing was only the first domain where it would apply its skills.

So in 1994, when the opportunity of the Internet began to reveal itself to the few people watching closely, Shaw felt that his company was uniquely positioned to exploit it. And the person he anointed to spearhead the effort was Jeff Bezos.

D. E. Shaw was ideally situated to take advantage of the Internet. Most Shaw employees had, instead of proprietary trading terminals, Sun workstations with Internet access, and they utilized early Internet tools like Gopher, Usenet, e-mail, and Mosaic, one of the first Web browsers. To write documents, they used an academic formatting tool called LaTeX, though Bezos refused to touch the program, claiming it was unnecessarily complicated. D. E. Shaw was also among the very first Wall Street firms to register its URL. Internet records show that Deshaw.com was claimed in 1992. Goldman Sachs took its domain in 1995, and Morgan Stanley a year after that.[Vi]

Shaw, who used the Internet and its predecessor, ARPANET, during his years as a professor, was passionate about the commercial and social implications of a single global computer network. Bezos had first encountered the Internet in an astrophysics class at Princeton in 1985 but hadn’t thought about its commercial potential until arriving at DESCO. Shaw and Bezos would meet for a few hours each week to brainstorm ideas for this coming technological wave, and then Bezos would take those ideas and investigate their feasibility.N6

In early 1994, several prescient business plans emerged from the discussions between Bezos and Shaw and others at D. E. Shaw. One was the concept of a free, advertising-supported e-mail service for consumers—the idea behind Gmail and Yahoo Mail. DESCO would develop that idea into a company called Juno, which went public in 1999 and soon after merged with NetZero, a rival.

Another idea was to create a new kind of financial service that allowed Internet users to trade stocks and bonds online. In 1995 Shaw turned that into a subsidiary called FarSight Financial Services, a precursor to companies like E-Trade. He later sold it to Merrill Lynch.

Shaw and Bezos discussed another idea as well. They called it “the everything store.”[Vi]

Several executives who worked at DESCO at that time say the idea of the everything store was simple: an Internet company that served as the intermediary between customers and manufacturers and sold nearly every type of product, all over the world. One important element in the early vision was that customers could leave written evaluations of any product, a more egalitarian and credible version of the old Montgomery Ward catalog reviews of its own suppliers. Shaw himself confirmed the Internet-store concept when he told the New York Times Magazine in 1999, “The idea was always that someone would be allowed to make a profit as an intermediary. The key question is: Who will get to be that middleman?”N7

Intrigued by Shaw’s conviction about the inevitable importance of the Internet, Bezos started researching its growth. A Texas-based author and publisher named John Quarterman had recently started the Matrix News, a monthly newsletter extolling the Internet and discussing its commercial possibilities. One set of numbers in particular in the February 1994 edition of the newsletter was startling. For the first time, Quarterman broke down the growth of the year-old World Wide Web and pointed out that its simple, friendly interface appealed to a far broader audience than other Internet technologies. In one chart, he showed that the number of bytes—a set of binary digits—transmitted over the Web had increased by a factor of 2,057 between January 1993 and January 1994. Another graphic showed the number of packets—a single unit of data—sent over the Web had jumped by 2,560 in the same span[Vi].N8

Bezos interpolated from this that Web activity overall had gone up that year by a factor of roughly 2,300—a 230,000 percent increase. “Things just don’t grow that fast,” Bezos later said. “It’s highly unusual, and that started me thinking, What kind of business plan might make sense in the context of that growth?”N9 (Bezos also liked to say in speeches during Amazon’s early years that it was the Web’s “2,300 percent” annual growth rate that jolted him out of complacency. Which makes for an interesting historical footnote: Amazon began with a math error.)

Bezos concluded that a true everything store would be impractical—at least at the beginning. He made a list of twenty possible product categories, including computer software, office supplies, apparel, and music. The category that eventually jumped out at him as the best option was books. They were pure commodities; a copy of a book in one store was identical to the same book carried in another, so buyers always knew what they were getting. There were two primary distributors of books at that time, Ingram and Baker and Taylor, so a new retailer wouldn’t have to approach each of the thousands of book publishers individually. And, most important, there were three million books in print worldwide, far more than a Barnes & Noble or a Borders superstore could ever stock.[Vi]

If he couldn’t build a true everything store right away, he could capture its essence—unlimited selection—in at least one important product category. “With that huge diversity of products you could build a store online that simply could not exist in any other way,” Bezos said. “You could build a true superstore with exhaustive selection, and customers value selection.”N10

In his offices on the fortieth floor of 120 West Forty-Fifth Street, Bezos could hardly contain his enthusiasm. With DESCO’s recruiting chief, Charles Ardai, he investigated some of the earliest online bookstore websites, such as Book Stacks Unlimited, located in Cleveland, Ohio, and WordsWorth, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Ardai still has the record from one purchase they made while testing these early sites. He bought a copy of Isaac Asimov’s Cyberdreams from the website of the Future Fantasy bookstore in Palo Alto, California. The price was $6.04. When the book appeared, two weeks later, Ardai ripped open the cardboard package and showed it to Bezos. It had become badly tattered in transit. No one had yet figured out how to do a good job selling books over the Internet. As Bezos saw it, this was a huge, untapped opportunity.

Bezos knew it would never really be his company if he pursued the venture inside D. E. Shaw. Indeed, the firm initially owned all of Juno and FarSight, and Shaw acted as chairman of both. If Bezos wanted to be a true owner and entrepreneur, with significant equity in his creation and the potential to achieve the same kind of financial rewards that businessmen like pizza magnate Frank Meeks did, he had to leave his lucrative and comfortable home on Wall Street.[Vi]

What happened next became one of the founding legends of the Internet. That spring, Bezos spoke to David Shaw and told him he planned to leave the company to create an online bookstore. Shaw suggested they take a walk. They wandered in Central Park for two hours, discussing the venture and the entrepreneurial drive. Shaw said he understood Bezos’s impulse and sympathized with it—he had done the same thing when he’d left Morgan Stanley. He also noted that D. E. Shaw was growing quickly and that Bezos already had a great job. He told Bezos that the firm might end up competing with his new venture. The two agreed that Bezos would spend a few days thinking about it.

At the time, Bezos was newly married, with a comfortable apartment on the Upper West Side and a well-paying job. While MacKenzie said she would be supportive if he decided to strike out on his own, the decision was not an easy one. Bezos would later describe his thinking process in unusually geeky terms. He says he came up with what he called a “regret-minimization framework” to decide the next step to take at this juncture of his career.[Vi]

“When you are in the thick of things, you can get confused by small stuff,” Bezos said a few years later. “I knew when I was eighty that I would never, for example, think about why I walked away from my 1994 Wall Street bonus right in the middle of the year at the worst possible time. That kind of thing just isn’t something you worry about when you’re eighty years old. At the same time, I knew that I might sincerely regret not having participated in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a revolutionizing event. When I thought about it that way… it was incredibly easy to make the decision.”N11

Bezos’s parents, Mike and Jackie, were nearing the end of a three-year stay in Bogotá, Colombia, where Mike was working for Exxon as a petroleum engineer, when they got the phone call. “What do you mean, you are going to sell books over the Internet?” was their first reaction, according to Mike Bezos. They had used the early online service Prodigy to correspond with family members and to organize Jeff and MacKenzie’s engagement party, so it wasn’t naïveté about new technology that unnerved them. Rather, it was seeing their accomplished son leave a well-paying job on Wall Street to pursue an idea that sounded like utter madness. Jackie Bezos suggested to her son that he run his new company at night or on the weekends. “No, things are changing fast,” Bezos told her. “I need to move quickly.”[Vi]

So Jeff Bezos started planning for his journey. He held a party at his Upper West Side apartment to watch the final episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Then he flew out to Santa Cruz, California, to meet two experienced programmers who had been introduced to him by Peter Laventhol, David Shaw’s first employee. Over blueberry pancakes at the Old Sash Mill Café in Santa Cruz, Bezos managed to intrigue one of them, a startup veteran named Shel Kaphan. Bezos “was inflamed by a lot of the same excitement as I was about what was happening with the Internet,” Kaphan says. They looked at office space together in Santa Cruz, but Bezos later learned of a 1992 Supreme Court decision that upheld a previous ruling that merchants did not have to collect sales tax in states where they did not have physical operations. As a result, mail-order businesses typically avoided locating in populous states like California and New York, and so would Bezos.

Back in New York, Bezos informed his colleagues that he was leaving D. E. Shaw. Bezos and Jeff Holden, a recent graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who had worked for Bezos as an engineer on the third-market project, went out one night for drinks. The two were close. Holden was from Rochester Hills, Michigan, and as a teenager, under the hacker nom de guerre the Nova, he had grown adept at cracking copyright protection on software. He was an avid Rollerblader and a fast talker; he spoke so rapidly that Bezos liked to joke that Holden “taught me to listen faster.”

Now they were sitting across from each other at Virgil’s, a barbecue place on Forty-Fourth Street. Bezos had tentatively decided to call his company Cadabra Inc. but was not committed to the name. Holden filled both sides of a piece of notebook paper with alternatives. The one Bezos liked best on the list was MakeItSo.com, after Captain Picard’s frequent command in Star Trek.[Vi]

Over beers, Holden told Bezos he wanted to come with him. But Bezos was worried; his contract with D. E. Shaw stipulated that if he left the firm, he couldn’t recruit DESCO employees for at least two years. David Shaw was not someone he wanted to cross. “You’re just out of school, you’ve got debt. And this is risky,” Bezos said. “Stay here. Build up some net worth and I’ll be in touch.”

Later that month, Bezos and MacKenzie packed up the contents of their home and told the movers to just start driving their belongings across the country—they said they would call them on the road the next day with a specific destination. First they flew to Fort Worth, Texas, and borrowed a 1988 Chevy Blazer from Bezos’s father. Then they drove northwest, Bezos sitting in the passenger seat, typing revenue projections into an Excel spreadsheet—numbers that would later prove to be radically inaccurate. They tried to check into a Motel 6 in Shamrock, Texas, but it was booked, so they settled for a road motel called the Rambler.N12 When MacKenzie saw the room, she declined to take off her shoes that night. A day later, they stopped at the Grand Canyon and watched the sunrise. He was thirty, she was twenty-four, and together they were writing an entrepreneurial origin story that would be imprinted on the collective imagination of millions of Internet users and hopeful startup founders.

More than a year passed before Jeff Holden heard from his friend again. Bezos had settled in Seattle, and he e-mailed Holden a link to a website. They were now calling it Amazon.com. The site was primitive, mostly text and somewhat unimpressive. Holden bought a few books through the site and offered some feedback. Then another year passed, and finally, a few months after Bezos’s do-not-poach agreement with David Shaw expired, Holden’s phone rang.

It was Bezos. “It’s time,” he said. “This is going to work.”[Vi]

—ooOoo—

CHAPTER 2

The Book of Bezos

Usenet bulletin-board posting, August 21, 1994:

Well-capitalized start-up seeks extremely talented C/C++/Unix developers to help pioneer commerce on the Internet. You must have experience designing and building large and complex (yet maintainable) systems, and you should be able to do so in about one-third the time that most competent people think possible. You should have a BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science or the equivalent. Top-notch communication skills are essential. Familiarity with web servers and HTML would be helpful but is not necessary.

Expect talented, motivated, intense, and interesting co-workers. Must be willing to relocate to the Seattle area (we will help cover moving costs).

Your compensation will include meaningful equity ownership.

Send resume and cover letter to Jeff Bezos. US mail: Cadabra, Inc. 10704 N.E. 28th St., Bellevue, WA 98004

We are an equal opportunity employer.

“It’s easier to invent the future than to predict it.”

—Alan Kay[Vi]

In the beginning, they knew they needed a better name. The magical allusions of Cadabra Inc., as Todd Tarbert, Bezos’s first lawyer, pointed out after they registered that name with Washington State in July of 1994, were too obscure, and over the phone, people tended to hear the name as Cadaver. So later that summer, after renting a three-bedroom ranch house in the East Seattle suburb of Bellevue, Bezos and MacKenzie started brainstorming. Internet records show that during that time, they registered the Web domains Awake.com, Browse.com, and Bookmall.com. Bezos also briefly considered Aard.com, from a Dutch word, as a way to stake a claim at the top of most listings of websites, which at the time were arranged alphabetically.

Bezos and his wife grew fond of another possibility: Relentless.com. Friends suggested that it sounded a bit sinister. But something about it must have captivated Bezos: he registered the URL in September 1994, and he kept it. Type Relentless.com into the Web today and it takes you to Amazon.

Bezos chose to start his company in Seattle because of the city’s reputation as a technology hub and because the state of Washington had a relatively small population (compared to California, New York, and Texas), which meant that Amazon would have to collect state sales tax from only a minor percentage of customers. While the area was still a remote urban outpost known more for its grunge rock than its business community, Microsoft was hitting its stride in nearby Redmond, and the University of Washington produced a steady stream of computer science graduates.[Vi]

Seattle was also close to one of the two big book distributors: Ingram had a warehouse a six-hour drive away, in Roseburg, Oregon. And local businessman Nick Hanauer, whom Bezos had recently met through a friend, lived there and urged Bezos to give Seattle a try. He would later be pivotal in introducing Bezos to potential investors.

That fall, Shel Kaphan drove a U-Haul full of his belongings up from Santa Cruz and officially joined Bezos and his wife as a founding employee of Amazon and as its primary technical steward. Kaphan had grown up in the San Francisco Bay Area and as a teenage computer enthusiast explored the ARPANET, the U.S. Defense Department–developed predecessor to the Internet. In high school, Kaphan met Stewart Brand, the writer and counterculture organizer, and the summer after he graduated, Kaphan took a job at the Whole Earth Catalog, Brand’s seminal guide to the tools and books of the enlightened new information age. Sporting long hippie-ish hair and a bushy beard, Kaphan worked at Brand’s Whole Earth Truck Store in Menlo Park, a mobile lending library and roving education service. He tended the cash register, filled subscriptions, and packed books and catalogs for shipment to customers.[Vi]

After earning a bachelor’s degree in mathematics in an on-again, off-again decade at the University of California at Santa Cruz, Kaphan logged time at a number of Bay Area companies, including the ill-fated Apple-IBM joint venture called Kaleida Labs, which developed media-player software for personal computers. He tended to display the disappointment of those experiences in what his friends considered a gloomy countenance. When he got to Seattle, Kaphan, characteristically, had severe doubts that the young startup was going to succeed. He immediately began worrying about the company’s name. “I was once part of a little consultancy called the Symmetry Group, and people always thought we were the Cemetery Group,” says Kaphan. “When I heard about Cadaver Inc., I thought, Oh God, not this again.” But Kaphan (by now shorn of his long locks and beard, balding, and in his early forties) was inspired by what he saw as Amazon’s potential to use the Web to fulfill the vision of the Whole Earth Catalog and make information and tools available around the world.

At first, Kaphan figured he’d write some code and return to Santa Cruz to work remotely, so he left half his belongings at home and stayed with Bezos and MacKenzie in Bellevue for a few days while looking for a place to rent. They set up shop in the converted garage of Bezos’s house, an enclosed space without insulation and with a large, black potbellied stove at its center.[Vi]

Bezos built the first two desks out of sixty-dollar blond-wood doors from Home Depot, an endeavor that later carried almost biblical significance at Amazon, like Noah building the ark. In late September, Bezos drove down to Portland, Oregon, to take a four-day course on bookselling sponsored by the American Booksellers Association, a trade organization for independent bookstores. The seminar covered such topics as “Selecting Opening Inventory” and “Inventory Management.”N1 At the same time, Kaphan started looking for computers and databases and learning how to code a website—in those days, everything on the Internet had to be custom built.

It was all done on a threadbare budget. At first Bezos backed the company himself with $10,000 in cash, and over the next sixteen months, he would finance the startup with an additional $84,000 in interest-free loans, according to public documents. Kaphan’s contract required him to commit to buying $5,000 of stock upon joining the company. He passed on the option to buy an additional $20,000 in shares, since he was already taking a 50 percent pay cut to work at the startup and would, like Bezos, earn only $64,000 a year. “The whole thing seemed pretty iffy at that stage,” says Kaphan, who some consider an Amazon cofounder. “There wasn’t really anything except for a guy with a barking laugh building desks out of doors in his converted garage, just like he’d seen in my Santa Cruz home office. I was taking a big risk by moving and accepting a low salary and so even though I had some savings, I didn’t feel comfortable committing more than I did.”[Vi]

In early 1995, Bezos’s parents, Jackie and Mike Bezos, invested $100,000 in Amazon. Exxon had covered most of the couple’s living expenses when Mike worked in Norway, Colombia, and Venezuela, so the couple had a considerable nest egg and were willing to spend a good portion of it on their oldest child. “We saw the business plan, but all of that went over our heads to a large extent,” says Mike Bezos. “As corny as it sounds, we were betting on Jeff.” Bezos told his parents there was a 70 percent chance they could lose it all. “I want you to know what the risks are, because I still want to come home for Thanksgiving if this doesn’t work,” he said.

Amazon was a family affair in another way. MacKenzie, an aspiring novelist, became the company’s first official accountant, handling the finances, writing the checks, and helping with hiring. For coffee breaks and meetings, the employees would go to a nearby Barnes & Noble, an irony that Bezos later mentioned often in speeches and interviews.

There was little urgency to their efforts, at least at first. Kaphan recalls showing up at the Bellevue house early one morning in October, only to have Bezos declare that they were all going to take the day off to go hiking. “The weather was changing and the days were getting short,” Kaphan says. “We were all new to the area and hadn’t seen much of it.” Bezos, MacKenzie, and Kaphan drove seventy miles to Mount Rainier and spent the day wandering amid patches of snow on the majestic volcano that, on clear days, dominates the Seattle skyline.[Vi]

Later that fall, they hired Paul Davis, a British-born programmer who had been on staff at the University of Washington’s computer science and engineering department. Davis’s colleagues were so dubious of his move to an as-yet-unlaunched online bookstore that they passed around a coffee can to collect a few dollars for him in case it didn’t work out. Davis joined Kaphan and Bezos in the garage, working on SPARCstation servers from Sun Microsystems, machines that resembled pizza boxes and drew so much power they repeatedly blew fuses in the home. Eventually they had to run orange extension cords from other rooms to put the computers on different circuits, making it impossible to run a hair dryer or vacuum cleaner in the house.N2

“At first it didn’t really have a lot of the energy one stereotypically associates with a startup,” says Davis, who biked to Bellevue each day wearing Gore-Tex socks over the cuffs of his trousers. “We were pre-startup. It was just Shel, myself, and Jeff in an office, sitting around a table with a whiteboard and discussing how to divide the programming work.”

One of their driving goals was to create something superior to the existing online bookstores, including Books.com, the website of the Cleveland-based bookstore Book Stacks Unlimited. “As crazy as it might sound, it did appear that the first challenge was to do something better than these other guys,” Davis says. “There was competition already. It wasn’t as if Jeff was coming up with something completely new.”[Vi]

During that time, the name Cadabra lived on, serving as a temporary placeholder. But in late October of 1994, Bezos pored through the A section of the dictionary and had an epiphany when he reached the word Amazon. Earth’s largest river; Earth’s largest bookstore.N3 He walked into the garage one morning and informed his colleagues of the company’s new name. He gave the impression that he didn’t care to hear anyone’s opinion on it, and he registered the new URL on November 1, 1994. “This is not only the largest river in the world, it’s many times larger than the next biggest river. It blows all other rivers away,” Bezos said.

While the original Bellevue garage would come to symbolize a romantic time in Amazon’s early history—the kind of modest beginnings that legendary companies like Apple and Hewlett-Packard started with—Amazon was located there for only a few months. With Kaphan and Davis nearing completion of a primitive beta website, Bezos began to think about hiring other employees—and that meant finding a more professional place to work. That spring, they moved to a small office above a Color Tile retail store in the industrial SoDo (for “south of the Kingdome”) district, near downtown Seattle. Amazon had its first official warehouse in part of that building’s basement: a two-hundred-square-foot windowless room that was once a band practice studio and still had the words Sonic Jungle spray-painted on a jet-black door. Soon after, Bezos and MacKenzie left the Bellevue house and, attempting to recapture the urban energy of their New York lives, moved into a nine-hundred-square-foot apartment on Vine Street in Seattle’s fashionable Belltown neighborhood.[Vi]

In the spring of 1995, Bezos and Kaphan sent links to the beta website to a few dozen friends, family members, and former colleagues. The site was bare, crammed with text and tuned to the rudimentary browsers and slowpoke Internet connections of the time. “One million titles, consistently low prices,” that first home page announced in blue underlined text. Next to that was the amateurishly illustrated logo: a giant A set against a marbled blue background with the image of a river snaking through the letter. The site seemed uninviting to literate people who had spent their lives happily browsing the shelves of bookstores and libraries. “I remember thinking that it was very improbable that people would ever want to do this,” says Susan Benson, whose husband, Eric, was a former colleague of Kaphan’s. Both would become early employees at Amazon.

Kaphan invited a former coworker, John Wainwright, to try the service, and Wainwright is credited with making the very first purchase: Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies, a science book by Douglas Hofstadter. His Amazon account history records the date of that inaugural order as April 3, 1995. Today, a building on Amazon’s Seattle’s campus is named Wainwright.[Vi]

While the site wasn’t much to look at, Kaphan and Davis had accomplished a lot on it in just a few months. There was a virtual shopping basket, a safe way to enter credit card numbers into a Web browser, and a rudimentary search engine that scoured a catalog drawn from the Books in Print CD-ROMs, a reference source published by R. R. Bowker, the provider of the standard identifying ISBN numbers for books in the United States. Kaphan and Davis also developed a system that allowed users of early online services like Prodigy and AOL to get information on books and place orders via e-mail alone—though that was never rolled out.

These were all state-of-the-art developments during the gritty initial days of the Web, a time when tools were primitive and techniques were constantly evolving. 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.

Each order during those early months brought a thrill to Amazon’s employees. When someone made a purchase, a bell would ring on Amazon’s computers, and everyone in the office would gather around to see if anyone knew the customer. (It was only a few weeks before it started ringing so often that they had to turn it off.) Amazon would then order the book from one of the two major book distributors, paying the standard wholesale rate of 50 percent off the list price (the advertised price printed on the book jacket).[Vi]

There was little science to Amazon’s earliest distribution methods. The company held no inventory itself at first. When a customer bought a book, Amazon ordered it, the book would arrive within a few days, and Amazon would store it in the basement and then ship it off to the customer. It took Amazon a week to deliver most items to customers, and it could take several weeks or more than a month for scarcer titles.

Even back then, Amazon was making only a slender profit on most sales. It offered up to 40 percent off the list price on bestsellers and books that were included in Spotlight, an early feature on the website that highlighted new titles each day. The company offered 10 percent off the list price on other books; it also charged shipping fees starting at $3.95 for single-book orders.

One early challenge was that the book distributors required retailers to order ten books at a time. Amazon didn’t yet have that kind of sales volume, and Bezos later enjoyed telling the story of how he got around it. “We found a loophole,” he said. “Their systems were programmed in such a way that you didn’t have to receive ten books, you only had to order ten books. So we found an obscure book about lichens that they had in their system but was out of stock. We began ordering the one book we wanted and nine copies of the lichen book. They would ship out the book we needed and a note that said, ‘Sorry, but we’re out of the lichen book.’ ”N4

In early June, Kaphan added a reviews feature that he’d coded over a single weekend. Bezos believed that if Amazon.com had more user-generated book reviews than any other site, it would give the company a huge advantage; customers would be less inclined to go to other online bookstores.[Vi]

They had discussed whether such unfiltered user-generated content could get the company in trouble. Bezos decided to watch reviews closely for offensive material rather than read everything before it was published.

The early employees and their friends wrote many of the initial reviews themselves. Kaphan himself took a book off the shelf that was meant for a customer, a Chinese memoir called Bitter Winds: A Memoir of My Years in China’s Gulag. He read it cover to cover and wrote one of the first reviews.

Naturally, some of the reviews were negative. In speeches, Bezos later recalled getting an angry letter from an executive at a book publisher implying that Bezos didn’t understand that his business was to sell books, not trash them. “We saw it very differently,” Bezos said. “When I read that letter, I thought, we don’t make money when we sell things. We make money when we help customers make purchase decisions.”N5

The site went live on July 16, 1995, and became visible to all Web users. And as word spread, the small Amazon team saw almost immediately that they had opened a strange window onto human behavior. The Internet’s early adopters ordered computer manuals, Dilbert comic collections, books on repairing antique musical instruments—and sex guides. (The bestseller on Amazon.com from that first year: How to Set Up and Maintain a World Wide Web Site: The Guide for Information Providers, by Lincoln D. Stein.)[Vi]

There were orders from U.S. troops overseas and from an individual in Ohio who wrote to say he lived fifty miles away from the nearest bookstore and that Amazon.com was a godsend. Someone from the European Southern Observatory in Chile ordered a Carl Sagan book—apparently as a test—and after the order was successful, the customer placed a second order for several dozen copies of the same book. Amazon was getting one of the first glimpses of the “long tail”—the large number of esoteric items that appeal to relatively few people. Paul Davis once surveyed the odd assortment of books squirreled away on the shelves in the basement and with a sigh called it “the smallest and most eclectic bookstore in the world.”

No one had been hired yet to pack books, so when volumes rose and the company fell behind on shipping, Bezos, Kaphan, and the others would descend to the basement at night to assemble customer orders. The next day, Bezos, MacKenzie, or an employee would drive the boxes to UPS or the post office.

The packing work was arduous and often lasted well into the night. Employees assembled orders on the floor, wrapping books in a cohesive cardboard that stuck to itself but not anything else. That summer Nicholas Lovejoy, a former D. E. Shaw employee who had left the hedge fund to teach high-school math in Seattle, joined the company part-time and made the obvious suggestion of adding packing tables to the warehouse.[Vi]

That tidy anecdote quickly made the catalog of Jeffisms and was still being repeated twenty years later. “I thought that was the most brilliant idea I had ever heard in my life,” Bezos said in a speech, finding the story so freshly amusing that he accompanied it with a honking laugh.N6

Bezos tapped Lovejoy to assist with recruiting and told him to go hire the smartest people he knew—just like David Shaw, Bezos wanted all of his employees to be high-IQ brainiacs. Lovejoy brought in four friends from his alma mater, Reed College, one of whom was Laurel Canan, a twenty-four-year-old carpenter who was planning to return to school to become a Chaucer scholar (it never happened). Canan helped build the much-needed packing tables, and then he formally joined the company and took over operations in the warehouse. (The landlord had finally allowed Amazon to expand out of the Sonic Jungle room and take over the entire basement.) One of the first things Canan did upon being hired was give up coffee. “You can’t do a job like that on caffeine. You have to do it on carbs,” he says.

It was an eclectic team operating under unusual circumstances in a challenging environment, and together they took their first tentative steps into an exotic river called the Internet. To everyone’s surprise, they all got swept up in a swift current. The first week after the official launch, they took $12,000 in orders and shipped $846 worth of books, according to Eric Dillon, one of Amazon’s original investors. The next week they took $14,000 in orders and shipped $7,000 worth of books. So they were behind from the get-go and scrambling to catch up.[Vi]

A week after the launch, Jerry Yang and David Filo, Stanford graduate students, wrote them an e-mail and asked if they would like to be featured on a site called Yahoo that listed cool things on the Web. At that time, Yahoo was one of the most highly trafficked sites on the Web and the default home page for many of the Internet’s earliest users. Bezos and his employees had of course heard of Yahoo and they sat around eating Chinese food that night and discussing whether they were ready for a wave of new business when they were already drowning in orders. Kaphan thought that it might be like “taking a sip through a fire hose.”N7 But they decided to do it, and within the first month of their launch they had sold books to people in all fifty states and in forty-five countries.N8

Every day the number of orders increased, and the tendrils of chaos—the company’s constant antagonist over the next several years—began to tighten around the young startup. Bezos insisted that Amazon had to have a customer-friendly thirty-day-return policy, but it had no processes in place to handle returns; it had a line of credit but would regularly max out its account, and MacKenzie would then have to walk down the street to the bank and write a check to reopen it. Tom Schonhoff, who joined that summer after getting a computer science degree at the University of Washington, remembers Bezos bringing a latte to work each morning and sitting down at his disorganized desk. One day, the young CEO grabbed the wrong cup and took a slug of curdled, week-old latte. He spent the rest of the day complaining that he might have to go to the hospital. Everyone was working long days, scrambling to keep up, and not getting enough sleep.[Vi]

On August 9, 1995, Netscape Communications, the corporate descendant of the pioneering Mosaic Web browser, went public. On the first day, its stock jumped from an initial price of $28 per share to $75, and the eyes of the world opened to the gathering phenomenon that was the World Wide Web.

While he and his employees worked exceedingly long days, Bezos was always thinking about raising money. That summer the Bezos family, using the Gise family trust (Gise was Jackie’s maiden name), invested another $145,000 in Amazon.N9 But the company couldn’t continue hiring and growing on the Bezos family savings alone. That summer, Nick Hanauer, a garrulous fixture of the Seattle business community whose father had started a successful pillow manufacturing company, helped to line up pitch meetings for Bezos. He canvassed sixty potential investors, seeking to raise $1 million from individual contributions of $50,000 each.N10

In the meetings, Bezos presented what was, at best, an ambiguous picture of Amazon’s future. At the time, it had about $139,000 in assets, $69,000 of which was in cash. The company had lost $52,000 in 1994 and was on track to lose another $300,000 that year.

Against that meager start, Bezos would tell investors he projected $74 million in sales by 2000 if things went moderately well, and $114 million in sales if they went much better than expected. (Actual net sales in 2000: $1.64 billion.) Bezos also predicted the company would be moderately profitable by that time (net loss in 2000: $1.4 billion). He wanted to value the fledgling firm at $6 million—an aggressive valuation that he had seemingly picked out of thin air. And he told investors the same thing he told his parents: the company had a 70 percent chance of failing.[Vi]

Though they could not have known it, investors were looking at the opportunity of a lifetime. This highly driven, articulate young man talked with conviction about the Internet’s potential to deliver a more convenient shopping experience than crowded big-box stores where the staff routinely ignored customers. He predicted the company’s eventual ability to personalize a version of the website for each shopper based on his or her previous purchases. And he prophesied what must have seemed like a radical future: that everyone would one day use the Internet at high speeds, not over screeching dial-up modems, and that the infinite shelf space of the Web would enable the fulfillment of the merchandiser’s dream of the everything store—a store with infinite selection.

Bezos started his investment tour at the Mercer Island home of Eric Dillon, a tall blond stockbroker and one of Hanauer’s best friends. “He swept me off my feet,” Dillon says. “He was so convinced that what he was doing was basically the work of God and that somehow the money would materialize. The real wild card was, could he really run a business? That wasn’t a gimme. Of course, about two years later I was going, ‘Holy shit, did we back the right horse!’ ”

Bezos also pitched Bob Gelfond, a former D. E. Shaw colleague. Gelfond turned for advice to his skeptical father, a man who had had a long career in book publishing and who had experienced the pain of trying to get his company to embrace personal computers. His father recommended against the investment, but Gelfond had watched Bezos smoothly operate in the hedge-fund world and bet on his friend anyway. “It’s one thing to have a good idea, but it’s another to have confidence in a person to execute it,” he says.[Vi]

Many others turned Bezos down. Hanauer and his mother invested, but one of Hanauer’s brothers and his father declined. Tom Alberg, a former executive at McCaw Cellular, met Bezos and was dubious because he loved browsing in bookstores. Then a few days later he failed to find a business book for his son at a local shop, and he changed his mind and decided to invest. The attorney who told Alberg about the deal invited Bezos to speak at an investment group that met regularly at Seattle’s tony Rainier Club. He thought the valuation was too high and passed.

Bezos later told the online journal of the Wharton School, “We got the normal comments from well-meaning people who basically didn’t believe the business plan; they just didn’t think it would work.”N11 Among the concerns was this prediction: “If you’re successful, you’re going to need a warehouse the size of the Library of Congress,” one investor told him.

Todd Tarbert, Amazon’s first lawyer, sighs heavily when recalling his decision about whether to personally back the company. For the first time in his career, he wanted to invest in a client’s firm, and he secured written permission to do so from the Washington State Bar Association. He also talked to his father about taking out a loan against their jointly owned farmhouse. But then Tarbert’s son was born prematurely, and he took a month off from work and never got around to writing the $50,000 check. By the time Tarbert returned, Bezos had already raised the $1 million at a slightly-lower-than-hoped-for $5 million valuation.[Vi]

One day in late 1997, after Amazon’s IPO, Tarbert was playing golf with his dad. “You know that company Amazon that just went public?” his father asked. “Was that the company we were talking about? What happened with that?”

“Yeah, Dad. You don’t want to know,” Tarbert replied.

“Well, what would that be worth today?” his father continued.

“At least a few million,” Tarbert said.

At the end of that summer, Nicholas Lovejoy told Bezos he wanted to move from part-time to full-time. To his surprise, his former D. E. Shaw colleague didn’t want to hire him full-time. Lovejoy had been working a modest thirty-five hours a week, playing ultimate Frisbee, kayaking, and hanging out with his girlfriend, and Bezos was imagining a different culture for Amazon, one where employees worked tirelessly for the sake of building a lasting company and increasing the value of their own ownership stakes. Lovejoy pleaded his case, arguing he was ready to sign up for sixty hours a week like everyone else, but he couldn’t change Bezos’s mind. Bezos even asked him to find a full-time employee to replace himself, which seemed particularly cruel. Eventually Lovejoy gave him a stack of résumés, and he put his own at the top. He also appealed to MacKenzie, Kaphan, and Davis and got them to change the boss’s mind. Lovejoy would work a variety of jobs at Amazon over the next few years, writing code and book reviews, ferrying packages to the post office at night, and eventually winding up in finance.[Vi]

Bezos felt that hiring only the best and brightest was key to Amazon’s success. For years he interviewed all potential hires himself and asked them for their SAT scores. “Every time we hire someone, he or she should raise the bar for the next hire, so that the overall talent pool is always improving,” he said, a recurring Jeffism. That approach caused plenty of friction. As Amazon grew, it badly needed additional manpower, and early employees eagerly recommended their friends, many of whom were as accomplished as they were. Bezos interrogated the applicants, lobbing the kind of improbable questions that were once asked at D. E. Shaw, like “How many gas stations are in the United States?” It was a test to measure the quality of a candidate’s thinking; Bezos wasn’t looking for the correct answer, only for the individual to demonstrate creativity by coming up with a sound way to derive a possible solution. And if the potential employees made the mistake of talking about wanting a harmonious balance between work and home life, Bezos rejected them.

Paul Davis was incredulous. Amazon at the time was offering about sixty thousand a year in salary, stock options of questionable value, a meager health plan with a high deductible, and an increasingly frenetic work pace. “We would look at him and ask, How do you think you’re ever going to attract anyone with that kind of background to a company that has no revenue and that is not projected to have any kind of revenue?” Davis said. “I don’t see what the selling point is here!”[Vi]

Little by little, the CEO with the piercing laugh, thinning hair, and twitchy demeanor revealed his true self to his employees. He was unusually confident, more stubborn than they had originally thought, and he strangely and presumptuously assumed that they would all work tirelessly and perform constant heroics. He seemed to keep his ambitions and plans very close to the vest, not revealing much even to Kaphan.

When his goals did slip out, they were improbably grandiose. Though the startup’s focus was clearly on books, Davis recalls Bezos saying he wanted to build “the next Sears,” a lasting company that was a major force in retail. Lovejoy, a kayaking enthusiast, remembers Bezos telling him that he envisioned a day when the site would sell not only books about kayaks but kayaks themselves, subscriptions to kayaking magazines, and reservations for kayaking trips—everything related to the sport.

“I thought he was a little bit crazy,” says Lovejoy. “At the time we offered 1.5 million books. Only about 1.2 million of those you could actually order. The database came from Baker and Taylor and we had about forty books in the warehouse.”[Vi]

Bezos was also proving himself to be something of a spoilsport. That year the engineers rigged a database command, rwerich, to track the number of daily purchases as well as orders throughout the lifetime of the company. They obsessively watched those numbers grow—it was one of their pleasures amid the typically frenetic days. Bezos eventually told them to stop doing it, in part because it was putting too much strain on the servers. And when Amazon had its first five-thousand-dollar-order day and Lovejoy wanted to throw a party, Bezos rejected the idea. “There are a lot of milestones coming and that’s not the way I want to run things,” he said.

By early 1996, the young company was outgrowing its space in the Color Tile building. Employees were jammed into three small rooms, four door-desks in each, and the basement warehouse was overflowing with books. Kaphan, Davis, and Bezos piled into a car and went looking for a larger office in industrial areas around Lake Washington. Bezos emerged from every building to proclaim the space too small, Davis recalls. He wanted to accommodate whatever came for the company down the road.

That March, Amazon finally moved to a larger building with a more spacious warehouse a few blocks away. The new office was next to the Pecos Pit, a popular barbecue stand whose tantalizing aromas would waft into the warehouse each day starting at around ten in the morning.[Vi]

But one early employee did not move with them. Paul Davis, who later became an advocate for open-source software and a critic of Amazon’s enforcing its 1-Click patent, told Bezos he wanted to spend more time with his newborn daughter. Leaving Amazon so early cost him a literal fortune in unclaimed stock options. A few months later, he would punctuate that misstep by slicing off the tip of his thumb with a band saw while preparing his home for sale. Bezos and Tom Schonhoff went to visit him in the hospital.

Somehow Davis, a native Londoner, was immune to the gospel of Jeff. He looked askance at the work-first zealotry, and he noticed that Bezos had changed a clever motivational phrase about choosing among three ways to work. In the old Bellevue house, Bezos had said to Kaphan and Davis, “You can work long, hard, and smart, but at Amazon.com you can pick only two out of three.” Now the young CEO liked to recite, “You can work long, you can work hard, you can work smart, but at Amazon you can’t choose two out of three.”

Davis had a KILL YOUR TV bumper sticker on his Honda Civic, and so to commemorate Davis’s departure, Bezos laid down a blue tarp in the parking lot and put an old computer terminal and keyboard on it. He handed Davis a sledgehammer and then filmed him smashing the machine. Afterward, Davis kept the Escape key.[Vi]

***

By the first weeks of 1996, revenues were growing 30 to 40 percent a month, a frenzied rate that undermined attempts at planning and required such a dizzying pace that employees later found gaps in their memory when they tried to recall this formative time. No one had any idea how to deal with that kind of growth, so they all made it up as they went along.

That spring, at the American Association of Publishers annual convention, the chairman of Random House, Alberto Vitale, told a Wall Street Journal reporter about the new online bookselling sensation from the Pacific Northwest. A few weeks later, Amazon was featured in a front-page WSJ article, “How Wall Street Whiz Found a Niche Selling Books on the Internet,” and Bezos had his first stippled-and-hatched portrait in the country’s largest financial newspaper. The number of orders each day immediately doubled. The world now knew about Amazon.com, and, likely, so did Barnes & Noble and Borders, the nation’s largest book chains.

With the influx of the $1 million in fresh capital, the company upgraded its servers and software, and, more important, it hired. Bezos added waves of new employees to customer service, to the warehouse, and to Kaphan’s technical team. He started building an editorial group—writers and editors who would craft a literary voice for the site and give customers a reason to keep coming back.[Vi]

The group’s mission was to make Amazon the most authoritative online source of information about books and replicate the trustworthy atmosphere of a quirky independent bookstore with refined literary tastes. “We were asking people to put a credit card into the computer, which at the time was a radical concept,” says Susan Benson, whose job title eventually evolved to editor in chief. Editorial “was important both in creating a good shopping experience but also in getting people comfortable about the idea that there were people on the other side of the screen that they could trust.”

That summer, the company launched what could be considered its first big innovation: allowing other websites to collect a fee when they sent customers directly to Amazon to buy a book. Amazon gave these approved sites an 8 percent commission for the referral. The Associates program wasn’t exactly the first of its kind, but it was the most prominent and it helped spawn a multibillion-dollar-a-year industry called affiliate marketing. It also allowed Amazon, very early on, to extend its reach across the Web to other sites, entrenching it in advance of the looming competition.

By that spring, the company was burning cash hiring and buying equipment and server space, so Bezos decided to raise venture capital. He started negotiating with the Boston-based General Atlantic, whose partners discussed valuing the company at $10 million, eminently reasonable for a startup on track for $15.7 million in sales and $5.8 million in losses that year. Then John Doerr, a prominent partner at the storied Silicon Valley venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, heard about the company and flew up to Seattle for a visit.[Vi]

“I walked into the door and this guy with a boisterous laugh who was just exuding energy comes bounding down the steps,” says Doerr, who had backed such winners as Netscape and Intuit. “In that moment, I wanted to be in business with Jeff.” Bezos introduced him to MacKenzie and Kaphan and took him on a tour of the warehouse, where all the outbound orders were neatly stacked on door-desks. When Doerr asked about the volume of daily transactions, Bezos leaned over a computer and typed a grep command next to a UNIX prompt, instantly pulling up the data—and demonstrating his technical fluency. Doerr swooned.

Kleiner and General Atlantic dueled for the next few weeks over the investment, driving Amazon’s valuation up to an altitude that Bezos had not imagined possible. He chose Kleiner on the strength of its reputation in the technology community. It invested $8 million, acquiring a 13 percent stake in the company, and valuing it at $60 million. Kleiner wanted to put a junior member of the firm on Amazon’s board of directors but, as a condition of the deal, Bezos insisted that Doerr himself take the position. Doerr’s direct involvement was a public vote of confidence for any technology startup.

In the circuitry of Bezos’s brain, something then flipped. Budding optimism about the Internet in Silicon Valley was creating a unique environment for raising money at a historically low price in ownership. Doerr’s optimism about the Web mixed with Bezos’s own bullish fervor and sparked an explosion of ambitions and expansion plans.[Vi]

Bezos was going to do more than establish an online bookstore; now he was set on building one of the first lasting Internet companies. “Jeff was always an expansive thinker, but access to capital was an enabler,” Doerr says. James Marcus, an editorial employee, saw it too, writing in his 2004 memoir Amazonia that “the cash from Kleiner Perkins hit the place like a dose of entrepreneurial steroids, making Jeff more determined than ever.”N12

Employees soon learned of a new motto: Get Big Fast. The bigger the company got, Bezos explained, the lower the prices it could exact from Ingram and Baker and Taylor, the book wholesalers, and the more distribution capacity it could afford. And the quicker the company grew, the more territory it could capture in what was becoming the race to establish new brands on the digital frontier. Bezos preached urgency: the company that got the lead now would likely keep it, and it could then use that lead to build a superior service for customers.

Of course, that meant everyone at Amazon would have to work even harder. The assumption was that no one would take even a weekend day off. “Nobody said you couldn’t, but nobody thought you would,” says Susan Benson. Eric Benson adds, “There were deadlines and death marches.”[Vi]

In the warehouse, an expanding and eclectic group raced to keep up with the surge of customer orders. An Amazon representative even told a temp agency, “Send us your freaks.” The bejeweled, tattooed, hair-dyed crew that responded to the call worked day and night in the warehouse next to the Pecos Pit and took turns selecting the music that played on a boom box. Their ranks included a three-hundred-pound baritone who would skip through the room belting out Russian arias.

Christopher Smith, a twenty-three-year-old warehouse temp with tattoos of Chinese characters on his forearms, began working at Amazon, and he would stay with the company in various roles for fourteen years. He started his typical day at four thirty in the morning, biked to work and let in the deliveryman from Ingram at six thirty, and usually stayed past midnight, packing furiously and answering customer e-mails before drinking a few beers in the warehouse and biking back home. “The dominant image in my mind is just… running. And scads of cardboard and packing material flying,” he says.

Smith worked so tirelessly over one span of eight months that he forgot about his light blue Peugeot station wagon that he’d parked near his apartment in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. The fate of the car would later be revealed in the piles of mail that stacked up inside his front door. When he finally opened the mail in that pile, Smith found, in succession, several parking tickets, a notice that the car had been towed, a few warnings from the towing company, and finally a letter informing him that the vehicle had been sold at auction for seven hundred dollars. He still owed eighteen hundred dollars on his car loan, and the incident dinged his credit rating. He doesn’t recall caring much at the time.

“Life just stopped,” Smith says. “You were stuck in amber. But inside that amber was frenetic activity that no one else could see.”[Vi]

Eric and Susan Benson didn’t come to Amazon alone every day—they brought their dog Rufus, a Welsh corgi. Because the two would be working such long hours, Bezos had promised they could always bring Rufus to the office. That was no problem in the SoDo buildings, but then Amazon moved yet again, late in the summer of 1996, to a building downtown, and the company had to write Rufus into the lease with the new landlord. The dog, an amiable presence who liked to park himself in meetings and occasionally suffered gastric distress from being overfed by employees, became the startup’s mascot. There was a superstitious belief that his paw tap on the keyboard was required to launch a new feature, and even today, though Rufus is long gone, there’s a building named for him on Amazon’s Seattle campus. (Bezos, it seems, has a nostalgic streak; one building is called Fiona, the code name of the original Kindle, and another is Obidos, which is what Shel Kaphan dubbed the company’s original computer infrastructure, after a town in Brazil where the tributaries of the Amazon River converge.)

Amazon was now nearing a hundred and fifty full-time employees, less than a third of whom were in the warehouse. A few months later, the warehouse also moved, to a larger, ninety-three-thousand-square-foot facility on Dawson Street in South Seattle (another current Amazon building: Dawson). The new downtown digs weren’t exactly high-class. Amazon took over the Columbia Building on Second Avenue in a seedy downtown neighborhood full of strip joints that was two blocks from touristy Pike Place Market. On the day the company moved in, a homeless man who’d been sleeping near the front door showed employees how to use their new key cards to gain access to the lobby.[Vi]

The building itself was across the street from a needle-exchange program and methadone clinic and a wig store that attracted the transvestite trade. Kay Dangaard, a New Zealander who had moved through careers as a reporter and an advertising executive, joined the company as its first publicist, and from her office in the new building, she could stare out the window across the alley and into the apartment of a prostitute who practiced her trade early every evening under a flickering, low-wattage lamp.

Parking was scarce and expensive. Nicholas Lovejoy suggested to Bezos that the company subsidize bus passes for employees, but Bezos scoffed at the idea. “He didn’t want employees to leave work to catch the bus,” Lovejoy says. “He wanted them to have their cars there so there was never any pressure to go home.”

That fall, the company focused on customizing the site for each visitor, just as Bezos had promised his original investors it would. Its first attempt relied on software developed by a firm called Firefly Network, an offshoot of the MIT Media Lab. The feature, which Amazon called Bookmatch, required customers to rate a few dozen books and then generated recommendations based on their tastes. The system was slow and crashed frequently, and Amazon found that customers were reluctant to go through the extra effort of evaluating books.[Vi]

So Bezos suggested that the personalization team develop a much simpler system, one that made recommendations based on books that customers had already bought. Eric Benson took about two weeks to construct a preliminary version that grouped together customers who had similar purchasing histories and then found books that appealed to the people in each group. That feature, called Similarities, immediately yielded a noticeable uptick in sales and allowed Amazon to point customers toward books that they might not otherwise have found. Greg Linden, an engineer who worked on the project, recalls Bezos coming into his office, getting down on his hands and knees, and joking, “I’m not worthy.”

Similarities eventually displaced Bookmatch and became the seed that would grow into Amazon’s formidable personalization effort. Bezos believed that this would be one of the insurmountable advantages of e-commerce over its brick-and-mortar counterparts. “Great merchants have never had the opportunity to understand their customers in a truly individualized way,” he said. “E-commerce is going to make that possible.”N13

As the company and its technologies evolved, one person was having a ridiculously good time: Shel Kaphan. He was forty-three years old and had led the remarkable effort to hack Bezos’s vision into existence, completely buying into the gospel of a bookstore with limitless shelf space that spread knowledge to all corners of the earth. He was the mother hen of the technology systems: during the move to the Pecos Pit building, he put the company’s two servers, dubbed Bert and Ernie, into the back of his Acura Integra and drove them over there himself.[Vi]

Kaphan had taped a fortune-cookie message to the PC monitor on his desk. It read Let no one cause you to alter your code.

Kaphan and Bezos occasionally took walks around the city to discuss the business and Kaphan’s concerns about technical issues and future plans. On one walk, Kaphan asked Bezos why, now that they had accomplished some of their earliest goals, he was so bent on rapid expansion. “When you are small, someone else that is bigger can always come along and take away what you have,” Bezos told him. “We have to level the playing field in terms of purchasing power with the established booksellers.”

One thing was bothering Kaphan around that time. He had enough experience with technology startups to know that the arrival of venture capitalists usually coincided with an influx of new, high-powered executives. He walked into Bezos’s office that year and wondered aloud, “We’re growing pretty quickly now. Are you going to replace me?”

Bezos didn’t waver. “Shel, the job is yours as long as you want it.”

In early 1997, Mark Breier, a former executive at Cinnabon and one of those new executives Kaphan had anticipated, invited his department to his Bellevue home for a day of meetings. That afternoon, Amazon’s marketing vice president introduced employees to a game called broomball. Breier’s father had been an engineer at IBM in Bethesda and had seen the game played on ice during trips to IBM’s offices in Canada. In Breier’s land-based version, players swatted a kickball on the lawn with brooms and other random implements from his garage.[Vi]

It seemed like goofy fun, but there was an undercurrent of intense competition. In other words, it perfectly expressed the temperament of Jeff Bezos, who stopped by the meeting and threw himself into the inaugural Amazon broomball contest with gusto. At one point, Andy Jassy, then a new recruit from Harvard, made his first significant impression at the company by inadvertently hitting Bezos in the head with a kayak paddle. Later, Bezos dove after the ball into some hedges and tore his blue oxford shirt.

Breier’s tenure at Amazon was short and rocky. Bezos wanted to reinvent everything about marketing, suggesting, for example, that they conduct annual reviews of advertising agencies to make them constantly compete for Amazon’s business. Breier explained that the advertising industry didn’t work that way. He lasted about a year. Over the first decade at Amazon, marketing VPs were the equivalent of the doomed drummers in the satirical band Spinal Tap; Bezos plowed through them at a rapid clip, looking for someone with the same low regard for the usual way of doing things that Bezos himself had. Breier’s broomball creation, however, became a regular pastime at Amazon employee picnics and offsite meetings, with employees covering their faces in war paint and Bezos himself getting in on the action.[Vi]

As Shel Kaphan had suspected, Breier’s arrival at Amazon was just the beginning of an influx of experienced business executives. With venture capital in the bank, Bezos fixated on taking the company public with an IPO, and he went on a recruiting spree. With the D. E. Shaw noncompete clause finally expiring, he called Jeff Holden and told him to pack his bags. Holden convinced a few other DESCO employees to come with him, though one, Paul Kotas, put his stuff in Holden’s U-Haul and then changed his mind. (Kotas moved to Washington two years later and did become a longtime Amazon executive, though his hesitation would cost him tens of millions of dollars in stock.)

Bezos began filling out the rest of his senior leadership ranks, building a group that would formally become known as the J Team. Amazon recruited executives from Barnes & Noble and Symantec and two from Microsoft—Joel Spiegel, a vice president of engineering, and David Risher, who would eventually take over as head of retail. Risher was swayed by the Amazon founder’s aggressive vision. “If we get this right, we might be a $1 billion company by 2000,” Bezos told him. Risher personally informed Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates of his defection to the bookseller across the lake. Gates, who underestimated the Internet’s impact for too long, was stunned. “I think he was honestly flabbergasted,” Risher says. “To some extent he was right. It didn’t make any sense.”[Vi]

One of Risher’s first tasks was taking over negotiations with crosstown coffee giant Starbucks, which had proposed putting a rack of merchandise from Amazon next to its cash registers in exchange for an ownership stake in the startup. Risher and Bezos visited Starbucks’ CEO Howard Schultz in his SoDo headquarters—across from the Pecos Pit—and Schultz told the pair that Amazon had a big problem and that Starbucks could solve it. “You have no physical presence,” the lanky Starbucks founder said as he brewed coffee for his guests. “That is going to hold you back.”

Bezos disagreed. He looked right at Schultz and told him, “We are going to take this thing to the moon.” They decided to work on a deal, but it fell apart a few weeks later when Schultz’s executives asked for a 10 percent ownership stake in Amazon and a seat on its board of directors. Bezos had been thinking along the lines of less than 1 percent. Even today, Amazon continues to evaluate the possibility of some kind of retail presence. “We were always willing to consider that there may be an opportunity there,” says Risher.[Vi]

Another new arrival was Joy Covey as chief financial officer. Driven and often intimidating to underlings, Covey became an intellectual foil to Bezos and a key architect of Amazon’s early expansion. She had an unconventional background. A hyperintelligent but alienated child from San Mateo, California, she had run away from home when she was a sophomore in high school and worked as a grocery-store clerk in Fresno. She entered Cal State, Fresno, at age seventeen, graduated in two years, and then took the exam to become a certified public accountant at age nineteen, notching the second-highest score in the nation without studying. She later earned a joint business and law degree from Harvard. When Bezos found her, she was the thirty-three-year-old chief financial officer for a Silicon Valley digital-audio company called Digidesign.

Over the next few years, Covey remained so intensely focused on executing Bezos’s “get big fast” imperative that everything else in her life became background noise. One morning she parked her car in the office garage and was so distracted that she inadvertently left it running—all day. That evening, she couldn’t find her car keys, concluded she had lost them, and went home without her car. The security guard in the garage called her a few hours later and told her that she might want to come back to the office to retrieve her still-idling vehicle.[Vi]

Covey began working on an IPO a month after joining the company. Amazon did not urgently require the capital of a public offering—it had yet to begin launching new product categories, and its ninety-three-thousand-square-foot warehouse in South Seattle was serving the company’s needs. But Bezos believed a public offering could be a global branding event that solidified Amazon in customers’ minds. In these days, Bezos took every opportunity to appear in public and tell the story of Amazon.com. (Always Amazon.com, never Amazon; he was as insistent on that as David Shaw had been on the space between the D. and the E. in his company’s name.) Another reason Bezos pushed to go public was that competition was looming online in the form of the reigning giant of the bookselling business, Barnes & Noble.

The chain store was run by Len Riggio, a tough-as-nails Bronx-born businessman with a taste for expensive suits and for fine art, which he lavishly hung on the walls of his lower Manhattan office. Over two decades, Barnes & Noble had revolutionized bookselling. It introduced discount prices on new releases and, with archrival Borders, spread the concept of the book superstore, driving many mall shops and independents out of business. As a result, between 1991 and 1997, the market share of independent bookstores in the United States dropped from 33 to 17 percent, according to the American Booksellers Association, whose membership dropped from 4,500 to 3,300 stores in that time.[Vi]

Now Barnes & Noble was faced with what must have seemed like a pipsqueak upstart. Amazon had a measly $16 million in sales in 1996; Barnes & Noble notched $2 billion in sales that same year. Still, after the Wall Street Journal article in 1996, Riggio called Bezos and told him he wanted to come to Seattle with his brother Stephen to talk about a deal. Inexperienced at the time in these kinds of discussions, Bezos called investor and board member Tom Alberg and asked him to accompany him to dinner with the Riggios. Beforehand, they decided on a strategy of caution and flattery.

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. The Riggios wore suits and came on strong. They told Bezos and Alberg that they were going to launch a website soon and crush Amazon. But they said they admired what Bezos had done and suggested a number of possible collaborations, such as licensing Amazon’s technology or opening a joint website. “They didn’t come right out and offer to buy us. It was not particularly specific,” Alberg says. “It was a pretty friendly dinner. Other than the threats.”

Afterward, Alberg and Bezos told the Riggios they would think about a partnership. Later Alberg and Bezos spoke on the phone and agreed that such a collaboration was unlikely to work. “Jeff was always a big believer that disruptive small companies could triumph,” Alberg says. “It wasn’t the end of the world. We knew we had a challenge.”[Vi]

Rebuffed, the Riggio brothers went home and started work on their own site. According to a person who worked at Barnes & Noble at the time, Len Riggio wanted to call the site the Book Predator but colleagues convinced him that was a bad idea. Barnes & Noble would take many months to back up its threat and spin up its own Web operation, and during that time, Bezos’s team accelerated the pace of innovation and expansion.

Joy Covey considered both Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs for the role of lead underwriter on the Amazon IPO, but she settled on Deutsche Bank and the tall, mustached founder of its technology practice, Frank Quattrone. Quattrone’s lead analyst, a future venture capitalist named Bill Gurley, had covered Amazon for a year and presciently identified it as one of the “wave riders” that was exploiting the ascendance of the Internet.

That spring, Bezos and Covey traveled the United States and Europe to pitch Amazon to potential investors. With three years of sales data, they now felt they had a unique story. Unlike traditional retailers, Amazon boasted what was called a negative operating cycle. Customers paid with their credit cards when their books shipped but Amazon settled its accounts with the book distributors only every few months. With every sale, Amazon put more cash in the bank, giving it a steady stream of capital to fund its operations and expansion.N14 The company could also lay claim to a uniquely high return on invested capital. Unlike brick-and-mortar retailers, whose inventories were spread out across hundreds or thousands of stores around the country, Amazon had one website and, at that time, a single warehouse and inventory.[Vi]

Amazon’s ratio of fixed costs to revenue was considerably more favorable than that of its offline competitors. In other words, Bezos and Covey argued, a dollar that was plugged into Amazon’s infrastructure could lead to exponentially greater returns than a dollar that went into the infrastructure of any other retailer in the world.

At seemingly every stop, investors asked the pair about possible expansion into other categories. Bezos demurred and said he was focused only on books. To burnish their case, they compared their fundamentals to Dell, the high-flying PC maker at the time. But Bezos, characteristically secretive, divulged only the legal minimum and withheld some data, like what it cost Amazon to attract a new user and how much loyal customers typically spent on the site. He wanted capital from an IPO but didn’t want to give his rivals a road map to use to follow in his footsteps. “There was a lot of skepticism on the road show,” says Covey. “A lot of people said, you are going to fail, Barnes and Noble is going to kill you, and who do you think you are not to share this stuff?”

The IPO process was painful in another way: During the seven-week SEC-mandated “quiet period,” Bezos was not permitted to talk to the press. “I can’t believe we have to delay our business by seven years,” he complained, equating weeks to years because he believed that the Internet was evolving at such an accelerated rate.[Vi]

Staying out of the press soon became even more difficult. Three days before Amazon’s IPO, Barnes & Noble filed a lawsuit against Amazon in federal court alleging that Amazon was falsely advertising itself to be the Earth’s Largest Bookstore. Riggio was appropriately worried about Amazon, but with the lawsuit he ended up giving his smaller competitor more attention. Later that month, the Riggios unveiled their own website, and many seemed ready to see Amazon crushed. The CEO of Forrester Research, a widely followed technology research firm, issued a report in which he called the company “Amazon.Toast.”

Straining against the regulatory shackles that required him to stay silent, Bezos wanted to send mimes wearing Amazon T-shirts to skulk around the Riggios’ launch event. Quattrone put the kibosh on the plan.

Later Bezos recalled speaking at an all-hands meeting called to address the assault by Barnes & Noble. “Look, you should wake up worried, terrified every morning,” he told his employees. “But don’t be worried about our competitors because they`re never going to send us any money anyway. Let’s be worried about our customers and stay heads-down focused.”N15

For the next year, Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com competed, each asserting that it had a better selection and lower prices. Barnes & Noble laid claim to a deeper catalog; Amazon ramped up efforts to find rare and out-of-print books, assigning employees to track down books in independent bookshops and at antique-book dealers. In 1998, Barnes & Noble would spin off its dot-com subsidiary with a $200 million investment from German media giant Bertelsmann and later take the company public. Amazon would then outflank the bookseller by rapidly expanding into other product categories like music and DVDs.[Vi]

Bezos had predicted that the chain retailer would have trouble seriously competing online, and, in the end, he was right. The Riggios were reluctant to lose money on a relatively small part of their business and didn’t want to put their most resourceful employees behind an effort that would siphon sales away from the more profitable stores. On top of that, their company’s distribution operation was well entrenched and geared toward servicing physical stores by sending out large shipments of books to a set number of locations. The shift from that to mailing small orders to individual customers was long, painful, and full of customer-service errors. For Amazon, that was just daily business.

Amazon’s IPO, on May 15, 1997, was a success, though a relatively mild one compared with the debauched dot-com affairs that would come later. Bezos battled his bankers to boost the price of the offering to eighteen dollars a share, and the stock traded underwater—below its IPO price—for more than a month. But the IPO raised $54 million and got widespread attention, propelling the company to a blockbuster year of 900 percent growth in annual revenues. Bezos, his parents, and his brother and sister (who had each bought ten thousand dollars’ worth of stock early on) were now officially multimillionaires. And Amazon’s original backers and Kleiner Perkins all saw a healthy return on their investments. But even that was peanuts compared to the coming exponential growth in Amazon’s stock.[Vi]

From New York, Bezos called into the Amazon office on the day of the IPO and asked employees not to overcelebrate the moment or obsess over the stock price. Henry Weinhard’s beer, an inexpensive local brew, was passed around the Seattle offices and then everyone went back to work, although they all occasionally stole furtive glances at Amazon’s stock price.

Later that month, everyone who worked on the IPO received a wooden box containing a bottle of tequila. On the bottle was a label with an invitation to a “Fiesta Mexicana,” a weekend at the Palmilla Resort in Los Cabos, Mexico, courtesy of Frank Quattrone and Deutsche Bank technology group.

Bezos, MacKenzie, Joy Covey, Shel Kaphan, and Nicholas Lovejoy attended, as did Jeff Blackburn, the Deutsche Bank associate and former Dartmouth College linebacker who would soon join Amazon and become its chief of business development. The weekend included a day cruise, during which Quattrone taught Bezos the Macarena, and the two men, despite a significant height difference, danced next to each other on the ship’s deck. One night there was an opulent dinner on the beach, and the bankers showed up in pirate regalia. Toward the end of the evening, storm winds started to gust and the ocean grew choppy. An errant wave came onto the shore and washed over electrical cables, shorting out the stereo equipment and sending a dessert tray crashing to the sand. As the partygoers scurried for shelter, a happy Bezos surveyed the scene, his laugh cutting through the Mexican night.[Vi]

In early 1997, while Amazon was fending off the world’s biggest bookstore chain, Covey and Bezos courted Rick Dalzell, a former U.S. Army Ranger. A native of Georgetown, Kentucky, Dalzell had spent the 1980s as a signal engineer stationed in Fort Gamble and then as a communications officer in West Germany. After returning to civilian life, he eventually went to work in the information-systems division of the most technologically sophisticated retailer in the world: Walmart.

With his cheerful demeanor, southern drawl, and penchant for wearing shorts year-round, Dalzell became one of Amazon’s most loved and respected executives. But at first, he turned Bezos and Covey down—repeatedly. When he visited Seattle that spring, the airline lost his luggage, so Dalzell borrowed a coat and tie from the bellman’s desk at his hotel. Then he showed up early to the Amazon offices, and no one was there; unlike Walmart’s staff, Amazon employees worked late and slept late. When Bezos did get there, he and Dalzell sat down to talk, and the Amazon founder promptly spilled his entire cup of coffee right onto Dalzell’s borrowed jacket.

Despite the awkward start, Dalzell left Seattle intrigued with Bezos’s vision and geeky charisma. But back in Bentonville, Arkansas, Dalzell was easily turned around by Walmart execs. From the front seat of a golf cart that was zooming through a massive distribution center, Lee Scott, the future Walmart CEO who was then running logistics, told Dalzell that Amazon was a novel idea but that it had limited potential. Don Soderquist, Walmart’s chief operating officer, said that because Amazon didn’t store its own inventory—at the time, it just ordered it from distributors and then quickly shipped it back out—the model would hit a wall once it got to $100 million in sales. He also said that Dalzell was one of a dozen guys they were betting on, and he added ominously, “Should you decide to leave, you are no longer a member of the Walmart family.”[Vi]

Dalzell took that advice to heart. But his infatuation with online retailing wouldn’t go away. At that time, early 1997, Walmart and Sam’s Club were taking their own first steps into the world of e-commerce, but Dalzell could see the effort did not have the company’s full backing.

Bezos didn’t give up on Dalzell or the prospect of getting another seasoned engineering executive. He kept looking elsewhere but had Covey call Dalzell’s wife, Kathryn, every few weeks and deployed John Doerr to try to exert his charm. At one point, Bezos and Covey flew to Bentonville to surprise Dalzell and invite him out for dinner. After that meal, Dalzell agreed to join Amazon—but then changed his mind. “It would take an atomic bomb to get my family out of Arkansas,” he said at the time.N16

But Dalzell couldn’t get Amazon out of his head. “My wife will tell you if I’m passionate about something, I don’t stop talking about it,” he says. “One day she turned to me and said, ‘Why are you still at Walmart?’ ” In August, he finally accepted the job, for real this time, and Walmart’s CIO stood in Dalzell’s office as he collected his belongings and then marched him out the door.

In August 1997, Dalzell started his new job as Amazon’s chief information officer and became a key member of the J Team. He was a seasoned manager, adept at hiring quickly and getting large groups to set and meet ambitious objectives. Dalzell regularly sat next to Bezos in meetings and was in charge of putting manpower behind the founder’s best ideas. “It was real easy for Jeff to spout off big ideas faster than anyone could practically do anything with them,” says Bruce Jones, a longtime Amazon engineer and Dalzell’s friend. “Rick made sure we got the important stuff done.”[Vi]

Dalzell’s arrival that summer had a big ripple effect, and it magnified the growing anxieties of Shel Kaphan. Before the IPO, Bezos had taken his original partner for a walk, told him the company needed deeper technical management, and then asked him to become chief technology officer of Amazon. It sounded like a promotion, but in reality Kaphan would be playing an advisory role with no budget or direct responsibilities. Kaphan thought about it for a few days and then registered an objection, but according to Kaphan, Bezos said, “It’s done,” and wouldn’t talk about it anymore.

Kaphan stayed as CTO for the next few years and remained on the management team, but he was sidelined, since he no longer had any employees reporting to him or any way to influence the distribution of critical resources. And his frustration and feelings of powerlessness grew. He had built Amazon’s original systems under battle conditions, with an emphasis on frugality. Now that Amazon was approaching $60 million in sales a year, the infrastructure was a disaster. Kaphan wanted to take the time to carefully rebuild it. Bezos refused to lift his foot off the pedal and wanted all his engineers working on new features, not rewriting old ones. Then he distressed Kaphan further by approving some of Kaphan’s projects, like rebuilding Amazon’s infrastructure from scratch, but allowing other managers to direct them. Kaphan could only sit and watch.

Bezos no longer entrusted the introverted programmer with any real management responsibility, but he did express an appreciation and a fondness for Kaphan. In the fall of 1998, Bezos told Kaphan to pack his bags and accompany him on a trip to check out a potential acquisition target. Then he surprised Kaphan with what he dubbed the Shelebration, a weekend in Hawaii to celebrate Kaphan’s four-year anniversary at Amazon.[Vi]

Bezos flew in colleagues and Kaphan’s family and friends and put everyone up for three days in private cabins on a Maui beach. Every attendee received an ornamental tile coaster emblazoned with a picture of Kaphan wearing a goofy Cat in the Hat hat.

That weekend spawned a fortuitous relationship for Bezos. One of Kaphan’s friends who came on the trip was Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog. Brand and his wife, Ryan, bonded with Bezos and MacKenzie, forging a connection that led to Bezos’s involvement in the Clock of the Long Now, an aspirational project aimed at building a massive mechanical clock designed to measure time for ten thousand years, a way to promote long-term thinking. A few years later, as a direct result of that weekend, Bezos would become the biggest financial backer of the 10,000-Year Clock and agree to install it on property he owned in Texas.

But Kaphan grimaced through the Hawaii weekend. He says he felt like “the guy getting the gold watch who has not retired yet.”

Two promises were in conflict with each other. Bezos had pledged to Kaphan that he could keep his job forever. But Amazon’s founder also promised the company and his investors that he would always raise the hiring bar and that Amazon would live or die based on its ability to recruit great engineers. Rick Dalzell and Joel Spiegel were adept at the political martial arts that occurred inside big companies. Kaphan was an introverted hacker with an idealistic streak and little intuitive leadership ability; in fact, he had been hopelessly behind on hiring and growing his own department. But he had also quietly and competently led the effort to deliver Amazon to the world back when it was only a set of uncertain predictions on Jeff Bezos’s spreadsheets.[Vi]

Kaphan couldn’t imagine himself walking away, but he found himself counting the weeks to his five-year anniversary at the company, when he was scheduled to get the last portion of his stock. He eventually stopped going into the office altogether. He officially stayed at Amazon until the fall of 1999 and then called Bezos one morning from home to say he was quitting. Kaphan recalls that Bezos said he was sorry Kaphan felt that he needed to make that decision and made little effort to persuade him to stay.

Bezos would describe Kaphan as “the most important person ever in the history of Amazon.com.”N17 But Kaphan felt bitter resentment about his five-year odyssey. He calls Bezos’s decision to remove him from active participation in Amazon “a betrayal of a sacred trust” between people who had started a business together and says that the way he was treated “was one of the biggest disappointments of my entire life.”

It was a distilled version of the dissatisfaction felt by many early Amazon employees. With his convincing gospel, Bezos had persuaded them all to have faith, and they were richly rewarded as a result. Then the steely-eyed founder replaced them with a new and more experienced group of believers. Watching the company move on without them gave these employees a gnawing sensation, as if their child had left home and moved in with another family. But in the end, as Bezos made abundantly clear to Shel Kaphan, Amazon had only one true parent.[Vi]

—ooOoo—

CHAPTER 3

Fever Dreams

In early 1997, Jeff Bezos flew to Boston to give a presentation at the Harvard Business School. He spoke to a class taking a course called Managing the Marketspace, and afterward the graduate students pretended he wasn’t there while they dissected the online retailer’s prospects. At the end of the hour, they reached a consensus: Amazon was unlikely to survive the wave of established retailers moving online. “You seem like a really nice guy, so don’t take this the wrong way, but you really need to sell to Barnes and Noble and get out now,” one student bluntly informed Bezos.

Brian Birtwistle, a student in the class, recalls that Bezos was humble and circumspect. “You may be right,” Amazon’s founder told the students. “But I think you might be underestimating the degree to which established brick-and-mortar business, or any company that might be used to doing things a certain way, will find it hard to be nimble or to focus attention on a new channel. I guess we’ll see.”

After the class, only a few students went to talk to Bezos, far fewer than the crush that greeted most speakers. One of those students was Jason Kilar (who would spend the next nine years scaling the executive ranks at Amazon before taking over as chief executive of the video site Hulu). By the time Birtwistle got to him, Bezos had to leave for the airport, so the professor of the class suggested that Birtwistle give him a ride. “Great,” Bezos agreed. “I can save on cab fare.”[Vi]

During the fifteen-minute drive, Bezos assumed Birtwistle was interested in a job and started to interview him. “Why do you want to work at Amazon.com?” he asked.

Birtwistle hadn’t prepared for an interview but he played along anyway. “I’m a student of history,” he said. “If I’m able to join a company like yours at this early stage, I’d feel like I get to participate in something historic.”

Bezos almost started yelling. “That is exactly how we think at Amazon.com! You watch. There will be a proliferation of companies in this space and most will die. There will be only a few enduring brands, and we will be one of them.”

After a few moments of silence, Bezos asked, “So, why are manhole covers round?”

“Jeff, if you want to get to the airport on time, you cannot ask me a question like that.”

Bezos let loose a gunfire burst of laughter, startling Birtwistle, who almost veered off the highway. “No, seriously,” Bezos said. “How would you solve that problem?”

“They’re round because it makes them easier to roll into place?”

“That is incorrect, but it is not a bad guess,” Bezos said.N1

When Birtwistle graduated from Harvard, he joined Amazon, along with Kilar and Andy Jassy, who years later would run Amazon’s pioneering cloud business. They were among the first business-school graduates hired at Amazon, which had previously favored local, technical talent. They were also a handy resource for Bezos at a crucial juncture in the company’s history.[Vi]

In early 1998, the doomed broomball pioneer and marketing executive Mark Breier brought Bezos findings from a survey that showed a significant majority of consumers did not use Amazon.com and were unlikely to start simply because they bought very few books. Bezos, Breier says, did not seem overly concerned with the depressing math behind America’s literary interests. He told Breier to organize the new Harvard Business School graduates into a “SWAT team” to research categories of products that had high SKUs (the number of potentially stockable items), were underrepresented in physical stores, and could easily be sent through the mail. This was a key part of Amazon’s early strategy: maximizing the Internet’s ability to provide a superior selection of products as compared to those available at traditional retail stores. “I brought him very bad news about our business, and for some reason, he got excited,” Breier says.

Bezos now felt expansion into new categories was urgent. In customers’ minds, the Amazon brand meant books only. He wanted it to be more malleable, like Richard Branson’s Virgin, which stood for everything from music to airlines to liquor. Bezos also needed Amazon to generate the kind of returns that would allow him to invest in technology and stay ahead of rivals. “By that time, Jeff had done the math on a legal pad and knew this had to happen. It was go really big or go home,” says Joel Spiegel, a vice president of engineering who had spent time at Microsoft and Apple.

Joy Covey believes that from the beginning, Bezos planned to expand beyond books, but he was looking for the right moment to do it. “He always had a large appetite,” she says. “It was just a question of staging the opportunities at the right time.”[Vi]

So that spring, Jassy researched music, Kilar looked into the home-video market, a former Harvard classmate named Victoria Pickett examined shrink-wrapped software, and the list went on. At a management offsite at the Westin Hotel, the MBAs presented their findings. Amazon executives chose music as the first expansion target, and DVDs as the second. To the discomfort of early employees wedded to the zeal of creating a literary hub on the Web, the mission was now more comprehensive. The motto on the top of the website changed from Earth’s Largest Bookstore to Books, Music and More, and, soon after, to Earth’s Biggest Selection—the everything store.

Near the end of the daylong offsite, Bezos asked everyone to write down a prediction of the company’s revenues in five years. Eugene Wei, a strategic planning analyst who was there to take notes, recalls that Bezos’s guess was one of the highest in the group but suspects that no one came close to getting it right. They simply had no idea what was coming down the pike.

To open new categories and build more warehouses, Amazon needed more than a plan: it needed additional capital. So that May, the company raised $326 million in a junk-bond offering, and the following February, another $1.25 billion in what was at the time the largest convertible debt offering in history. With a 4.75 percent interest rate for the latter offering, it was exceedingly cheap capital for the time. To their surprise, Covey and Bezos did not have to head back onto the road to pitch the Amazon story to hidebound institutional shareholders. Investors who had been raised on a steady diet of dot-com hype over the preceding year lined up eagerly to buy the bonds.[Vi]

Randy Tinsley, Amazon’s treasurer and corporate development chief, met finance colleague Tim Stone on a Saturday at an auto-repair shop in Issaquah to sign the promissory notes for the convertible-bond deal. Tinsley was having a car stereo installed in his jeep and he showed the papers to the bewildered attendant behind the desk. “You want to know what this is?” he bragged. “This is 1.25 billion dollars.”

The two-year frenzy that followed would come to be known as the dot-com bubble.

In the late 1990s, the Web evolved from the province of geeks to the stuff of front-page newspaper stories, day traders, and regular folks who were venturing for the first time into what was then popularly called cyberspace. The resulting mania for the widely predicted changes to business and society sparked an equity bubble that made rational observers question their own sanity. Yahoo was valued more highly than Disney; Amazon was worth more than storied Sears. In Silicon Valley, entrepreneurs and their backers got drunk on the overflowing optimism and abundant venture capital and threw a two-year-long party. Capital was cheap, opportunities seemed limitless, and pineapple-infused-vodka martinis were everywhere.[Vi]

During that time, no one placed bigger, bolder bets on the Internet than Jeff Bezos. Bezos believed more than anyone that the Web would change the landscape for companies and customers, so he sprinted ahead without the least hesitation. “I think our company is undervalued” became another oft-repeated Jeffism. “The world just doesn’t understand what Amazon is going to be.” In those highly carbonated years, from 1998 to early 2000, Amazon raised a breathtaking $2.2 billion in three separate bond offerings. It spent much of that on acquisitions, but even just a few years later, it was difficult to show that any of those deals helped its primary business. It opened five new state-of-the-art distribution centers in the United States and later had to close two of them and lay off hundreds of workers amid the inevitable retrenchment.

During those misadventures, Bezos seemed unperturbed. If anything, the setbacks made him push the company even harder into new territory. He said to Rick Dalzell, the former Army Ranger who’d joined Amazon from Walmart, “Physically, I’m a chicken. Mentally, I’m bold.” Susan Benson remembers riding up the Columbia Building elevator one morning with Amazon’s founder. She had Rufus in tow, and Bezos quietly studied the corgi. “You are a very sweet dog, Rufus,” he said. Then he looked up at Benson. “But you know, he is not bold.”[Vi]

Bezos used that word a lot: bold. In the company’s first letter to its public shareholders, written collaboratively by Bezos and Joy Covey and typed up by treasurer Russ Grandinetti in early 1998, the word bold was used repeatedly. “We will make bold rather than timid investment decisions where we see a sufficient probability of gaining market leadership advantages,” they wrote. “Some of these investments will pay off, others will not, and we will have learned another valuable lesson in either case.” The letter also stated that the company would make decisions based on long-term prospects of boosting free cash flow and growing market share rather than on short-term profitability, and one section in particular served as a guidepost for the unorthodox way the company planned to approach Wall Street.

We believe that a fundamental measure of our success will be the shareholder value we create over the long term. This value will be a direct result of our ability to extend and solidify our current market leadership position. The stronger our market leadership, the more powerful our economic model. Market leadership can translate directly to higher revenue, higher profitability, greater capital velocity, and correspondingly stronger returns on invested capital.

Our decisions have consistently reflected this focus. We first measure ourselves in terms of the metrics most indicative of our market leadership: customer and revenue growth, the degree to which our customers continue to purchase from us on a repeat basis, and the strength of our brand. We have invested and will continue to invest aggressively to expand and leverage our customer base, brand, and infrastructure as we move to establish an enduring franchise.[Vi]

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.

Amazon started its dot-com-era sprint with what it called its megadeals. It paid tens of millions of dollars in the late 1990s to be the exclusive bookseller on the popular sites of the day like AOL, Yahoo, MSN, and Excite. These sites were called portals, because they were the main entryways to the Web for the new and technically unsophisticated masses. The portals were accustomed to receiving equity stakes for these kinds of deals, but Bezos refused to give that—he was as stingy about handing out stock as he was about allowing employees to fly business-class. Instead, he paid cash and convinced each portal to throw in a freebie: links to Amazon books within search results. For example, if someone searched AOL.com for ski vacations, he would see a link to books about skiing on Amazon.

Bezos enforced strict frugality in Amazon’s daily operations; he made employees pay for parking and required all executives to fly coach. But he was surprisingly profligate in some ways. In early 1998, when he hired Randy Tinsley from Intel to become director of corporate development, one of the first things he said to him was “I am really looking forward to going shopping with you.”[Vi]

Their resulting splurge was epic. Amazon bought the movie database IMDB.com, the British Web bookstore BookPages, the German Web bookstore Telebuch, the online marketplace Exchange.com, the pioneering social-networking service PlanetAll, and a data-collection company called Alexa Internet—among many other purchases. The acquisitions brought in experienced executives, but Amazon was moving too quickly, and was too chaotic internally, to properly integrate the companies and their technology. Most of the executives left after a year or two, repulsed by the frenetic pace, the dreary Seattle weather, or both.

Amazon also veered disastrously into the venture-capital arena. In 1998 Bezos and venture capitalist John Doerr saw an opportunity for an online pharmacy and founded Drugstore.com, recruiting longtime Microsoft executive Peter Neupert to run it. Amazon owned a third of the company. The venture got off to a promising start, so for the next two years, Tinsley and Bezos invested tens of millions of Amazon’s cash in a variety of dot-com hopefuls, including Pets.com, Gear.com, Wineshopper.com, Greenlight.com, Homegrocer.com, and the urban delivery service Kozmo.com. In exchange for its cash, Amazon took a minority ownership position and a seat on the board for each, and the company believed it was well positioned for the future if those product categories succeeded on the Internet. The startups believed they had a powerful partner invested in their success.[Vi]

Almost all of them went down in flames, though, during the collapse of the dot-com bubble in 2000, and by then, Bezos had his own problems and possessed neither the temperament nor the time to try to save them. The company lost hundreds of millions on these investments. “Amazon had to be focused on its own business,” says Tinsley. “Our biggest mistake was thinking we had the bandwidth to work with all these companies.”

Inside Amazon, employees lived under Bezos’s frugal edicts while they watched in awe as he kept pushing more and more chips into the pot. Gene Pope was an early engineer at Apple who reunited at Amazon with his former colleague Joel Spiegel. After watching the wild expansion for a few months, Pope said to Spiegel, “What we are doing here is building a giant rocket ship, and we’re going to light the fuse. Then it’s either going to go to the moon or leave a giant smoking crater in the ground. Either way I want to be here when it happens.”

As the company grew, Bezos offered another sign that his ambitions were larger than anyone had suspected. He started hiring more Walmart executives. In early 1998, Amazon pursued one of Rick Dalzell’s former colleagues, a retired Walmart vice president of distribution named Jimmy Wright. At Walmart, the abrasive Wright had proven himself so exasperating that once during an argument in his office, Dalzell, the Army Ranger, had lifted Wright entirely off his feet, deposited him outside the office, and slammed the door shut. But Dalzell knew that if anyone could accomplish Bezos’s ambitious vision of a rapid build-out of distribution capacity, it was Jimmy Wright. “I’m not sure anyone else in America could have done it,” Dalzell says.[Vi]

Bezos courted Wright for months and that summer got him to tour the Dawson Street warehouse. Bezos said he wanted a distribution system that was ten times larger than it currently was, and not just in the United States but in Amazon’s new markets in the United Kingdom and Germany. Wright asked Bezos what products they would be shipping. “He said, ‘I don’t know. Just design something that will handle anything,’ ” Wright recalls. “I’m going, You’re kidding me, right? And he said, ‘No, that is the mission.’ I had to have a solution to handle everything but an aircraft carrier.”

Wright had never experienced a challenge of that magnitude. At Walmart, distribution centers shipped containers of products predictably, once a day, to all the stores in the surrounding area. At Amazon, there were innumerable packages going to countless destinations. And there was no predictability, because Amazon sales were growing by 300 percent a year.

As Wright started planning, Amazon navigated a tumultuous 1998 holiday season. Around Thanksgiving, Joy Covey realized that the gap between the number of orders being placed on the website and the number of packages being shipped to customers was widening, and she raised an alarm. Amazon declared an all-hands-on-deck emergency, and, in a program dubbed Save Santa, every employee from the main office took a graveyard shift on Dawson Street or in a new facility in Delaware. They brought their friends and family, ate burritos and drank coffee from a food cart, and often slept in their cars before going to work the next day. Bezos held contests to see who could pick orders off the shelves fastest. After Christmas was over, he vowed that Amazon would never again have a shortage of physical capacity to meet customer demand.[Vi]

Around that time, Wright showed Bezos the blueprints for a new warehouse in Fernley, Nevada, thirty miles east of Reno. The founder’s eyes lit up. “This is beautiful, Jimmy,” Bezos said.

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.

Over the next year, Wright went on a wild $300 million spending spree. He not only built the warehouse in Fernley but purchased and retrofitted existing warehouses, one near Atlanta, two in Kentucky, and one in Kansas. He turned them into real-life versions of an M. C. Escher drawing, automating them to the rafters, with blinking lights on aisles and shelves to guide human workers to the right products, and conveyor belts that ran into and out of massive machines, called Crisplants, that took products from the conveyors and scanned and sorted them into customer orders to be packaged and shipped. These facilities, Wright decreed, would be called not warehouses but distribution centers, as they were in Walmart’s internal lexicon.[Vi]

Wright kept his home and private consulting office in Bentonville, and during his fifteen months at Amazon he shuttled back and forth to Seattle. He did something else in that time as well. In backyard barbecues and at the Bentonville community fitness center, he canvassed his former colleagues and pitched them on joining the online retailer. “Walmart did not even have Internet in the building back then,” says Kerry Morris, a product buyer who moved from Walmart to Amazon. “We weren’t online. We weren’t e-mailing. None of us even knew what he meant by online retail.”

Amazon knew Walmart would react poorly to Amazon’s poaching from its ranks. Morris says that her interview process was conducted stealthily. She stayed at a friend’s in Seattle rather than at a hotel and interviewed for the job at a Starbucks, not at Amazon’s office. Amazon, she says, paid for her expenses with cash. That year, more than a dozen Walmart employees moved to Amazon.

The Walmart transplants created plenty of uncomfortable friction. The Amazon employees were in their twenties and early thirties and full of Bezos-programmed bravado about doing everything differently. The folks from Bentonville were considerably older, in their forties and fifties, and had little patience for the brash youngsters. One notoriously caustic émigré from Walmart, Tom Sharpe, took over as vice president of merchandising and lasted a little more than a year. Birtwistle, the Harvard MBA, remembers a preliminary conversation with Sharpe that went like this.

Sharpe: “What’s your name again?”

Birtwistle: “It’s Brian Birtwistle.”

Sharpe: “Well, listen, Buttwistle, the grown-ups are here now. We are here to make this thing run like a real business.”[Vi]

The Walmart transplants created another problem. As part of the Drugstore.com build-out, Bezos and Doerr recruited a Walmart engineer named Kal Raman, and he also began cherry-picking his former colleagues from Bentonville. That was the last straw. Walmart sued Amazon, Kleiner, and Drugstore.com in the Arkansas state court, alleging that they were trying to steal trade secrets. John Doerr joked that he could no longer safely travel to the state.

The case was a symbolic shot across the bow and was ultimately settled with no damages. But it brought the bubbling tensions between the reigning retail champion and the brash online upstart into the open. Some people were unhappy about this. Rick Dalzell’s wife, Kathryn, was upset that her new community was now at war with her old one. Dalzell happened to mention that to Bezos, and soon after, Bezos and MacKenzie stopped by Dalzell’s home with flowers and a copy of Sam Walton’s autobiography, Sam Walton: Made in America.

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. The book clearly resonated with Amazon’s founder. On the last page, a section completed a few weeks before his death, Walton wrote:[Vi]

Could a Wal-Mart-type story still occur in this day and age? My answer is of course it could happen again. Somewhere out there right now there’s someone—probably hundreds of thousands of someones—with good enough ideas to go all the way. It will be done again, over and over, providing that someone wants it badly enough to do what it takes to get there. It’s all a matter of attitude and the capacity to constantly study and question the management of the business.

Jeff Bezos embodied the qualities Sam Walton wrote about. He was constitutionally unwilling to watch Amazon succumb to any kind of institutional torpor, and he generated a nonstop flood of ideas on how to improve the experience of the website, make it more compelling for customers, and keep it one step ahead of rivals.

In early 1998, Bezos was closely involved with a department called Personalization and Community, which was geared toward helping customers discover books, music, and movies they might find interesting. That May, he surveyed what was then Amazon’s Hot 100 bestseller list and had an epiphany—why not rank everything on the site, not just the top sellers? “I thought, ‘Hey, why do we stop at a hundred? This is the Internet! Not some newspaper bestseller list. We can have a list that goes on and on,’ ” he told the Washington Post.N2

The notion was not only to create a new kind of taxonomy of popularity but also to give authors, artists, and publishers a better idea of how they were doing—and to cater to some of their more neurotic impulses. “Bezos knew sales rank would be like a drug to authors,” says Greg Linden, an early Amazon engineer. “He insisted that it change whenever a new order came in.”[Vi]

That was not a trivial challenge. Amazon’s overloaded servers were already stretched to the limit, and its Oracle database software was not designed to handle the increasing loads generated by the swelling audience of the Web. Engineers ended up fudging it, taking snapshots of sales data and pushing new rankings to the website every few minutes. The service, called Amazon Sales Rank, was introduced in June to the consternation of not only authors, who began compulsively checking their rankings at all hours of the day and night, but also their spouses and more than a few wary editors and publishers. “I understand how addictive it can be, but maybe they could spend their time more productively, like, maybe, writing a new book,” veteran editor John Sterling said.N3

Around that same time, Amazon filed for a patent on what it called its 1-Click ordering process. The system stemmed from a lunch Bezos had with Shel Kaphan and interface engineer Peri Hartman back in 1997, during which he declared that he wanted to make it as easy as possible for customers to buy things on the site. Hartman, a computer science graduate from the University of Washington, devised a system that preloaded a customer’s credit card information and preferred shipping address and then offered the opportunity to execute a purchase with a single press of a button when he or she ordered a product.[Vi]

By reducing the friction of online buying even marginally, Amazon could reap additional millions in revenue while simultaneously digging a protective moat around its business and hobbling its rivals. The company’s nineteen-page patent application for the system, entitled “Method and System for Placing a Purchase Order Via a Communications Network,” was approved in the fall of 1999. Amazon trademarked the name 1-Click, and a multiyear debate over the wisdom of legally protecting basic business tools began.

Critics charged that the idea behind 1-Click was rudimentary and that its approval by the U.S. patent office was a symptom of lazy bureaucracy and a broken patent process. Bezos didn’t altogether disagree—intellectually, he was an advocate for patent reform—but he was determined to exploit the status quo for any possible advantage. He sued Barnes & Noble for infringing on the patent in late 1999 and won a preliminary ruling that forced the bookseller to add an extra step to its checkout process. Amazon licensed the patent to Apple in 2000 for an undisclosed sum and tried to use it, ineffectively, to gain some leverage over a rising and worrisome rival that first showed up on Amazon’s radar in mid-1998: eBay.[Vi]

Jeff Blackburn, the former Dartmouth football player who later would become Amazon’s chief of business development, saw eBay coming before almost anyone else at Amazon. The Silicon Valley startup, founded in 1995 as a site called AuctionWeb, made $5.7 million in 1997, $47.4 million in 1998, and $224.7 million in 1999. Blackburn realized that it was growing rapidly, and, even more unsettling—and unlike Amazon—it was profitable. The company had the perfect business model: it took a commission on each sale but had none of the costs of storing inventory and mailing packages. Sellers posted their own products on the site, auctioned them off to the highest bidder, and handled shipping to the customers themselves. The site had started with collectibles like Beanie Babies and baseball cards but it was well on its way to intercepting Bezos’s dream of unlimited selection and stealing the mantle of the everything store.

In the summer of 1998, Bezos invited eBay’s Iranian American founder, Pierre Omidyar, and its CEO, Meg Whitman, a former Disney executive, to Seattle; eBay had just filed to go public when the two executive teams, whose fates would be intertwined for a decade, met for the first time. Bezos gave the eBay team a tour of the Dawson Street distribution center. Omidyar recalls being impressed by the automation in the facility and startled by the piercings and tattoos of the workers. “I thought it was all very cool,” Omidyar says. Later Whitman told him, “Pierre, get over it. This is horrible. The last thing we’d ever want to do is manage warehouses like this.”[Vi]

During the meeting, the executives discussed different ways of working together. Omidyar and Whitman suggested putting eBay links on Amazon when a customer searched for products it didn’t carry, such as Beanie Babies, and they offered to do the same on eBay for the books of popular authors like Tom Wolfe. Bezos suggested the possibility of Amazon investing in eBay. The eBay executives came away with an impression that Bezos was offering to buy eBay for around $600 million—roughly the market capitalization it was pursuing in its IPO, though later Jeff Blackburn didn’t recall that any formal proposals were made. In the end, though, it didn’t matter; the eBay execs believed that they were pioneering a new type of virtual commerce where supply and demand met to identify the perfect price for any product. They were also put off by Bezos’s startling laugh. The venture capitalists backing eBay asked around and heard that one did not work with Jeff Bezos; one worked for him.

Bezos had not immediately viewed eBay as a direct threat. But as eBay’s sales and profits grew, he worried that customers might see eBay as the natural starting point for an online shopping trip. Though Bezos often claimed that Amazon considered itself “a customer-focused company, not a competitor-focused company,”N4 eBay anxiety spread. Employees exposed to a steady barrage of new economy hokum in newspapers and magazines worried not only that eBay had a better business but that fixed-price retailing itself might become a relic of the past.[Vi]

Late that year, Bezos initiated a secret auctions project in a sequestered space on the second floor of the Columbia Building, dubbing the effort EBS, for Earth’s Biggest Selection (or alternatively, employees joked, for eBay by spring). Bezos did not tell other employees or his directors, particularly since Scott Cook, the founder of Intuit, was on both the Amazon and eBay boards. Joel Spiegel, who led the effort with Jeff Blackburn, had a mandate to replicate eBay in three months.

Bezos was confident he could beat eBay, particularly since well-capitalized Amazon could afford to charge a lower listing fee to sellers and offer free fraud insurance. Foreseeing the need to marry auctions with a seamless way for buyers and sellers to exchange money, he paid $175 million to acquire the six-month-old payment firm Accept.com, which had not yet introduced an actual service but was already in the process of finalizing a deal with eBay when Bezos swooped in.

Bezos went skiing in Aspen that winter with Cook and Doerr and finally told them what was coming. “He said, ‘We’re going to win, so you probably want to consider whether to stay on the eBay board,’ ” says Cook. “He thought it would be the only natural outcome.” Cook said he wanted to wait and see how things played out.

Amazon Auctions launched in March 1999, and though it got off to a slow start, Bezos quickly doubled down. He acquired a company to broadcast auctions live on the Web and signed a deal with the storied auction house Sotheby’s to focus on high-end products. But the effort went nowhere. Customers could reach Amazon Auctions only by clicking on a separate tab on the Amazon home page, and it looked like a dingy leftovers bin to people who were accustomed to using Amazon to shop in the traditional way, with predictable prices for each item.[Vi]

The high-tech community was getting a lesson in the dynamics of network effects—products or services become increasingly valuable as more people use them. In online marketplaces, the network effect was pervasive; sellers stuck around for access to a critical mass of buyers, and vice versa. In the auctions category, eBay already had an insurmountable advantage. Amazon’s executives remember this significant failure as painful but strangely uplifting. “Those days in the nineties were the most intense, fun time I ever had at the company,” Blackburn says. “We had an insanely talented group of people trying to figure out how to launch a superior auctions site. In the end the network effect mattered. You could say we were naïve, but we built a great product.”

Bezos didn’t take the defeat personally. He later cast the mistake as the first step in a series of important experiments to bring third-party sellers onto Amazon. Auctions would evolve into something called zShops, a platform for sellers that allowed them to operate their own fixed-price stores on Amazon.com (zShops, incidentally, was almost called Jeff’s Club, à la Walmart’s Sam’s Club). Regardless, it went nowhere as well. For now, at least, the Web’s small sellers were wedded to eBay.[Vi]

Perhaps the most avid user of Amazon’s auction site was Bezos himself, who began to collect various scientific and historical curiosities. Most memorably, he purchased the skeleton of an Ice Age cave bear, complete with an accompanying penis bone, for $40,000. After the company’s headquarters moved yet again over the summer, out of the deteriorating Columbia Building and into the Pacific Medical Center building, a 1930s-era art-deco hospital that sat on a hill overlooking the I-5 freeway, Bezos displayed the skeleton in the lobby. Next to it was a sign that read PLEASE DON’T FEED THE BEAR.

Bears—the stock-market kind, pessimists who believe security prices are due to fall—would play no part in what happened next. On December 15, 1998, Oppenheimer analyst Henry Blodget made what became one of the most infamous predictions of the decade, projecting that Amazon’s stock price—already riding the wave of dot-com hysteria into the $200s—would hit $400 per share over the next twelve months. The forecast became a self-fulfilling prophecy and signaled the onset of mass delusion. It sent Amazon stock $46 dollars higher that first day alone, and the stock hit the $400 mark just three weeks later (after two subsequent stock splits, it peaked at $107). Nudged along by the breathless reports and rhetoric emanating from Wall Street and the press, investors were beginning to lose their minds.[Vi]

Bezos claimed he was impervious to the hype, but as the dot-com frenzy intensified, he used the unique climate to hasten Amazon’s growth. If there was to be a great Internet landgrab, he reasoned, Amazon should rush to carve out the biggest parcel of territory. “We don’t view ourselves as a bookstore or a music store,” he said that year. “We want to be the place for someone to find and discover anything they want to buy.”N5

There were two ways to accomplish this: either slowly, category by category, or all at once. Bezos tried both paths, and some of his ideas were so outlandish that employees called them “fever dreams.”

One internal initiative from that time was dubbed the Alexandria Project or, informally, Noah’s Ark. The idea was to obtain two copies of every book ever printed and store them in the new distribution center in Lexington, Kentucky. That was expensive and inefficient; most books would just sit gathering dust and taking up space, but Bezos wanted customers to be able to find any title on Amazon and get it quickly. Book-buying teams eventually pushed back against the directive, stocking only the most popular books but negotiating deals with select distributors and publishers so they would ship less popular titles directly to any customers who ordered them.[Vi]

An even more absurd Bezos fever dream was named Project Fargo, after the Coen brothers’ film. Bezos wanted to obtain one of every product ever manufactured and store it in a distribution center. “The overarching goal was to make Amazon the first place people looked to buy anything,” says Kim Rachmeler, a longtime Amazon executive. “If you had a rodeo costume in stock, what wouldn’t you have?”

Rachmeler says that Project Fargo “didn’t have a lot of support among the rank and file, to put it mildly. It kept getting pushed down the stack and Jeff kept reviving it. I vividly remember a large meeting where Jeff was trying to convince people that Fargo needed to be done. ‘This is the most critical project in Amazon’s history’ is pretty close to a direct quote.” Ultimately, the project faded amid other, more pressing priorities.

It is more evident in the way Amazon operates now that Bezos became absorbed with the challenge of delivering products immediately after customers placed their orders. John Doerr says that “for many years we were on a journey to figure out if we could get to same-day delivery.” The quest sparked a $60 million investment in Kozmo.com, which delivered everything, from snacks to video games, to a New York City customer’s doorstep. (It went bust in 2001.) Bezos even wondered aloud whether Amazon could hire college students on every block in Manhattan and get them to store popular products in their apartments and deliver them on bicycles. Employees were dumbstruck. “We were like, Aren’t we already worried about theft from our distribution center in Atlanta?” says Bruce Jones, an engineer who worked on DC software.[Vi]

The fever dreams were perhaps best embodied by the 1998 acquisition of a Silicon Valley company called Junglee, founded by three graduates from Stanford’s computer science PhD program. Junglee was the first comparison-shopping site on the Web; it collected data from a variety of online retailers and allowed customers to easily compare prices on specific products. A few months after the Amazon IPO, Bezos snatched the startup out of the hands of Yahoo, which was also negotiating to acquire it, for $170 million in Amazon stock. His idea was to incorporate Junglee’s listings into the Amazon site and ensure that customers could search for and see information on any conceivable product, even if Amazon did not carry it.

Worried that it would have to start collecting sales tax if it had offices in California, Amazon management insisted that the Junglee employees move to Seattle, where for the next few months they turned their service into a feature on the Amazon site called Shop the Web. When a customer searched for a product on Amazon.com, the Junglee software generated a list of prices and blue links. But the customer would have to click on those links and go to another website to actually buy the items. Many Amazon executives hated the fact that customers were leaving their site to make purchases elsewhere. As a result, Shop the Web lasted on Amazon.com for just a few months and then died a quiet death. Ram Shriram, the chief operating officer of Junglee before he became a business-development executive at Amazon, calls it a “total tissue rejection. Part of the reason it didn’t succeed was that the team didn’t buy into it.”[Vi]

By any measure, the acquisition of Junglee was a failure. All of Junglee’s founders and most of its employees left Amazon by the end of 1999 to return to the Bay Area. But the deal nevertheless produced an extraordinarily bounteous outcome—for Bezos. Unbeknownst to the founders of Junglee at the time, Ram Shriram was quietly advising two PhD students at Stanford—Larry Page and Sergey Brin—who were trying to reimagine search on the Internet. In February 1998, Shriram had become one of the first four investors who backed the hopeful little company, Google, with $250,000 each.

Six months after that investment, over the summer of 1998, Bezos and MacKenzie were in the Bay Area for a camping trip with friends, and Bezos told Shriram that he wanted to meet the Google guys. On a Saturday morning, Shriram picked up Bezos and his wife at a local hotel, the Inn at Saratoga, and drove them to his home. Page and Brin met them there for breakfast and demonstrated their modest search engine. Years later, Bezos told journalist Steven Levy that he was impressed by the Google guys’ “healthy stubbornness” as they explained why they would never put advertisements on their home page.N6

Brin and Page left Shriram’s house after breakfast. Revealing once again his utter faith in passionate entrepreneurs’ power to harness the Internet, Bezos immediately told Shriram that he wanted to personally invest in Google.[Vi]

Shriram told him the financing round had closed months ago, but Bezos insisted and said he wanted the same deal terms as other early investors. Shriram said he would try to get it done. He later went back to the Google founders and argued that Bezos’s insight and budding celebrity could help the fledgling firm, and they agreed. Brin and Page flew to Seattle and spent an hour with Bezos at Amazon’s offices talking about technical issues like computer infrastructure. “Jeff was very helpful in some of those early meetings,” Larry Page says.

Thus did Jeff Bezos become one of the original investors in Google, his company’s future rival, and four years after starting Amazon, he minted an entirely separate fortune that today might be worth well over a billion dollars. (Bezos adamantly refuses to discuss whether he kept some or all of his Google holdings after its IPO in 2004.) “He’s so prescient. It’s like he can peer into the future,” says Shriram, who left Amazon in 2000 and remains a Google board member and who still marvels at that transaction years later. “He’s also extremely shrewd and self-aware and knows just how far he can push something.”[Vi]

As Bezos’s fever dreams receded in the face of practical concerns inside the company, Amazon pursued a more methodical path to expanding selection. The expansion into selling music and DVDs in 1998 had gone well, with Amazon quickly surpassing the early leaders in each market, including a startup called CDNow.com in music and Reel.com in movies. At first Amazon couldn’t get music labels and movie studios to supply it directly. But as in the book business, there were intermediary distributors, like Baker and Taylor, that gave Amazon an initial boost and then allowed it to credibly make its case directly to the big media companies.

At the beginning of 1999, an emboldened Bezos selected toys and electronics as two of the company’s primary new targets. To lead the toys rollout, David Risher, the senior VP of retail, chose Harrison Miller, a recent graduate of Stanford’s MBA program whose only apparent qualification for the toy job came from his once teaching fifth grade in a New York City school. In other words, Miller knew nothing about toy retailing, but in a pattern that would recur over and over, Bezos didn’t care. He was looking for versatile managers—he called them “athletes”—who could move fast and get big things done.

Miller was given a single lieutenant, Brian Birtwistle, and just eight months to get a toy business up and running before the holiday crush. A few days after getting the assignment, he and Birtwistle flew to the annual toy fair in New York, passing analyst reports about the toy business back and forth across the airplane aisle. They walked the convention floor that week introducing themselves to wary toy companies that weren’t sure if Amazon and e-commerce in general represented an opportunity or a threat. The toy company execs demanded to know how much product the two wanted to buy. The young Amazon executives had no earthly idea.[Vi]

Toys were fundamentally different than books, music, or movies. This time, there were no third-party distributors to provide any item and take back unsold inventory. The big toy makers carefully weighed how much product they would allocate to each retailer. And the retailers had to predict nearly a year in advance what the next holiday season’s most popular items would be, as a majority of their sales occurred within a six-week frenzy of parental indulgence. If the retailers’ forecasts were wrong, they were in deep trouble, because after the holidays, unsold toys were nonreturnable and about as desirable as rotten fruit. “Toys are so fad driven, it’s a little like betting on Oscar winners only by looking at movie trailers,” Miller says.

For the first time, Amazon had to prostrate itself to suppliers for the privilege of selling the suppliers’ products. In pursuit of Star Wars action figures and other toys from the classic trilogy, Miller, Bezos, and John Doerr went to dinner with Hasbro chief executive Alan Hassenfeld at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco and made a pilgrimage to Lucasfilm headquarters in Marin County, north of San Francisco. “It was our first serious encounter with having to beg and plead to stock an item,” says Miller. “The whole issue of being an approved supplier suddenly became a huge hill to climb.”[Vi]

That summer, Harrison Miller and Bezos butted heads in front of the board of directors over the size of the bet on toys. Bezos wanted Miller to plow $120 million into stocking every possible toy, from Barbie dolls to rare German-made wooden trains to cheap plastic beach pails, so that kids and parents would never be disappointed when they searched for an item on Amazon. But a prescient Miller, sensing disaster ahead, pushed to lower his own buy.

“No! No! A hundred and twenty million!” Bezos yelled. “I want it all. If I have to, I will drive it to the landfill myself!”

“Jeff, you drive a Honda Accord,” Joy Covey pointed out. “That’s going to be a lot of trips.”

Bezos prevailed. And the company would make a sizable contribution to Toys for Tots after the holidays that year. “That first holiday season was the best of times and the worst of times,” Miller says. “The store was great for customers and we made our revenue goals, which were big, but other than that everything that could go wrong did. In the aftermath we were sitting on fifty million dollars of toy inventory. I had guys going down the back stairs with ‘Vinnie’ in New York, selling Digimons off to Mexico at twenty cents on the dollar. You just had to get rid of them, fast.”

The electronics effort faced even greater challenges. To launch that category, David Risher tapped a Dartmouth alum named Chris Payne who had previously worked on Amazon’s DVD store. Like Miller, Payne had to plead with suppliers—in this case, Asian consumer-electronics companies like Sony, Toshiba, and Samsung.[Vi]

He quickly hit a wall. The Japanese electronics giants viewed Internet sellers like Amazon as sketchy discounters. They also had big-box stores like Best Buy and Circuit City whispering in their ears and asking them to take a pass on Amazon. There were middlemen distributors, like Ingram Electronics, but they offered a limited selection. Bezos deployed Doerr to talk to Howard Stringer at Sony America, but he got nowhere.

So Payne had to turn to the secondary distributors—jobbers that exist in an unsanctioned, though not illegal, gray market. Randy Miller, a retail finance director who came to Amazon from Eddie Bauer, equates it to buying from the trunk of someone’s car in a dark alley. “It was not a sustainable inventory model, but if you are desperate to have particular products on your site or in your store, you do what you need to do,” he says.

Buying through these murky middlemen got Payne and his fledgling electronics team part of the way toward stocking Amazon’s virtual shelves. But Bezos was unimpressed with the selection and grumpily compared it to shopping in a Russian supermarket during the years of Communist rule. It would take Amazon years to generate enough sales to sway the big Asian brands. For now, the electronics store was sparely furnished. Bezos had asked to see $100 million in electronics sales for the 1999 holiday season; Payne and his crew got about two-thirds of the way there.[Vi]

Amazon officially announced the new toy and electronics stores that summer, and in September, the company held a press event at the Sheraton in midtown Manhattan to promote the new categories. Someone had the idea that the tables in the conference room at the Sheraton should have piles of merchandise representing all the new categories, to reinforce the idea of broad selection. Bezos loved it, but when he walked into the room the night before the event, he threw a tantrum: he didn’t think the piles were large enough. “Do you want to hand this business to our competitors?” he barked into his cell phone at his underlings. “This is pathetic!”

Harrison Miller, Chris Payne, and their colleagues fanned out that night across Manhattan to various stores, splurging on random products and stuffing them in the trunks of taxicabs. Miller spent a thousand dollars alone at a Toys “R” Us in Herald Square. Payne maxed out his personal credit card and had to call his wife in Seattle to tell her not to use the card for a few days. The piles of products were eventually large enough to satisfy Bezos, but the episode was an early warning. To satisfy customers and their own demanding boss during the upcoming holiday, Amazon executives were going to have to substitute artifice and improvisation for truly comprehensive selection.[Vi]

***

In the midst of Amazon’s frenzied growth and the crush of the holiday selling season, Bezos kept coming back to the kind of culture he wanted to instill in his young but rapidly growing company. With door-desks and minimal subsidies for employee parking, he was constantly reinforcing the value of frugality. A coffee stand on the first floor of the Pac Med building handed out loyalty cards so a customer could get a free drink after his or her tenth purchase. Bezos, by now a multimillionaire, often made a deliberate show of getting his card punched or handing his free-drink credit to a colleague waiting in line next to him. Around that time, he also started traveling via a private plane, which he subleased from a local businessman. But whenever he flew with colleagues, he invariably declared, “The company isn’t paying for this, I am.”

Amazon’s purchase of Telebuch in Germany and BookPages in the UK in 1998 gave Bezos an opportunity to articulate the company’s core principles. Alison Allgor, a D. E. Shaw transplant who worked in human resources, pondered Amazon’s values with Bezos as he prepared for an introductory conference call with the Telebuch founders. They agreed on five core values and wrote them down on a whiteboard in a conference room: customer obsession, frugality, bias for action, ownership, and high bar for talent. Later Amazon would add a sixth value, innovation.[Vi]

Bezos began thinking about ways to inculcate those values in the company beyond hanging the lists on the walls of offices and distribution centers. To reinforce the notion of the high hiring bar, he drew inspiration from nearby Microsoft. As part of its famed recruiting process, Microsoft designated what it referred to as an as-appropriate senior interviewer, who talked to the candidate last and got to make the final judgment on the hire. Assigning an experienced executive to this role helped ensure that Microsoft maintained a consistent hiring standard. Bezos heard about the Microsoft program from Joel Spiegel and David Risher and then crafted Amazon’s own version, which he called bar raisers.

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. “Many companies as they grow begin to compromise their standards in order to fill their resource needs,” says Dalzell. “We wanted to make sure that did not happen at Amazon.”[Vi]

Looking for a way to reinforce Walton’s notion of a bias for action, Bezos instituted the Just Do It award—an acknowledgment of an employee who did something notable on his own initiative, typically outside his primary job responsibilities. Even if the action turned out to be an egregious mistake, an employee could still earn the prize as long as he or she had taken risks and shown resourcefulness in the process. Considering his emphasis on frugality, Bezos reasoned that the award could not be something of high monetary value. He would eventually acquire a pair of size 21 Nike sneakers from former Northwestern University basketball player Dan Kreft, who worked at Amazon as an engineer. Those ratty shoes, and the successors that Kreft periodically supplied, became the prize.

While employees embraced Amazon’s newly articulated values, many resisted the breakneck pace of the work. As Amazon’s growth accelerated, Bezos drove employees even harder, calling meetings over the weekends, starting an executive book club that gathered on Saturday mornings, and often repeating his quote about working smart, hard, and long. As a result, the company was not friendly toward families, and some executives left when they wanted to have children. “Jeff didn’t believe in work-life balance,” says Kim Rachmeler. “He believed in work-life harmony. I guess the idea is you might be able to do everything all at once.”[Vi]

Evidence of this friction usually emerged during the question-and-answer sessions at the company’s regular all-hands meetings, held for many years at Seattle’s oldest playhouse, the Moore Theater. Employees would stand up and pose direct questions to the executive team, and often they inquired about the enormous workload and frenetic pace. During one memorable meeting, a female employee pointedly asked Bezos when Amazon was going to establish a better work-life balance. He didn’t take that well. “The reason we are here is to get stuff done, that is the top priority,” he answered bluntly. “That is the DNA of Amazon. If you can’t excel and put everything into it, this might not be the place for you.”

In Amazon’s accounting group, the bean counters were working around the clock, and getting nervous. They tried to rationalize the numbers and forecast the future, but none of it added up to anything other than massive losses as far as they could see. They fretted about opening seven costly distribution centers and even about having gotten so deeply immersed in the muck of distribution in the first place. Bezos insisted the company needed to master anything that touched the hallowed customer experience, and he resisted any efforts to project profitability. “If you are planning for more than twenty minutes ahead in this kind of environment, you are wasting your time,” he said in meetings.[Vi]

For two years Wall Street had forgiven Amazon’s extravagant spending. On the routine conference calls after its quarterly earnings reports came out, analysts were usually so upbeat and congratulatory that Amazon executives had to prevent themselves from sounding overly arrogant. On the tops of their earnings scripts, they wrote in giant letters Humble, humble, humble. A few times they also added Remember, Meg is listening, a reference to the eBay CEO and a reminder to remain guarded with company information.

In the spring of 1999, Wall Street’s euphoria seemed to diminish. The financial weekly Barron’s published a seminal article entitled “Amazon.bomb” that declared, “Investors are beginning to realize that this storybook stock has problems.”N7 The article overreached, suggesting Walmart and Barnes & Noble would crush the upstart. But it did momentarily moderate the market’s exuberance. The next month, Amazon released a typical quarterly earnings report, with significant sales growth and deep losses. This time the reaction was more muted and Amazon stock actually fell slightly. Ominously, there were none of the usual ingratiating offers of congratulations from analysts on the conference call.

Kelyn Brannon, Amazon’s chief accounting officer at the time, says that she and Joy Covey pulled Bezos into a meeting to show him a form of financial analysis called common-sizing the income statement; it expressed each part of the balance sheet as a percentage of value to sales. The calculations showed that at its current rate, Amazon wouldn’t become profitable for decades. “It was an aha moment,” Brannon says. Bezos agreed to lift his foot from the accelerator and begin to move the company toward profitability. To mark the occasion, he took a photo of the group with his ever-present point-and-shoot digital camera and later taped the picture to the door of his office.[Vi]

But the deluge of spending and the widening losses had fueled fear among Amazon’s management team—a fear that Bezos, still a young and volatile thirty-five-year-old CEO, needed additional help. And after hearing persistent grumbling from the ranks that Bezos didn’t listen to his subordinates, the Amazon board initiated one of the biggest misadventures of the company’s first decade. The board members asked Bezos to search for a chief operating officer.

Bezos eventually warmed to the idea. He believed the company should stockpile as many experienced managers as possible, and he was beginning to contemplate spending more of his time in the pursuit of his other personal passions. Amazon interviewed a number of high-powered executives, including Wall Street veteran Jamie Dimon, who had just been fired from Citibank by chairman Sandy Weill. But they settled on Joe Galli Jr., a flamboyant and aggressive salesman from Black and Decker who had developed the popular line of DeWalt power tools. Bezos, Covey, and John Doerr aggressively pursued Galli and closed the deal with him in June, snatching him away from PepsiCo, where he had tentatively agreed to take a job running its Frito-Lay division just a day earlier.N8

Bezos himself drew up the unorthodox new reporting structure, according to John Doerr. All Amazon executives now reported to Galli, who in turn reported to Bezos. Galli also joined the Amazon board. The J Team was renamed the S Team (the S stood for “Senior”). Bezos was free to focus his attention on new products, public relations, his outside interests, and his family. MacKenzie was pregnant with their first child, and earlier that year, the couple had moved out of their apartment in Seattle and into a ten-million-dollar mansion in Medina, on the eastern shores of Lake Washington. “Jeff was really thinking that he would focus on his philanthropic and other interests, which were diverse, and that he would turn Amazon over more,” Galli says. “That was exciting to me.”[Vi]

Galli, the son of an Italian American scrapyard owner from Pittsburgh, fashioned himself a cost-cutter and turnaround artist, and he was eager to make an impact on what was then one of the biggest business stages in the world. He walked the halls imperiously, wearing expensive Brioni suits and carrying a baseball bat for dramatic effect. Bezos seemed to love it, at first. “I hired Joe to be the adult,” Bezos told employees as he introduced Galli around the company. “But all I’ve asked Joe to do was pour more gasoline on the fire.”

Galli hit Amazon like an angry bull let loose on the streets of Pamplona. Everywhere around him, he saw employees operating without the discipline he had learned during his nineteen years at Black and Decker. “There were all these brilliant kids from Stanford and Harvard running up and down the halls,” Galli says. “But we lacked operational rigor and control. It was the Wild West.” One of his first moves was to cut a rare office perk, free Advil, which he viewed as an unnecessary expense. It sparked a near insurrection among employees.[Vi]

Galli was not technical, a significant drawback at a firm whose employees somewhat defensively viewed their workplace as a software-development company, not a retailer. He read his e-mail only after his secretary printed it out for him, and he wanted to change the Amazon culture to favor phone calls instead of e-mail. He was absorbed with the trappings of authority and angled for his own private corporate jet, since he flew often to expand Amazon’s business abroad. There were widespread rumors at the company that he had parked his Porsche in a prime visitor’s spot one too many times and that a building security guard had finally had it towed. Galli remembers only parking it incorrectly.

In October of 1999, Galli led the acquisition of Tool Crib of the North, a small North Dakota hardware chain, and began preparations to open a tool category on the site. He flew to Cleveland to meet with executives from Sherwin-Williams to investigate the possibility of adding a paint category, even though paint did not ship easily and colors such as Swiss Coffee did not display well on the Web. Copying one of his successful marketing gimmicks from Black and Decker, he set up what he called swarm teams of black SUVs adorned with the Amazon logo; employees were supposed to drive them around the country and give tutorials on how to use Amazon.com and the Web in general. The effort faded amid other urgent priorities, and for a few months the vehicles sat abandoned in the Pac Med parking lot, a stark contrast with the cost-cutting efforts of the time. “Most companies have priority lists of forty-five good ideas and triage is easy,” Galli says. “At Amazon there were a hundred and fifty good ideas all the time and Jeff was capable of developing a new one every day.”[Vi]

Bezos and Galli’s collaboration was troubled from the start. Though Bezos had drawn the new organizational structure himself, he kept his hands firmly on Amazon’s steering wheel throughout Galli’s tenure, voicing detailed opinions about everything from acquisitions to minute changes in the appearance of the home page. Galli thought he had signed up to run the company, and eventually he began to agitate for more authority. “Frankly, Joe was disruptive,” says board member Tom Alberg. “What Joe wanted was to be CEO, but he wasn’t hired to do that.” Bezos took some time off after the birth of his first child, Preston, and then returned to find the company in an uproar over Galli’s abrasive style. Amazon and its board of directors now had a leadership crisis.

But Galli was also making some important contributions. He turned category leaders like Harrison Miller and Chris Payne into general managers who had control over their own profit-and-loss statements and their costs and profit margins. He had experienced the push-and-pull of Black and Decker’s relationship with big-box stores like Home Depot, so he introduced traditional retailing concepts, like the idea of earning cooperative marketing dollars, or co-op, from suppliers in exchange for highlighting their products to customers. Covey was burning out after three years of nonstop work, and Galli helped Amazon hire a new chief financial officer, Warren Jenson from Delta. Galli finally had enough of the often absent Jimmy Wright, who was commuting from Bentonville, and Wright abruptly resigned, under pressure, right before the 1999 holiday season. Galli was instrumental in snagging a new head of operations, Jeff Wilke from AlliedSignal, and Wilke would play a pivotal role in the years ahead.[Vi]

Customers flocked to the site over the 1999 holidays. After a year of hearing constant hype about dot-coms, consumers were ready to wade en masse into the alluring waters of the Web. The employees of Amazon held their collective breath.

There were now five distribution centers spread across the United States and two in Europe. Jimmy Wright and many of his Walmart cronies were gone, and a software system originally designed for the shipment of books had to accommodate everything from televisions to children’s sandboxes. Chaos, Amazon’s old foe, reared its head once again.

Soon after Thanksgiving, predictably, Amazon was failing to keep the most popular toys in stock. Kerry Morris, the buyer who joined Amazon from Walmart, says she organized Amazon employee visits to Costco and Toys “R” Us stores around the country and had them scoop up supplies of Pokémon toys and Mattel’s Walk ’N Wag dog, which were hot that season. She cleaned out the inventory of Pokémon products on the brand-new ToysRUs.com website and had everything shipped to Fernley, exploiting a rival’s free-shipping promotion. “Because they were so new to the e-commerce space that year, they really did not have the tools to alert them to us wiping out their inventory until it was too late,” Morris says.[Vi]

The rapid growth once again required the company to initiate the Save Santa operation. Employees said good-bye to their families and headed off on two-week shifts to staff the customer-service phone lines or work in distribution centers across the country. Frugal to the bone, Amazon packed them two to a hotel room. To some, it was the greatest experience they had ever had at the company. Others hated it and complained vociferously. “I won’t say they were prima donnas but they weren’t used to it, they didn’t expect it, and a lot couldn’t handle it,” says Bert Wegner, the general manager of the Fernley distribution center.

In Fernley, some employees stayed at the Golden Nugget in Reno, and after they worked the graveyard shift, they met for beers at the casino bar at six a.m. Later, a few swore they had been working alongside furloughed prisoners from a nearby jail, though that is difficult to prove. Early employee Tom Schonhoff was among a group that went to Delaware, where the facility was having problems with the quality of the temporary labor pool. “There were a lot of temp workers that looked like the rehab center had pushed them out the back door,” he says. He watched one worker get fired for intoxication and then wet himself while he tried to protest.[Vi]

Schonhoff and his team labored for a week clearing up Delaware’s backlog and organizing the staff. “We worked with sincerity and diligence. Can I say that without sounding like an ass?” he says. “The goal was to get Christmas out the door and uphold our brand promise. We believed in it.”

A team led by Kim Rachmeler and Joel Spiegel descended on the new eight-hundred-thousand-square-foot distribution center in McDonough, Georgia. The facility was not yet finished, so employees had to wear hard hats. Their group focused on a problem called FUD: fillable, unfilled demand. These were cases where products had been sold on the website but had not yet shipped because they were lost somewhere in the cavernous distribution center. This was a more serious problem than a hundred or so customers not getting their orders for Christmas (which itself was bad enough). During the holiday season, when the sorting machines were operating at absolute peak capacity, any order that didn’t successfully ship clogged up a chute and backed up another customer order, which then also wouldn’t ship on time. So as the FUD accumulated, it started to stall large parts of the facility. Rachmeler’s team worked to clear up the backlog but eventually it became evident that there was one item in particular that was causing the distribution center to go haywire—a missing pallet of Pokémon Jigglypuffs.[Vi]

The Amazon database insisted that the Jigglypuffs had been delivered to the facility, but if so, they were either misplaced or stolen. Although Rachmeler put together a search team, the task seemed nearly impossible. The group was looking for a single box inside an eight-hundred-thousand-square-foot facility. “It was very much like that scene at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark,” Rachmeler says. She dashed out to a nearby Walmart to buy a few pairs of binoculars and then passed them out among her group so they could scan the upper levels of the metal shelving.

After three days of exhaustive searching, at two o’clock in the morning, Rachmeler was sitting, spent and dejected, in a private office. Suddenly, the door flew open. A colleague danced in, and Rachmeler briefly wondered if she was dreaming. Then she noticed that the woman was leading a conga line of other workers and that they were jubilantly holding above their heads the missing box of Jigglypuffs.

When the 1999 holiday season ended, employees and executives of Amazon could finally take a breather. Sales were up 95 percent over the previous year, and the company had attracted three million new customers, exceeding twenty million registered accounts. Jeff Bezos was named Time’s Person of the Year, one of the youngest ever, and credited as “the king of cybercommerce.”N9 It was an incredible validation for Amazon and its mission.[Vi]

The company had stumbled and would write off $39 million in unsold toys. Still, thanks to herculean efforts up and down the ranks, there were no obvious disasters or disappointments for customers. Meanwhile, the websites of rivals like Toys “R” Us and Macy’s barely survived their first major holiday season and were plagued by customer complaints, bad press, and even an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission into unfulfilled promises made to shoppers.N10

In January, after everyone recovered and many took well-deserved vacations, Amazon held its annual holiday costume party. Warren Jenson, the new chief financial officer, bought a few dozen Barbie dolls on Amazon and sewed them onto a sweater. He darkly joked that he was dressed as excess inventory. Harrison Miller thought it was only kind of funny.

Amazon had battled chaos and lived to fight another day. But it had come closer to the precipice than anyone knew. Its internal accounting was in disarray; rapid growth had led to misplaced and stolen inventory, which made it impossible to close the books on the company’s fourth quarter. Accountant Jason Child was working for Amazon’s German operation at the time but was called back to Seattle to take over as comptroller and tackle the problem. “It was the craziest quarter in Amazon’s history,” he says. The company sought outside help and hired a consultant through Ernst and Young. He came in, took a good look at the bedlam for a few weeks, and quit. Child and his colleagues had barely closed the books when the quarter ended in late January.[Vi]

Now Amazon’s board had to deal with the leadership crisis. There were complaints about Galli, who was clearly agitating to be CEO, and Bezos, who many employees felt was not taking the time to cultivate other leaders, listen to their issues, or invest in their personal growth. John Doerr quietly phoned many of the company’s senior executives to get their take on the boiling tensions in the management team. To adjudicate the matter, he turned to a Silicon Valley legend, a former Columbia University football coach named Bill Campbell.

An amiable former Apple exec and the chief executive of Intuit in the mid-1990s, Campbell had a reputation for being an astute listener who could parachute into difficult corporate situations and get executives to confront their own shortcomings. Steve Jobs considered him a confidant and got him to join the Apple board when Jobs returned to the helm of that company in 1997. At Amazon, Campbell’s stated mission was to help Galli play nicely with others. He commuted between Silicon Valley and Seattle for a few weeks, sitting quietly in executive meetings and talking privately with Amazon managers about the metastasizing leadership problems.[Vi]

Several Amazon executives from that time believe that Campbell was also given another, more secret mandate by the board: To see if Bezos should be persuaded to step aside and let Galli take over as chief executive. This was consistent with the overall philosophy in Silicon Valley at the time, which was to bring in “adult supervision” to execute the plans of a visionary founder. Meg Whitman had taken over at eBay; a Motorola executive named Tim Koogle had replaced founder Jerry Yang at Yahoo. The Amazon board saw Amazon’s egregious spending and widening losses and heard from other executives that Bezos was impetuous and controlling. They were naturally worried that the goose who laid the golden egg might be about to crack the egg in half.

Board members, including Cook, Doerr, and Alberg, deny they ever seriously considered asking Bezos to step aside, and in any case, it would have been fruitless if Bezos resisted, since he controlled a majority of the company. But Campbell himself revealingly described his role at Amazon this way in an interview with Forbes magazine in 2011: “Jeff Bezos at Amazon—I visited them early on to see if they needed a CEO and I was like, ‘Why would you ever replace him?’ He’s out of his mind, so brilliant about what he does.”N11

Regardless, Campbell concluded Galli was unnaturally focused on issues of compensation and on perks like private planes, and he saw that employees were loyal to Bezos. He sagely recommended to the board members that they stick with their founder.[Vi]

Galli says that the final decision to leave Amazon was his own. Before he joined the company, he had read the book Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple, by John Sculley, who had joined Apple as CEO in the mid-1980s and then ousted Steve Jobs in a boardroom coup. “Before I went out there, I promised myself and my family that I would never do to Jeff what Sculley did to Steve Jobs,” Galli says. “I just felt like Jeff was falling in love more and more with his vision and what the company could be. I could anticipate it was not going to work. He wanted to have a more hands-on role. I’m just not a great number two. It’s not in my DNA.”

In July of 2000, Galli left Amazon for the top job at a startup called VerticalNet, which perished soon after in the dot-com bust. Within a few months, he moved over to Newell Rubbermaid, a troubled consumer-goods company, where he managed four turbulent years of layoffs and declining stock prices. He later became CEO of the Asian manufacturer Techtronic Industries, which makes the Dirt Devil and Hoover vacuums. He has since presided over six years of growth.

After Galli left Amazon, the board tried to pair Bezos with another chief operating officer. Peter Neupert, the former Microsoft executive who ran Drugstore.com, sat in on S Team meetings for a few months. But Neupert and Bezos couldn’t agree on a way to collaborate permanently, and Bezos was coming to recognize that he enjoyed being needed by colleagues and engaged in the details and that he wanted to be an active chief executive. “He decided to spend the next umpteen years of his life building the company, as opposed to gradually withdrawing to pursue other interests,” says Tom Alberg.[Vi]

The Galli experiment and all of the misadventures from that year would leave permanent scars on Amazon. As of this writing, the company has not given another executive the formal title of president or chief operating officer. Amazon wouldn’t make another significant acquisition for years, and when it did, Bezos carefully considered the lessons from his reckless binge.

As a new millennium dawned, Amazon stood on the precipice. It was on track to lose more than a billion dollars in 2000, just as the sunny optimism over the dot-com economy morphed into dark pessimism. As he had been doing over and over since the company’s very first days, Bezos would have to persuade everyone that Amazon could survive the cyclone of debt and losses that it had created for itself during a singularly feverish time.[Vi]

—ooOoo—

CHAPTER 4

Milliravi

The turmoil in Amazon’s management during the company’s frenzied years of expansion was only the start of a much longer test of faith. In 2000 and 2001, the years commonly thought of as the dot-com bust, investors, the general public, and many of his employees fell out of love with Bezos. Most observers not only dismissed the company’s prospects but also began to doubt its chances of survival. Amazon stock, which since its IPO had moved primarily in one direction—up—topped out at $107 and would head steadily down over the next twenty-one months. It was a stunning fall from grace.

There were several immediate reasons for the stock market’s reversal. The excesses of the dot-com boom had begun to wear on investors. Companies without actual business models were raising hundreds of millions of dollars, rushing to go public, and seeing their stock prices roar into the stratosphere despite unsound financial footing. In March of 2000, a critical cover story in Barron’s pointed out the self-destructive rate at which Web companies like Amazon were burning through their venture capital. The dot-com boom had been built largely on faith that the market would give these young, unprofitable companies plenty of room to mature; the Barron’s story reinforced fears that a day of reckoning was coming. The NASDAQ peaked on March 10, then wobbled and began to spiral downward.[Vi]

The outbreak of negative sentiment toward Internet companies in general would be nudged along by other events over the course of the next two years, like the collapse of Enron and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. But the underlying reality was that many investors decided to doff their rose-colored glasses and look at Internet companies more pragmatically. And those companies included Amazon.

While other dot-coms merged or perished, Amazon survived through a combination of conviction, improvisation, and luck. Early in 2000, Warren Jenson, the fiscally conservative new chief financial officer from Delta and, before that, the NBC division of General Electric, decided that the company needed a stronger cash position as a hedge against the possibility that nervous suppliers might ask to be paid more quickly for the products Amazon sold. Ruth Porat, co-head of Morgan Stanley’s global-technology group, advised him to tap into the European market, and so in February, Amazon sold $672 million in convertible bonds to overseas investors. This time, with the stock market fluctuating and the global economy tipping into recession, the process wasn’t as easy as the previous fund-raising had been. Amazon was forced to offer a far more generous 6.9 percent interest rate and flexible conversion terms—another sign that times were changing. The deal was completed just a month before the crash of the stock market, after which it became exceedingly difficult for any company to raise money. Without that cushion, Amazon would almost certainly have faced the prospect of insolvency over the next year.[Vi]

At the same time, rising investor skepticism and the pleadings of nervous senior executives finally convinced Bezos to shift gears. Instead of Get Big Fast, the company adopted a new operating mantra: Get Our House in Order. The watchwords were discipline, efficiency, and eliminating waste. The company had exploded from 1,500 employees in 1998 to 7,600 at the beginning of 2000, and now, even Bezos agreed, it needed to take a breath. The rollout of new product categories slowed, and Amazon shifted its infrastructure to technology based on the free operating system Linux. It also began a concerted effort to improve efficiency in its far-flung distribution centers. “The company got creative because it had to,” says Warren Jenson.

Yet the dot-com collapse took a heavy toll inside the company. Employees had agreed to work tirelessly and sacrifice holidays with their families in exchange for the possibility of fantastic wealth. The cratering stock price cleaved the company in two. Employees who had joined early were still fabulously rich (though they were also exhausted). Many who had joined more recently held stock options that were now worthless.

Even top managers grew disillusioned. Three senior executives recall meeting privately in a conference room that year to write a list of all of Bezos’s successes and failures on a whiteboard. The latter column included Auctions, zShops, the investments in other dot-coms, and most of Amazon’s acquisitions. It was far longer than the first column, which at that time appeared to be limited to books, music, and DVDs. The future of the new toys, tools, and electronics categories was still in question.[Vi]

But through it all, Bezos never showed anxiety or appeared to worry about the wild swings in public sentiment. “We were all running around the halls with our hair on fire thinking, What are we going to do?” says Mark Britto, a senior vice president. But not Jeff. “I have never seen anyone so calm in the eye of a storm. Ice water runs through his veins,” Britto says.

In the span of the next two turbulent years, Bezos redefined Amazon for the rapidly changing times. During this period, he met with two retailing legends who would focus his attention on the power of everyday low prices. He would start to think differently about conventional advertising and look for a way to mitigate the costs and inconveniences of shipping products through the mail. He would also show what was becoming a characteristic volatility, lashing out at executives who failed to meet his improbably high standards. The Amazon we know today, with all of its attributes and idiosyncrasies, is in many ways a product of the obstacles Bezos and Amazon navigated during the dot-com crash, a response to the widespread lack of faith in the company and its leadership.

In the midst of all this, Bezos burned out many of his top executives and saw a dramatic exodus from the company. But Amazon escaped the downdraft that sucked hundreds of other similarly overcapitalized dot-coms and telecoms to their deaths. He proved a lot of people wrong.[Vi]

“Up until that point, I had seen Jeff only at one speed, the go-go speed of grow at all costs. I had not seen him drive toward profitability and efficiency,” says Scott Cook, the Intuit founder and an Amazon board member during that time. “Most execs, particularly first-time CEOs who get good at one thing, can only dance what they know how to dance.

“Frankly, I didn’t think he could do it.”

In June of 2000, with Amazon’s stock price headed downward along with the rest of the NASDAQ, Bezos first heard the name Ravi Suria. A native of Madras, India, and the son of a schoolteacher, Suria came to the United States to attend the University of Toledo and earned an MBA from the school of business at Tulane University. At the start of 2000, he was a new and unknown twenty-eight-year-old convertible-bond analyst at the investment bank Lehman Brothers, working in a small office on the fourteenth floor of the World Financial Center.N1 By the end of that year, he was one of the most frequently mentioned analysts on Wall Street and the unlikely nemesis of Jeff Bezos and Amazon.

For the first five years of his career, at Paine Webber and then at Lehman, Suria wrote about esoteric subjects like the overcapitalization of telecommunications companies and biotechnology firms. After raising its third high-profile round of debt and losing Joe Galli, its chief operating officer, Amazon demanded Suria’s attention. Working from Amazon’s latest quarterly earnings release, Suria analyzed the heavy losses of the previous holiday season and concluded that the company was in trouble, and in a widely disseminated research report, he predicted doom.[Vi]

“From a bond perspective, we find the credit extremely weak and deteriorating,” he wrote in what would be the first of several scathing reports on Amazon over the next eight months. Suria said that investors should avoid Amazon debt at all costs and that the company had shown an “exceedingly high degree of ineptitude” in areas like distribution. The haymaker was this: “We believe that the company will run out of cash within the next four quarters, unless it manages to pull another financing rabbit out of its rather magical hat.”

The prediction generated sensational headlines around the world (New York Post: “Analyst Finally Tells the Truth about Dot-Coms”N2). Already freaked by the market’s initial decline, investors dropped Amazon, and its stock fell by another 20 percent.

Inside Amazon, Suria’s report hit a nerve. Bill Curry, Amazon’s chief publicist at the time, called the report “hogwash.” Bezos expanded on that assessment when he spoke to the Washington Post, saying that it was “pure unadulterated hogwash.”N3

Suria’s analysis was, in the narrowest sense and with the benefit of hindsight, incorrect. With the additional capital from the bond raise in Europe, Amazon had nearly a billion dollars in cash and securities, enough to cover all of its outstanding accounts with suppliers. Moreover, the company’s negative-working-capital model would continue to generate cash from sales to fund its operations. Amazon was also well along in the process of cutting costs.[Vi]

The real danger for Amazon was that the Lehman report might turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy. If Suria’s predictions spooked suppliers into going on the equivalent of a bank run and demanding immediate payment from Amazon for their products, Amazon’s expenses might rise. If Suria frightened customers and they turned away from Amazon because they believed, from the ubiquitous news coverage, that the Internet was only a fad, Amazon’s revenue growth could go down. Then it really could be in trouble. In other words, the danger for Amazon was that in their wrongness, Suria and other Wall Street bears might prove themselves right. “The most anxiety-inducing thing about it was that the risk was a function of the perception and not the reality,” says Russ Grandinetti, Amazon’s treasurer at the time.

Which is why Amazon’s damage-control response was unusually emphatic. In early summer, Jenson and Grandinetti crisscrossed the United States and Europe, meeting with big suppliers and giving presentations on the financial health of the company. “Even the facts were guilty until proven innocent for a short period of time,” Grandinetti says.

In one trip, Grandinetti and Jenson flew to Nashville to reassure the board of Ingram that Amazon was on sound financial footing. “Look, we believe in you guys. We like what you’re doing,” John Ingram, its president, told the Amazon executives while his mother, Martha Ingram, the company’s chairman, looked on. “But if you go down, we go down. If we’re wrong about you, it’s not ‘oh, shucks.’ We have such a concentration of our receivables from Amazon that we will be in trouble too.”[Vi]

With Amazon’s reputation and brand getting battered in the media, Bezos began a charm offensive. Suddenly, he was everywhere—on CNBC, in interviews with print journalists, talking to investors—asserting that Suria was incorrect and that Amazon’s fundamentals were fine. At the time, I was the Silicon Valley reporter for Newsweek magazine, and I spoke to both Bezos and Jenson that summer. “The biggest message here is, his cash flow prediction is wrong. It’s just completely wrong,” Bezos told me in the first of our dozen or so conversations over the next decade.

In the transcript of that interview, Bezos seemed, even a decade later, to be full of confidence and conviction, and he was already a steady recycler of tidy Jeffisms. He reaffirmed his commitment to building a lasting company, learning from his mistakes, and developing a brand associated not with books or media but with the “abstract concept of starting with the customer and working backward.”

But when Bezos addressed Suria’s predictions, his comments seemed defensive. “First of all, for anybody who has followed Amazon.com for any length of time, we’ve all seen this movie before,” he said, interjecting cavalcades of laughter between his answers. “I know we live in a period where long term is ten minutes [laugh] but if you take any historical perspective whatsoever… I mean, let me ask you this question. How much do you think our stock is up over the last three years? The stock is up by a factor of twenty! So this is normal. I always say about Amazon.com we don’t seek controversy, but we certainly find it [laugh].”[Vi]

In fact, times were not normal. The challenge from Suria and the dot-com collapse had changed the financial climate, and Bezos knew it. A few weeks later, Jenson and Bezos sat down to scrutinize Amazon’s balance sheet. They came to the conclusion that even if the company showed reasonable growth, its fixed costs—the distribution centers and salary rolls—were simply too big. They would have to cut even more. Bezos announced in an internal memo that Amazon was “putting a stake in the ground” and would be profitable by the fourth quarter of 2001.N4 Jenson said that the company “tried to be realistic about what revenues were going to be and everyone was given a target on expenses.”

But the company couldn’t catch a break in the press. When Amazon announced this goal publicly later in the year, it was subject to a new round of criticism for specifying that it would measure profitability using the pro forma accounting standard—which ignored certain expenses, like the costs of issuing stock options—instead of more conventional accounting methods.

For the next eight months, Ravi Suria continued to pummel Amazon with negative reports. His research became a litmus test for people’s view of the dawning new Internet age. Those who believed in the promise of the Web and who had bet their livelihoods on it were likely to be skeptical of Suria’s negative perspective. But those who felt that the coming wave of changes threatened their businesses, their sense of the natural order, even their identities, were likely to embrace the sentiments of Suria and like-minded analysts and believe that Amazon.com was nothing more than a crazy dream precariously built on an irrationally exuberant stock market.[Vi]

Perhaps that is why hyperrational Bezos grew so obsessed with the mild-mannered, bespectacled New York analyst. To Bezos, Suria represented a strain of illogical thinking that had infected the broader market: the notion that the Internet revolution and all of the brash reinvention that accompanied it would just go away. According to colleagues from the time, Bezos frequently invoked Suria’s analyses in meetings. An executive in the finance group used Suria’s name to coin a term for a significant mathematical error of a million dollars or more; Bezos loved it and started using it himself.

The word was milliravi.

It is the ambition of every technology company to be worth more than the sum of its parts. It inevitably seeks to offer a set of tools that other companies can use to reach their customers. It wants to become, in the parlance of the industry, a platform.

At the time, Microsoft was the archetype for such a strategy. Software makers tailored their products to run on the ubiquitous Windows operating system. Then Apple’s iOS operating system for phones and tablets became a foundation for mobile developers to reach users. Over the years, companies like Intel, Cisco, IBM, and even AT&T built platforms and then reaped the rewards of that advantageous position.[Vi]

So it was only natural that as early as 1997, executives at Amazon were thinking about how to become a platform and augment the e-commerce efforts of other retailers. Amazon Auctions was the first such attempt, followed by zShops, the service that allowed small retailers to set up their own stores on Amazon.com. Both efforts failed in the face of eBay’s insurmountable popularity with mom-and-pop merchants. Nevertheless, by 2000, according to an internal company memo, Bezos was telling colleagues that by the time Amazon got to $200 billion in annual sales, he wanted revenues to be split evenly between sales from products it sold itself and commissions that it collected from other sellers who used Amazon.com.

Ironically, it was the industrywide overreach of 1999 that finally sent Amazon down the path of becoming a platform. Toys “R” Us, though it had taken a $60 million investment from SoftBank and the private equity firm Mobius Equity Partners to create the Internet subsidiary ToysRUs.com, stumbled badly during the 1999 holidays. The offline retailer suffered a raft of negative publicity from frequent outages of its website and late shipments of orders, which in some cases missed Christmas altogether. The company ended up paying a $350,000 fine to the Federal Trade Commission for failing to fulfill its promises to customers. Amazon, meanwhile, had to write off $39 million in the unsold toy inventory that Bezos had so fervently vowed he would personally drive to the local dump.[Vi]

One night after the holidays, ToysRUs.com chief financial officer Jon Foster cold-called Bezos in his office, and the Amazon CEO picked up the phone. Foster suggested joining forces; the online retailer could provide the critical infrastructure, and the offline retailer would bring the product expertise and relationships with suppliers like Hasbro. Bezos suggested the Toys “R” Us execs meet with Harrison Miller, the category manager of the toy business. The companies held a preliminary meeting in Seattle, but at that point Amazon saw little reason to collaborate with a key competitor.

The next spring, Miller and Amazon’s operations team studied the problems of stocking and shipping toys and concluded that achieving profitability in the category would require sales of nearly $1 billion. The biggest challenge was selecting and acquiring just the right selection of toys—precisely the kind of thing Toys “R” Us did well.

A few weeks later, Miller and Mark Britto, who ran Amazon’s business-development group, met with ToysRUs.com executives in a tiny conference room at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport and began formal negotiations to combine their toy-selling efforts. “It was dawning on us how brutal it was to pick Barbies and Digimons, and it was dawning on them how expensive it would be to build a world-class e-commerce infrastructure,” Miller says.[Vi]

It seemed like a perfect fit. Toys “R” Us was adept at choosing the right toys for each season and had the necessary clout with manufacturers to get favorable prices and sufficient supplies of the most popular toys. Amazon of course had the expertise to run an online retailing business and get products to customers on time. The negotiations were, as was often the case when Jeff Bezos was involved, long and, according to Jon Foster, “excruciating.” When both teams met for the first time, Bezos made a big show of keeping one chair open at the conference-room table, “for the customer,” he explained. Bezos was primarily focused on building comprehensive selection and wanted Toys “R” Us to commit to putting every available toy on the site. Toys “R” Us argued that this was impractical and expensive. Meanwhile, it wanted to be the exclusive seller of toys on Amazon.com, which Bezos felt was too constricting.

The companies were at loggerheads for months. To get the deal done, they met somewhere in the murky middle. Toys “R” Us agreed to sell the few hundred most popular toys, and Amazon reserved the right to complement the Toys “R” Us selection with less popular items. Neither company got what it wanted, but for the moment, everyone was relieved. In August, the companies announced a ten-year partnership, with Amazon getting a major source of desperately needed cash and some help with its balance-sheet problems. The companies agreed that Toys “R” Us inventory would be kept in Amazon’s distribution centers—the first step toward making the most expensive and complicated part of Amazon’s business a platform that other companies could use.[Vi]

The deal became a template for Amazon. Having outsourced his job running the toy category to Toys “R” Us, Harrison Miller assumed a newly created role as head of platform services. With Neil Roseman, a vice president of engineering, he started traveling the country pitching other big retailers on duplicating the Toys “R” Us deal.

They came close with electronics giant Best Buy, until the chain’s founder, Richard Schulze, insisted late in the negotiations during a dramatic Saturday-morning conference call that Amazon give him total exclusivity in the electronics category. Bezos refused. Bed, Bath, and Beyond and Barnes & Noble also balked.

Sony Electronics explored the possibility of using Amazon to bring its Sony Style chain online. As part of the discussions, Howard Stringer, chief of Sony Corporation of America, toured the Amazon fulfillment center in Fernley and, in a memorable moment, encountered on the warehouse floor a pile of Sony merchandise, which Amazon was technically not supposed to be selling. Stringer and his colleagues started examining the labels and writing down product numbers in an attempt to determine where the merchandise had come from. That deal didn’t happen either.[Vi]

But in early 2001, the effort started to gain traction. Amazon signed a deal with the book chain Borders, which had blundered by building a massive distribution facility outside Nashville for online orders before realizing it needed smaller, geographically dispersed warehouses to get books to customers quickly and inexpensively. A few months later, Amazon agreed to run AOL’s shopping channel in return for a much-needed $100 million investment. Amazon also signed a deal to carry the inventory of retailer Circuit City, helping to add additional selection to the sparsely furnished shelves of Amazon’s electronics category.

All of these deals improved Amazon’s balance sheet in the short term, but in the long run, they were awkward for all parties. By relying on Amazon, the retailers delayed a necessary education on an important new frontier and ceded the loyalty of their customers to an aggressive upstart. That would be one of many problems for Borders and Circuit City, both of which went bankrupt in the depths of the financial crisis that began in 2008.

Bezos never got completely comfortable with these deals or with the idea of outsourcing his prized goal of limitless selection. The Toys “R” Us arrangement in particular was hugely lucrative, but Bezos grew frustrated as it became more difficult to ensure that Amazon could offer a comprehensive toy selection. That ultimately factored heavily into the outcome of the partnership several years later—dueling lawsuits in federal court.[Vi]

In the summer of 2000, with Ravi Suria continuing to press his case in public, the slide in Amazon’s stock price started to accelerate. In the span of three weeks in June, it dropped from $57 to $33, shedding almost half its value. Employees started to get nervous. Bezos scrawled I am not my stock price on the whiteboard in his office and instructed everyone to ignore the mounting pessimism. “You don’t feel thirty percent smarter when the stock goes up by thirty percent, so when the stock goes down you shouldn’t feel thirty percent dumber,” he said at an all-hands meeting. He quoted Benjamin Graham, the British-born investor who inspired Warren Buffett: “In the short term, the stock market is a voting machine. In the long run, it’s a weighing machine” that measures a company’s true value. If Amazon stayed focused on the customer, Bezos declared, the company would be fine.

As if to prove his singular obsession with customer experience, Bezos placed an expensive bet, hitching Amazon’s Quidditch broom to the rising fantasy series Harry Potter. In July, author J. K. Rowling published the fourth book in the series, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Amazon offered a 40 percent discount on the book and express delivery so customers would get it on Saturday, July 8—the day the book was released—for the cost of regular delivery. Amazon lost a few dollars on each of about 255,000 orders, just the kind of money-losing gambit that frustrated Wall Street. But Bezos refused to see it as anything other than a move to build customer loyalty. “That either-or mentality, that if you are doing something good for customers it must be bad for shareholders, is very amateurish,” he said in our interview that summer.[Vi]

The Harry Potter promotion unsettled even the executives working on it. “I was thinking, Holy shit, this is a lot of money,” says Lyn Blake, the Amazon executive in charge of books at the time. She was later inclined to admit that Bezos was right. “We were able to assess all the good press and heard all these stories from people who were meeting their deliverymen at their front doors. And we got these testimonials back from drivers. It was the best day of their lives.” Amazon was mentioned in some seven hundred stories about the new Harry Potter novel in June and July that year.

Bezos was obsessed with the customer experience, and anyone who didn’t have the same single-minded focus or who he felt wasn’t demonstrating a capacity for thinking big bore the brunt of his considerable temper. One person who became a frequent target during this time was the vice president in charge of customer service, Bill Price.

A veteran of long-distance provider MCI, Price came to Amazon in 1999. He blundered early by suggesting in a meeting that Amazon executives who traveled frequently should be permitted to fly business-class. Bezos often said he wanted his colleagues to speak their minds, but at times it seemed he did not appreciate being personally challenged. “You would have thought I was trying to stop the Earth from tilting on its axis,” Price says, recalling that moment with horror years later. “Jeff slammed his hand on the table and said, ‘That is not how an owner thinks! That’s the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard.’[Vi]

“Of course everyone else was thinking [executives should be allowed to fly business-class], but I was the exposed nail in the room,” Price says.

The 2000 holidays would be Price’s Waterloo. His customer-service department tracked two important metrics: average talk time (the amount of time an employee spent on the phone with a customer) and contacts per order (the number of times a purchase necessitated a customer phone call or e-mail). Bezos demanded that Price reduce both, but that was fundamentally impractical. If a customer-service rep stayed on the phone long enough to fully solve each customer’s problem, the number of contacts per order might go down, but the average talk time would go up. If the customer-service rep tried to jump off each call quickly, average talk times would decline, but customers would be more likely to call back.

Bezos didn’t care about that simple calculus. He hated when customers called at all, seeing it as a defect in the system, and he believed that customers should be able to solve their problems themselves with the aid of self-help tools.N5 When they did call, Bezos wanted their queries answered promptly and their issues settled conclusively. There were no excuses. Price’s only solution was to push his team harder, but since he had limited resources to add new people, employees were burning out.[Vi]

The denouement came in a new S Team ritual called the war room, a meeting that was held daily during the holiday period to review critical company and customer issues. About thirty senior executives in the company packed into a conference room on the top floor of the Pac Med building that had expansive views of the Puget Sound. With Christmas sales ramping up and hold times on Amazon phone lines once again growing longer, Bezos began the meeting by asking Price what the customer wait times were. Price then violated a cardinal rule at Amazon: he assured Bezos that they were well under a minute but without offering much in the way of proof.

“Really?” Bezos said. “Let’s see.” On the speakerphone in the middle of the conference table, he called Amazon’s 800 number. Incongruously cheerful hold music filled the room. Bezos took his watch off and made a deliberate show of tracking the time. A brutal minute passed, then two. Other execs fidgeted uncomfortably while Price furtively picked up his cell phone and quietly tried to summon his subordinates. Bezos’s face grew red; the vein in his forehead, a hurricane warning system, popped out and introduced itself to the room. Around four and a half minutes passed, but according to multiple people at the meeting who related the story, the wait seemed interminable.

Eventually a cheerful voice blurted out, “Hello, Amazon.com!” Bezos said, “I’m just calling to check,” and slammed down the phone. Then he tore into Price, accusing him of incompetence and lying.

Price resigned about ten months later.[Vi]

While Amazon executives were courting large chain retailers, a rival was courting them. CEO of eBay Meg Whitman and one of her top deputies, Jeff Jordan, visited Amazon that fall with a tempting proposal: they wanted to take over Amazon’s failing Amazon Auctions business.

Whitman made a convincing case. She highlighted eBay’s focus on the unruly community of small sellers and argued that Amazon’s core retail business was at fundamental odds with its attempts to host third-party sellers, since both Amazon and these merchants were often competing to sell the same items. However, eBay had no such conflict, since it didn’t sell anything itself. Whitman argued that the deal could solve a problem for Amazon while also strengthening eBay’s position in its primary area of focus, auctions. It was the classic win-win scenario.

But Bezos declined the offer for the same reason he kept the ghost towns of Auctions and zShops alive on the Amazon website. He wasn’t ready to give up or relinquish Amazon’s hopes of becoming a platform for small and midsized retailers. The fact that third-party selling on Amazon wasn’t working meant, to Bezos, only that it wasn’t working at that particular moment.[Vi]

The main problem was that Auctions and zShops were siloed on the Amazon website and got little attention from customers. Bezos referred to them as cul-de-sacs on the site. To the extent they enjoyed any traffic at all, it was through a feature called Crosslinks, in which links to third-party auctions appeared on related retail pages. For example, a seller hawking vintage fishing rods could choose to list his auctions via Crosslinks on the pages of books or movies about fly-fishing.N6

Amazon experimented with using algorithms to analyze specific phrases on product pages and auctions and then automatically matching up similar products. The technology resulted in some memorable miscues. For example, the product page for a novel titled The Subtle Knife, the sequel to the young-adult novel The Golden Compass, carried links to a variety of survivalist-minded sellers in the auctions category who were hawking switchblades and SS weaponry kits. “There were some very unhappy results,” says Joel Spiegel. “The person whose mission in life was to sell children’s books would storm into my office yelling, Why the hell do I have Nazi memorabilia listed on my pages?”

One weekend in the fall of 2000, Bezos called various S Team members and executives to a daylong meeting in the basement of his lakefront mansion in Medina so they could examine why the third-party efforts were failing. Despite the problems, the group recognized that Crosslinks on the product pages were generating most of the traffic to Amazon’s third-party sellers.[Vi]

That was an important observation. Traffic on Amazon was oriented around Amazon’s reliable product catalog. On eBay, a customer might search for the Hemingway novel The Sun Also Rises and get dozens of auctions of new and vintage copies. If a customer searched for the book on Amazon, there was one single page, with a definitive description of the novel, and that’s where customers flocked.

Amazon executives reasoned that day that they had the Internet’s most authoritative product catalog and that they should exploit it. That, it turned out, was the central insight that not only turned Amazon into a thriving platform for small online merchants but powers a good deal of its success today. If Amazon wanted to host other sellers on its site, it would have to list their wares right alongside its own products on the pages that customers actually visited. “It was a great meeting,” says Jeff Blackburn. “By the end of the day we all felt one hundred percent sure that this was the future.”

That fall, Amazon announced a new initiative called Marketplace. The effort started with used books. Other sellers of books were invited to advertise their wares directly within a box on Amazon’s own book pages. Customers got to choose whether to purchase the item from Amazon itself or from a third-party seller. If they chose the latter, either because the seller had a lower price or because the product was out of stock at Amazon, the company would lose the sale but collect a small commission. “Jeff was super clear from the beginning,” says Neil Roseman. “If somebody else can sell it cheaper than us, we should let them and figure out how they are able to do it.”[Vi]

Marketplace launched in November 2000 in the books category and immediately drew protests. Two trade groups, the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild, each posted a public letter on its website complaining that Amazon was undermining the sale of new books in favor of used books and in the process taking royalties out of the pockets of authors.N7 “If your aggressive promotion of used book sales becomes popular among Amazon’s customers, this service will cut significantly into sales of new titles, directly harming authors and publishers,” said the letter.

The protest was nothing compared to the consternation over Marketplace inside Amazon. Category managers realized they could now lose a sale to a competitor within the previously safe confines of their own store. Even worse, a customer might have a bad experience with that seller and end up leaving a negative review. And the company’s buyers now had to contend with irate publishers and other manufacturers who wanted to know why used products from small, often unauthorized sellers were being sold directly next to their new wares. This debate would play out gradually over the next few years as Amazon expanded the effort and added both new and used products from third-party sellers to each category. Marketplace, in effect, made it more difficult for the retailers inside Amazon to accomplish the lofty goals Bezos himself had set for them.[Vi]

“Imagine you’re the guy on the hook for a zillion dollars’ worth of inventory,” says Chris Payne, recalling his initial reaction to Marketplace. “And this other lunatic comes over putting low-priced crap on your page. You can bet that leads to some squabbles.”

The new strategy would result in years of tension between various divisions, between Amazon and its suppliers, and between industry trade groups and the company. Bezos didn’t care about any of that, as long as it offered more choices to customers and, in the process, gave Amazon a greater selection of products. With a single brilliant and nonintuitive strategic move, he managed to upset almost everybody, even his own colleagues. “As usual,” says Mark Britto, “it was Jeff against the world.”

One Saturday in early December 2000, Britto and Doug Boake, business-development executives who joined Amazon in the Accept.com acquisition, were in Fernley gift-wrapping packages when Britto got a call on his cell phone. It was Bezos. He told them to meet him that night in Bentonville, Arkansas. They were going to visit Walmart.

Though it sounds unlikely, now that they are archrivals, Amazon was pitching Walmart on the idea of operating its website. Walmart was the undisputed gorilla of retailing, opening hundreds of new stores a year around the world and remaining relatively unharmed by the bear market. Lee Scott, just the third CEO in Walmart history, had personally invited Bezos to his home. Britto and Boake happily put down the gift wrap and headed to the Reno airport.[Vi]

That evening, the Amazon executives met in Bentonville, where they got a taste of Walmart’s brand of frugality. Walmart booked them rooms at a local Days Inn. That night, Bezos, Britto, and Boake had dinner at a nearby Chili’s and walked around the historic town square.

The next morning, a procession of three black Chevy Suburbans rolled up to the hotel at the appointed time. The drivers wore earpieces, sunglasses, and steely expressions. The Amazon executives were ushered into the middle car and marveled at the abundance of security. Though he didn’t know it, Bezos was glimpsing his own future.

The cars drove to a large house in a gated community off a golf course, and the Amazon execs got out, walked up, and knocked on the front door. Linda Scott, the CEO’s wife, opened the door and immediately put them at ease. She told Bezos she was a big fan of his and had watched his appearance on CNBC’s Squawk Box a few weeks before.

The Amazon execs met Lee Scott and his chief financial officer, Tom Schoewe, in a dining room with big bay windows. For two hours, over pastries and coffee, the CEOs spoke frankly. They talked about the companies’ shared culture and the principles Bezos had taken from Sam Walton’s autobiography. Bezos spoke generally about Amazon’s attempts at personalization and the technology behind collaborative filtering—the algorithms that determined that people who bought one particular kind of product were inclined to purchase another specific set of products.[Vi]

Scott noted that Walmart had similar techniques. It could measure whether a certain item, such as a globe for children, could lift the sale of another item, like a coloring book, if they were placed next to each other on a store display. Both companies had a deep interest in testing these combinations.

Scott also talked about how Walmart viewed advertising and pricing as two ends on the same spectrum. “We spend only forty basis points on marketing. Go look at our shareholder statement,” he said. “Most of that goes to newspapers to inform people about what is in our stores. The rest of our marketing dollars we pour into reducing prices. Our marketing strategy is our pricing strategy, which is everyday low pricing.”

Before the meeting, Rick Dalzell had warned Bezos to be wary of the crafty and astute Walmart chief. But Bezos was sponging up everything the older man said. Amazon had always considered itself an e-commerce company, not a retailer. Now Bezos needed to learn some of the fundamental rules in a professional sport that, up until that point, he had been playing only amateurishly.

After the first hour, the executives got down to business. Scott wanted to know what Amazon had in mind. The execs explained the Toys “R” Us deal and the nascent effort to operate the websites and handle distribution for other retailers. Scott said noncommittally that it was worth talking about. To conclude the meeting, he leaned forward and said, “So, is there something deeper and more strategic that we should be considering?”[Vi]

Bezos said he would think about how to make the proposal more interesting to Walmart. The men shook hands, and the Amazon executives returned to the Suburban waiting out front. As they were being driven to the airport, Britto and Boake agreed that Lee Scott’s parting words could be interpreted only as a veiled acquisition offer. “Really, is that what he meant by that?” Bezos asked.

Of course Bezos wasn’t interested in selling his company to Walmart, and Scott ultimately rejected the idea of outsourcing a crucial part of Walmart’s online operation to Amazon. The conversation between the two retailers never developed further and the meeting remained a quirk of history, a tantalizing suggestion of what might have been. The two companies would continue on separate paths, which, years later, would converge to produce a fierce rivalry.

***

In February 2001, Ravi Suria reared his head again. He published another report that questioned Amazon’s reserve of capital. With Amazon facing $130 million in annual interest expenses on its debt and given the prospect of its continued losses, Suria predicted that the company would face a cash shortage by the end of the year.[Vi]

This time, Amazon made it personal. Spokesman Bill Curry retorted in an interview that Suria’s report was “silly.”N8 Warren Jenson paid a personal visit to Lehman vice chairman Howard Clark, and John Doerr called Dick Fuld, chief executive of the investment bank, and implored him to have the firm review Suria’s research.

Years later, over cocktails at midtown Manhattan’s Trump Bar, with its dim lights and dark, polished wood, Suria complained that Amazon exerted unbearable pressure on him during that time. “They wanted to fire me. Everyone at Lehman hated my guts during those months,” he says. “Every time I picked up the phone someone was screaming at me.”

Suria now helps to run a hedge fund and has a bitter view of his history with the online retailer. “Amazon was like a high-school bully picking on an elementary-school kid. I was twenty-nine years old. It was a character-defining moment [for them], and as far as I’m concerned, they failed it miserably. It ruined my life for two years.” Suria believes Bezos is “deranged” and proudly notes that he hasn’t bought anything from Amazon since he tangled with the company.[Vi]

But there’s no doubt that investors were keyed into Suria’s analysis. The February research report, his last at Lehman Brothers before departing for the hedge fund Duquesne Capital Management, sent Amazon stock roaring toward the ignominious land of the single digits. It had another repercussion as well. In regulatory papers filed by his lawyer that month, Bezos revealed intentions to sell a small parcel of stock, worth about $12 million. Since Lehman had allowed Amazon to see a version of Suria’s report before it was published, the timing of the stock sale suggested to the Securities and Exchange Commission that Bezos was deliberately dumping Amazon shares before bad news was made public.

In retrospect, one can see it was the farthest thing from the truth; Bezos remained completely convinced of the eventual success of his venture. But the SEC—which had been hammered by critics for whiffing on the dot-com bubble—announced an investigation into the possibility of insider trading. The investigation went nowhere, but the New York Times, among other publications, splashed the news prominently on the front of its business section.N9 “I don’t care who you are or how much chutzpah you have,” says Warren Jenson. “It’s not fun picking up the Times and seeing your picture above the fold accused of insider trading. We are all products of what we’ve been through. This is one of the things that made Jeff the person he is. That scar does not heal easily.”[Vi]

Now Amazon once again had to come to terms with the practical effects of its deteriorating stock price and its overzealous expansion. That month Amazon repriced the stock options of employees. They could trade three shares at their old stock price for one share at the new price—a move that boosted the morale of employees whose options, with the cratering stock prices, had become worthless. Amazon also announced plans to cut thirteen hundred employees, or about 15 percent of its workforce. The company was accustomed to adding people, not losing them, and the layoffs were brutal. People who had been hired just months before were summarily fired, their careers and personal lives left in tatters. Mitch Berman, a merchandising manager in the DVD group, had previously worked at Coca-Cola in Atlanta and had moved to Seattle for the job. He was employed by Amazon for all of four months and never understood why it didn’t work out. “I had literally picked up my entire life and moved across the country,” he says. “Obviously, I felt burned. I had to roll up my sleeves and start all over again.” He’s now a life coach living in Barcelona, Spain.

Diego Piacentini, a new executive from Apple, was thrust directly into the mess. Bezos hired the suave, Italian-born Piacentini in early 2000 to take the top spot running Amazon’s international operations. Piacentini’s old boss Steve Jobs had expressed incredulity at the move in his typically strident way. Over lunch in the Apple cafeteria in Cupertino, Jobs asked Piacentini why he would possibly want to go to a boring retailer when Apple was in the process of reinventing computing. Then in the same breath, Jobs suggested that maybe the career move revealed that Piacentini was so dumb that it was a good thing he was leaving Apple.[Vi]

At first, Piacentini himself wondered why he’d made the move. He had joined Amazon right in the middle of Bezos’s conflict with Joe Galli. After his first few weeks, Piacentini called his wife back in Milan and told her not to pack their things for Seattle quite yet. But after Galli left, he grew more comfortable at Amazon. A year later, during the layoffs, he was tasked with closing Amazon’s new multilingual call center in The Hague. The facility had been poorly selected. The Hague was a financial and diplomatic hub, and the call center was incongruously located in a marble-floored building that had once been occupied by a bank. It never should have been opened in the first place, but “people at various levels were making decentralized decisions to move quickly and the process wasn’t strong,” Piacentini says.

The center had been open only a few months when Piacentini arrived to shut it down. With a few colleagues from Seattle, he collected the two hundred and fifty or so employees in the large marble lobby and made a brief speech in English telling everyone the bad news. Employees started howling and shouting, according to one Amazon employee who was there. One woman began sobbing and rolling on the floor.

Inside Amazon’s Seattle offices, it seemed like the walls were closing in—at times, literally. On the morning of Wednesday, February 28, Neil Roseman, Rick Dalzell, and an executive named Tom Killalea met with Bezos in his private conference room to brief him on a potentially serious security breach at Amazon’s used-book marketplace, Exchange.com. A few minutes into the conversation, the room started to shake.[Vi]

It started slowly, a rumbling in the floor that passed into the walls and then intensified. The four men looked questioningly at one another and then dove under the side-by-side door-desks at the center of the room. Forty-six miles southwest, the Earth had suddenly shifted, and the Nisqually earthquake, 6.9 on the Richter scale, had begun.

Outside, chunks of brick and mortar were shaken loose from the sixty-eight-year-old Pacific Medical building and rained to the ground. Inside, the sprinklers went off and employees rolled under their mercifully thick door-desks. Bezos’s tiny conference room was full of tchotchkes like Star Trek figurines and water guns, many of which noisily rattled to the floor. Also in the room was a twenty-two-pound ball made of the dense metal tungsten, a memento from Stewart Brand and the organizers of the Clock of the Long Now. Halfway through the earthquake, the executives in the room heard the ominous sound of the ball rolling off its stand. “I was the low man on the totem pole, so my legs were halfway exposed,” says Neil Roseman, only partly in jest. Fortunately, the ball thudded harmlessly to the floor.

As the earthquake progressed, Killalea poked his head out, retrieved his laptop, and checked to see if the Amazon website was still running. (He would win a Just Do It award and get to keep an old ratty sneaker for that bit of bravado.)

The rumbling stopped after forty-five seconds, and employees evacuated the building. In a commanding performance, Bezos donned an item from his collection of oddities, a hard hat shaped like a ten-gallon cowboy hat, scrambled onto the roof of a car in the parking lot, and organized pairs of employees to reenter the building and collect their valuables. The building owner later shut down the tenth and twelfth floors for repairs, and for months plastic tarps covered patches of the façade where bricks had shaken loose.[Vi]

When I visited Amazon for another Newsweek story that March, the stock was hovering around $10 and the city inspector had closed the main lobby. It was an unattractive sight and an unavoidable metaphor for the company’s rapid descent. Visitors were ushered into the basement through the back of the building, past a large placard warning of falling bricks.

In early 2001, Amazon’s position and future prospects remained dubious. The problem wasn’t only its diminishing market capitalization or its overlarded staffing and expansion efforts. Growth, particularly in the oldest category, books—still more than half its business at the time—appeared to be slowing after years of annual double-digit increases. Inside the company, executives were fearful that the slowdown augured an overall decrease in online shopping itself. “We were scared to death,” says Erich Ringewald, a vice president in charge of Marketplace. “Books were decelerating, and everyone thought that Walmart.com would start selling books at a loss to keep us from growing.”

Amazon then did something rare in its history. Warren Jenson, pushing to improve margins to meet the company’s self-imposed profitability deadline, convinced Bezos to quietly raise prices in the older media categories. Amazon reduced its discounts on bestselling books and started charging more to overseas customers who were buying from the domestic website. Bezos signed off on the increases, but another important meeting quickly made him change his mind.[Vi]

On a Saturday morning that spring, at the Starbucks inside the Bellevue Barnes & Noble where he had conducted Amazon’s very first meetings, Bezos met Jim Sinegal, the founder of Costco. Sinegal was a casual, plain-speaking native of Pittsburgh, a Wilford Brimley look-alike with a bushy white mustache and an amiable countenance that concealed the steely determination of an entrepreneur. Well into retirement age, he showed no interest in slowing down. The two had plenty in common. For years Sinegal, like Bezos, had battled Wall Street analysts who wanted him to raise Costco’s prices on clothing, appliances, and packaged foods. Like Bezos, Sinegal had rejected multiple acquisition offers over the years, including one from Sam Walton, and he liked to say he didn’t have an exit strategy—he was building a company for the long term.

Bezos had set up the meeting to ask Sinegal about using Costco as a wholesale supplier for products that manufacturers still wouldn’t sell to Amazon. That idea never went anywhere, but over the next hour, Bezos listened carefully and once again drew key lessons from a more experienced retail veteran.

Sinegal explained the Costco model to Bezos: it was all about customer loyalty. There are some four thousand products in the average Costco warehouse, including limited-quantity seasonal or trendy products called treasure-hunt items that are spread out around the building. Though the selection of products in individual categories is limited, there are copious quantities of everything there—and it is all dirt cheap. Costco buys in bulk and marks up everything at a standard, across-the-board 14 percent, even when it could charge more. It doesn’t advertise at all, and earns most of its gross profit from the annual membership fees.[Vi]

“The membership fee is a onetime pain, but it’s reinforced every time customers walk in and see forty-seven-inch televisions that are two hundred dollars less than anyplace else,” Sinegal said. “It reinforces the value of the concept. Customers know they will find really cheap stuff at Costco.”N10

Costco’s low prices generated heavy sales volume, and the company then used its significant size to demand the best possible deals from suppliers and raise its per-unit gross profit dollars. Its vendors hadn’t been happy about being squeezed but they eventually came around. “You can fill Safeco Field with the people that don’t want to sell to us,” Sinegal said. “But over a period of time, we generate enough business and prove we are a good customer and pay our bills and keep our promises. Then they say, ‘Why the hell am I not doing business with these guys. I gotta be stupid. They are a great form of distribution.’

“My approach has always been that value trumps everything,” Sinegal continued. “The reason people are prepared to come to our strange places to shop is that we have value. We deliver on that value constantly. There are no annuities in this business.”

A decade later and finally preparing to retire, Sinegal remembers that conversation well. “I think Jeff looked at it and thought that was something that would apply to his business as well,” he says. Sinegal doesn’t regret educating an entrepreneur who would evolve into a ferocious competitor. “I’ve always had the opinion that we have shamelessly stolen any good ideas,” he says.[Vi]

In 2008, Sinegal bought a Kindle e-reader that turned out to be defective and wrote Bezos a laudatory e-mail after Amazon’s customer service replaced his device for free. Bezos wrote back, “I want you to consider me your personal customer service agent on the Kindle.”

Perhaps Amazon’s founder realized he owed Sinegal a debt of gratitude, because he took the lessons he learned during that coffee in 2001 and applied them with a vengeance.

The Monday after the meeting with Sinegal, Bezos opened an S Team meeting by saying he was determined to make a change. The company’s pricing strategy, he said, according to several executives who were there, was incoherent. Amazon preached low prices but in some cases its prices were higher than competitors’. Like Walmart and Costco, Bezos said, Amazon should have “everyday low prices.” The company should look at other large retailers and match their lowest prices, all the time. If Amazon could stay competitive on price, it could win the day on unlimited selection and on the convenience afforded to customers who didn’t have to get in the car to go to a store and wait in line.

That July, as a result of the Sinegal meeting, Amazon announced it was cutting prices of books, music, and videos by 20 to 30 percent. “There are two kinds of retailers: there are those folks who work to figure how to charge more, and there are companies that work to figure how to charge less, and we are going to be the second, full-stop,” he said in that month’s quarterly conference call with analysts, coining a new Jeffism to be repeated over and over ad nauseam for years.[Vi]

Bezos had seemingly made up his mind that he was no longer going to indulge in financial maneuvering as a way to escape the rather large hole Amazon had dug for itself, and it wasn’t just through borrowing Sinegal’s business plan. At a two-day management and board offsite later that year, Amazon invited business thinker Jim Collins to present the findings from his soon-to-be-published book Good to Great. Collins had studied the company and led a series of intense discussions at the offsite. “You’ve got to decide what you’re great at,” he told the Amazon executives.

Drawing on Collins’s concept of a flywheel, or self-reinforcing loop, Bezos and his lieutenants sketched their own virtuous cycle, which they believed powered their business. It went something like this: Lower prices led to more customer visits. More customers increased the volume of sales and attracted more commission-paying third-party sellers to the site. That allowed Amazon to get more out of fixed costs like the fulfillment centers and the servers needed to run the website. This greater efficiency then enabled it to lower prices further. Feed any part of this flywheel, they reasoned, and it should accelerate the loop. Amazon executives were elated; according to several members of the S Team at the time, they felt that, after five years, they finally understood their own business. But when Warren Jenson asked Bezos if he should put the flywheel in his presentations to analysts, Bezos asked him not to. For now, he considered it the secret sauce.[Vi]

In September 2001, Bezos, Mark Britto, Harrison Miller, and two Amazon publicists flew to Minneapolis to announce a long-planned deal with Target. On the day of the announcement, they arrived just before 8:00 a.m. at the retailer’s downtown headquarters and took an elevator to a television studio on the thirty-second floor of Target Plaza South, one of the tallest buildings in the city. As they were in the elevator, Amazon PR chief Bill Curry got a call from a colleague in Seattle. A plane had hit the World Trade Center. When they got upstairs, they asked their Target counterparts to turn on the television.

Together the Amazon and Target executives watched in horror as the second plane hit the World Trade Center. No one had any idea what was going on. Curry, a former publicist for Boeing, observed that the plane looked like a 767. Plans to publicize the partnership with a series of satellite-television interviews were scrubbed. The tragic morning then unfolded before them, as it did for everyone else around the world. The Target building was evacuated and then reopened, and the Amazon and Target executives stood together for much of the day watching a single television.

In the afternoon, Bezos, still on his photography kick, walked around the Target office taking pictures with his Elph digital camera to record the awful, historic day. Someone complained to Dale Nitschke, the Target manager in charge of the Amazon partnership, and he quietly asked Bezos to stop.[Vi]

The skies were closed to commercial flights for the next seventy-two hours, so the Amazon group couldn’t fly back to Seattle. On the morning of September 12, they bought additional clothes and an automobile cell phone charger from a Marshall Field’s department store, rented a white Mazda minivan from Hertz at an exorbitant daily rate, and headed west on I-90, a highway that ended in Seattle.N11 Britto drove, Miller sat in the front seat, and they all stewed, shell-shocked, listening to music and their own thoughts. “Driving through the farmland and thinking about what was next was surreal and cathartic,” Miller says.

While Britto drove, Bezos used his phone and helped to organize a donation drive on the Amazon home page, which in two weeks would raise seven million dollars for the Red Cross. They stopped to stretch their legs in the Badlands and spent the night at a Mount Rushmore hotel that Bezos remembered visiting with his family as a child. Flags were at half-mast at the Mount Rushmore memorial, and the tourists were somber. Some tourists recognized Bezos—not as the Amazon.com founder, but as the CEO who had just appeared in a goofy ad for Taco Bell to raise money for the Special Olympics. Afterward, the executives bought matching navy blue Mount Rushmore windbreakers and ate at the park cafeteria.

The group kept driving west. Later that day, the skies briefly reopened for private flights, and Bezos’s plane met them on a small airstrip. Bowing to the gravity of the moment, Bezos did not make his usual announcement that the company was not paying for the flight; they flew to Seattle, and their solemn cross-country odyssey ended.[Vi]

Bezos may have been famous to some because of his notorious Taco Bell ad, but in fact Amazon had some of the most memorable TV ads of the dot-com era. In the Sweatermen series, created by the San Francisco office of an agency called FCB Worldwide, a campy chorus of men dressed like Mr. Rogers extolled the virtues of unlimited selection on Amazon. The playful, retro shtick reflected the goofy sensibility of Amazon’s CEO. But a year into the bust, Bezos was desperately trying to figure out how he could stop advertising altogether.

As usual, Bezos battled his marketing executives. They argued that Amazon had to be on the airwaves to reach new customers. As Amazon’s losses mounted, Bezos’s opposition hardened. He had the marketing department organize tests, running commercials in only the Minneapolis and Portland media markets and measuring whether they generated an uptick in local purchases. They did—but, Bezos concluded, not enough to justify the investment.N12 “It was pretty clear afterward that TV advertising wasn’t really having an impact,” says Mark Stabingas, a finance vice president who joined the company from Pepsi.

The result was not only the cancellation of all of Amazon’s television advertising but another dramatic purge of the marketing department. Alan Brown, a chief marketing officer who came from MasterCard, left after only a year on the job. Centralized marketing at Amazon was shut down and its tasks spread out among the e-mail marketing and worldwide discovery groups led by Andy Jassy and Jeff Holden. Amazon wouldn’t advertise on television again for another seven years, not until the introduction of the Kindle. “There can be only one head of marketing at Amazon, and his name is Jeff,” says Diane Lye, a British senior manager who led Amazon’s data-mining department and helped run the advertising tests.[Vi]

Bezos felt that word of mouth could deliver customers to Amazon. He wanted to funnel the saved marketing dollars into improving the customer experience and accelerating the flywheel. And as it happened, at the time, Amazon was conducting an experiment that was actually working this way—free shipping.

During the 2000 and 2001 holidays, Amazon offered free shipping to customers who placed orders of a hundred dollars or more. The promotion was expensive but clearly boosted sales. Customer surveys showed that shipping costs were one of the biggest hurdles to ordering online. Amazon hadn’t yet found a good way to convince customers to shop in multiple categories—to buy books, kitchen appliances, and software, for example, all at the same time. The hundred-dollar threshold motivated buyers to fill their baskets with a variety of items.

In early 2002 late on a Monday night, Bezos called a meeting in Warren Jenson’s conference room to talk about how to turn the holiday-season free shipping into a permanent offer. This was one way he could redeploy his marketing budget. Jenson in particular was opposed to this. The CFO worried that free shipping would be expensive and wasteful, since Amazon would be giving discounts to all comers, including those customers who were inclined to place large orders anyway.[Vi]

Then one of his deputies, a finance vice president named Greg Greeley, mentioned how airlines had segmented their customers into two groups—business people and recreational travelers—by reducing ticket prices for those customers who were willing to stay at their destination through a Saturday night. Greeley suggested doing the equivalent at Amazon. They would make the free-shipping offer permanent, but only for customers who were willing to wait a few extra days for their order. Just like the airlines, Amazon would, in effect, divide its customers into two groups: those whose needs were time sensitive, and everyone else. The company could then reduce the expense of free shipping, because workers in the fulfillment centers could pack those free-shipping orders in the trucks that Amazon sent off to express shippers and the post office whenever the trucks had excess room. Bezos loved it. “That is exactly what we are going to do,” he said.

Amazon introduced the service, called Free Super Saver Shipping, in January 2002 for orders above $99. In the span of a few months, that number dropped to $49, and then to $25. Super Saver Shipping would set the stage for a variety of new initiatives in the years ahead, including the subscription club Amazon Prime.

Not everyone was happy with this outcome. After that meeting, Warren Jenson took Greeley aside and berated him, in that moment seeing free shipping as nothing but another potential balance-sheet buster.[Vi]

Over the next year, Amazon executives quit in droves. They left because their stock had been vested or because they no longer believed in the mission or because their comparatively low salaries and the depressed stock price guaranteed that they were not getting wealthy anytime soon. Some were tired and just wanted a change. Others felt Bezos didn’t listen to them and that he wasn’t about to start. Almost all figured that Amazon’s best days were behind it. The company reached incredible levels of attrition in 2002 and 2003. “The number of employees at that point other than Jeff who thought he could turn it into an eighty-billion-dollar company—that’s a short list,” says Doug Boake, who departed for the Silicon Valley startup OpenTable. “He just never stopped believing. He never blinked once.”

They all had their reasons. David Risher left to teach at the University of Washington’s business school. Joel Spiegel wanted to spend more time with his three teenage kids before they left home. Mark Britto wanted to get back to the Bay Area. Harrison Miller was exhausted and needed a change. Chris Payne left for Microsoft, where he would help launch the Bing search engine, after which he would end up as a top executive at eBay. And on and on.

People left and afterward they took a breath and felt disoriented, like they had escaped a cult. Though they didn’t share it openly, many just couldn’t take working for Bezos any longer. He demanded more than they could possibly deliver and was extremely stingy with praise. At the same time, many felt a tremendous loyalty to Bezos and would later marvel at how much they accomplished at Amazon. Kim Rachmeler shared a favorite quote she heard from a colleague around that time. “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.”[Vi]

Bezos never despaired over the mass exodus. One of his gifts, his colleagues said, was being able to drive and motivate his employees without getting overly attached to them personally. But he did usually make time in his calendar for a private meeting with exiting executives. Harrison Miller told Bezos at their parting lunch that the accomplishment at Amazon he was most proud of was the platform-services business with large retailers, which was responsible for a third of Amazon’s cash flow in 2002. “Yeah, but don’t forget, you built our first toy store and it was great,” Bezos said, another indication he remained more focused on his long-term goal of unlimited selection than on his short-term revenue-boosting partnerships, however lucrative.

At his going-away meeting, Brian Birtwistle wrote a list on a cocktail napkin of his favorite moments at Amazon. Bezos and Birtwistle took a picture with the napkin and recalled their drive from Harvard’s business school to the Boston airport. “This whole journey started with a car ride and what a ride it’s been,” Bezos said.

Bezos wasn’t always so sentimental. Christopher Zyda, Amazon’s Chief Financial Officer, defected to eBay, and, in a throwback to Walmart’s lawsuit over poaching, Amazon sued Zyda in federal court, alleging that he was violating the noncompete clause in his employment contract. The lawsuit, like the Walmart poaching case against Amazon, was settled with no consequential damages. But if his legal strategy was any guide, Bezos was clearly worried about high-flying eBay, whose market capitalization now exceeded Amazon’s by a significant margin.[Vi]

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. Now it was clear he would need to cut ties with one of them. He chose to leave Amazon and stick with eBay. “Jeff was angry, but not at me,” Cook says. “He was angry at himself for not stopping me when I said I wanted to join the eBay board in the first place. He doesn’t like losing.”

Warren Jenson also left. Amazon’s CFO explained that he wanted to return to his wife and children, who were still living in Atlanta, and that the time was right because Amazon was finally clear of its most serious financial challenges. This was almost certainly not the whole story.

Jenson and Bezos were at loggerheads. Jenson had tried to placate angry investors by getting the company to profitability. He raised the last round of capital from European bonds at a critical time and forced Bezos to make tough decisions when the company’s runway was getting short. But he also pushed to raise prices and campaigned against free shipping. “I would never claim to be perfect,” he says. “I always tried to do what was right for the business.”[Vi]

Jenson’s legacy at Amazon was hotly debated even a decade later. Some thought he was overly political. Others argued that he helped to direct the company away from its path of reckless growth and that he assembled an accomplished finance team that would go on to make significant contributions at Amazon and throughout the technology world. The evidence for the pro-Jenson case is difficult to dismiss. “Warren was the right CFO for the time,” says Dave Stephenson, a finance exec who worked for him at Amazon. “He forced hard decisions and hard debates. He would always stand up to Jeff a little bit more directly than anyone else.”

To replace Jenson, Bezos recruited another chief financial officer from General Electric, Tom Szkutak, sealing the deal with an impassioned two-page letter to Szkutak and his wife about the impact they could make at a historic juncture for the Internet. Szkutak was also the right CFO for Amazon at the right time. He would facilitate rather than challenge Bezos’s ambitious forays into various new businesses in the years ahead.

Perhaps the most rancorous exits in the company during this time stemmed from the intramural combat between two departments: Amazon’s editorial group and its personalization team. The editorial division, which dated back to Amazon’s earliest days, was composed of writers and editors who added a human touch to the Amazon home page and to the individual product pages. Bezos originally formed the group to cultivate the literary aura of an independent bookstore and recommend books to customers that they might not have otherwise found.[Vi]

But over the years, the personalization group started to infringe on the editorial group’s turf. P13N, as it was cleverly abbreviated (there are thirteen letters between the p and the last n in personalization), used analytics and algorithms to generate recommendations crafted to appeal to individual customers based on their previous purchases. 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.

The juxtaposition between the two approaches was stark. 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 backpack 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. PEOPLE FORGET THAT JOHN HENRY DIED IN THE END, read a sign on the wall of the P13N office, a reference to the folktale of the steel driver who raced to dig a hole in competition with a steam-powered drilling machine; he won the contest but died immediately afterward.[Vi]

Most editors and writers were reassigned or laid off. Susan Benson—Rufus’s owner—took a sabbatical from Amazon. When she returned, Jason Kilar, then the vice president of media, invited her to a meeting that he described ominously in e-mails as an “editorial game changer.” She knew she was in trouble. “It had a lot do with how to dismantle editorial and turn it into part of the automated universe,” Benson says. “I thought, Yeah, my time here is done.”

An algorithm called Amabot brought about the downfall of editorial. Amabot replaced the personable, handcrafted sections of the site with automatically generated recommendations in a standardized layout. The system handily won a series of tests and demonstrated it could sell as many products as the human editors. Soon after, an anonymous Amazon employee placed a three-line classified advertisement in the Valentine’s Day 2002 edition of the Stranger, an independent Seattle newspaper. It read:

DEAREST AMABOT

If you only had a heart to absorb our hatred… Thanks for nothing, you jury-rigged rust bucket. The gorgeous messiness of flesh and blood will prevail![Vi]

***

In January 2002, Amazon reported its first profitable quarter, posting net income of $5 million, a meager but symbolic penny per share. Marketing costs were down, international revenues from the United Kingdom and Germany were up, and sales from third-party sellers on the vaunted Amazon platform made up 15 percent of the company’s orders. The exclamation point on the accomplishment was that Amazon had turned a profit by both controversial pro forma accounting standards and conventional methods.

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. Kathy Savitt, a new Amazon publicist, told Bezos she wanted to frame some of the positive news articles and hang them on the office walls. He told her he would rather frame the negative stories like Barron’s infamous Amazon.bomb cover. When people wrote or said positive things about Amazon, he wanted employees to remember the Barron’s article and remain scared.

The company wasn’t yet entirely clear of its balance-sheet problems but it was on its way. In the first quarter the following year, Amazon cleared $1 billion in sales for the first time during a non-holiday period, setting the stage for its first profitable year. In a sign of optimism, Amazon said it would prematurely redeem the bonds from its first debt round back in 1998, paying bond holders the full outstanding value of the bonds five years before their maturity date.[Vi]

As they prepared to make this announcement, someone on the finance team wondered what their old foe Ravi Suria was thinking. That revived the notion of the milliravi, a significant mathematical error. Mark Peek, the chief accounting officer at the time, joked that they should find a way to use the word in their press release. Everyone loved that idea, including Bezos, and they started exchanging suggestions over e-mail. Finally, investor-relations chief Tim Stone asked Bezos if he was serious about actually doing this, and Bezos said that yes, he definitely was.

Thus, on April 24, 2003, in the press release announcing quarterly earnings, shareholders, analysts, and journalists were treated to this inexplicable headline, which doubled as a quotation attributed to Bezos: MEANINGFUL INNOVATION LEADS, LAUNCHES, INSPIRES RELENTLESS AMAZON VISITOR IMPROVEMENTS.

Taking the first letter of each word and putting them together produced milliravi. A few of the analysts and reporters following the company scratched their heads over the unartful prose. No one outside Amazon knew what to make of it. But for Jeff Bezos, and for the employees who stuck with their implacably demanding leader through that first critical battle, the message was clear.

They had won.[Vi]

—ooOoo—

PART II

Literary Influences
Ảnh hưởng của con chữ

—ooOoo—

CHAPTER 5

Rocket Boy

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. Similarly, he did more than just outmaneuver Barnes & Noble in the marketplace—he enjoyed telling the story of how he’d held his first meetings in its coffee shops.

When Bezos’s longtime friends and colleagues try to explain his fierce competitive streak and uncommon need to best his adversaries, they often veer into the past—back almost fifty years—to the circumstances of his early childhood. Bezos grew up in a tight-knit family, with two deeply involved and caring parents, Jackie and Mike, and two close younger siblings, Christina and Mark. Seemingly, there was nothing unusual about it.

Yet for a brief period early in his life, before this ordinary childhood, Bezos lived alone with his mother and grandparents. And before that, he lived with his mother and his biological father, a man named Ted Jorgensen. Bezos himself told Wired magazine that he remembered when Jackie and Mike, who is technically his adoptive father, explained this situation to him when he was ten. He learned Mike wasn’t his biological father around the same time he learned that he needed glasses. “That made me cry,” he said.N1 Years later, as a college student, he confronted his mother and asked her a series of pointed questions about his birth. They both declined to discuss the details of that conversation but afterward Bezos hugged her and said, “You did a great job, Mom.”N2

Bezos says that the only time he thinks about Ted Jorgensen is when he’s filling out a medical form that asks for his family history. He told Wired in 1999 that he had never met the man. Strictly speaking, that is not true; Bezos last saw him when he was three years old.[Vi]

It is of course unknowable whether the unusual circumstances of his birth helped to create that fecund entrepreneurial mix of intelligence, ambition, and a relentless need to prove himself. Two other technology icons, Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison, were adopted, and the experience is thought by some to have given each a powerful motivation to succeed. 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. His childhood was a launching pad, of sorts, that sent Bezos rocketing toward a life as an entrepreneur. It also instilled in him an abiding interest in the exploration and discovery of space, a fascination that perhaps one day may actually take him there.

Theodore John Jorgensen was a circus performer and in the 1960s was one of Albuquerque’s best unicyclists. The archives of local newspapers contain a colorful record of his youthful proficiency. An Albuquerque Journal photograph taken in 1961, when he was sixteen, shows him standing on the pedals of his unicycle facing backward, one hand on the seat, the other splayed theatrically to the side, his expression tense with concentration. The caption says he was awarded “most versatile rider” in the local unicycle club.[Vi]

That year, Jorgensen and half a dozen other riders traveled widely playing unicycle polo in a team managed by Lloyd Smith, the owner of a local bike shop. Jorgensen’s team was victorious in places like Newport Beach, California, and Boulder, Colorado. The newspaper has an account of the Boulder event. Four hundred people turned out in freezing weather to a shopping-center parking lot to watch the teams swivel around in four inches of snow wielding thirty-six-inch-long plastic mallets in pursuit of a small rubber ball, six inches in diameter. Jorgensen’s team swept the contest, a doubleheader, three to two and six to five.N3

In 1963, Jorgensen’s troupe resurfaced in newspapers as the Unicycle Wranglers, touring county fairs, sporting events, and circuses. They square-danced, did the jitterbug and the twist, skipped rope, and performed tricks like riding on a high wire. The group practiced constantly, rehearsing three times a week at Lloyd Smith’s shop and taking dance classes two times a week. “It’s like balancing on greased lightning and dancing all at the same time,” one member told the Albuquerque Tribune.N4 When the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus came to town, the Wranglers performed under the big top, and in the spring of 1965 they performed in eight local shows of the Rude Brothers Circus. They also went to Hollywood to try out (unsuccessfully, as it happened) for the Ed Sullivan Show.[Vi]

Ted Jorgensen was born in Chicago to a family of Baptists. His father moved the family to Albuquerque when Jorgensen and his younger brother, Gordon, were in elementary school. Ted’s father took a job as a purchase agent at Sandia, then the largest nuclear-weapons installation in the country, handling the procurement of supplies at the base. Jorgensen’s paternal grandfather, an immigrant from Denmark, was one of the last surviving veterans of the Spanish American War.

In high school Jorgensen started dating Jacklyn Gise, a girl two years his junior whose father also worked at Sandia. Their dads knew each other. Her father, Lawrence Preston Gise, known to friends as Preston and to his family as Pop, ran the local office of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, the federal agency that managed the nuclear-weapons program after Truman took it from the military following World War II.

Jorgensen was eighteen and was finishing his senior year in high school when Gise became pregnant. She was sixteen and a sophomore. They were in love and decided to get married. Her parents gave them money to fly to Juárez, Mexico, for a ceremony. A few months later, on July 19, 1963, they married again at the Gises’ house. Because Gise was underage, both her mother and Jorgensen’s signed the application for a marriage license. The baby was born on January 12, 1964. They named him Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen.[Vi]

The new parents rented an apartment in the city’s Southeast Heights neighborhood and Jackie finished high school. During the day, her mother, Mattie, took care of the baby. The situation was difficult. Jorgensen was perpetually broke, and they had only one car, his cream-colored ’55 Chevy. Belonging to a unicycle troupe didn’t pay much. The Wranglers divided their fees among all members, with Lloyd Smith taking a generous cut off the top. Eventually Jorgensen got a $1.25-an-hour job at the Globe Department Store, which was part of Walgreen’s short-lived foray into the promising discount-retail market being pioneered at the time by Kmart and Walmart. Occasionally Jackie brought the baby to the store to visit.

The parents were young and immature and their marriage was probably doomed from the start. But Jorgensen also had a habit of drinking too much and carousing late at night with friends. He was an inattentive dad and husband. Preston Gise tried to help him; he paid his son-in-law’s tuition at the University of New Mexico, but Jorgensen dropped out after a few semesters. Gise then tried to get Jorgensen a job with the New Mexico State Police, but Jorgensen didn’t follow through on the opportunity.[Vi]

Eventually, Jackie took the child and moved back in with her parents on Sandia Base. In June 1965, when the baby was seventeen months old, she filed for divorce. The court ordered Jorgensen to pay forty dollars a month in child support. Court records indicate that his income at the time was a hundred and eighty dollars a month. Over the next few years, Jorgensen visited his son occasionally but missed many of those support payments. He was undependable, and he had no money.

Then Jackie started dating someone. On several occasions when Jorgensen was visiting his son, the other man was there, and they avoided each other. But Jorgensen asked around and heard he was a good guy.

In 1968, Jackie called Ted Jorgensen on the phone and told him she was getting remarried and moving to Houston. He could stop paying child support, but she wanted to give Jeffrey her new husband’s surname and let him adopt the boy. She asked Jorgensen not to interfere in their lives. Around the same time, Jackie’s father confronted Jorgensen and elicited from him a promise that he would stay away. But Ted’s permission was needed for the adoption, and after thinking it over and reasoning that the boy was likely to have a better life as the son of Jackie and her new husband, Jorgensen gave it. After a few years, he lost track of the family, and then he forgot their last name. For decades he wouldn’t know what had become of his child, and his own bad choices haunted him.[Vi]

The Cuban Revolution in 1959 blew apart the comfortable world of Miguel Angel Bezos Perez. Jeff Bezos’s future adoptive father had been attending the elite Jesuit private school Colegio de Dolores in Santiago de Cuba, on the south coast of the island, when the Batista government fell. Castro (himself a graduate of Dolores) replaced the schools with socialist youth camps and shut down private companies, including a lumberyard owned by Miguel Bezos’s father and uncle where Miguel worked most mornings. Miguel and his friends spent their days on the street, floating around and “doing things we shouldn’t have been doing, like writing anti-Castro slogans,” he says. When his parents heard about his antics, they worried he could get in trouble and, like many other Cuban families with teenage children, started making preparations to send him to the United States.

They waited a year before they got his passport under the auspices of the Catholic Church. Miguel’s mother fretted about his moving to the frigid climate of el norte, so she and his sister knitted him a sweater from old rags. Miguel wore it to the airport. (The sweater is now framed and hanging on the wall of his home in Aspen.) His mother had to drop him off at the curb and then park in a nearby lot to watch the plane take off. But the family figured this was temporary and would last only until the political situation stabilized and everything reverted to normal.[Vi]

Miguel Bezos arrived in Miami in 1962, sixteen years old and alone. He knew only one word in English: hamburger. He was one of the oldest members of Operation Pedro Pan, a rescue program run by the Catholic Church and heavily funded by the U.S. government, that removed thousands of teenagers from Castro’s grip in the early 1960s. The Catholic Welfare Bureau brought Bezos to a South Florida camp, called Matecumbe, where he joined four hundred other exiled children. By a stroke of good fortune, the next day his cousin Angel arrived at the same facility. “Immediately the two of us were joined at the hip,” Miguel says. A few weeks later, they were summoned to the camp’s office and given suitcases and heavy jackets—real ones. They were being moved to a group home in Wilmington, Delaware. “We looked at each other and said, ‘Boy, we’re in trouble,’ ” Miguel recalls.

Miguel and his cousin joined about two dozen other Pedro Pans in a facility called Casa de Sales under the care of Father James Byrnes, a young priest who spoke fluent Spanish and enjoyed the occasional vodka tonic. They would later learn he was fresh from the seminary, but to his youthful charges, Byrnes was a towering figure of authority. He taught them English, forced them to focus on their studies, and gave them each fifty cents a week after their chores were done so they could attend a Saturday-night dance. “What he did for us we can never repay,” says Carlos Rubio Albet, Miguel and Angel Bezos’s roommate at the facility. “He took a houseful of exiled teenage boys who didn’t speak English and turned it into a real family. That first Christmas I was there, in ’62, he made sure everyone had something under that tree.” After the thirteen tension-filled days of the Cuban missile crisis in October of that year, the residents of La Casa, as they called it, knew they weren’t going home any time soon.[Vi]

While the atmosphere at the Casa de Sales was strict, the teenagers enjoyed themselves, and when they later gathered for reunions with Father Byrnes, they remembered their days there as among the happiest of their lives. The young Miguel Bezos had a particular affinity for one practical joke. When someone new arrived at the group home, he would pretend to be a deaf-mute, gesturing and grunting for items at the dinner table. A few days into the routine, he would startle the joke’s target, usually by standing up and shouting as an attractive girl passed, “Man, that’s a good-looking woman!” His friends would all sing out, “It’s a miracle!” before everyone collapsed in stitches.

Miguel Bezos left the Casa de Sales after a year and enrolled as an undergraduate in the University of Albuquerque, a now-defunct Catholic college that offered full scholarships for Cuban refugees. To earn extra money, he got a job as a clerk on the overnight shift at the Bank of New Mexico—at the same time as the young, recently divorced Jacklyn Gise Jorgensen started work in the bank’s bookkeeping department. Their shifts overlapped by an hour. In his thick Cuban accent and rudimentary English, Bezos asked her out several times; he was repeatedly but politely rejected. Finally, she agreed. On their first date they saw the movie The Sound of Music.[Vi]

Miguel Bezos went on to graduate from the University of New Mexico and married Jackie in April 1968 at the First Congregational Church in Albuquerque. The reception was held at the Coronado Club on Sandia Base. Miguel got a job as a petroleum engineer at Exxon and they moved to Houston, the first stop in a career that would take them to three continents. Four-year-old Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen became Jeffrey Preston Bezos and started calling Miguel Bezos Dad. A year later, they had a daughter, Christina, and then a year after that, another son, Mark.

Jeff and his siblings grew up observing their father’s tireless work ethic and his frequent expressions of love for America and its opportunities and freedoms. Miguel Bezos, who later began going by the name Mike, acknowledges that he may have also passed on a libertarian aversion to government intrusion into the private lives and enterprises of citizens. “Certainly it was something that permeated our home life,” he says, while noting that dinnertime conversations were apolitical and revolved around the kids. “I cannot stand any kind of totalitarian form of government, from the right or the left or anything in between, and maybe that had some impact.”[Vi]

Certain moments in the early life of her oldest child took on significance when Jackie Bezos viewed them in retrospect. 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.”

At age eight, Bezos scored highly on a standardized test, and his parents enrolled him in the Vanguard program at River Oaks Elementary School, a half-hour drive from their home. Bezos was a standout pupil, and the school’s principal trotted him out to speak to visitors like Julie Ray, who was doing research for her book Turning On Bright Minds. A local company donated the excess capacity on its mainframe computer to the school, and the young Bezos led a group of friends in connecting to the mainframe via a Teletype machine that sat in the school hallway. They taught themselves how to program, then discovered a primitive Star Trek game on the mainframe and spent countless hours playing it.[Vi]

At the time, Bezos’s parents worried their son might be turning into a bit of an egghead. To ensure he was well rounded and help him “make friends with his weaknesses,” as Jackie Bezos later put it, they enrolled him in various youth sports. Bezos was a pitcher in baseball, but his aim proved so unpredictable that his mother tied a mattress to the fence and asked him to practice on his own. He also reluctantly played football, barely clearing the league weight limit but getting named defensive captain by the team coach because he could memorize the plays and remembered where everyone on the field was supposed to stand. “I was dead set against playing football,” he said. “I had no interest in playing a game where people would tackle me to the ground.” Still, in sports, Bezos revealed a ferocious competitive streak, and when his football team, the Jets, lost the league championship, he broke down in tears.N5

Playing sports didn’t diminish young Jeff Bezos’s passion for the nerdier pastimes. Star Trek was a fixture in the Bezos household in Houston, and they watched reruns in the afternoon after school. “We were all Trekkies. It got to the point where Jeff would quote the lines, he was so captivated,” says Jackie Bezos. The program reinforced a budding fascination with space exploration that had begun when he was five and watched the Apollo 11 moon landing on his family’s old black-and-white television. His grandfather, who two decades earlier had worked in the military’s research and development wing, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA (now DARPA), also stoked this obsession, telling stories of rockets, missiles, and the coming wonders of space travel.[Vi]

In 1968, at age fifty-three, Pop Gise resigned from the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission over a bureaucratic squabble with his bosses in Washington. He and Mattie retired to his wife’s family’s ranch in Cotulla, Texas. Between the ages of four and sixteen, Jeff Bezos spent every summer with his grandparents, and his grandfather enlisted his help in doing the gritty work of the ranch, which was a hundred miles from the nearest store or hospital.

Gise, who had been a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy during World War II, was in many ways Bezos’s mentor. He instilled in Bezos the values of self-reliance and resourcefulness, as well as a visceral distaste for inefficiency. “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.

Every so often, Pop Gise got carried away with this do-it-yourself impulse. One such occasion occurred when his faithful bird dog Spike injured the tip of his tail in a car door. The nearby veterinarians all specialized in cattle and other large animals, and Gise reasoned that he could perform the necessary amputation himself in his garage. “I never knew a dog’s tail could bleed so much,” he reported afterward.[Vi]

But it wasn’t all amateur surgeries and physical labor; 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. He read seminal works by Jules Verne, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlein and fantasized about interstellar travel, deciding that he wanted to grow up to be an astronaut. Pop Gise taught Bezos checkers and then soundly and repeatedly defeated him, despite Jackie’s pleading with him to let Jeff win a match. “He’ll beat me when he’s ready to,” her father said.N6

Bezos’s grandparents taught him a lesson in compassion that he related decades later, in a 2010 commencement speech at Princeton. Every few years Pop and Mattie Gise hooked an Airstream trailer to their car and caravanned around the country with other Airstream owners, and they sometimes took Jeff with them. On one of these road trips, when Bezos was ten and passing time in the back seat of the car, he took some mortality statistics he had heard on an antismoking public service announcement and calculated that his grandmother’s smoking habit would take nine years off her life. When he poked his head into the front seat to matter-of-factly inform her of this, she burst into tears, and Pop Gise pulled over and stopped the car.

In fact, Mattie Gise fought cancer for years and would eventually succumb to it. Bezos described what happened next in his speech at Princeton.[Vi]

He got out of the car and came around and opened my door and waited for me to follow. Was I in trouble? My grandfather was a highly intelligent, quiet man. He had never said a harsh word to me, and maybe this was to be the first time? Or maybe he would ask that I get back in the car and apologize to my grandmother. I had no experience in this realm with my grandparents and no way to gauge what the consequences might be. We stopped beside the trailer. My grandfather looked at me, and after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly said, “Jeff, one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.”

When Jeff was thirteen, Mike Bezos’s job with Exxon took the family to Pensacola, on the Florida Panhandle. Showing the same unwavering resolve that her son would employ later in life, Jackie Bezos prevailed on local school officials to let her son into the middle school’s gifted program despite the fact that the program had a strict one-year waiting period. The officials had been reluctant, so she forced them to examine the boy’s work, which changed their minds.N7 “You want to account for Jeff’s success, look at Jackie,” says Bezos’s childhood friend Joshua Weinstein. “She’s the toughest lady you’ll ever meet and also the sweetest and most loyal.”[Vi]

The former Jackie Gise was just thirty when her oldest child became a teenager, but she understood him well and nurtured his passions. 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.”N8

Bezos occasionally watched over his younger sister and brother during these years but 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.”

After a two-year stop in Pensacola, the family moved again. This time, Mike Bezos’s job took them to Miami—a city Mike had first encountered fifteen years before as a penniless immigrant. Now he was an executive at Exxon, and the family bought a four-bedroom house with a backyard pool in the affluent Palmetto neighborhood in unincorporated Dade County.[Vi]

Miami at the time was a tumultuous place. The drug wars were in full swing, and in 1980 the Mariel boatlift brought a mass emigration of Cubans fleeing the Communist regime. All the violence and frenetic activity barely registered in the insular worlds of Bezos and his new friends. Jeff enrolled in Miami Palmetto Senior High School, joined the science and chess clubs, drove a blue Ford Falcon station wagon with no air-conditioning, and impressed his classmates with his fierce work ethic. “He was excruciatingly focused,” says Weinstein, who lived around the corner and became one of Bezos’s best friends (the two are still close). “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.”

The Bezos house was a gathering point for Jeff and his wide circle of friends. They built the homecoming science-club float in his garage and gathered there for prom after-parties. Jackie Bezos, the youngest of all the moms, commanded the kids’ respect and became a fixture in their lives. With Weinstein’s mother, she organized a neighborhood watch and conducted its meetings at her home. She could be strict. When a state trooper gave Bezos a ticket on the Dixie Highway, she made him call the friends who had been in the car with him and personally apologize.[Vi]

The teenage Bezos didn’t butt heads only with his mother. When he was a senior in high school, Jackie Bezos remembers, Jeff got into a heated argument with his father over some now-forgotten ideological issue. It was ten at night when they started arguing and each was unwilling to retreat on the substance of the matter. The disagreement evolved into a full-blown quarrel but eventually broke up; Mike retreated to his bedroom and Jeff to the first-floor bathroom, which, like those in many South Florida homes at the time, had a separate door that opened onto the backyard. Jackie let them both stew for an hour and then went to check up on them. “Mike was still in the bedroom, looking like he had lost his best friend,” she says. She went downstairs and knocked on the bathroom door, but there was no answer. It was locked. She went around to the backyard, opened its outside door—and saw the bathroom was empty. The family cars were still there. “I was terribly worried,” Jackie says. “It was midnight on a weekday and he’s out there on foot. I thought, This is not good.”

While she contemplated her next move, the home phone rang. It was Jeff, calling from the closest, safest place with a pay telephone—a hospital. He didn’t want her to worry, he said, but he was not yet ready to come home. She eventually got him to let her pick him up, and they drove to a nearby all-night diner and talked for hours. He finally agreed to return home, and though it was after three a.m. and he had school that day, Jeff apparently didn’t go right to sleep. That morning, when Mike Bezos got to work, he discovered a handwritten letter from his son in his briefcase. He still carries the letter in his briefcase today.[Vi]

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. Less well known was his job helping an eccentric neighbor, who decided one day that she was going to breed and sell hamsters. Bezos cleaned the cages and fed the rodents but soon found he was spending more time listening to the woman’s troubles than taking care of the animals. He apparently was a good confidant; she once called him at school and pulled him out of a class to discuss some new personal crisis. When Jackie Bezos found out about it, she put an end to the relationship.

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, he announced to his classmates his intention to become the valedictorian of his 680-student class, and he crammed his schedule with honors courses to bolster his rank. “The race [for the rest of the students] then became to be number two,” says Josh Weinstein. “Jeff decided he wanted it and he worked harder than anybody else.”

Ursula Werner, Jeff’s high-school girlfriend, says he was exceedingly creative and quite a romantic. For her eighteenth birthday, he spent days crafting an elaborate scavenger hunt that sent her around Miami on bizarre and embarrassing errands, such as entering a bank to ask a teller for a million pennies and navigating a Home Depot to find a clue that was hidden under a toilet lid.[Vi]

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. The class “emphasizes the use of new ways of thinking in old areas,” according to a flier the young teachers passed out to parents. Werner said that her parents were dismissive of the class and wondered who would possibly sign up. But Bezos’s parents cheered the effort and immediately enrolled Mark and Christina. “I got the sense that Jackie and Mike were the kinds of parents who always encouraged Jeff and nurtured his creativity,” Werner says.

Bezos scored straight As at Miami Palmetto, got early admission to Princeton University, and not only became valedictorian of his high school but won the Silver Knight, a prestigious statewide award sponsored by the Miami Herald. According to Weinstein, who was there, when Jeff went to the bank to deposit his award check, the teller looked at it and said, “Oh, what do you do for the Miami Herald?” and Bezos cockily replied, “I win Silver Knights.”

Bezos wrote out his valedictory speech longhand. His mother typed it up, pausing just long enough to realize that for a high-school senior, Jeff had some wildly outlandish ambitions. She still has a copy, which includes the classic Star Trek opening, “Space, the final frontier,” and discusses his dream of saving humanity by creating permanent human colonies in orbiting space stations while turning the planet into an enormous nature preserve.

These were not pie-in-the-sky ideas. They were personal goals. “Whatever image he had of his own future, it always involved becoming wealthy,” Ursula Werner says. “There was no way to get what he wanted without it.” What exactly did he want? “The reason he’s earning so much money,” Werner told journalists who contacted her in the 1990s, seeking to understand the Internet magnate, “is to get to outer space.”[Vi]

***

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.N9 Still, it was an enormous sum, and it made him one of the richest people in the world. He had seen firsthand how technology, patience, and long-term thinking could pay off. And so, 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.

Bezos intended to keep his new space lab a secret. But many of his Amazon colleagues knew about his ambitions. He told Kay Dangaard, Amazon’s public relations chief in the 1990s, and she quietly tried to please him by incorporating it into the Amazon brand. She actually set up a product-placement deal to put Amazon billboards on the moon in the Eddie Murphy movie The Adventures of Pluto Nash but canceled the deal after reading the terrible script. In 1999, she tried to get NASA to allow the space shuttle Discovery astronauts to order Christmas gifts on Amazon.com from orbit. After tentatively expressing interest, the agency nixed the idea as overly commercial.

Bezos also confided his dreams to Nick Hanauer, the early Amazon investor and an unofficial board member during the company’s first five years. “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.”[Vi]

In retrospect, it almost seems like Bezos was taunting the media with his top-secret space plans. He clearly couldn’t resist obliquely referencing them. Discussing concerns about the long-term health of the planet with Wired magazine in 1999, he told an interviewer, “I wouldn’t mind helping in some way. I do think we have all our eggs in one basket.”N10 He told Fast Company in 2001 that it would be great if the novel Dune, in which humanity has colonized other planets, was “nonfiction.”

In 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’s answer seemed particularly convoluted. “It’s a very hard technical problem and I think it’s very hard to see how you would generate a return in a reasonable amount of time on that investment,” he said. “So the answer to your question is probably yes, there probably is somebody doing it, but it’s not… when you go to venture capital conferences, it never comes up. To say it was a cold topic would be exaggerating how hot it is.”[Vi]

In 2002, Bezos created a public Wish List of his own on Amazon, available for anyone to see, specifying some of his reading interests. Among the titles were The History of Space Vehicles, by Tim Furniss, and Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe, by Peter Douglas Ward and Donald Brownlee. Then, in February 2003, I attended a TED conference, an annual gathering devoted to technology and design that was held back then in Monterey, California, and I overheard someone talking about a space company in Seattle called Blue. A month later, Bezos and his attorney suffered minor injuries in a helicopter accident near Alpine in West Texas—a few hundred miles from the middle of nowhere. “During… takeoff the tailboom struck a tree, aircraft rolled to side, ended up in a creek partially submerged,” read the official incident report from the Federal Aviation Administration. “The three passengers received injuries and were transported to the local hospital. Degree of injuries believed to be nonthreatening.”

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.

He was also looking for a good place to build a launchpad.[Vi]

At the time of the helicopter crash, the world knew nothing of Jeff Bezos’s space-exploration company. But it all seemed to be adding up to something. After the accident, I searched the Washington State corporate database for a company called Blue and found an entry for Blue Operations LLC that had been registered with an address of 1200 Twelfth Avenue South in Seattle—Amazon’s headquarters. The company had a mysteriously vague website advertising job openings for aerospace engineers who had expertise in areas like propulsion and avionics. I was a cub reporter for Newsweek magazine at the time, and the notion that a famous Internet billionaire was secretly building his own spaceship was too enticing to resist.

On a trip to Seattle in March of 2003, I rented a car and, late at night, drove to another address I had found in the Washington State corporate records for Blue, this one located in an industrial zone south of Seattle along the Duwamish Waterway. At that address was a fifty-three-thousand-square-foot warehouse with a blue awning over the front door imprinted with the words Blue Origin in white letters.

Though it was late on a weekend night, the lights were on and a few cars and motorcycles were parked out front. I couldn’t see anything through the covered windows and there was no one outside. The air smelled heavily of river water and processed lumber. I sat in the rental car, just wondering, indulging visions of secret spaceships and billionaire-funded missions to Mars. But I had nothing to go on, and it was intensely frustrating. After an hour, I couldn’t take it anymore. I got out, walked quietly across the street to a trash can, removed an armful of its contents, walked back to the car, and dumped it in the trunk.[Vi]

A few weeks later, for Newsweek magazine, I wrote the first story about Blue Origin, entitled “Bezos in Space.”N11 Aided by an extremely convenient discovery I’d made that night—a sheaf of coffee-stained drafts of a Blue Origin mission statement—I reported that the long-term mission of the firm was to create an enduring human presence in space. The company was building a spaceship called New Shepard, after Alan Shepard, the pioneering Mercury astronaut, which would take tourists into the upper reaches of the atmosphere. The unique designs called for a vertical takeoff and thrusters to control a vertical landing so that the vehicle could be economically reused. The startup was also funding forward-looking research into new propulsion systems, like wave rotors and rockets powered by ground-based lasers.

A few days after my visit to Blue Origin’s warehouse, I e-mailed all these details to Bezos to let him know what would be in the article and to try to elicit a reaction. I’ve since lost the message I sent, but in my breathless quest I must have implied that he had grown impatient with the progress of manned space travel inside NASA. I kept his reply:[Vi]

Brad, I’m travelling and responding by Blackberry—maybe you’ll get this.

It’s way premature for Blue to say anything or comment on anything because we haven’t done anything worthy of comment. If you’re interested in this topic over the coming years, we’ll keep it in mind for when we have anything worth saying. Some of what you have below is right and some is wrong. I will comment on one thing because you touched a nerve, and I think it’s hurtful to the people of NASA. There should be a counterpoint.

NASA is a national treasure, and it’s total bull that anyone should be frustrated by NASA. The only reason I’m interested in space is because they inspired me when I was five years old. How many government agencies can you think of that inspire five year olds? The work NASA does is technically super-demanding and inherently risky, and they continue to do an outstanding job. The ONLY reason any of these small space companies have a chance of doing ANYTHING is because they get to stand on the shoulders of NASA’s accomplishments and ingenuity.

If you want a specific example: consider that all these companies use extremely sophisticated computer codes for analyzing things like structures, heat flows and aerodynamics, which codes were developed (over many years and meticulously tested against physical reality) by NASA!

Jeff[Vi]

There was a smattering of media coverage after the Newsweek article but Blue Origin continued to labor in secret. Bezos acquired his Texas ranch using anonymous corporate entities named after historic explorers (enterprises like James Cook LP and Coronado Ventures) to make generous offers to landowners around Van Horn, Texas, not far from where his helicopter had gone down.N12 By 2005 he owned 290,000 acres—an area about a third of the size of Rhode Island. He announced his intentions to build a spaceport by walking into the office of a local newspaper, the Van Horn Advocate, and giving an impromptu interview to its bewildered editor.

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. The group was “working to lower the cost of space flight to build a future where we humans can explore the solar system firsthand and in person,” he said. “Slow steady progress can erode any challenge over time.”

Progress may be slower than Bezos and his rocket scientists first imagined. In 2011, a Blue Origin test vehicle spun out of control at Mach 1.2 and an altitude of 45,000 feet, leaving a spectacular fireball in the sky that reminded Van Horn residents of the space shuttle Challenger disaster. “Not the outcome any of us wanted, but we’re signed up for this to be hard,” Bezos wrote in a blog post on the Blue Origin website.N13 A year after that, the company successfully tested the spaceship’s crew-capsule escape system. It has received two grants from NASA worth more than $25 million to develop technologies related to human spaceflight. Internet magnate Elon Musk, with SpaceX, and billionaire Richard Branson, the founder of an enterprise called Virgin Galactic, are pursuing some of the same goals.[Vi]

Bezos does not allow the public or media to tour his space facilities. In 2006, the company moved to larger headquarters in Kent, Washington, twenty miles south of Seattle. Visitors describe a facility studded with Bezos’s space collectibles, like props from Star Trek, rocket parts from various spaceships throughout history, and a real cosmonaut suit from the Soviet Union. Engineers zoom around the 280,000-square-foot facility on Segways. In the atrium of the building, there is a full-scale steampunk model of a Victorian-era spaceship as it might have been described in the fiction of Jules Verne, complete with a cockpit, brass controls, and nineteenth-century furnishings. Visitors can venture inside, sit on the velvet-covered seats, and imagine themselves as intrepid explorers in the time of Captain Nemo and Phileas Fogg. “To an imaginative child, it would look like an artifact,” says Bezos’s friend Danny Hillis.[Vi]

Like other great entrepreneurs, including Walt Disney, Henry Ford, and Steve Jobs, Bezos was turning imagination into reality, the fancies of his youth into actual physical things. “Space for Jeff is not a year 2000 or a year 2010 opportunity,” says Hillis. “It’s been a dream of humanity’s for centuries and it will continue to be one for centuries. Jeff sees himself and Blue Origin as part of that bigger story. It’s the next step in what Jules Verne was writing about and what the Apollo missions accomplished.”

Bezos did not hesitate to embrace the responsibilities that came with pursuing this passion. Even as Amazon struggled to maintain orbit, he collected new obligations and hired more employees for Blue Origin and then devised clever ways to divide his time among all his responsibilities in the most efficient manner possible. He gave Blue Origin a coat of arms and a Latin motto, Gradatim Ferociter, which translates to “Step by Step, Ferociously.” The phrase accurately captures Amazon’s guiding philosophy as well. Steady progress toward seemingly impossible goals will win the day. Setbacks are temporary. Naysayers are best ignored.

An interviewer once asked Bezos why he was motivated to accomplish so much, considering that he had already amassed an exceedingly large fortune. “I have realized about myself that I’m very motivated by people counting on me,” he answered. “I like to be counted on.[Vi]”N14

—ooOoo—

CHAPTER 6

Chaos Theory

Jeff Bezos liked to be counted on, but after Amazon reached profitability during the ebb of the dot-com bust in 2002, he discovered that he himself would need to count on someone. For while Amazon had quieted its most vociferous critics, Bezos needed help taming the growing chaos inside his company’s walls.

In every significant way, Amazon was becoming a larger and more complicated business. It had 2,100 employees at the end of 1998, and 9,000 at the end of 2004. And after it survived the worst effects of the dot-com crash, it resumed lurching into new categories, like sporting goods, apparel, and jewelry, and new countries, like Japan and China.

Size bred chaos. All companies hit this critical moment, when their internal structures, like a teenager’s old shoes, suddenly don’t fit anymore. But Amazon went through a severe form of this rite of passage. 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.[Vi]

In the distribution centers, chaos wasn’t an ethereal thing but tangible, reflected in frequent system outages that could shut down facilities for hours and in omnipresent piles of products that sat on the floor, ignored by workers. During the early years of frenzied growth, new product categories had been plopped onto Amazon’s logistics network with little preparation. Employees remember that when the home and kitchen category was introduced in the fall of 1999, kitchen knives would fly down the conveyor chutes, free of protective packaging. Amazon’s internal logistics software didn’t properly account for new categories, so the computers would ask workers whether a new toy entering the warehouse was a hardcover or a paperback book.

Amazon once tried to conquer chaos by synchronizing its employees’ efforts with broad unifying themes like Get Big Fast and Get Our House in Order. That had gotten everyone paddling in the same direction, but now the company had become too big for that kind of transparent sloganeering.

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. To guide his company through this transition, he created an unorthodox organizational structure with a peculiar name. And to quell the turmoil in the distribution centers, he started to rely on a young executive named Jeff Wilke, whose cerebral and occasionally impatient management style mirrored his own. “They fed off each other,” says Bruce Jones, a supply-chain vice president. “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.”[Vi]

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.”

Wilke was from suburban Pittsburgh, the son of an attorney; his parents divorced when he was twelve. He learned he had a talent for mathematics in the sixth grade when to his surprise he placed second in a regional math tournament. When he was fifteen and visiting his grandparents in Las Vegas, he was enthralled by a casino’s video-poker machine. He went home and replicated it on his first-generation personal computer, called the Timex Sinclair 1000 (internal memory: 2 KB). Wilke got straight As throughout school but his guidance counselor told him not to apply to Princeton University because no one from Keystone Oaks High School had ever been admitted to the Ivy League. He applied anyway and got in.[Vi]

Wilke graduated summa cum laude from Princeton in 1989, three years after Bezos. He earned an MBA and an MS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s engineering/MBA dual-degree program. Called Leaders for Manufacturing (now it’s Leaders for Global Operations), the program is a novel alliance of MIT’s business school, its engineering school, and partner companies, like Boeing, created to address emerging global competition. 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 began his career at Andersen Consulting and then joined AlliedSignal, the manufacturing giant, which was later acquired by Honeywell. He quickly climbed the ranks to vice president, reporting directly to CEO Larry Bossidy and running the company’s $200-million-a-year pharmaceutical business. In AlliedSignal’s headquarters in Morristown, New Jersey, 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.

Back in 1999, Scott Pitasky, an Amazon recruiter who later became the head of human resources at Microsoft, was put in charge of finding a replacement for Jimmy Wright. Pitasky had previously worked with Wilke at AlliedSignal, so he thought of his former colleague after concluding that Amazon needed someone who was smart enough to go toe to toe with Jeff Bezos, who delighted in questioning how everything was done.[Vi]

Pitasky tracked Wilke down on a business trip in Switzerland and pitched him on taking over the critical distribution network at Amazon. He told Wilke that he would have the chance to build a unique distribution network and define a nascent industry, an opportunity that simply didn’t exist at AlliedSignal. Working quickly, Pitasky convinced then COO Joe Galli, visiting his children at the time on the East Coast, to meet Wilke at a hotel restaurant near Dulles International Airport as soon as Wilke returned to the States.

All of thirty-two years old at the time, with a toothy smile and unfashionable eyeglasses, 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 supply-chain expert who relied on fact-based analysis and wanted to zero in and do the right thing.” Over dinner that night, and during a separate trip Galli made to visit Wilke and his wife, Liesl, at their home in New Jersey, the pair bonded. Wilke and Galli were both from Pittsburgh and had similar middle-class roots. Ever the salesman, Galli piqued Wilke’s interest in the massive logistics challenges Amazon faced. Wilke then visited Seattle to interview with Bezos and Joy Covey. He joined the company soon after as vice president and general manager of worldwide operations. After his last conversation with Larry Bossidy, who had just announced his retirement from AlliedSignal, the veteran CEO gave him a hug.[Vi]

Immediately upon moving to Seattle, Wilke set about filling the ranks of Amazon’s logistics division with scientists and engineers rather than retail-distribution veterans. 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. Wilke had attended Princeton with Allgor and had cribbed from his engineering problem sets. Allgor and his supply-chain algorithms team would become Amazon’s secret weapon, devising mathematical answers to questions such as where and when to stock particular products within Amazon’s distribution network and how to most efficiently combine various items in a customer’s order in a single box.N1

Wilke recognized that Amazon had a unique problem in its distribution arm: it was extremely difficult for the company to plan ahead from one shipment to the next. The company didn’t store and ship a predictable number or type of orders. A customer might order one book, a DVD, some tools—perhaps gift-wrapped, perhaps not—and that exact combination might never again be repeated. There were an infinite number of permutations. “We were essentially assembling and fulfilling customer orders. The factory physics were a lot closer to manufacturing and assembly than they were to retail,” Wilke says. So in one of his first moves, Wilke renamed Amazon’s shipping facilities to more accurately represent what was happening there. They were no longer to be called warehouses (the original name) or distribution centers (Jimmy Wright’s name); forever after, they would be known as fulfillment centers, or FCs.[Vi]

Before Wilke joined Amazon, the general managers of the fulfillment centers often improvised their strategies, talking on the telephone each morning and gauging which facility was fully operational or had excess capacity, then passing off orders to one another based on those snap judgments. Wilke’s algorithms seamlessly matched demand to the correct FC, leveling out backlogs and obviating the need for the morning phone call. He then applied the process-driven doctrine of Six Sigma that he’d learned at AlliedSignal and mixed it with Toyota’s lean manufacturing philosophy, which requires a company to rationalize every expense in terms of the value it creates for customers and allows workers (now called associates) to pull a red cord and stop all production on the floor if they find a defect (the manufacturing term for the system is andon).

In his first two years, Wilke and his team devised dozens of metrics, and he ordered his general managers to track them carefully, including how many shipments each FC received, how many orders were shipped out, and the per-unit cost of packing and shipping each item. He got rid of the older, sometimes frivolous names for mistakes—Amazon’s term to describe the delivery of the wrong product to a customer was switcheroo—and substituted more serious names. And he instilled some basic discipline in the FCs. “When I joined, I didn’t find time clocks,” Wilke says. “People came in when they felt like it in the morning and then went home when the work was done and the last truck was loaded. It wasn’t the kind of rigor I thought would scale.” Wilke promised Bezos that he would reliably generate cost savings each year just by reducing defects and increasing productivity.[Vi]

Wilke elevated the visibility of his FC managers within Amazon. He brought them to Seattle as often as possible and highlighted the urgency of their technical issues. During the holiday season, in what remains today his personal signature, Wilke wore a flannel shirt every day as a gesture of solidarity with his blue-collar comrades in the field. Wilke “recognized that a general manager was a difficult job and he made you feel you were in a lifelong club,” says Bert Wegner, who ran the Fernley FC in those years.

Wilke had another tool at his disposal: like Bezos, he had an occasionally volcanic temper. Back in the fall of 2000, the software systems in Amazon’s FCs were still incapable of precisely tracking inventory and shipments. So that holiday, Wilke’s second one at the company, during the annual race to Christmas that the company internally referred to as the big push, Wilke started a series of daily conference calls with his general managers in the United States and Europe. He told his general managers that on each call, he wanted to know the facts on the ground: how many orders had shipped, how many had not, whether there was a backlog, and, if so, why. As that holiday season ramped up, Wilke also demanded that his managers be prepared to tell him “what was in their yard”—the exact number and contents of the trucks waiting outside the FCs to unload products and ferry orders to the post office or UPS.[Vi]

One recurring trouble spot that year was the fulfillment center in McDonough, Georgia, a working-class city thirty miles south of Atlanta. In the heat of the tumultuous holiday season, McDonough—the source of the infamous Jigglypuff crisis of 1999—was regularly falling behind schedule. Its general manager, a once and future Walmart executive named Bob Duron, was already skating on thin ice when Wilke surveyed his managers on a conference call and asked them what they had in their yards. When he got to McDonough, Duron apparently hadn’t gotten the message and said: “Hold on a second, Jeff, I can see them outside my window.” Then he leaned back in his chair and started counting aloud on the phone. “I’ve got one, two, three, four…”

Wilke went off like a bomb. He was calling that day from his home office on Mercer Island, and he started screaming—an oral assault of such intensity and vulgarity that the handsets of the general managers on the call shrieked with feedback. And then, just as abruptly as the outburst began, there was quiet. Wilke had seemingly disappeared.

No one said anything for thirty seconds. Finally Arthur Valdez, the general manager in Campbellsville, said quietly, “I think he ate the phone.”

There were various interpretations of what actually happened. Some claimed that in his rage, Wilke had inadvertently yanked the phone cord out of the wall. Others speculated that he had thrown the receiver across the room in his fury. A decade later, over lunch at an Italian brasserie near Amazon’s offices, Wilke explains that he had actually still been on the line but was simply so angry that he could no longer speak. “We were just struggling to make it work on a whole host of different levels in McDonough,” he says. “We were struggling to recruit the right leaders, and struggling to get enough people to work there.”[Vi]

That spring, with Amazon sprinting toward its profitability goal, Wilke shut down McDonough and fired four hundred and fifty full-time employees. Closing the facility wouldn’t solve Amazon’s problems; in fact, the reduction in capacity put even more pressure on Amazon’s other fulfillment centers. The company was already running at capacity over the holidays and sales were growing at more than 20 percent a year. Now Amazon had no choice but to master the complexity of its own systems and get more out of the investments it had already made.

Wilke had burned a boat in mid-voyage, and for the Amazon armada, there was no turning back. Along the way, he was exhibiting a style—leadership by example, augmented with a healthy dose of impatience—that was positively Bezosian in character. Perhaps not coincidentally, Wilke was promoted to senior vice president a little over a year after joining Amazon. Jeff Bezos had found his chief ally in the war against chaos.

At a management offsite in the late 1990s, a team of well-intentioned junior executives stood up before the company’s top brass and gave a presentation on a problem indigenous to all large organizations: the difficulty of coordinating far-flung divisions. The junior executives recommended a variety of different techniques to foster cross-group dialogue and afterward seemed proud of their own ingenuity. Then Jeff Bezos, his face red and the blood vessel in his forehead pulsing, spoke up.[Vi]

“I understand what you’re saying, but you are completely wrong,” he said. “Communication is a sign of dysfunction. It means people aren’t working together in a close, organic way. We should be trying to figure out a way for teams to communicate less with each other, not more.”

That confrontation was widely remembered. “Jeff has these aha moments,” says David Risher. “All the blood in his entire body goes to his face. He’s incredibly passionate. If he was a table pounder, he would be pounding the table.”

At that meeting and in public speeches afterward, Bezos vowed to run Amazon with an emphasis on decentralization and independent decision-making. “A hierarchy isn’t responsive enough to change,” he said. “I’m still trying to get people to do occasionally what I ask. And if I was successful, maybe we wouldn’t have the right kind of company.”N2

Bezos’s counterintuitive point was that coordination among employees wasted time, and that the people closest to problems were usually in the best position to solve them. That would come to represent something akin to the conventional wisdom in the high-tech industry over the next decade. The companies that embraced this philosophy, like Google, Amazon, and, later, Facebook, were in part drawing lessons from theories about lean and agile software development. In the seminal high-tech book The Mythical Man-Month, IBM veteran and computer science professor Frederick Brooks argued that adding manpower to complex software projects actually delayed progress. One reason was that the time and money spent on communication increased in proportion to the number of people on a project.[Vi]

Bezos and other startup founders were reacting to lessons from previous technology giants. Microsoft took a top-down management approach with layers of middle managers, a system that ended up slowing decisions and stifling innovation. Looking at the muffled and unhappy hierarchy of the software giant across Lake Washington, Amazon executives saw a neon sign warning them exactly what to avoid.

The drive to cut costs also forced Bezos to eliminate any emerging layers of middle management from his company. After the stock market crash in 2000, Amazon went through two rounds of layoffs. But Bezos didn’t want to stop recruiting altogether; he just wanted to be more efficient. So he framed the kind of employees he wanted in simple terms. All new hires had to directly improve the outcome of the company. He wanted doers—engineers, developers, perhaps merchandise buyers, but not managers. “We didn’t want to be a monolithic army of program managers, à la Microsoft. We wanted independent teams to be entrepreneurial,” says Neil Roseman. Or, as Roseman also put it: “Autonomous working units are good. Things to manage working units are bad.”

But as was often the case, no one could anticipate just how far Bezos would venture into these organizational theories in his quest to distill them down to their core ideas. In early 2002, as part of a new personal ritual, he took time after the holidays to think and read. (In this respect, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, who also took such annual think weeks, served as a positive example.) Returning to the company after a few weeks, Bezos presented his next big idea to the S Team in the basement of his Medina, Washington, home.[Vi]

The entire company, he said, would restructure itself around what he called “two-pizza teams.” Employees would be organized into autonomous groups of fewer than ten people—small enough that, when working late, the team members could be fed with two pizza pies. These teams would be independently set loose on Amazon’s biggest problems. They would likely compete with one another for resources and sometimes duplicate their efforts, replicating the Darwinian realities of surviving in nature. Freed from the constraints of intracompany communication, Bezos hoped, these loosely coupled teams could move faster and get features to customers quicker.

There were some head-scratching aspects to Bezos’s two-pizza-team concept. Each group was required to propose its own “fitness function”—a linear equation that it could use to measure its own impact without ambiguity. For example, a two-pizza team in charge of sending advertising e-mails to customers might choose for its fitness function the rate at which these messages were opened multiplied by the average order size those e-mails generated. A group writing software code for the fulfillment centers might home in on decreasing the cost of shipping each type of product and reducing the time that elapsed between a customer’s making a purchase and the item leaving the FC in a truck. Bezos wanted to personally approve each equation and track the results over time. It would be his way of guiding a team’s evolution.[Vi]

Bezos was applying a kind of chaos theory to management, acknowledging the complexity of his organization by breaking it down to its most basic parts in the hopes that surprising results might emerge. That, at least, was the high-minded goal; the end result was somewhat disappointing. The two-pizza-team concept took root first in engineering, where it was backed by Rick Dalzell, and over the course of several years, it was somewhat inconsistently applied through the rest of the company. There was just no reason to organize some departments, such as legal and finance, in this way.

The idea of fitness functions in particular appeared to clash with some fundamental aspects of human nature—it’s uncomfortable to have to set the framework for your own evaluation when you might be judged harshly by the end result. Asking groups to define their own fitness functions was a little like asking a condemned man to decide how he’d like to be executed. Teams ended up spending too much time worrying over their formulas and making them ever more complex and abstract. “Being a two-pizza team was not exactly liberating,” says Kim Rachmeler. “It was actually kind of a pain in the ass. It did not help you get your job done and consequently the vast majority of engineers and teams flipped the bit on it.”[Vi]

A year into Jeff Wilke’s tenure at Amazon, he called a former teacher of his, Stephen Graves, a professor of management science at MIT, and asked for help. Amazon operated an e-commerce distribution network of unrivaled scale but the company was still struggling to run it efficiently. Its seven fulfillment centers around the world were expensive, their output inconsistent. Bezos wanted the Amazon website to be able to tell customers precisely when their packages would be delivered. For example, a college student ordering a crucial book for a final exam should know that the book would be delivered the following Monday. But the fulfillment centers were not yet reliable enough to make that kind of specific prediction.

Wilke asked Graves if he might meet with Wilke and his colleagues later that month to take a fresh look at their problems. Bezos and Wilke were asking themselves a fundamental question that seems surprising today: Should Amazon even be in the business of storing and distributing its products? The alternative was to shift to the model used by rivals like Buy.com, which took orders online but had products drop-shipped from manufacturers and distributors like Ingram.[Vi]

That St. Patrick’s Day, some of Amazon’s biggest brains descended on a drab meeting room at the Fernley, Nevada, fulfillment center. Jeff Bezos and Brewster Kahle, a supercomputer engineer and founder of Alexa Internet, a data-mining company Amazon had acquired, made the two-hour flight from Seattle on Bezos’s newly purchased private plane, a Dassault Falcon 900 EX. Stephen Graves flew from Massachusetts to Reno and then drove the dreary thirty-four miles through the desert to Fernley. A few other Amazon engineers were there, as was the facility’s senior manager at the time, Bert Wegner. In the morning, the group toured the fulfillment center and listened to a presentation by one of the company’s primary contractors, who listed the benefits of additional equipment and software that he could sell them, reflecting the same traditional thinking about distribution that wasn’t working in the first place. They then dismissed the surprised contractor for the day and spent the afternoon filling up whiteboards and tackling the question of how everything at the FC might be improved. For lunch, they brought in McDonald’s and snacked from the building’s vending machines.

For Wegner, the questions being asked that day carried personal resonance. “We had a key decision to make,” he says. “Was distribution a commodity or was it a core competency? If it’s a commodity, why invest in it? And when we grow, do we continue to do it on our own or do we outsource it?” If Amazon chose to outsource it, Wegner might be out of a job. “I basically saw my own career flash before my eyes,” he says.[Vi]

Amazon’s problem boiled down to something called, in the esoteric lexicon of manufacturing, batches. The equipment in Amazon’s FCs had originally been acquired by Jimmy Wright, and, like the system in Walmart’s distribution centers, was designed by its manufacturers to operate in waves—moving from minimum capacity to maximum and then back again. At the start of a wave, a group of workers called pickers fanned out across the stacks of products, each in his or her own zone, to retrieve the items ordered by customers. At the time, Amazon used the common pick-to-light system. Various lights on the aisles and on individual shelves guided pickers to the right products, which they would then deposit into their totes—a cart of the picks from that wave. They then delivered their totes to conveyor belts that fed into the giant sorting machines, which rearranged products into customer orders and sent them off on a new set of conveyor belts to be packed and shipped.

The software required pickers to work individually, but, naturally, some took longer than others, which led to problems. For example, if ninety-nine pickers completed their batches within forty-five minutes but the one hundredth picker took an additional half an hour, those ninety-nine pickers had to sit idly and wait. Only when that final tote cleared the chute did the system come fully alive again, with a thunderous roar that rolled through the fulfillment center and indicated that it was again ready to start operating at peak capacity.[Vi]

Everything in the fulfillment center happened in this episodic manner. For a company trying to maximize its capacity during the big push each holiday season, that was a huge problem. Wilke subscribed to the principles laid out in a seminal book about constraints in manufacturing, Eliyahu M. Goldratt’s The Goal, published in 1984. The book, cloaked in the guise of an entertaining novel, instructs manufacturers to focus on maximizing the efficiency of their biggest bottlenecks. For Amazon, that was the Crisplant sorting machines, where the products all ended up, but picking in batches limited how fast the sorters could be fed. As a result, the machines were operating at full capacity only during the brief few minutes at the peak of the batch. Wilke’s group had experimented with trying to run overlapping waves, but that tended to overload the Crisplant sorters and, in the dramatic terminology of the general managers, “blow up the building.” It would take hours to clean up that mess and get everything back on track.

In the meeting that day at Fernley, the executives and engineers questioned the prevailing orthodoxies of retail distribution. In the late afternoon, everyone headed back onto the facility floor and watched orders move haltingly through the facility. “I didn’t know Jeff Bezos but I just remember being blown away by the fact that he was there with his sleeves rolled up, climbing around the conveyors with all of us,” says Stephen Graves, the MIT professor. “We were thinking critically and throwing around some crazy ideas of how we can do this better.”[Vi]

At the end of the day, Bezos, Wilke, and their colleagues reached a conclusion: the equipment and software from third-party vendors simply wasn’t designed for the task at hand. To escape from batches and move toward a continuous and predictable flow of orders through the facility, Amazon would have to rewrite all the software code. Instead of exiting the business of distribution, they had to reinvest in it.

Over the next few years, “one by one, we unplugged our vendors’ modems and we watched as their jaws hit the floor,” says Wegner. “They couldn’t believe we were engineering our own solutions.” When Amazon later opened small facilities in places like Seattle and Las Vegas to handle easily packable items and larger fulfillment centers in Indianapolis, Phoenix, and elsewhere, it would go even further, dispensing with the pick-to-light systems and big Crisplant sorting machines altogether and instead employing a less automated approach that favored invisible algorithms. Employees would bring their totes from the shelves right to the packing stations, their movements carefully coordinated by software. Slowly, Amazon would vanquish wave-based picking, elicit more productivity from its workers, and improve the accuracy and reliability of its fulfillment centers.[Vi]

Wilke’s gradual success in making the logistics network more efficient would offer Amazon innumerable advantages in the years ahead. Tightly controlling distribution allowed the company to make specific promises to customers on when they could expect their purchases to arrive. Amazon’s operating all of its own technology, from the supply chain to the website, allowed Russell Allgor and his engineers to create algorithms that modeled countless scenarios for each order so systems could pick the one that would yield the quickest and cheapest delivery. Millions of those decisions could be made every hour, helping Amazon reduce its costs—and thus lower prices and increase volume of sales. The challenge was getting good enough to do this well.

“No matter how hard it is, the consolidation of products within fulfillment centers pays for the inventory and for pieces of the overhead,” says Jeff Wilke, who claims that he never worried that Bezos would abandon the FC model at the Fernley meeting. “The principles and math were on our side, and I realized early on that this was a company where you can carry the day when you have the principles and math on your side, and you are patient and tenacious.”[Vi]

Whenever Jeff Bezos roamed a fulfillment center or his own Seattle headquarters, he looked for defects—flaws in the company’s systems or even its corporate culture. On an otherwise regular weekday morning in 2003, for example, Bezos walked into an Amazon conference room and was taken aback. Mounted on the wall, in a corner of the room, was a newly installed television meant for video presentations to employees. A TV in a conference room did not by itself seem controversial, yet Bezos was not pleased.

The installations, which he had not known about or authorized, represented to him both a clumsy attempt at interoffice communication and an extravagant expenditure. “How can anything good be communicated in this way,” he complained.

Bezos had all the new televisions in Amazon’s conference rooms immediately removed. But according to Matt Williams, a longtime Amazon manager, Bezos deliberately kept the metal mounts hanging in the conference rooms for many years, even some that were so low on the wall that employees were likely to stand up and hit them. Like a warlord leaving the decapitated heads of his enemies on stakes outside his village walls, he was using the mounts as a symbol, and as an admonition to employees about how not to behave.

The television episode was the foundation of another official award at Amazon, this one presented to an employee who identified an activity that was bureaucratic and wasteful. The suddenly superfluous televisions were given as the prize. When the supply ran out, that commendation morphed into the Door-Desk award, given to an employee who came up with “a well-built idea that helps us to deliver lower prices to customers”—the prize was a door-desk ornament. Bezos was once again looking for ways to reinforce his values within the company.[Vi]

Around the same time he was ripping televisions off the walls, Bezos made two significant changes to the corporate culture. As part of his ongoing quest for a better allocation of his own time, he decreed that he would no longer have one-on-one meetings with his subordinates. These meetings tended to be filled with trivial updates and political distractions, rather than problem solving and brainstorming. Even today, Bezos rarely meets alone with an individual colleague.

The other change was also peculiar and perhaps unique in corporate history. Up until that time, Amazon employees had been using Microsoft’s PowerPoint and Excel spreadsheet software to present their ideas in meetings. Bezos believed that method concealed lazy thinking. “PowerPoint is a very imprecise communication mechanism,” says Jeff Holden, Bezos’s former D. E. Shaw colleague, who by that point had joined the S Team. “It is fantastically easy to hide between bullet points. You are never forced to express your thoughts completely.”

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. “I don’t want this place to become a country club,” he was fond of saying as he pushed employees harder. “What we do is hard. This is not where people go to retire.”[Vi]

There was a period of grumbling adjustment. Meetings no longer started with someone standing up and commanding the floor as they had previously at Amazon and everywhere else throughout the corporate land. Instead, the narratives were passed out and everyone sat quietly reading the document for fifteen minutes—or longer. At the beginning, there was no page limit, an omission that Diego Piacentini recalled as “painful” and that led to several weeks of employees churning out papers as long as sixty pages. Quickly there was a supplemental decree: a six-page limit on narratives, with additional room for footnotes.

Not everyone embraced the new format. Many employees felt the system was rigged to reward good writers but not necessarily efficient operators or innovative thinkers. Engineers in particular were unhappy to suddenly find themselves crafting essays as if they had been hurled back through time into ninth-grade English. “Putting everything into a narrative ended up sort of being like describing a spreadsheet,” says Lyn Blake, a vice president in charge of the company’s relationships with manufacturers at the time. Blake herself suspected the whole thing was a phase. (It wasn’t.)

Bezos refined the formula even further. 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.[Vi]

Steve Jobs was known for the clarity of his insights about what customers wanted, but he was also known for his volatility with coworkers. Apple’s founder reportedly fired employees in the elevator and screamed at underperforming executives. Perhaps there is something endemic in the fast-paced technology business that causes this behavior, because such intensity is not exactly rare among its CEOs. Bill Gates used to throw epic tantrums. Steve Ballmer, his successor at Microsoft, had a propensity for throwing chairs. Andy Grove, the longtime CEO of Intel, was known to be so harsh and intimidating that a subordinate once fainted during a performance review.

Jeff Bezos fit comfortably into this mold. His manic drive and boldness trumped other conventional leadership ideals, such as building consensus and promoting civility. While he was charming and capable of great humor in public, in private, Bezos could bite an employee’s head right off.

Bezos was prone to melodramatic temper tantrums that some Amazon employees called, privately, nutters. A colleague failing to meet Bezos’s exacting standards would predictably set off a nutter. If an employee did not have the right answers, or tried to bluff the right answer, or took credit for someone else’s work, or exhibited a whiff of internal politics, or showed any kind of uncertainty or frailty in the heat of battle, the vessel in Bezos’s forehead popped out and his filter fell away. He was capable of both hyperbole and cruelty in these moments, and over the years he delivered some devastating rebukes to employees. Among his greatest hits, collected and relayed by Amazon veterans:[Vi]

“If that’s our plan, I don’t like our plan.”

“I’m sorry, did I take my stupid pills today?”

“Do I need to go down and get the certificate that says I’m CEO of the company to get you to stop challenging me on this?”

“Are you trying to take credit for something you had nothing to do with?”

“Are you lazy or just incompetent?”

“I trust you to run world-class operations and this is another example of how you are letting me down.”

“If I hear that idea again, I’m gonna have to kill myself.”

“Does it surprise you that you don’t know the answer to that question?”

“Why are you ruining my life?”

[After someone presented a proposal.] “We need to apply some human intelligence to this problem.”

[After reviewing the annual plan from the supply-chain team.] “I guess supply chain isn’t doing anything interesting next year.”

[After reading a narrative.] “This document was clearly written by the B team. Can someone get me the A team document? I don’t want to waste my time with the B team document.”

Some Amazon employees currently advance the theory that Bezos, like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Larry Ellison, lacks a certain degree of empathy and that as a result he treats workers like expendable resources without taking into account their contributions to the company. That in turn allows him to coldly allocate capital and manpower and make hyperrational business decisions while another executive might let emotion and personal relationships intrude. But they also acknowledge that Bezos is primarily consumed with improving the company’s performance and customer service, and that personnel issues are secondary. “This is not somebody who takes pleasure at tearing someone a new asshole. He is not that kind of person,” says Kim Rachmeler. “Jeff doesn’t tolerate stupidity, even accidental stupidity.”[Vi]

Right or wrong, Bezos’s behavior was often easier to accept because he was so frequently on target with his criticisms, to the amazement and often irritation of employees. Bruce Jones, the former Amazon vice president, describes leading a five-engineer team working to create algorithms to optimize pickers’ movements in the fulfillment centers while the company was trying to solve the problem of batches. The group spent nine months on the task, then presented their work to Bezos and the S Team. “We had beautiful documents and everyone was really prepared,” Jones says. Bezos read the paper, said, “You’re all wrong,” stood up, and started writing on the whiteboard.

“He had no background in control theory, no background in operating systems,” Jones says. “He only had minimum experience in the distribution centers and never spent weeks and months out on the line.” But Bezos laid out his argument on the whiteboard and “every stinking thing he put down was correct and true,” Jones says. “It would be easier to stomach if we could prove he was wrong but we couldn’t. That was a typical interaction with Jeff. He had this unbelievable ability to be incredibly intelligent about things he had nothing to do with, and he was totally ruthless about communicating it.”

In 2002 Amazon changed the way it accounted for inventory, from a system called last-in first-out, or LIFO, to one called first-in first-out, or FIFO. The change allowed Amazon to better distinguish between its products and the products that were owned and stored in the FCs by partners like Toys “R” Us and Target.[Vi]

Jones’s supply-chain team was in charge of this complicated effort, and its software, ridden by bugs, created a few difficult days during which Amazon’s systems were unable to formally recognize any revenue. On the third day, Jones was updating the S Team on the transition when Bezos tore into him. “He called me a ‘complete fucking idiot’ and said he had no idea why he hired idiots like me at the company, and said, ‘I need you to clean up your organization,’ ” Jones recalls, years later. “It was brutal. I almost quit. I was a resource of his that failed. An hour later he would have been the same guy as always and it would have been different. He can compartmentalize like no one I’ve ever seen.”

As Jones left the FIFO meeting, Jeff Wilke’s administrative assistant approached him with a telephone. Wilke was calling from vacation in Arizona, where he’d already heard about the confrontation. “He said, ‘Bruce, I want you to know I’m behind you one hundred percent. I’m completely confident in you. If you need anything, I’m on a golf course, and I’ll do whatever I can to help.’ ”

Jeff Wilke wasn’t always the softer counterbalance to Bezos. The pair visited each fulfillment center every fall in an annual ritual they called the whistle-stop tour. They spent a week on the road, one day in each FC, and used their commanding presence to focus attention on eliminating errors and improving processes. General managers, their palms sweaty and their pulses elevated, would present to the pair, laying out their emergency scenarios and the ways in which they had once again managed to wrangle thousands of temporary workers for the holidays. Wilke and Bezos dug into the details, asking their inhumanly prescient questions. It was both inspiring and terrifying. “Those guys could be brutal,” says Mark Mastandrea. “You had to be comfortable saying, ‘I don’t know; I’ll get back to you in a couple of hours,’ and then doing it. You could not ever bullshit or make stuff up. That would be the end.”[Vi]

T. E. Mullane worked in Amazon’s logistics network for years, helping to open and manage new fulfillment centers. He opened a new FC in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, and hosted Wilke on his first visit to the facility. Wilke, Mullane says, started the tour by quietly walking the inside perimeter of the building. In a corner of the building near the inbound docks, he encountered a disorganized pile of nonconveyable products—too heavy to move on the conveyor belts. For one reason or another, workers had not been able to match the merchandise with order slips and so had left them in a heap.

After the walk, Wilke looked at Mullane and initiated a typical exchange. “T.E., do you know why I walked the perimeter? Tell me why.”

“To look for errors,” Mullane said.

“So why do the operators leave piles?”

“Because the process isn’t correct right now. It’s not precise and predictable.”

“Right. So you are going to take care of this?”

“Yes.”

The whistle-stop visits usually occurred midway through the fourth quarter of the year, just as the holiday season was ramping up but before the big shopping days known as Black Friday and Cyber Monday. During the big push itself, Wilke would return to Seattle but stay in touch with subordinates via his grueling daily conference calls.[Vi]

The pressure during the holidays could get so intense that Wilke instituted a new ritual as a form of therapeutic release: primal screams. When a logistics executive or his team accomplished something significant, Wilke would allow the person or even the entire group to lean back, close their eyes, and yell into the phone at the tops of their lungs. “It was clearly a great release but the first time it almost blew my phone speaker,” Wilke says.

After the big push was over and the last box had shipped, typically on December 23, “you got to enjoy Christmas Day more than anybody else on the planet, because you had worked so hard to get there,” says Bert Wegner. Then planning would begin all over again.

In 2002, Jeff Wilke led the first significant effort to use Amazon’s now impressive size to exact concessions from a major business partner: the United Parcel Service. That year, Amazon’s contract with UPS was up for renewal, and the package-delivery giant, embroiled in a separate standoff with the Teamsters Union, did not appear to be in the mood to grant more-favorable terms to the online upstart. Amazon wasn’t using Federal Express in any significant way at the time, and the primary alternative to UPS, the federally managed U.S. Postal Service, was not permitted to negotiate its rates. Amazon, it seemed, had no leverage.[Vi]

But early that year, sensing an opportunity, Wilke approached Bruce Jones in Operations and asked him to begin cultivating FedEx. Over the course of six months, Jones and a team traveled frequently to FedEx’s headquarters in Memphis, integrating their systems and quietly ratcheting up the volume of packages. Amazon also increased its shipment injections with the U.S. Postal Service: company employees drove Amazon’s trucks to the post office and inserted packages directly into the flow of federal mail.

Wilke started his negotiations with UPS that summer in Louisville, ahead of a September 1 contract deadline. When UPS was predictably obstinate about deviating from its standard rate card, Wilke threatened to walk. UPS officials thought he was bluffing. Wilke called Jones in Seattle and said, “Bruce, turn them off.”

“In twelve hours, they went from millions of pieces [from Amazon] a day to a couple a day,” says Jones, who flew to Fernley to watch the fallout. The standoff lasted seventy-two hours and went unnoticed by customers and other outsiders. In Fernley, UPS representatives told Jones they knew Amazon couldn’t keep it up and predicted that FedEx would be overwhelmed. They were likely right. But before it came to that, UPS execs caved and gave Amazon discounted rates.

“Yes, we could have operated mostly without them,” Wilke says. “But it would have been very hard, very painful. They knew that. I didn’t want to leave them, I just wanted a fair price.” In the end, he got one, bringing home one of Amazon’s first bulk discounts and teaching the company an enduring lesson about the power of scale and the reality of Darwinian survival in the world of big business.[Vi]

In 2003, Jeff Bezos came up with yet another way to frame his concept of Amazon. This time, it was for a group of buyers who were leading the company’s charge into the new hard-lines categories, a group of products that included hardware, sporting goods, and electronics. Amazon, Bezos said, was the unstore.

At the time, Bezos had selected jewelry as the company’s next big opportunity. It was a tempting target: the products were small, the prices were high, and shipping was relatively cheap. He tapped retail managers Eric Broussard and Randy Miller to lead the effort. As usual, the executives Bezos chose to head the product’s sales had no prior experience selling that product.

Though it seemed alluring, selling jewelry posed some challenges. Expensive baubles were difficult to display in full detail online; also, the products were valuable and tempting to pilfering workers in the company’s fulfillment centers. Another issue arose with pricing: The jewelry industry had a simplistic pricing model with generous margins. Retail markup was significant; stores doubled the wholesale cost (a practice known as keystone pricing) or even tripled it (known as triple-keystone pricing). Jewelry manufacturers and retailers clung tightly to that custom, which didn’t fit well with Bezos’s newly adamant resolve to offer the lowest prices anywhere.[Vi]

The Amazon jewelry executives decided on an approach similar to the one the company had recently used for its cautious first foray into apparel. 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.”

Bezos seemed amenable to that plan, at least at first. And then one day, in a meeting with the S Team and the hard-lines group, something set him off. They were discussing the margins in the jewelry business, and one of Randy Miller’s colleagues mentioned how the jewelry industry conducted business in the “traditional way.” “You’re not thinking about this right,” Bezos said, and he excused himself to get something from his office. He was gone a few minutes, then returned with a stack of photocopied documents and handed a page to everyone in the meeting. It had only one paragraph, about ten sentences long. It began with the words We are the “Unstore.”

The document, as Miller and other executives who were there remember it, defined how Bezos saw his own company—and explains why, even years later, so many businesses are unsettled by Amazon’s entrance into their markets.[Vi]

Being an unstore meant, in Bezos’s view, that Amazon was not bound by the traditional rules of retail. It had limitless shelf space and personalized itself for every customer. It allowed negative reviews in addition to positive ones, and it placed used products directly next to new ones so that customers could make informed choices. In Bezos’s eyes, Amazon offered both everyday low prices and great customer service. It was Walmart and Nordstrom’s.

Being an unstore also meant that Amazon had to concern itself only with what was best for the customer. The conventions of the jewelry business allowed routine 100 or 200 percent markups, but, well, that just didn’t apply to Amazon.

In that meeting, Bezos decreed that Amazon was not in retail, and therefore did not have to kowtow to retail. He suggested that Amazon could ignore the conventions of pricing in the jewelry business and envisioned customers buying a bracelet on the site for $1,200 and then going to get an appraisal and finding out from the local jeweler that the item was actually worth $2,000. “I know you’re retailers and I hired you because you are retailers,” Bezos said. “But I want you to understand that from this day forward, you are not bound by the old rules.”

Amazon started selling jewelry in the spring of 2004; two-thirds of the selection came from its Marketplace and the other third came directly from Amazon. For months, Bezos was consumed by the design of the elegant wooden jewelry box that Amazon would use. “The box was everything to him,” says Randy Miller. “He wanted it to be as iconic as Tiffany’s.”[Vi]

Amazon contracted with celebrity socialite Paris Hilton to sell her jewelry designs exclusively on the site, and the company spent considerable resources creating a tool to let customers design their own rings on the website. Amazon’s new staff jewelers would then craft the rings over an open flame on the mezzanine of the Lexington, Kentucky, fulfillment center. Additionally, Amazon introduced a feature called Diamond Search that let customers look for individual stones based on carat, shape, and color. And in a draconian tactic that further exposed his competitive streak, Bezos instructed Amazon’s communication staff to time public announcements in the jewelry category to coincide with the quarterly reports of Seattle-based rival Blue Nile, the leader in online jewelry sales.

Selling jewelry became a modestly profitable business for Amazon, according to employees who worked on the category, but the seeds clearly did not grow into the trees that Bezos had envisioned. Although Amazon’s watch business became robust, customers still wanted to go into actual stores to pick out engagement rings. After a while, the ring-designing tool and Diamond Search disappeared from the site. Amazon’s attention wandered to new battlefields, such as shoes and apparel. Employees who passed through jewelry later described a grueling experience, with shifting goals, rotating bosses, and endless disputes with suppliers who disliked Amazon’s pricing. Being an unstore was evidently not as easy as Bezos had thought. Amazon executives in the hard-lines business during these years had a running joke: “Why do you think they call them hard?”[Vi]

***

As the hard-lines teams were bringing Amazon into new categories, with varying degrees of success, Jeff Wilke and his group had nearly completed their job morphing Amazon’s fulfillment process from a network of haphazardly constructed facilities into something that could more accurately be considered a system of polynomial equations. A customer might place an order for a half a dozen products, and the company’s software would quickly examine factors like the address of the customer, the location of the merchandise in the FCs, and the cutoff times for shipping at the various facilities around the country. Then it would take all those variables and calculate both the fastest and the least expensive way to ship the items.

The complete software rewrite of the logistics network was having its desired effect. Cost per unit (the overall expense of fulfilling the order of a particular item) fell, while ship times (how quickly merchandise ordered on the website was loaded onto a truck) shortened. A year after the Fernley meeting, the click-to-ship time for most items in the company’s FCs was as minimal as four hours, down from the three days it had taken when Wilke first started at the company. The standard for the rest of the e-commerce industry at the time was twelve hours.

Amazon’s ability to ship products efficiently and offer precise delivery times to customers gave the company a competitive edge over its rivals, particularly eBay, which avoided this part of the business altogether. Fulfillment was a lever that Bezos had invested in, and he started using it to guide strategy.[Vi]

By 2002, the company was offering customers the option, for an extra fee, of overnight, two-day, or three-day shipping. Wilke’s team called these fast-track or fast-lane orders and built a separate process around them. On the floor of the FCs, those items were accelerated through the Crisplant sorters and were the first to be delivered to the packers and the trucks waiting in the yard. The company refined this ability gradually, pushing the cutoff time for next-day delivery to forty-five minutes before the last trucks left its fulfillment centers. Expedited shipping was almost prohibitively expensive, for customers and for Amazon, but the website’s having the capability was to pay huge strategic dividends.

In 2004, an Amazon engineer named Charlie Ward used an employee-suggestion program called the Idea Tool to make a proposal. Super Saver Shipping, he reasoned, catered to price-conscious customers whose needs were not time sensitive—they were like the airline travelers who paid a lower rate because they stayed at their destinations over a Saturday night. Their orders got placed on the trucks whenever there was room for them, reducing the overall shipping cost. Why not create a service for the opposite type of customer, Ward suggested, a speedy shipping club for consumers whose needs were time sensitive and who weren’t price conscious? He suggested that it could work like a music club, with a monthly charge.[Vi]

That fall, employees showed enough enthusiasm for Ward’s proposal that it came to the attention of Bezos. Immediately enchanted by the idea, Bezos asked a group that included Vijay Ravindran, the director of Amazon’s ordering systems, to meet him on a Saturday in the boathouse behind his home in Medina. Bezos conveyed a sense of urgency as he began the meeting, saying that the shipping club was now top priority. “This is a big idea,” he told the gathered engineers. He asked Ravindran and Jeff Holden to put together a SWAT team of a dozen of their best people and told them he wanted the program ready by the next earnings announcement, in February—just weeks away.

Bezos met with the group, which included Charlie Ward and Dorothy Nicholls, who would later go on to become a longtime Kindle executive, weekly over the next two months. They devised the two-day shipping offer, exploiting the ability of Wilke’s group to accelerate the handling of individual items in its fulfillment centers. The team proposed several names for the new feature, including Super Saver Platinum, which Bezos rejected because he didn’t want people to see the service as a money-saving program. Bing Gordon, Amazon board member and partner at Kleiner Perkins, claims he came up with the name Prime, though some members of the team believe the name was chosen because fast-track pallets were in prime positions in fulfillment centers. Focus groups were brought into Amazon’s offices to test the Prime sign-up process. The volunteers found the process confusing, so Holden proposed using a large orange button with the words Create my Prime account right inside the button.[Vi]

Selecting the fee for the service was a challenge; there were no clear financial models because no one knew how many customers would join or how joining would affect their purchasing habits. The group considered several prices, including $49 and $99. Bezos decided on $79 per year, saying it needed to be large enough to matter to consumers but small enough that they would be willing to try it out. “It was never about the seventy-nine dollars. It was really about changing people’s mentality so they wouldn’t shop anywhere else,” says Ravindran, who later became chief digital officer for the Washington Post.

Bezos was adamant about the February launch date. When the Prime team reported that they needed more time, Bezos delayed the earnings announcement by a week. The team members finished mapping out the details for the service at three o’clock in the morning on the day of the deadline. It was a complex undertaking, but it was achievable because so many of the elements of the program already existed. Wilke’s organization had created a system for the expedited picking, packing, and shipping of prioritized items within the FCs. The company’s European operation had built a subscription-membership tool for its nascent DVD-by-mail business (a Netflix clone) in Germany and the United Kingdom, and that service, though rudimentary, was quickly improved and pushed into production in the United States to support Prime. “It was almost like Prime was already there, and we were putting the finishing touches on it,” Holden says.[Vi]

In many ways, the introduction of Amazon Prime was an act of faith. The company had little concrete idea how the program would affect orders or customers’ likelihood to shop in other categories beyond media. If each expedited shipment cost the company $8, and if a shipping-club member placed twenty orders a year, it would cost the company $160 in shipping, far above the $79 fee. The service was expensive to run, and there was no clear way to break even. “We made this decision even though every single financial analysis said we were completely crazy to give two-day shipping for free,” says Diego Piacentini.

But Bezos was going on gut and experience. He knew that Super Saver Shipping had changed customers’ behavior, motivating them to place bigger orders and shop in new categories. He also knew from 1-Click ordering that when friction was removed from online shopping, customers spent more. That accelerated the company’s fabled flywheel—the virtuous cycle. When customers spent more, Amazon’s volumes increased, so it could lower shipping costs and negotiate new deals with vendors. That saved the company money, which would help pay for Prime and lead back to lower prices.[Vi]

Prime would eventually justify its existence. The service turned customers into Amazon addicts who gorged on the almost instant gratification of having purchases reliably appear two days after they ordered them. Signing up for Amazon Prime, Jason Kilar said at the time, “was like going from a dial-up to a broadband Internet connection.” The shipping club also keyed off a faintly irrational human impulse to maximize the benefits of a membership club one has already joined. With the punitive cost of expedited shipping, Amazon lost money on Prime membership, at first. But gradually Wilke’s organization got better at combining multiple items from a customer’s order into a single box, which saved money and helped drive down Amazon’s transportation costs by double-digit percentages each year.

Prime wouldn’t reveal itself to the world as a huge success for another few years, and originally it was unpopular inside Amazon. One technology executive griped to Vijay Ravindran that he feared Bezos would now believe that he could commandeer engineers and ram his favorite projects through the system. Other execs were wary because of Prime’s estimated losses. Almost alone, Bezos believed fervently in Prime, closely tracking sign-ups each day and intervening every time the retail group dropped promotions for the shipping club from the home page.

But even back in February of 2005, Bezos suspected he had a winner. At Amazon’s all-hands meeting that month at the usual location, the classic Moore Theater on Second Avenue, Vijay Ravindran presented Prime to the company, and afterward Bezos led everyone in a round of applause.[Vi]

Prime opened up new doors, and the next year Amazon introduced a service called Fulfillment by Amazon, or FBA. The program allowed other merchants to have their products stored and shipped from Amazon’s fulfillment centers. As an added benefit, their products qualified for two-day shipping for Prime members, exposing the sellers to Amazon’s most active customers. For Wilke’s logistics group, it was a proud moment. “That is when it really hit home,” says Bert Wegner. “We had built such a good service that people were willing to pay us to use it.”

So when Bezos pulled Wilke out of an operating review in late 2006, Wilke wasn’t expecting to hear that that holiday season would be his last in the world of logistics. Bezos wanted Wilke to take over the entire North American retail division, and Wilke was charged with finding his own replacement. Wilke thought that Amazon’s progress in its FCs had plateaued, so instead of promoting from within the ranks of Amazon’s logistics executives, all of them molded, as he was, by the dogma of Six Sigma, Wilke went looking for someone with a fresh approach and additional international experience.

The search led him to Marc Onetto, a former General Electric executive with a thick French accent and a gift for animated storytelling. Under Onetto’s watch, engineers once again rewrote elements of Amazon’s logistics software and devised a computer system, called Mechanical Sensei, that simulated all the orders coursing through Amazon’s fulfillment centers and predicted where new FCs would most productively be located. Onetto also shifted Amazon’s focus toward lean manufacturing, another management philosophy that emanated from Toyota and was directed at eliminating waste and making practical changes on the shop floor. Japanese consultants occasionally came to work with Amazon, and they were so unimpressed and derogatory that Amazon employees gave them a nickname: the insultants.[Vi]

Though Amazon was intensely focused on its software and systems, there was another key element of its distribution system—the low-wage laborers who actually worked in it. As Amazon grew throughout the decade, it hired tens of thousands of temporary employees each holiday season and usually kept on about 10 to 15 percent of them permanently. These generally low-skilled workers, toiling for ten to twelve dollars an hour in places where there were few other good jobs, could find Amazon to be a somewhat cruel master. Theft was a constant problem, as the FCs were stocked with easily concealable goodies like DVDs and jewelry, so the company outfitted all of its FCs with metal detectors and security cameras and eventually contracted with an outside security firm to patrol the facilities. “They definitely viewed everyone as someone who could potentially steal from them,” says Randall Krause, an associate who worked at the Fernley FC in 2010. “I didn’t really take it personally because probably a lot of people actually were stealing.”

Amazon tried to combat employee delinquency by using a point system to track how workers performed their jobs. Arriving late cost an employee half a point; failing to show up altogether was three points. Even calling in sick cost a point. An employee who collected six such demerits was let go. “They laid out their expectations and if you didn’t meet them, they had people waiting to take your job,” says Krause. “They wouldn’t give you a second chance.”[Vi]

Over the years, unions like the Teamsters and the United Food and Commercial Workers tried to organize associates in Amazon’s U.S. FCs, passing out flyers in the parking lots and in some cases knocking on the doors of workers’ homes. Amazon’s logistics executives quickly met these campaigns by engaging with employees and listening to complaints while making it clear that unionizing efforts would not be tolerated. The sheer size of Amazon’s workforce and the fact that turnover is so high in the fulfillment centers make it extremely difficult for anyone to organize workers. Most recently, in 2013, workers at two Amazon FCs in Germany went on strike for four days, demanding better pay and benefits. The company refused to negotiate with the union.

The unions themselves say there’s another hurdle involved—employees’ fear of retribution. In January 2001, the company closed a Seattle customer-service call center, as part of a larger round of cost-cutting measures. Amazon said closing the facility was unrelated to recent union activity there, but the union involved was not so sure. “The number one thing standing in the way of Amazon unionization is fear,” says Rennie Sawade, a spokesman for the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers. Employees are “afraid they’ll fire you—even though it’s technically not legal. You’re the one who has to fight to get your job back if they do.”[Vi]

Amazon often had to contend with something even more unpredictable than stealing, unionization, or truancy in its FCs: the weather. Company managers learned quickly that they had no choice but to install air-conditioning in their first fulfillment centers in Phoenix, where the summers were brutal, but they skimped on what they viewed as an unnecessary expense in colder climates. Instead, fulfillment-center managers developed protocols to deal with heat waves. If temperatures spiked above 100 degrees, which they often did over the summer in the Midwest, five minutes were added to morning and afternoon breaks, which were normally fifteen minutes long, and the company installed fans and handed out free Gatorade.

These moves sound almost comically insufficient, and they were. In 2011, the Morning Call, an Allentown newspaper, published an exposé about poor working conditions in Amazon’s two Lehigh Valley fulfillment centers during that summer’s brutal heat wave. Fifteen workers suffered heat-related symptoms and were taken to a local hospital. An emergency room doctor called federal regulators to report an unsafe working environment. In a detail that struck many readers and Amazon customers as downright cruel, the newspaper noted that Amazon paid a private ambulance company to have paramedics stationed outside the FCs during the heat wave—ready to deal with employees as they dropped.[Vi]

Jeff Wilke argues that Amazon’s overall safety record, as reflected in the low number of incidents reported to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, demonstrates that it is safer to work in the company’s warehouses than in department stores. (The low number of recorded complaints to OSHA regarding Amazon facilities backs up this contention.N3) In terms of public perception, though, it didn’t matter. The report sent shock waves through the media, and the following year, battered by the negative publicity, Amazon announced it was paying $52 million to install air-conditioning in more of its fulfillment centers.N4

Bezos and Wilke could battle chaos, they could try to out-engineer it, but they could never eradicate it completely. The capricious and unpredictable quirks of human nature always managed to emerge in unexpected ways, like in December of 2010, when a disgruntled employee set a fire in a supply room in Fernley. Employees were evacuated and had to stand out in the cold shivering for two hours before being sent home, according to two employees who were there. That same year in Fernley, a worker preparing to quit hoisted himself onto a conveyor belt and took a long joyride through the facility. He was subsequently escorted out the door.[Vi]

Perhaps the best story stems from the busy holiday season of 2006. A temporary employee in the Coffeyville, Kansas, fulfillment center showed up at the start of his shift and left at the end of it, but strangely, he was not logging any actual work in the hours in between. Amazon’s time clocks were not yet linked to the system that tracked productivity, so the discrepancy went unnoticed for at least a week.

Finally someone uncovered the scheme. The worker had surreptitiously tunneled out a cavern inside an eight-foot-tall pile of empty wooden pallets in a far corner of the fulfillment center. Inside, completely blocked from view, he had created a cozy den and furnished it with items purloined from Amazon’s plentiful shelves. There was food, a comfortable bed, pictures ripped from books adorning the walls—and several pornographic calendars. Brian Calvin, the general manager of the Coffeyville FC, busted the worker in his hovel and marched him out the door. The man left without argument and walked to a nearby bus stop; sheepish, one might imagine, but perhaps also just a little bit triumphant.[Vi]

—ooOoo—

CHAPTER 7

A Technology Company, Not a Retailer

On July 30, 2005, Amazon celebrated its tenth anniversary at a gala at Seattle’s Benaroya Hall. Authors James Patterson and Jim Collins and screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan spoke to employees and their guests, and Bob Dylan and Norah Jones performed and sang a rare duet, Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released.” The comedian Bill Maher acted as master of ceremonies. Communications vice president Kathy Savitt had persuaded Bezos to splurge on the historic moment, and, characteristically, they organized everything in such a way that it had a benefit for customers: the concert was streamed live on Amazon.com and watched by a million people.

Despite how far Amazon.com had come, it was still often a media afterthought. It was now officially the age of Google, the search-engine star from Silicon Valley. Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were rewriting the story of the Internet. Their high-profile ascent, which included an IPO in 2004, was universally watched. Suddenly, clever online business models and experienced CEOs from traditional companies were passé in Silicon Valley, replaced by executives with deep technical competence.

This, it seemed, was to be the era of Stanford computer science PhDs, not Harvard MBAs or hedge-fund whiz kids from Wall Street, and the outside world did not believe Amazon would fare well in this profound shift.[Vi]

In the year leading up to its birthday celebration, Amazon’s stock fell 12 percent as Wall Street focused on its slender margins and the superior business models of other Internet companies. Eighteen of the twenty-three financial analysts who covered the company at the time of the anniversary event expressed their skepticism by putting either a hold or a sell rating on Amazon’s stock. The market capitalization of eBay, still viewed as a perfect venue for commerce, was three times larger than Amazon’s. Google’s valuation was more than four times Amazon’s, and it had been public for less than a year. Fixed-price online retail was simply out of vogue.

Ever since the late 1990s, Bezos had been claiming that Amazon was a technology company pioneering e-commerce, not a retailer. But that sounded like wishful thinking. Amazon still collected a vast majority of its revenues by selling stuff to customers. Despite Bezos’s protestations, Amazon looked, smelled, walked, and quacked like a retailer—and not a very profitable one at that.

A week after the tenth-anniversary show, the New York Times published a lengthy article on the front page of its Sunday business section that suggested Bezos was no longer the right man for the job.N1 “It’s time for Mr. Bezos to do as the founders of so many other technology companies have done before him: find a professionally trained chief executive with a deep background in operations to take the reins,” said an analyst quoted prominently in the piece.[Vi]

The rise of Google did more than shift the mind-set of Wall Street and the media. It posed a new set of challenges to Amazon. Rather than just hopping on Amazon.com and looking for products, Internet users were starting their shopping trips on Google, putting an unwelcome intermediary between Jeff Bezos and his customers. Google had its own e-commerce ambitions and early on opened a comparative shopping engine, dubbed Froogle. Even worse, both Amazon and eBay had to compete with each other to advertise alongside Google results for popular keywords like flat-screen TV and Apple iPod. They were essentially paying a tax to Google on sales that began with a search. To make this new kind of advertising more efficient, Amazon devised one of the Web’s first automated search-ad-buying systems, naming it Urubamba, after a river in Peru, a tributary of the Amazon. But Bezos was wary of helping Google develop tools that it might then extend to Amazon’s rivals. “Treat Google like a mountain. You can climb the mountain, but you can’t move it,” he told Blake Scholl, the young developer in charge of Urubamba. “Use them, but don’t make them smarter.”

Google competed with Amazon for both customers and talented engineers. After its IPO, the search giant opened an office in Kirkland, a twenty-minute drive from downtown Seattle. Google offered its employees lavish perks, like free food, office gyms, and day care for their children, not to mention valuable stock options. For its part, Amazon offered a sickly stock price and a combative internal culture, and employees still had to pay for their own parking and meals. Not surprisingly, Google began to suck engineers out of Amazon en masse.[Vi]

During this time, Bezos relentlessly advocated for taking risks outside of Amazon’s core business. Between 2003 and 2005, Amazon started its own search engine and devised a way to allow customers to search for phrases inside books on the site. Bezos also helped to pioneer the modern crowd-sourcing movement with a service called Mechanical Turk and laid the groundwork for Amazon Web Services—a seminal initiative that ushered in the age of cloud computing.

Bezos battled a reaction that he dubbed the institutional no, by which he meant any and all signs of internal resistance to these unorthodox moves. Even strong companies, he said, tended to reflexively push back against moves in unusual directions. At quarterly board meetings, he asked each director to share an example of the institutional no from his or her own past. Bezos was preparing his overseers to approve what would be a series of improbable, expensive, and risky bets. He simply refused to accept Amazon’s fate as an unexciting and marginally profitable online retailer. “There’s only one way out of this predicament,” he said repeatedly to employees during this time, “and that is to invent our way out.”[Vi]

Bezos was certain that Amazon needed to define itself as a technology company instead of a retailer, so he started hiring technologists and giving them obscure job titles. In 2001, he lured Apple veteran and renowned user-interface expert Larry Tesler to Amazon and called him vice president of shopping experience. The next year, he hired a Stanford-educated machine-learning professor named Andreas Weigend and dubbed him chief scientist. Neither did particularly well under Bezos’s demanding tutelage and both quickly grew tired of Seattle. Weigend lasted only sixteen months at Amazon, Tesler a little over three years. Then Bezos found a technologist who thought just as grandly as he did about ways Amazon could branch out in new directions.

Udi Manber was born in Kiryat Haim, a small town in northern Israel, and he earned a PhD in computer science at the University of Washington. In 1989, as a computer science professor at the University of Arizona, he wrote an authoritative book about the problem-solving wonders of complex mathematical formulas called Introduction to Algorithms: A Creative Approach that captured the attention of the Silicon Valley cognoscenti. Manber worked at Yahoo during its glory years but quit in disappointment in 2002 after former Warner Brothers CEO Terry Semel took over as CEO and reoriented the Web portal toward becoming a media company.[Vi]

Rick Dalzell had heard of Manber’s book and started courting him while Manber was preparing to leave Yahoo. Dalzell introduced Manber to Bezos, and by all accounts, an intoxicating geek bromance was born. One of the first questions Bezos asked Manber was “Why don’t you describe a new algorithm that you invented?” Manber did and then marveled at Bezos’s comprehension. “He not only fully understood it, but did it faster than most people. I did not expect that from a CEO. It would have taken me a month to explain it to most senior Yahoo people,” he says.

Manber had serious reservations about moving to Seattle. His wife was a professor at Stanford and they had two young daughters in school. But Bezos agreed to let him split his time between Seattle and Silicon Valley. Manber joined Amazon that fall, and Bezos gave him a typically obscure job title: chief algorithms officer. A few months later, he joined the S Team. “Udi and Jeff had instant chemistry,” says Dalzell.

Manber’s mission was a broad one: use technology to improve Amazon’s operations and invent new features. He would see Bezos once a week—an exception to the CEO’s aversion to one-on-one meetings—to review ongoing projects and brainstorm new ideas. Manber always had Bezos’s full attention, even on a day when they met just a few hours before Amazon’s quarterly earnings announcement.[Vi]

One of Manber’s first projects at Amazon captured the interest of both the media and the New York publishing establishment for the sheer scope of its ambition. Before Manber joined the company, Amazon had introduced a tool called Look Inside the Book, an effort to match the experience of a physical bookstore by allowing customers to browse through the first few pages of any title. Manber took that idea much further. He proposed a service called Search Inside the Book that would let customers look for specific words or phrases from any book they had purchased. Bezos loved the idea and raised the stakes: he wanted customers to be able to search any book on the site, and he gave Manber a goal of getting one hundred thousand books into the new digital catalog.N2

“We had a very simple argument” for book publishers, Manber says. “Think of two bookstores, one where all the books are shrink-wrapped and one where you can sit as long as you want and read any book you want. Which one do you think will sell more books?”

Publishers were concerned that Search Inside the Book might open up the floodgates of online piracy. Most, however, agreed to try it out and gave Amazon physical copies of their titles, which were shipped to a contractor in the Philippines to be scanned. Then Manber’s team ran optical character-recognition software over the book files to convert the scanned images into text that Amazon’s search algorithms could navigate and index. To reduce the chance that customers would read the books for free, Amazon served up only snippets of content—one or two pages before and after the search term, for example, and only to customers who had credit cards on file. It also dropped a small piece of code, called a cookie, in each customer’s computer to ensure he didn’t keep coming back to read additional pages without paying.[Vi]

It was a computationally intensive process, and Amazon did not provide Manber and his team with much in the way of computer resources. Manber almost had to resort to running his software on employee computers at night and on weekends, but one of his employees found a batch of idle PCs that had been set aside for emergencies. He was allowed to commandeer those machines, although with the understanding that they could be taken back at any time.

Amazon introduced Search Inside the Book on October 2003—and for the first time in three and a half years, there was a feature story on the company in Wired magazine, celebrating its significant innovation. The article revived Bezos’s vision of the Alexandria Project, that 1990s-era fever dream of a bookstore that stocked every book ever written. Perhaps such a universal library could be digital and thus infinitely more practical? Bezos cautiously told Wired that Search Inside the Book could indeed be such a beginning. “You have to start somewhere,” he said. “You climb the top of the first tiny hill and from there you see the next hill.”N3

As Amazon was adding product categories throughout the 1990s, its executives came to an inevitable conclusion: the company had to become good at product search. Early in its history, Amazon had licensed a now-defunct search engine called Alta Vista, a spinoff of computer maker Digital Equipment Corp., but it had quickly proved insufficient.[Vi]

In the late 1990s, Amazon engineers Dwayne Bowman and Ruben Ortega led the development of an internal product-search tool called Botega (a mash-up of their surnames) that capitalized on Amazon’s vast trove of customer data, information the website had been collecting from the moment it officially opened for business. The system identified the top products customers clicked on for a given search term and then positioned those products higher in ensuing searches. That worked, for a time. But as Amazon’s catalog grew ever more complicated and Google got exceedingly good at indexing and organizing the Web, Amazon had to confront the awkward truth that one of its chief rivals could search Amazon’s site better than its own search engine could.

At that point, several factors led Amazon directly into the broader Web search arena—and into its first head-to-head confrontation with Google. Amazon was having a difficult time luring technical talent to Seattle, and its divisions often found themselves competing for the same engineers. So in late 2003, Jeff Holden, Udi Manber, and several colleagues travelled to Palo Alto to interview potential hires. The trip was so fruitful and the Seattle labor market had grown so challenging that the company decided to open its first North American office outside Seattle.[Vi]

Bezos and Dalzell came to call these satellite locations remote development centers. The idea was to place the offices in regions with rich pools of technical talent and set teams to work on specific, isolated projects, harnessing the energy and agility of a startup while minimizing the need for communication with the mother ship in Seattle. Amazon’s lawyers, concerned that this might require the company to collect state sales tax, signed off on the strategy but only if the offices were set up as independent subsidiaries and stayed away from transactions with customers.

After one year in Seattle, Manber was already tired of his commute, and he was asked to head up the new Palo Alto office. In October 2003, Amazon’s first development center was opened on Waverly and Hamilton Streets in downtown Palo Alto. Staying true to his affinity for mathematical abbreviations, Bezos called it A9—shorthand for algorithms. Despite his move, Manber kept up his weekly meetings with Bezos via conference calls and regular trips to headquarters.

They were still thinking big. A9 not only worked on revamping product search on Amazon.com but also, in a direct attack on Google’s turf, developed a general Web search engine. The company licensed the Google search index but built on top of it—simultaneously partnering with and challenging Google. “Search is not a solved problem,” Manber said in April of 2004 when Amazon unveiled a Web search engine at A9.com. “There are lots more things that can be done. This is just the beginning.”[Vi]

A9 would give Bezos and Manber a forum to try out some of their more ambitious ideas, most of which had nothing to do with Amazon’s core business. In one brainstorming session, they decided the Web presented a natural opportunity to reinvent the Yellow Pages and ginned up a project called Block View that matched street-level photographs of stores and restaurants with their listings in A9’s search results. This was two years before Google announced a similar (more successful and ultimately controversial) initiative called Street View.

Google would blanket the country with a fleet of company-owned trucks outfitted with expensive, specialized cameras to get its street views, but Amazon approached the problem with its usual emphasis on frugality. Manber’s budget for the project was less than a hundred thousand dollars. A9 flew photographers and portable equipment to twenty major cities and rented vehicles.

By late 2005, with Google gaining in both popularity and market capitalization, the general Web search at A9.com started to look like a noble but failed experiment. Web search, it became apparent, was not something that could be done cheaply or by piggybacking on a rival’s search index. Manber had a dozen engineers working on Web search, while Google had several hundred. Still, the A9 development center was showing promise. It made modest improvements to product search on Amazon.com and started work on an advertising service called Clickriver, which would allow advertisers (a television installer, for example) to purchase links within search results on Amazon.com (a search for HDTVs, for instance).[Vi]

Clickriver contained the seeds of a new advertising business, seeds that would later sprout into a healthy source of revenue for the company. Manber’s time at Amazon was productive in other ways too: after three years, he had more than twenty patent applications, several of which carried Bezos’s name too.

But then a series of conflicts erupted that rocked the S Team, broke up the Bezos-Manber partnership, and sent Bezos all the way back to the drawing board in his ongoing attempts to prove to the world that Amazon was something more than just a boring retailer, or a technology company that had chosen the least inspired business model of a new age.

At ten years old, Amazon could be a deeply unhappy place to work. The stock price was flat, there were strict limits on annual raises, and the pace was unrelenting. Employees felt underpaid and overworked. When the new development centers opened in Palo Alto and elsewhere, the joke inside Amazon was that it was a necessary move because everyone in Seattle was aware of how abjectly miserable employees at the company were.

In the engineering department, employees were constantly trying to fix a technical infrastructure that was now an aging, sprawling mess. The company had outgrown the original framework devised by Shel Kaphan in the 1990s, the monolithic code base dubbed Obidos that for years was held together by what Amazon executive Werner Vogels later called “duct tape and WD40 engineering.”N4 And when Amazon cloned its clunky code base to run the websites of Target and Borders, those deals were lucrative but they magnified the company’s infrastructure problems. Instead of fighting flames emanating from a single building, engineers often had to deal with a neighborhoodwide inferno.[Vi]

Like a lot of other technology companies at the time, Amazon got an education in the wisdom of moving to a simpler and more flexible technology infrastructure, called service-oriented architecture. In this kind of framework, every feature and service is treated as an independent piece and each can easily be updated or replaced without breaking the whole.

Led by Amazon’s chief technology officer at the time, an avid pilot named Al Vermeulen, whom colleagues fondly called Al V., the company rebuilt its technology infrastructure as a series of these independent but interconnected parts. The awkward and extended transition to this new code base, one element of which Amazon called Gurupa (after a section of the Amazon river where the tributaries diverged), took over three years and caused all kinds of excruciating pain among its network engineers, who were forced to carry pagers so they could respond promptly to the numerous problems.

As a result, dozens of these talented technicians left, many of them defecting to Google. Steve Yegge was one such engineer who made the move around this time. He would publish his opinion of his former employer years later by writing a screed on the Google+ social network and accidentally making it public for the entire Internet to read. “My challenge with Amazon is finding a way to describe it without making me puke,” Yegge wrote. “But I’ll figure something out, eventually. In many ways they’re a world-class operation—primarily in ways that matter to their customers; employees, not so much. But I guess in the end it’s the customers that matter.”[Vi]

In late 2004, another window opened on the mood and inner workings of Amazon. Toys “R” Us sued Amazon in federal court, contending that Amazon had violated the agreement to allow the chain store to be the exclusive seller of the most popular toys on the Amazon website. The issues in the case were numerous and complex and hinged on some of the arcane legal language in the original contract. But they boiled down to a clash of goals and worldviews. Toys “R” Us thought it was paying Amazon hefty annual fees and a percentage of sales for exclusivity as the seller of the most popular toys on Amazon. But Amazon and its CEO could not abide anything that impeded their drive to give customers the ultimate selection, and Amazon constantly angered its partner by conceiving of new ways to allow other sellers to list competing toys on the site.

The trial was held in September of 2005 in a stuffy courtroom in Paterson, New Jersey. Bezos testified over the course of two days, and from court records, it does not appear that he enjoyed himself. Judge Margaret Mary McVeigh questioned Bezos’s inability to recall key decisions and ultimately ruled in favor of Toys “R” Us, allowing the toy seller to break its contract with Amazon and revive its own website. In her ruling, the judge described Amazon employees as contemptuous toward their offline counterpart and worshipful and apprehensive of their own CEO and his demands. “It was certainly my perception that nothing major happened at Amazon without Jeff Bezos’s approval,” she wrote in her judgment, quoting the testimony of a Toys “R” Us executive.[Vi]

Amazon appealed the settlement but lost and was required to pay $51 million to its former partner. The dispute with Toys “R” Us would become exhibit A in the argument that Amazon was so fixated on catering to its customers and on the mechanics of its own business that the corporation was often hostile to the large companies it partnered with. (At the same time as the Toys “R” Us suit, another partnership, with travel site Expedia, also dissolved in litigation. That matter was settled out of court.)

With the toy business now in transition after the dissolution of the agreement with Toys “R” Us, the hard-lines retail division was cast into further disarray. Part of the problem was that categories like electronics and jewelry were not yet profitable but were growing faster than the older media businesses, which dragged down the company’s finances. Bezos felt he needed to give the issue specific attention, and so in late 2004, he hired Kal Raman, the former Drugstore.com executive who had played a supporting role in the employee poaching that had led to the Walmart lawsuit in 1998. Overnight, Bezos cleaved in two the domain of Diego Piacentini, then the senior vice president for worldwide retail, and he handed hard lines over to Raman. Bezos announced the move on a Tuesday in an internal e-mail to the company. Almost everyone from that time says the message was a shock not only to them but also to Piacentini (though Piacentini insists that he knew about the change before the e-mail went out).[Vi]

Raman was a native of a small village in southern India. His father had died when he was fifteen, plunging his family into poverty. He bootstrapped his way to a degree in electrical engineering, then to a job at Tata Consulting Engineers in Mumbai, and then to a consultant gig at Walmart in Texas, where he climbed the ranks of its IT department and met Rick Dalzell.N5 Raman was whip-smart, a tireless worker, and he had a reputation as an exceedingly demanding manager. He also had some memorable habits, including chewing an Indian betel leaf called pan during meetings and spitting into the garbage pails. Diane Lye, who ran Amazon’s data warehouse at the time and reported to Raman, sums it up this way: “Kal was a screamer.”

Applying his experience from Walmart, Raman pushed to build systems that finally realized Bezos’s vision of Amazon as a company with data at its heart. His groups created automated tools that allowed buyers to order merchandise based on dozens of variables such as seasonal trends, past purchasing behaviors, and how many customers were searching for a particular product at certain times. Raman’s teams also improved the software for pricing bots, which were automated programs that crawled the Web, spied on competitors’ prices, and then adjusted Amazon’s prices accordingly, ensuring that Bezos’s adamant demand that the company always match the lowest price anywhere, offline or online, would be met.[Vi]

Buyers were held strictly accountable for keeping their products in stock and their prices competitive. If they somehow failed to deliver—if their shelves were suddenly empty or if Amazon’s prices were higher than a rival’s—then “Kal was going to personally hunt you down and kill you,” says Diane Lye, who worked for Raman for eighteen months. “There was so much fighting and yelling at each other. The technology was broken all the time and because the technology was broken, the data was often wrong. We would bring it to Jeff Bezos and it was all contradictory and he would be yelling and screaming at us. Oh, it was horrible.”

Raman spoke fast and had a thick accent, and his malapropisms, dubbed Kalisms, were legendary. “You all must be smoking cracks!” he yelled. Or “Can I have some of what you’re drinking so I can feel good about your business too?” He lasted at Amazon less than two years, but people at the company still talk about him.

“Kal was brutal,” says Jason Goldberger, a retail director who worked for Raman. “He’s like out of a movie. The year after Katrina, I took over the home-improvement business, and he could not understand why generator business had fallen [compared to the increase that had accompanied the storm]. He’s such a driven personality.”[Vi]

The turbulence caused by all these changes added to the overall dysfunction gripping Amazon at the time. The S Team was beset by a variety of internecine rivalries, perhaps typical for a large company. Raman and Piacentini, uncomfortably splitting ownership of the retail business, did not get along. Raman also battled with Jeff Wilke. At one point, Wilke heard that Raman had spoken negatively about the fulfillment team and he confronted him in a large meeting. “I heard there’s something you want to say to me,” Wilke said. “Do you want to say it in front of all these people?” Onlookers thought they might come to blows. In addition, Kathy Savitt, the vice president of communications, didn’t get along with Piacentini, and Jason Kilar, who had fully imbibed Bezos’s principles and mannerisms, had committed to run the video site Hulu but stuck around while he gave Amazon months to find his replacement.

Bezos handled it all poorly; it was as if the personal dramas were happening on a different dimensional plane that he couldn’t or didn’t want to access. As a result, the S Team, according to several of its members, became a highly combustible forum, a group in which everyone felt the need to be outspoken and curry favor with the boss and where political disputes were allowed to fester.

One of the biggest of those disputes was between Udi Manber and another technical leader of the company, Jeff Holden—Bezos’s former colleague at D. E. Shaw, the onetime teenage hacker who had dubbed himself the Nova.[Vi]

Holden had been at Amazon longer than anyone else on the management team and had the closest personal relationship with Bezos. If members of the S Team were planets revolving around the sun, then Holden was Mercury, occupying a privileged orbit and drawing a fair amount of criticism, partly based on jealousy. Now in his midthirties, Holden remained a fast talker and a prodigious diet soda and Frappuccino drinker who always paced intensely during product meetings. Like Bezos, he was an aggressive manager who wanted to see results fast.

As senior vice president of worldwide discovery, Holden oversaw more than five hundred employees in Personalization, Automated Merchandising, Associates, E-Mail Marketing—and the department in charge of the search engine. It had been partly his idea to have Manber return to Palo Alto and run A9. But after a while, Holden began to feel that Manber’s group was too absorbed with the abstract challenges of general search and wasn’t focused enough on the practicalities of running the search for the Amazon website and solving nagging problems, such as latency, or the amount of time it took for searches on Amazon.com to generate results. The problem was that Holden retained ownership of the search experience on the website while Manber held responsibility for the search technology; they were basically dependent on each other.[Vi]

Eventually, after growing increasingly frustrated, Holden concluded the situation was unworkable and, with an engineer named Darren Vengroff, started his own secretive effort in Seattle to rebuild Amazon’s search engine using the open-source tools Lucene and Solr. After a few months, Holden demonstrated the prototype to Bezos, who agreed to let them test it. Holden told Bezos he wanted to develop the Solr-based engine further and, if things went well, move search back to Seattle. Bezos said he’d think about it and later ran the proposal by Manber, who felt it was a sneak attack on his turf.

Now everyone was in a difficult spot. Bezos came back and told Holden and Manber to form a joint team to evaluate the new approach. There are various versions of what happened next, but the bottom line is that Manber and Holden didn’t like each other and couldn’t work well together. After the evaluation period ended, Bezos decided that search should remain the purview of A9. Holden was crestfallen. He argued that his organization had spearheaded the project and was doing the hard work to fix the persistent search problems on the site. Bezos pointed out that those were emotional concerns, not logical ones.

Feeling that Bezos had chosen Manber over him, Holden planned his departure from Amazon. With Vengroff, he would start a mobile search company called Pelago (which Groupon later acquired). Though this was a difficult time in their relationship, Holden and Bezos remained friends, and Bezos invested in Pelago. But when Holden left, Bezos lost one of his oldest friends at the company and one of Amazon’s most versatile innovators. Fortunately, he still had Udi Manber.

And then Manber decided to leave.[Vi]

Manber said he didn’t like running a remote office and felt isolated from the decision-making in Seattle. Privately, he was annoyed that Bezos had allowed Holden’s rival search effort to take root in Seattle. He told Bezos and Rick Dalzell that he was considering going back to academia to do research in the science of memory. Bezos pleaded with Manber to stay on as what he called an Amazon Fellow. Manber said he would consider it.

Meanwhile, Urs Hölzle, one of Google’s first employees and its vice president of engineering, wanted to relinquish his oversight of search to focus on Google’s infrastructure. Hölzle invited Udi Manber to have dinner with him and surprised the Israeli scientist by asking if he was interested in replacing him as Google’s head of search engineering. Manber demurred at first, saying he was planning on getting out of the field. Then a few weeks later he changed his mind and decided that he might as well hear Google’s offer. Hölzle arranged a dinner that January with Larry Page in a private room of Il Fornaio, a restaurant in downtown Palo Alto. Page and Manber made sure to enter the restaurant separately. In the middle of dinner, Sergey Brin joined them. Google CEO Eric Schmidt showed up for dessert. It was an impressive full-court press.

By February, Manber had received an extraordinarily lucrative offer to run the search team at Google, and he decided to take it. Money aside, for any search engineer at the time, going to Google meant stepping onto the biggest playing field in the world and joining a championship-caliber team. For its part, Google had snagged one of the brightest minds in search and simultaneously decapitated the efforts of a competitor with one swift stroke.[Vi]

Now Manber had to inform Bezos, right in the midst of so many other defections to Google. He delivered the news over the phone. Amazon employees would describe what happened next as one of Bezos’s all-time biggest nutters. Manber anticipated that Bezos would be disappointed and perhaps try to persuade him again to stay. “That’s what I had expected Jeff to do, but that’s not what he did,” Manber says. “He was clearly angry and he was dumping on me. I don’t recall now his exact words, but it was something like ‘No! No! No! You can’t do that!’ He was blaming me almost like I was a kid who did something very wrong.”

In that moment, Manber felt like he had lost a friend. He pleaded with Bezos that an engineer with his background and interests could not possibly decline the opportunity to run search at Google. Bezos viewed it as a personal betrayal. This time, he couldn’t brush away an employee’s departure easily. “He was not mincing words, and I felt horrible. He was always very good to me, the closest to a mentor that I ever had, and I was letting him down,” Manber says. “I don’t know if he ever forgave me, probably not, but I didn’t really have a rational choice. I [had] already decided to leave Amazon, so it was between moving to the top of my field or starting from scratch in a new field.”[Vi]

A few days later Bezos calmed down and tried to get Manber to change his mind, but it was too late. Bezos had now lost his two closest colleagues and technical leaders, and just at the time that Amazon’s attempt to break out of retail and embrace an identity as a technology company was faltering. The general search engine at A9.com was a failure and was shut down a year after Manber left. Block View would be overtaken by Google’s Street View. Search Inside the Book was interesting but hardly a game changer, and the world’s best engineers were fleeing a poisonous Amazon culture and flocking to Google and other hot Internet companies in Silicon Valley. If Bezos was going to prove to the world that Amazon was indeed the technology company that he so desperately claimed it to be, he needed a dramatic breakthrough.

***

In early 2002, Web evangelist and computer book publisher Tim O’Reilly flew to Seattle to bend Jeff Bezos’s ear. O’Reilly, who would go on to help create a popular series of Web 2.0 technology conferences and the traveling festival for hardware hobbyists called the Maker Faire, thought that Amazon was acting too much like an isolated Web destination. He wanted the company to make available its sales data that could, for example, allow him and other book publishers to track various trends and help them decide what to publish next.N6 Bezos hadn’t considered providing a broad range of such services to the outside world and initially replied that he didn’t see how that would benefit Amazon.[Vi]

Over the years, O’Reilly and Bezos would have a friendly but sometimes adversarial relationship. In February of 2000, O’Reilly had organized an online protest against Amazon when it refused to allow other Internet retailers to use its patented 1-Click system. (Bezos cleverly blunted the campaign by joining in O’Reilly’s criticism of the patent system and supporting his idea for an independent company called BountyQuest, which, until it folded, allowed companies to post rewards for documents that undermined patents.N7) O’Reilly also wrote a blog post urging fans of local bookstores to make their purchases there even if prices were cheaper online, arguing that those merchants would otherwise go away. That missive was taped to the cash registers of more than a few independent bookstores around the country.

But on this particular visit to Bezos in 2002, O’Reilly had a cogent case to make, and Bezos listened. The publisher showed Bezos Amarank, a sophisticated tool his company had created that visited the Amazon website every few hours and copied the rankings of O’Reilly Media books and the books of its competitors. It was a clunky process that relied on a primitive technique called screen scraping, and O’Reilly suggested that Amazon should develop a series of online tools called application programming interfaces, or APIs, that allowed third parties to easily harvest data about its prices, products, and sales rankings.[Vi]

O’Reilly spoke ambitiously about parceling out entire sectors of the Amazon store and allowing other websites to build on top of them. “Companies need to think not just what they can get for themselves from new technologies but how they can enable others,” he said.N8

After O’Reilly’s visit, Bezos convened a meeting with Rick Dalzell, Neil Roseman, and Colin Bryar, the head of Associates at the time, to talk about the issue. Dalzell pointed out that there was already something like this under way inside the company and told Bezos about a young engineer named Rob Frederick whose mobile commerce startup, Convergence, Amazon had acquired in 1999. Frederick’s group was working on APIs that would allow non-PC mobile devices like phones and PalmPilots to access the Amazon store. After that meeting, Bezos invited O’Reilly to speak to a group of engineers, and later at an Amazon all-hands meeting, about lessons from computer history and the importance of becoming a platform.

Bezos added Frederick’s team to the Associates group under Colin Bryar and tasked them with creating a new set of APIs to let developers plug into the Amazon website. Soon other websites would be able to publish selections from the Amazon catalog, including prices and detailed product descriptions, and use its payment system and shopping cart. Bezos himself bought into the Web’s new orthodoxy of openness, preaching inside Amazon over the next few months that they should make these new tools available to developers and “let them surprise us.” The company held its first developer conference that spring and invited all the outsiders who were trying to hack Amazon’s systems. Now developers became another constituency at Amazon, joining customers and third-party sellers. And the new group, run by Colin Bryar and Rob Frederick, was given a formal name: Amazon Web Services.[Vi]

It was the trailhead of an extremely serendipitous path.

Amazon Web Services, or AWS, is today in the business of selling basic computer infrastructure like storage, databases, and raw computing power. The service is woven into the fabric of daily life in Silicon Valley and the broader technology community. Startups like Pinterest and Instagram rent space and cycles on Amazon’s computers and run their operations over the Internet as if the high-powered servers were sitting in the backs of their own offices. Even large companies rely on AWS—Netflix, for example, uses it to stream movies to its customers. AWS helped introduce the ethereal concept known as the cloud, and it is viewed as so vital to the future fortunes of technology startups that venture capitalists often give gift certificates for it to their new entrepreneurs. Various divisions of the U.S. government, such as NASA and the Central Intelligence Agency, are high-profile AWS customers as well. Though Amazon keeps AWS’s financial performance and profitability a secret, analysts at Morgan Stanley estimate that in 2012, it brought in $2.2 billion in revenue.

The rise of Amazon Web Services brings up a few obvious questions. How did an online retailer spawn such a completely unrelated business? How did the creature that was originally called Amazon Web Services—the group working on the commerce APIs—evolve into something so radically different, a seller of high-tech infrastructure? Early observers suggested that Amazon’s retail business was so seasonal—booming during the holiday months—that Bezos had decided to rent his spare computer capacity during the quieter periods. But that explanation is widely debunked by Amazon insiders, in part because it would require Amazon to kick developers off its servers every fall.[Vi]

The shift to offering these infrastructure services actually began with the transition to Gurupa and a more reliable technology infrastructure, a process that gathered momentum in 2003. While Amazon’s internal systems had been broken down into more durable individual components, Amazon’s technical staff was still organized conventionally as a single team, headquartered in a separate office building downtown near Seattle’s Union Station. This group strictly controlled who could access Amazon’s servers, and various teams inside the company had to plead for resources to try out their new projects and features. The process slowed down and frustrated many Amazon project managers. “You had a set of folks running these machines who were the priesthood of hardware, and the rest of us were railing against it,” says Chris Brown, a software-development manager at the time. “We wanted a playground where we could go to freely try things out.”

Bezos was getting annoyed as well. The company had improved on its pick-to-light system in the FCs, and its infrastructure had been successfully recast into component services, but the provisioning of computer resources remained a bottleneck. It got so dysfunctional that project leaders would present the S Team with their six-page narratives and then in the discussion afterward admit they had been unable to actually test their projects. Rick Dalzell recalls a particularly significant meeting when Matt Round, the head of Personalization at the time, complained that he didn’t have resources for experimentation. “Jeff finally just exploded at me,” Dalzell says. “I always handled Jeff’s outbursts pretty well, but to be honest about it, he had a right to be angry. We were stifling the flow of creativity. Even though we were probably faster than ninety-nine percent of companies in the world, we were still too slow.”[Vi]

At the same time, Bezos became enamored with a book called Creation, by Steve Grand, the developer of a 1990s video game called Creatures that allowed players to guide and nurture a seemingly intelligent organism on their computer screens. Grand wrote that his approach to creating intelligent life was to focus on designing simple computational building blocks, called primitives, and then sit back and watch surprising behaviors emerge. Just as electronics are built from basic components like resistors and capacitors, and as living beings spring from genetic building blocks, Grand wrote that sophisticated AI can emerge from cybernetic primitives, and then it’s up to the “ratchet of evolution to change the design.”N9

The book, though dense and challenging, was widely discussed in the book clubs of Amazon executives at the time and it helped to crystallize the debate over the problems with the company’s own infrastructure. If Amazon wanted to stimulate creativity among its developers, it shouldn’t try to guess what kind of services they might want; such guesses would be based on patterns of the past. Instead, it should be creating primitives—the building blocks of computing—and then getting out of the way. In other words, it needed to break its infrastructure down into the smallest, simplest atomic components and allow developers to freely access them with as much flexibility as possible. As Bezos proclaimed at the time, according to numerous employees: “Developers are alchemists and our job is to do everything we can to get them to do their alchemy.”[Vi]

Bezos directed groups of engineers in brainstorming possible primitives. Storage, bandwidth, messaging, payments, and processing all made the list. In an informal way—as if the company didn’t quite know the insight around primitives was an extraordinary one—Amazon then started building teams to develop the services described on that list.

In late 2004, Chris Pinkham, head of the company’s IT infrastructure, told Dalzell that he had decided to return with his family to their native South Africa. At this point, A9 had taken root in Palo Alto, and Dalzell was busy establishing remote developer centers in Scotland and India, among other places. Dalzell suggested to Pinkham that instead of leaving Amazon, he open an office in Cape Town. They brainstormed possible projects and finally settled on trying to build a service that would allow a developer to run any application, regardless of its type, on Amazon’s servers. Pinkham and a few colleagues studied the problem and came up with a plan to use a new open-source tool called Xen, a layer of software that made it easier to run numerous applications on a single physical server in a data center.

Pinkham took colleague Chris Brown along with him to South Africa and they set up shop in a nondescript office complex in Constantia, a winemaking region northeast of Cape Town, near a school and a small homeless encampment. Their efforts would become the Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2—the service that is at the heart of AWS and that became the engine of the Web 2.0 boom.[Vi]

EC2 was born in isolation, with Pinkham talking to his colleagues in Seattle only sporadically, at least for the first year. The Constantia office had to make do with two residential-grade DSL lines, and during the hot summer of 2005, one of the country’s two nuclear reactors went offline, so engineers worked amid rolling brownouts. Pinkham later said that the solitude was beneficial, as it afforded a comfortable distance from Amazon’s intrusive CEO. “I spent most of my time trying to hide from Bezos,” Pinkham says. “He was a fun guy to talk to but you did not want to be his pet project. He would love it to distraction.”

The dozen engineers concurrently developing what would become Amazon’s Simple Storage Service, or S3, did not have that luxury, despite their best attempts to keep to themselves. They worked in an office on the eighth floor of Pac Med, ate lunch together every day for nearly two years, and often played cards together after work. Neither they nor their manager, Alan Atlas, a veteran of crosstown digital-media startup Real Networks, were able to hide half a world away.

Bezos was deeply interested in the evolution of Web services and often dived into the minutiae of S3, asking for details about how the services would keep up with demand and repeatedly sending engineers back to the drawing board to simplify the S3 architecture. “It would always start out fun and happy, with Jeff’s laugh rebounding against the walls,” Atlas says. “Then something would happen and the meeting would go south and you would fear for your life. I literally thought I’d get fired after every one of those meetings.”[Vi]

Atlas said that while working on the S3 project, he frequently had difficulty grasping just how big Bezos was thinking. “He had this vision of literally tens of thousands of cheap, two-hundred-dollar machines piling up in racks, exploding. And it had to be able to expand forever,” Atlas says. Bezos told him, “This has to scale to infinity with no planned downtime. Infinity!”

During one meeting, Atlas blundered by suggesting they could figure out how to keep up with any unexpected growth after the service launched. That triggered a Bezos nutter. “He leaned toward me and said, ‘Why are you wasting my life?,’ and went on a tirade about Keystone Cops,” Atlas says. “That was real anger. I wasn’t keeping up with him. There were a number of times like that. He was so far ahead of us.”

For the launch of Simple Storage Service, Atlas had commemorative T-shirts made up for his colleagues; he used the design of Superman’s costume but with an S3 rather than an S on the chest. Naturally, he had to pay for the shirts himself.

As their ambitions for Web services expanded between South Africa and Seattle, Bezos and Dalzell began to consider who would lead the effort. Bezos suggested Al Vermeulen, Amazon’s chief technology officer, but Al V. commuted to Seattle by plane every day from Corvallis, Oregon, and said he didn’t want an administrative job. He demoted himself to an engineer working on S3 with Alan Atlas. So Dalzell recommended Andy Jassy, who had inauspiciously started his career at Amazon so many years ago by hitting Jeff Bezos with a kayak paddle during the company’s first game of broomball.[Vi]

If the new era in high-tech was indeed to be the age of computer science PhDs, then Jassy would prove to be a conspicuous anomaly. A graduate of Harvard Business School with a passion for buffalo wings and New York sports teams, Jassy seemed unlikely to fit in at a geeky technology startup. Perhaps as a result of this, his path at Amazon had been meandering and sometimes difficult. It was Jassy who presented the original business plan in 1998 for Amazon to enter the music business, but then he watched in disappointment as another executive was selected to lead the charge. A few years later, in a companywide reorganization, Jassy was chosen to oversee the personalization group, but then the engineers in that department objected to being led by someone they viewed at the time as nontechnical.

So Jassy was given a unique opportunity. Bezos asked him to become his first official shadow—a new role that would entail Jassy’s following around the CEO and sitting with him in every meeting. Other technology companies like Intel and Sun had similar positions, and Bezos had tried this before with executives who were new to the company—including a D. E. Shaw engineer named John Overdeck and Accept.com founder Danny Shader—but it had never been a full-time job, and many of those previous shadows had subsequently left the company.[Vi]

Jassy was conflicted about the proposal. “I was flattered by the offer to work closely with Jeff but wasn’t initially excited about it because I’d seen the way it had gone down before,” he says. “I asked Jeff what success would look like. He said success would be if I got to know him and he got to know me and we built trust in each other.” Jassy agreed and spent much of the next eighteen months by Bezos’s side, traveling with him, discussing the events of each day, and observing the CEO’s style and thought process. Jassy would define the shadow role as a quasi chief of staff, and today the position of Bezos’s shadow, now formally known as technical adviser, is highly coveted and has broad visibility within the company. For Bezos, having an accomplished assistant on hand to discuss important matters with and ensure that people follow up on certain tasks is another way to extend his reach.

As Jassy’s tenure as shadow ended, he became a natural candidate to step in as the new head of AWS. One of his first jobs was to write a vision statement; he had to tinker with the margins to get it under six pages. The paper laid out the expanded AWS mission: “to enable developers and companies to use Web services to build sophisticated and scalable applications.” The paper listed the primitives that Amazon would subsequently turn into Web services, from storage and computing to database, payments, and messaging. “We tried to imagine a student in a dorm room who would have at his or her disposal the same infrastructure as the largest companies in the world,” Jassy says. “We thought it was a great playing-field leveler for startups and smaller companies to have the same cost structure as big companies.”[Vi]

Jassy, Bezos, and Dalzell presented the plan for the new AWS to the Amazon board, and the institutional no came close to rearing its ugly head. John Doerr, expressing what he would later call a “healthy skepticism,” asked the obvious question: At a time when Amazon was having difficulty hiring engineers and needed to accelerate its international expansion, “Why would we go into this business?”

“Because we need it as well,” Bezos replied, suggesting that Amazon’s demand for such a service reflected the broader market need. Jassy remembers Doerr telling him after the meeting that he was lucky to work at a company that would invest in something so daring.

Around this time, Bezos was pursuing another project whose origins were shaped by resistance from Amazon’s board of directors. When the founders of the comparison-shopping site Junglee had left Amazon in the late 1990s, they had done so on good terms and with the agreement that they would stay in touch with Amazon executives and even coordinate their efforts. Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan, two of the cofounders, then started their own Internet incubator called Cambrian Ventures, and Bezos wanted Amazon to invest in it. But in a rare act of resistance to Bezos’s will, the Amazon board vetoed the move. So Bezos ended up investing personally. The circuitous result of that decision was yet another unlikely Web service from Amazon and another sign that the company was trying to evolve beyond online retailing.[Vi]

At the time that Cambrian Ventures was starting up in Silicon Valley, the peer-to-peer file-sharing service Napster was dominating headlines and panicking the music business. The Cambrian engineers thought about Napster and the power of networks that linked people who were scattered around the world. Could you do something of value with those distributed networks, they wondered, something better than stealing music? That question became the seed of an initiative they called Project Agreya—the Sanskrit word for “first.”

The idea was to build software and harness the Internet to coordinate groups of people around the world to work on problems that computers weren’t very good at solving. For example, a computer system might have difficulty examining a collection of photos of domestic pets and reliably selecting the ones that depicted cats or dogs. But humans could do that easily. The Cambrian Ventures executives hypothesized that they could build an online service to coordinate low-wage workers around the world and then sell access to this workforce to financial firms and other large companies. In 2001, they filed for a patent for the idea and called it a “Hybrid machine/human computing arrangement.”N10

The world would later come to know this idea, and embrace it, as crowd-sourcing. But Project Agreya was ahead of its time, and financial firms didn’t know quite what to make of it. The Agreya team was in New York trying to pitch the concept the week of 9/11. Venture capital dried up after the terrorist attacks, so they shut down Project Agreya and moved on.[Vi]

In 2003 Rajaraman and Harinarayan decided to close Cambrian Ventures to work on a new company called Kosmix, which would develop technology to organize information on the Web by specific topics. As part of winding down Cambrian, they had to deal with Bezos and his investment in the firm. Not surprisingly, Bezos proved to be a tenacious negotiator and a stubborn defender of his own financial interests, even when the stakes were a relatively inconsequential fraction of his net worth. Rajaraman and Harinarayan recall a brutal two-month-long negotiation during which Bezos leveraged the dissolution of Cambrian Ventures into a stake in Kosmix. In the midst of this, they happened to tell Bezos about the Agreya patent, and he was immediately interested and asked for it to be included in the overall deal. Seeing an opportunity to conclude the arrangement, they quickly agreed to sell it to him.

To their surprise, Bezos then actually developed a version of Project Agreya inside Amazon. He renamed it Mechanical Turk, after an eighteenth-century chess-playing automaton that concealed a diminutive man—a chess master—who hid inside and guided the machine’s moves. About two dozen Amazon employees worked on the service from January 2004 to November 2005. It was considered a Jeff project, which meant that the product manager met with Bezos every few weeks and received a constant stream of e-mail from the CEO, usually containing extraordinarily detailed recommendations and frequently arriving late at night.[Vi]

Amazon started using Mechanical Turk internally in 2005 to have humans do things like review Search Inside the Book scans and check product images uploaded to Amazon by customers to ensure they were not pornographic. The company also used Mechanical Turk to match the images with the corresponding commercial establishments in A9’s fledgling Block View tool. Bezos himself became consumed with this task and used it as a way to demonstrate the service.

As the company prepared to introduce Mechanical Turk to the public, Amazon’s PR team and a few employees complained they were uncomfortable with the system’s reference to the Turkish people. Bezos liked the name for its historical association but agreed to let the communications staff and Mechanical Turk team brainstorm alternatives. They seriously considered Cadabra, an allusion to magic and the original corporate name of Amazon. But in the end, Bezos shrugged off the concerns and said that he personally would bear the responsibility for any backlash.

Mechanical Turk quietly launched in November 2005. Now any Internet user could perform what Amazon called human-intelligence tasks, typically earning a few cents per job. Other companies could list jobs on the Mechanical Turk website, with Amazon taking a 10 percent cut of the payments.N11 One of the first applications, from a company called Casting Words, paid workers a few cents per minute to listen to and transcribe podcasts.[Vi]

Mechanical Turk gave Bezos another opportunity to demonstrate Amazon’s ability to innovate outside of its core retail business and show off his own curious attempts to crystallize abstract concepts. He called Mechanical Turk “artificial, artificial intelligence” and gave interviews about the service to the New York Times and the Economist. The ethnic reference in the name was never criticized, but labor activists targeted the service as a “virtual sweatshop” and “the dark side of globalization.”N12

By 2007 there were a hundred thousand workers on Mechanical Turk in more than one hundred countries.N13 But it didn’t take off in the way Bezos clearly hoped it would, or at least it hasn’t yet. One obvious reason is that the exceedingly low wages on Mechanical Turk have the greatest appeal in less developed countries, yet most impoverished workers in the third world do not own Internet-connected PCs. When Amazon’s other Web services unexpectedly took off in the following years, Bezos devoted considerably more attention and resources to them. Just as in Amazon’s early days, when automated personalization replaced editorial, machines, not people hiding inside them, would drive Amazon’s long-awaited big breakthrough.[Vi]

In March 2006, Amazon introduced the Simple Storage Service, which allowed other websites and developers to store computer files like photos, documents, or video-game player profiles on Amazon’s servers. S3 remained alone and somewhat overlooked, like a section of a fence that had not yet been finished. A month after the launch, Alan Atlas recalled, it crashed for nine hours, and hardly anyone in the outside world noticed. Then a few months later, the Elastic Compute Cloud went to public beta, allowing developers to actually run their own programs on Amazon’s computers. According to Chris Brown, who returned from South Africa for the launch, Amazon opened the first servers to customers on the East Coast of the United States, and developers rushed in so quickly that the initial batch of computers was taken up before Amazon had a chance to let in folks on the West Coast.

Part of AWS’s immediate attraction to startups was its business model. Bezos viewed Web services as similar to an electric utility that allowed customers to pay for only what they used and to increase or decrease their consumption at any time. “The best analogy that I know is the electric grid,” Bezos said. “You go back in time a hundred years, if you wanted to have electricity, you had to build your own little electric power plant, and a lot of factories did this. As soon as the electric power grid came online, they dumped their electric power generator, and they started buying power off the grid. It just makes more sense. And that’s what is starting to happen with infrastructure computing.”N14

Bezos wanted AWS to be a utility with discount rates, even if that meant losing money in the short term. Willem van Biljon, who worked with Chris Pinkham on EC2 and stayed for a few months after Pinkham quit in 2006, proposed pricing EC2 instances at fifteen cents an hour, a rate that he believed would allow the company to break even on the service. In an S Team meeting before EC2 launched, Bezos unilaterally revised that to ten cents. “You realize you could lose money on that for a long time,” van Biljon told him. “Great,” Bezos said.[Vi]

Bezos believed his company had a natural advantage in its cost structure and ability to survive in the thin atmosphere of low-margin businesses. Companies like IBM, Microsoft, and Google, he suspected, would hesitate to get into such markets because it would depress their overall profit margins. Bill Miller, the chief investment officer at Legg Mason Capital Management and a major Amazon shareholder, asked Bezos at the time about the profitability prospects for AWS. Bezos predicted they would be good over the long term but said that he didn’t want to repeat “Steve Jobs’s mistake” of pricing the iPhone in a way that was so fantastically profitable that the smartphone market became a magnet for competition.

The comment reflected his distinctive business philosophy. Bezos believed that high margins justified rivals’ investments in research and development and attracted more competition, while low margins attracted customers and were more defensible. (He was partly right about the iPhone; its sizable profits did indeed attract a deluge of competition, starting with smartphones running Google’s Android operating system. But the pioneering smartphone is also a fantastically lucrative product for Apple and its shareholders in a way that AWS has not been, at least so far.)[Vi]

Bezos’s belief was borne out, and AWS’s deliberately low rates had their intended effect; Google chairman Eric Schmidt said it was at least two years before he noticed that the founders of seemingly every startup he visited told him they were building their systems atop Amazon’s servers. “All of the sudden, it was all Amazon,” Schmidt says. “It’s a significant benefit when every interesting fast-growing company starts on your platform.” Microsoft announced a similar cloud initiative called Azure in 2010. In 2012, Google announced its own Compute Engine. “Let’s give them credit,” Schmidt says. “The book guys got computer science, they figured out the analytics, and they built something significant.”

Just like Creation author Steve Grand had predicted, the creatures were evolving in ways that Bezos could not have imagined. It was the combination of EC2 and S3—storage and compute, two primitives linked together—that transformed both AWS and the technology world. Startups no longer needed to spend their venture capital on buying servers and hiring specialized engineers to run them. Infrastructure costs were variable instead of fixed, and they could grow in direct proportion to revenues. It freed companies to experiment, to change their business models with a minimum of pain, and to keep up with the rapidly growing audiences of erupting social networks like Facebook and Twitter.[Vi]

All of this took years and required significant effort, and its developers encountered many challenges and setbacks along the way. Andy Jassy, along with technical lieutenants Charlie Bell and Werner Vogels, outpaced rivals by layering additional services like Flexible Payment Services and Amazon CloudSearch alongside of EC2 and S3. Groups within Amazon were told to use AWS while the services were still immature, a demand that led to another round of consternation among its engineers. As startups and even some big companies began to rely heavily on AWS, outages had widespread repercussions, and chronically secretive Amazon found it had to get better at explaining itself and speaking to the public.

But the emergence of Amazon Web Services was transformational in a number of ways. Amazon’s inexpensive and easily accessible Web services facilitated the creation of thousands of Internet startups, some of which would not have been possible without it, and it provided larger companies with the ability to rent a supercomputer in the cloud, ushering in a new era of innovation in areas like finance, oil and gas, health, and science. It is not hyperbole to say that AWS, particularly the original services like S3 and EC2, helped lift the entire technology industry out of a prolonged post-dot-com malaise. Amazon also completely outflanked the great hardware makers of the time, like Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard, and defined the next wave of corporate computing.

Perhaps the greatest makeover was of Amazon’s own image. AWS enlarged the scope of what it meant to be the everything store and stocked Amazon’s shelves with incongruous products like spot instances and storage terabytes. It made Amazon a confusing target for Walmart and other rival retailers and gave the company fresh appeal to the legions of engineers looking to solve the world’s most interesting problems. Finally, after years of setbacks and internal rancor, Amazon was unquestionably a technology company, what Bezos had always imagined it to be.[Vi]

—ooOoo—

CHAPTER 8

Fiona

Back in the Paleozoic era of the Internet, around the year 1997, an entrepreneur named Martin Eberhard was sitting in a Palo Alto coffee shop with his friend Marc Tarpenning, sipping a latte and pondering the inevitably bright future of mobile computing. The PalmPilot, the pioneering personal digital assistant, had just been introduced, and cell phones were evolving quickly into sleek devices that slid easily into a jacket pocket. Eberhard and Tarpenning worked for a disk-drive manufacturer and had just returned from a conference called DiskCon. In other words, they were bored out of their skulls and looking for something more interesting to do. They both happened to be voracious readers.

Over coffee that day, the friends postulated that it might finally be possible to invent a computer for reading digital books. People had been talking about this for years, ever since Project Gutenberg, a nonprofit founded in the early 1970s in Champaign, Illinois, with a mission to digitize the world’s books and make them available on personal computers. Eberhard and Tarpenning had a different idea. They wanted something mobile, so people could take whole libraries of e-books with them in dedicated electronic-reading devices. That spring they started NuvoMedia and developed one of the world’s first portable e-readers, which they called the Rocket e-Book, or Rocketbook.

Eberhard had founded a computer-networking company in the 1980s and had been around the Silicon Valley block a few times. (Later he would cofound the electric-car company Tesla.) So he knew that he needed deep-pocketed investors as well as powerful allies to pave his way in the complex and cosseted world of the book-publishing business. Eberhard believed that he needed Jeff Bezos and Amazon.com.[Vi]

In late 1997, the NuvoMedia founders and their lawyer took a Rocketbook prototype to Seattle and spent three weeks in negotiations with Bezos and his top executives. They stayed at a cheap hotel downtown and made regular trips to the old Columbia Building on Second Avenue to discuss the possibility of an Amazon investment in NuvoMedia. Bezos “was really intrigued by our device,” Eberhard says. “He understood that the display technology was finally good enough.”

The prototype itself was crude, with a painted surface and rudimentary software. But it worked, displaying such books as Alice in Wonderland and A Tale of Two Cities on its glowing transflective LCD screen. The device weighed a little over a pound, heavy by today’s standards, but it could be held with one hand, like a paperback book, and its battery lasted twenty hours with the backlight on, which compares favorably to today’s mobile devices.

Bezos seemed impressed but had some reservations. To download books, a customer needed to plug the e-reader into his computer. “We talked about wireless but it was crazily expensive at the time,” says Eberhard. “It would add an extra four hundred dollars to each unit and the data plans were insane.” The Rocketbook’s display wasn’t as easy on the eyes as modern e-readers, but Eberhard had checked out low-powered, low-glare alternatives, like E Ink, being developed in the MIT Media Lab, and e-paper, from Xerox, and found the technology was still unreliable and expensive.[Vi]

After three weeks of intense negotiations, the companies hit a major roadblock. Bezos told Eberhard he was concerned that by backing NuvoMedia and helping it succeed, he might be creating an opportunity for Barnes & Noble to swoop in and buy the startup later. So he demanded exclusivity provisions in any contract between the companies and wanted veto power over future investors. “If we made a bet on the future of reading, we’d want to help it succeed by introducing it to our customers in a big way,” says David Risher, Amazon’s former senior vice president of U.S. retail, who participated in the negotiations. “But the only way that’d have made sense is if it had been exclusive to us. Otherwise, we’d have been funneling our customers to a potential rival.”

Eberhard couldn’t bring himself to agree to limit his future fund-raising opportunities, so Bezos’s concerns became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Once it was evident that the companies were at an impasse, Eberhard and Tarpenning got on a plane and flew to New York to meet with Len and Stephen Riggio of Barnes & Noble. They shook hands on a deal within the week. The bookseller and the publishing giant Bertelsmann agreed to invest two million dollars each, and together they owned nearly half of NuvoMedia.

It later became fashionable to say that the Rocketbook and contemporaneous competitors like the SoftBook were ahead of their time and that the world was not yet ready to read digitally.[Vi]

But that is not quite the entire story. NuvoMedia sold twenty thousand units in its first year and was on track to double that in its second. It negotiated pioneering e-book contracts with all the major book publishers (the Authors Guild condemned the contracts as being unfavorable to authorsN1), and in 1999, Cisco invested in NuvoMedia, giving the company more credibility and another strategic ally. The reviews of the device were generally favorable. Oprah Winfrey included the Rocketbook among her Ten Favorite Things in the inaugural issue of O magazine, and Wired wrote of the device, “It’s like an object that has tumbled out of the future.”N2

NuvoMedia had an aggressive road map for rapid development. Eberhard planned to exploit economies of scale and advances in technology to improve the Rocketbook’s screen quality and battery life while driving down its price. (Over the 1999 holiday season, the basic model cost $169.) “Within five years,” he told Newsweek’s Steven Levy that December, “We’ll have front-surface technology that doesn’t require you to read behind glass.”N3 But NuvoMedia still needed fresh capital, and Eberhard was growing nervous about the unsustainable dot-com bubble and the deteriorating fund-raising climate. In February 2000, he sold NuvoMedia to a Burbank-based interactive TV-guide firm called Gemstar in a stock transaction worth about $187 million. Gemstar also snapped up SoftBook.[Vi]

It was a terrible move. Gemstar’s main corporate objective, it turned out, was exploiting its patent portfolio through litigation. A few months after the sale, Eberhard and Tarpenning exited the firm in disappointment. Gemstar released successors to both Rocketbook and SoftBook, but after slow sales and given its own internal lack of enthusiasm, it pulled them from the market in 2003. Gemstar CEO Henry Yuen, who orchestrated the company’s e-book acquisitions, later fled to China amid accusations of accounting fraud.N4

The Gemstar debacle did more than just demolish the future prospects of the Rocketbook and SoftBook. It seemingly dampened all interest in the very idea of digital reading. BarnesandNoble.com stopped selling e-books altogether after the Rocketbook disappeared, and Palm sold its e-book business at around the same time.N5 E-books seemed like a technological dead-end and a hopeless medium—to almost everyone.

Bezos and Eberhard remained friendly during those years, and Bezos watched the rise and fall of the Rocketbook with more than passing interest. “I firmly believe that at some point the vast majority of books will be in electronic form,” he said in the late 1990s. “I also believe that is a long way in the future, many more than ten years in the future.”N6

Bezos was underestimating the potential, perhaps intentionally. In 2004, seeking a digital strategy for Amazon amid the gathering power of a revived Apple Computer, he started a secretive Silicon Valley skunkworks with the mysterious name Lab126.[Vi]

The hardware hackers at Lab126 were given a difficult job: they were to disrupt Amazon’s own successful bookselling business with an e-book device while also meeting the impossibly high standards of Amazon’s designer in chief, Bezos himself. In order for Amazon to furnish its new digital library, the company’s liaisons to the book world were ordered to push publishers to embrace a seemingly dormant format. It was a nearly impossible mission, and it had to be executed on Amazon’s typical shoestring budget. Many mistakes were made, some of which continue to resonate today.

But in 2007, a few weeks after Amazon unveiled the result of all this effort, the first Kindle, Bezos called up Martin Eberhard at his home in Silicon Valley to ask him whether he thought Amazon had finally gotten it right.

Over his years at the helm of Apple, Steve Jobs usually reviled those former colleagues who had defected from his company and abandoned its righteous mission. Though Diego Piacentini left Apple for a startup that Jobs had incredulously dismissed as just a retailer, the two remained unusually cordial, perhaps because Piacentini had given Apple six months to find his replacement as head of European operations. Jobs would occasionally contact Piacentini when he needed something from Amazon, and in early 2003, Piacentini e-mailed his former boss with a request of his own. Amazon wanted to make Apple a proposal.[Vi]

Piacentini brought Neil Roseman, Rob Frederick, and H. B. Siegel, the technologist who’d started the company’s fledgling digital-media group, to the meeting that spring on Apple’s campus in Cupertino. The Amazon executives did not expect to meet with Jobs himself and were surprised when Apple’s cofounder greeted them personally and spent several hours with them that day.

At the time, Apple did not sell music; its iTunes software allowed users to organize and play their music collections on their PCs and transfer songs onto their iPods. Jobs wanted to get iTunes onto as many PCs as possible, and he floated the idea of Amazon distributing CDs to its customers that carried iTunes software. Piacentini and his colleagues had another plan: they suggested creating a joint music store that would allow iPod owners to buy digital-music files from the Amazon website.

Neither proposal went anywhere. Jobs stood up to illustrate on the conference-room whiteboard his vision of how Apple itself would sell albums and single-tracks directly from iTunes. The Amazon executives countered that surely such a music store should exist on the Web, not inside a piece of clunky desktop software that needed to be regularly updated. But Jobs wanted a consistent, easy-to-use experience that stretched from the music store all the way to the portable media player and was so simple that even unsophisticated users could operate it. “It was clear that Jobs had disdain for selling on the Web and he didn’t think anyone cared about books,” Neil Roseman says. “He had this vision for a client-application version of the iTunes store and he let us know why it had to be an end-to-end experience.”[Vi]

Jobs confidently predicted that Apple would quickly overtake Amazon in music sales, and he was right. In April 2003 Apple introduced the iTunes music store, and in just a few years Apple leapfrogged over, in quick succession, Amazon, Best Buy, and Walmart to become the top music retailer in the United States.

At the time of that humbling lesson, Amazon investors “needed a microscope to find the sales” from all of the company’s various digital initiatives, as Bezos later put it.N7 The company sold downloadable e-books in Microsoft’s and Adobe’s proprietary formats for reading on a PC screen, but the e-book store was well hidden on the Amazon website and yielded few sales. Look Inside the Book and Search Inside the Book were arguably digital-reading efforts, but their purpose was to improve the shopping experience and increase the sales of physical books. As the negotiations with NuvoMedia showed, Bezos was thinking early about the inevitable transition to digital media. But more pressing matters, like fixing the fulfillment centers and improving Amazon’s technology infrastructure, always seemed to take precedence.

Over the next few years Apple dominated the music business and helped send chains like Tower Records and Virgin Megastores into the retail dustbin (with a significant assist from Internet piracy). At first Bezos dismissed iTunes, noting that selling single-tracks for ninety-nine cents each wasn’t profitable and that Apple’s goal was only to increase sales of the iPod. This was true, but as the iPod became ubiquitous, Apple began to exploit iTunes to get into adjacent media such as video, and Amazon took a deeper look. “We talked a lot about what made the iPod successful in music when nothing else had been,” says Neil Roseman.[Vi]

Amazon executives spent months considering various digital-music strategies and at one point explored the possibility of preloading iPods sold on Amazon with the music from CDs that customers had bought on the site. When it proved impossible to get the music labels to agree to that, Amazon settled on launching a digital-music service, similar to Rhapsody, which gave monthly subscribers unlimited access to a vast catalog of music. Amazon came close to launching that effort in 2005. It was going to use music encoded with Microsoft’s proprietary DRM (digital rights management) anticopying software Janus. But then several members of the team rebelled at what they viewed as a flawed approach, in part because the Janus-encoded music wouldn’t play on the iPod, which so many Amazon customers already owned. “I realized I’d rather die than launch that store,” says Erich Ringewald, a product manager who worked on the initiative. Bezos agreed to scrap the effort and start over. Meanwhile, Apple increased its lead in digital media. Amazon finally introduced the MP3 Store in 2007, featuring songs without DRM that users could freely copy. But Apple quickly negotiated the same agreements and Amazon remained a perennial straggler in music.

Bezos’s colleagues and friends often attribute Amazon’s tardiness in digital music to Bezos’s lack of interest in music of any kind. In high school, Bezos forced himself to memorize the call letters of local Miami radio stations in an effort to fake musical fluency in conversations with his peers.N8 Colleagues remember that on the solemn road trip from Target’s offices in Minneapolis after 9/11, Bezos indiscriminately grabbed stacks of CDs from the bargain rack of a convenience store, as if they were all interchangeable.[Vi]

Steve Jobs, on the other hand, lived and breathed music. He was a notoriously devoted fan of Bob Dylan and the Beatles and had once dated singer Joan Baez. Jobs’s personal interests guided Apple’s strategy. Bezos’s particular passions would have the same defining impact at Amazon. Bezos didn’t just love books—he fully imbibed them, methodically processing each detail. Stewart Brand, the author of How Buildings Learn, among other works, recalls being startled when Bezos showed him his personal copy of the 1995 book. Each page was filled with Bezos’s carefully scribbled notes.

In 2004, Apple’s dominance in digital music spawned fresh soul-searching at Amazon. The sales of books, music, and movies accounted for 74 percent of Amazon’s annual revenues that year. If those formats were inevitably transitioning to digital, as Apple’s accomplishment seemed to demonstrate, then Amazon had to move quickly to protect itself. “We were freaking out over what the iPod had done to Amazon’s music business,” says director John Doerr. “We feared that there would be another kind of device from Apple or someone else that would go after the core business: books.”

Investor Bill Miller from Legg Mason often discussed the digital transition with Bezos when the two got together. “I think the thing that blindsided Jeff and helped with the Kindle was the iPod, which overturned the music business faster than he thought,” says Miller. “He had always understood this stuff was going digital, but he didn’t expect to have his CD business eviscerated like that.”[Vi]

Bezos ultimately concluded that if Amazon was to continue to thrive as a bookseller in a new digital age, it must own the e-book business in the same way that Apple controlled the music business. “It is far better to cannibalize yourself than have someone else do it,” said Diego Piacentini in a speech at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business a few years later. “We didn’t want to be Kodak.” The reference was to the century-old photography giant whose engineers had invented digital cameras in the 1970s but whose profit margins were so healthy that its executives couldn’t bear to risk it all on an unproven venture in a less profitable frontier.

Bezos was apparently contemplating a dedicated electronic reader as early as 2003—around the time Gemstar pulled the Rocketbook from shelves. Andreas Weigend, Amazon’s short-lived chief scientist, remembers Bezos speaking to his technical team about such a device and saying, “It’s for one-handed reading.” Upon imagining what the other hand might be doing, Weigend started to laugh out loud, and then everyone else in the small conference room did as well. “Jeff, the good kid that he is, had no idea what one-handed reading could refer to,” Weigend says.

In 2004, Amazon executives were considering shutting down their own fledgling e-bookstore, which featured books in Adobe and Microsoft formats. The store was everything Bezos hated: its selection was small, its prices were high, and the customer experience of downloading titles and reading them on the screen of a PC or PDA was terrible. But Bezos, according to Piacentini, seemed determined. Despite these early flaws, e-books were clearly the future of bookselling.[Vi]

A few weeks into these discussions, in an S Team meeting, Bezos announced that Amazon would develop its own dedicated electronic reading device for long-form reading. It was a stunning edict. Creating hardware was expensive and complicated. It was also well outside of Amazon’s core competency—its litany of obvious skills. There was a chorus of vehement objections. Jeff Wilke in particular had the background in manufacturing to know what challenges lay ahead for the company if it tried to make and sell its own devices. “I thought it would be difficult and disruptive and I was skeptical that it was the right use of our resources,” he says. “It turned out that most of the things I predicted would happen actually happened, and we still powered through it because Jeff is not deterred by short-term setbacks.”

Diego Piacentini also protested. He had watched firsthand as Apple struggled through the 1990s with disastrous surpluses of products and massive inventory write-offs. “It was seen by me and all the small thinkers as a very risky investment,” he says.

Bezos dismissed those objections and insisted that to succeed in books as Apple had in music, Amazon needed to control the entire customer experience, combining sleek hardware with an easy-to-use digital bookstore. “We are going to hire our way to having the talent,” he told his executives in that meeting. “I absolutely know it’s very hard. We’ll learn how to do it.”[Vi]

Within Amazon there is a term used to describe the top executives who get to implement Jeff Bezos’s best ideas: Jeff Bots. The playfully derisive phrase that undoubtedly hides a little jealousy connotes slavish devotion but also loyalty and effectiveness. Jeff Bots draw fuel from their CEO’s ample idea tank and then go out into the world and dutifully execute the best notions. They have completely absorbed Bezos’s business philosophy and molded their own worldviews around it, and they recite rote Jeffisms—how they start from the customer and work backward, et cetera—as if these were their prime directives. To interview a Jeff Bot as a journalist is to witness his or her remarkable ability to say absolutely nothing of substance while going on about Amazon’s inventiveness and its unmatched, gee-whiz enthusiasm for the customer. Jeff Bots would surely rather chomp down on their cyanide-capsule-implanted molars than address topics that Amazon has programmed them to never publicly discuss—subjects such as the competition and any possible problems with products.

Throughout Amazon history, there was perhaps no more faithful or enterprising Jeff Bot than Steve Kessel, a Boston-born graduate of Dartmouth College and the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. Kessel joined Amazon in the heat of the 1999 expansion after a job consulting for browser pioneer Netscape. In his first few years at the company, he ran the book category at a time when Amazon was cultivating direct relationships with publishers and trying to assuage their fears about third-party merchants selling used books on the site. During this grinding period of Amazon’s greatest challenges, Bezos grew to trust him immensely.[Vi]

One day in 2004, Bezos called Kessel into his office and abruptly took away his impressive job, with all of its responsibilities and subordinates. He said he wanted Kessel to take over Amazon’s fledgling digital efforts. Kessel was skeptical. “My first reaction was that I already had the best job in the world,” he says. “Ultimately Jeff talked about building brand-new things, and I got excited by the challenge.” Bezos was adamant that Kessel could not run both the physical and digital-media businesses at the same time. “If you are running both businesses you will never go after the digital opportunity with tenacity,” he said.

By that time, Bezos and his executives had devoured and raptly discussed another book that would significantly affect the company’s strategy: The Innovator’s Dilemma, by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen. Christensen wrote that great companies fail not because they want to avoid disruptive change but because they are reluctant to embrace promising new markets that might undermine their traditional businesses and that do not appear to satisfy their short-term growth requirements. Sears, for example, failed to move from department stores to discount retailing; IBM couldn’t shift from mainframe to minicomputers. The companies that solved the innovator’s dilemma, Christensen wrote, succeeded when they “set up autonomous organizations charged with building new and independent businesses around the disruptive technology.”N9

Drawing lessons directly from the book, Bezos unshackled Kessel from Amazon’s traditional media organization.[Vi]

“Your job is to kill your own business,” he told him. “I want you to proceed as if your goal is to put everyone selling physical books out of a job.” Bezos underscored the urgency of the effort. He believed that if Amazon didn’t lead the world into the age of digital reading, then Apple or Google would. When Kessel asked Bezos what his deadline was on developing the company’s first piece of hardware, an electronic reading device, Bezos told him, “You are basically already late.”

With no personal knowledge of the hardware business and no internal resources at the company to draw on, Kessel went on a fact-finding mission to Silicon Valley, meeting with hardware experts from Apple and Palm and with executives from the famed industrial design firm Ideo. He learned that Amazon would need not just designers but electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, wireless engineers—the list was endless.

Following Christensen’s dictates as if they were instructions in a recipe, Kessel set up another subsidiary in Palo Alto in addition to A9. To take the helm of the new division, he hired Gregg Zehr, an easygoing former vice president of engineering at Palm Computing who kept a jazz guitar in his office. Jateen Parekh, a former engineer at set-top-box maker ReplayTV (an early TiVo rival), became the first employee, and a few others were hired as well. There was no office to report to, so they set up shop in an empty room in the headquarters of A9. Zehr and his colleagues set about furnishing the new division with a name alluring enough to attract the best and brightest engineers from Silicon Valley. They eventually settled on Lab126. The 1 stands for a, the 26 for z; it’s a subtle indication of Bezos’s dream to allow customers to buy any book ever published, from a to z.[Vi]

They didn’t get their marching orders right away, so Zehr and his team spent the first few weeks investigating the possibility of building an Internet-connected set-top box and even an MP3 player. Finally Amazon’s new hardware geeks were given their mission: they were to build an electronic reading device. “We were told to do one great thing with maniacal focus,” says Tom Ryan, a software engineer from Palm whom Zehr brought over that fall. “The aspiration was to be Apple.”

The group piggybacked on A9’s infrastructure for the next year. When the search division moved to the former offices of a law firm on Lytton and Alma in downtown Palo Alto, Lab126 moved with them and took up residence in the old law library. They researched existing e-readers of the time, such as the Sony Libre, which required triple-A batteries and sold poorly. They concluded the market was wide open. “It was the one thing that wasn’t being done well by anyone else out there,” says Parekh.

Lab126 was soon given extensive resources but it also had to contend with the unfettered imagination of Bezos. Amazon’s founder wanted his new e-reading device to be so easy to use that a grandmother could operate it, and he argued that configuring devices to work with WiFi networks was too complicated for non-tech-savvy users. He didn’t want to force customers to connect the device to a PC, so the only alternative was to build cellular access right into the hardware, the equivalent of embedding a wireless phone in each unit. Nothing like that had been tried before. Bezos insisted that customers should never have to know the wireless connection was there or even pay for access. “I thought it was insane, I really did,” Parekh says.[Vi]

In those early months, much of the early direction for the Kindle was set. Zehr and Parekh made the decision to explore the low-powered black-and-white display technology called E Ink that, years before, Martin Eberhard had found too primitive and expensive. It used millions of tiny microcapsules, each about the diameter of a human hair and containing positively charged white particles and negatively charged black particles suspended in a clear fluid. When a positive electric field is applied, positively charged particles move to the top of the microcapsule, making that spot appear white; when a negative electric field is applied, negative particles migrate up, and the spot appears black.

Unlike LCD systems, the technology worked well under direct sunlight, used very little battery power, and was exceedingly easy on the eyes. In a sense, Amazon got lucky. A technology perfectly suited for long-form reading on a device (and terrible for everything else) just happened to be maturing after a decade of development.

In those waning months of 2004, the early Lab126 engineers selected a code name for their new project. On his desk, Zehr had a copy of Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, a futuristic novel about an engineer who steals a rare interactive textbook to give to his daughter, Fiona. The early Lab126 engineers thought of the fictitious textbook in the novel as a template for what they were creating. Michael Cronan, the San Francisco–based graphic designer and marketing executive who baptized the TiVo, was later hired to officially brand the new dedicated reading device, and he came up with Kindle, which played off the notion of starting a conflagration and worked as both a noun and a verb. But by then Kessel’s team was devoted to the name Fiona and the group tried, unsuccessfully, to convince Bezos to keep it. In a sense, the knowledge-starved Fiona of Stephenson’s fictional world became Amazon’s patron saint in its risky journey into the digital frontier.[Vi]

While Zehr and his crew at Lab126 worked on software and developed relationships with Asian manufacturers, the early industrial design work on Amazon’s new e-reader was contracted out to the San Francisco office of global design firm Pentagram. Zehr had worked with a partner there, Robert Brunner, at Apple in the 1990s, and he introduced Brunner to Steve Kessel with the suggestion that Pentagram could offer a nimbler and perhaps more discrete style of collaboration than larger firms like Ideo. Brunner assigned two of his employees, Tom Hobbs and Symon Whitehorn, to the job.

The Pentagram designers, both British born, began by studying the actual physics of reading—the physical aspects of the pastime, such as how readers turn pages and hold books in their hands. They forced themselves to read on existing e-readers, like the Sony Libre and the old Rocketbook, and on PDAs like the iPaq from Compaq and Palm’s Treo. They brought in focus groups, conducted phone interviews, and even went up to Seattle to talk to Bezos himself, trying to deconstruct a process that for many hundreds of years people had taken for granted. “We were pushing for the subconscious qualities that made it feel like you are reading a book,” says Hobbs. One of the primary conclusions from their research was that a good book disappears in the reader’s hands. Bezos later called this the top design objective. “Kindle also had to get out of the way and disappear so that you could enter the author’s world,” he said.N10

The Pentagram designers worked on the Kindle for nearly two years. They met with Steve Kessel, Greg Zehr, and Charlie Tritschler—another Palm veteran who’d joined Lab126—every Tuesday morning at A9 in Palo Alto and later at the new Lab126 offices in Mountain View. They periodically traveled to Seattle to update Bezos on their progress, and they had to present to the CEO in the customary Amazon way, with six-page narratives.[Vi]

The meetings could get tense. Hobbs, Whitehorn, and Brunner wanted to strip out complexity and make the device as streamlined and inconspicuous as possible. Bezos also wanted a simple, iconic design but insisted on adding a keyboard so users could easily search for book titles and make annotations. (He envisioned sitting in a taxi with Wall Street Journal columnist Walt Mossberg and keying in and downloading an e-book right there in the cab.) Bezos toted around a BlackBerry messaging device at the time and told the designers, “I want you to join my BlackBerry and my book.”

In one trip to Seattle, the designers stubbornly brought models that left out the keyboard. Bezos gave them a withering look. “Look, we already talked about this,” he said. “I might be wrong but at the same time I’ve got a bit more to stand on than you have.”

“I remember being very silent for the rest of that meeting,” Hobbs says. They complied and designed oblong buttons, based on the style of the BlackBerry, while trying to accommodate the angles that reader’s fingers might take moving across the device.

There were similar disputes about wireless connectivity. The Pentagram designers couldn’t understand how the economics of the wireless connection could work and assumed Amazon would be asking the user to pay a wireless charge every time he or she bought a book. At one point, they pitched Bezos on a process similar to the iTunes model, which required making the bookstore accessible on a PC. Bezos pushed back. “Here’s my scenario, I’m going to the airport. I need a book to read. I want to enter it into the device and download it right there from my car.”

“But you can’t do that,” Hobbs replied.[Vi]

“I’ll decide what I can do,” Bezos said. “I’ll figure this out and it is not going to be a business model you understand. You are the designers, I want you to design this and I’ll think about the business model.”

Pentagram worked on Fiona through the middle of 2006, and then Lab126, which by then had hired its own designers, reclaimed the project. The Pentagram designers would feel ambivalent about the device when they finally saw it at the same time as the rest of the world. It was too cluttered with buttons, the design too confusing. After the project, Symon Whitehorn left Pentagram to go work at, of all places, Kodak. He hired Tom Hobbs as a contractor and together they created a unique digital camera that allowed picture-takers to impose on their photos the historical look of classic Kodachrome film. It presaged mobile-phone applications like Instagram, and, naturally, Kodak killed the project before it ever hit the market.

Meanwhile, after Pentagram left the Kindle project, the device seemed nearly ready and close to launching. But a litany of delays followed. E Ink sent displays from Asia, and owing to variable temperatures and humidity, batches would have low contrast or get dimmer with frequent use. Intel sold the family of XScale microprocessor chips that Kindle used to another chip company, Marvell. Qualcomm and Broadcom, two wireless-technology companies that manufactured cellular components to be used in the Kindle, sued each other in 2007, and at one point it seemed like a judge would prevent certain key Kindle parts from entering the United States. Bezos himself brought about repeated delays, finding one fault or another with the device and constantly asking for changes.[Vi]

The top-secret Kindle effort dragged on for so long that it became the subject of persistent rumors inside Amazon, even though no one was supposed to know of the project’s existence. At an all-hands meeting at the Moore Theater in the fall of 2006, someone stood up and asked, “Can you tell us what Lab126 is?”

Bezos responded brusquely. “It’s a development center in Northern California. Next question.”

***

To give the Kindle even a remote chance of succeeding, Amazon needed e-books—lots of them. Bezos had watched the Rocketbook and later saw the Sony Reader hobbled by pitifully limited catalogs. There was simply nothing for owners of the early e-book devices to read. His goal was to have one hundred thousand digital titles, including 90 percent of the New York Times’ bestsellers, available for download when the device went on sale. At the time, publishers had digitized only their front lists, or about twenty thousand books total. The Kindle store finally offered Bezos another chance to fulfill part of his dream of the everything store, a comprehensively stocked library that was exceedingly convenient for customers, but to get there, Amazon would have to pressure, cajole, and even threaten some of its oldest partners, a group of companies that had come to view Amazon as something other than a faithful friend.[Vi]

Back in its earliest days, Amazon’s relationship with book publishers was uncomplicated and largely symbiotic. The company acquired most of its books from Ingram, Baker and Taylor, and other distributors, and on the rare occasions when the distributors didn’t have a title in stock, they bought directly from publishers. There were occasional but insignificant skirmishes during these years. Bezos often said publicly that publishers originally hated the notion of customer reviews, fearing that harsh and often anonymous online critiques could hurt sales. Publishers and the Authors Guild also complained about the appearance of third-party sellers hawking used books on the site.N11

For its part, a young Amazon constantly harangued publishers for more “metadata,” the books’ supplementary information, like author biographies, comprehensive descriptions of the subject matter, and digital images of jacket covers. Still, many publishers viewed Amazon as a savior, a desperately needed counterbalance to Barnes & Noble, Borders, and Waterstones in the United Kingdom, all of which were churning out new superstores and using their size and growth to press for steeper discounts on wholesale prices.

Living in Seattle, a continent away from New York City, Bezos made few friendships in the world of book publishing. One of his rare personal connections was with Larry Kirshbaum, the CEO of the Time Warner Book Group and the high-profile minder of James Patterson and other authors.[Vi]

Kirshbaum believed so deeply in the Amazon mission that he had bought shares in its May 1997 initial public offering. A few months later, on a night of pounding rain in midtown Manhattan, Bezos and Kirshbaum walked six blocks from the Time-Life Building to attend a party that Rupert Murdoch was throwing for Jane Friedman, then the incoming chief executive officer of News Corporation’s HarperCollins book division. The luminaries of the publishing business, such as Random House’s then CEO Alberto Vitale and literary agent Lynn Nesbit, crowded into the Monkey Bar on Fifty-Fourth Street, with its red-leather booths and murals of gamboling chimps. For a rare night, Bezos socialized amiably with the titans of an industry that Amazon was about to irrevocably change. “It was one of those moments in your life where you remember everything,” says Kirshbaum, who would join Amazon as the head of its New York publishing division in 2011. “In fact, I think Bezos still owes me an umbrella.”

When Amazon began its all-consuming pursuit of profitability after the turn of the century, its attitude toward the rest of the book world began to change. By 2004, Amazon sold a large percentage of all books in the United States. So it aggressively sought more favorable financial terms in its deals with publishers and tried to reap some of the benefits of its growing size and significance in the industry. During these pivotal years, the steward of Amazon’s relationship with publishers, Lyn Blake, was herself a veteran of the industry, a former executive of the computer-book division of Macmillan.[Vi]

Blake joined Amazon in 1999. Her first job was to establish stronger direct relationships with publishers and create standards for how they shipped packages of books to Amazon’s fulfillment centers (no Styrofoam packing peanuts, for example). Blake brought more discipline and analytics to Amazon’s book-supply chain, overseeing the creation of automated systems that purchased from whichever source—distributor or publisher—had books in stock and offered the best price. She developed Amazon’s first co-op programs in the book category, selling prominent placement on the site to publishers who were willing to pay promotional fees. These were customary tactics for any large retailer, and Blake had seen them employed by other retail chains, to profitable effect, from her perch at Macmillan.

Blake was an anomaly at Amazon. She refused to carry a BlackBerry and left the office every day promptly at five to greet her young daughter at home. She could be a tough negotiator, and she knew her way around the Robinson-Patman Act, the 1936 antitrust law that prohibited manufacturers from selling goods to large retailers at a lower price than they sold to their smaller competitors. Having been on the other side of the negotiating table, she was sensitive to the needs of book publishers and was often their advocate inside Amazon. “My relationship with the largest publishers was very positive,” Blake says. “Of course I pushed them to do better and work harder, but when they had issues with us, I was willing to address those issues.”[Vi]

Blake’s balancing act soon became difficult. In Bezos’s perennial quest to subsidize low prices for customers and finance programs like Super Saver Shipping and Prime, he pushed Blake and her team to establish more favorable financial relationships with book publishers and expand profit margins wherever they could. Bezos believed Amazon should be well compensated for the special benefits it brought to the book industry. The site carried millions of titles, not just the one hundred and fifty thousand or so that appeared on the shelves of a Barnes & Noble superstore. Unlike traditional retailers, Amazon returned few unsold books, often less than 5 percent. The big book chains regularly returned 40 percent of all the books they acquired from publishers, for full refunds, an arrangement that is nearly unique in retail.

By 2004, Amazon’s normally placid book-buying department found itself preparing for battle. Buyers received negotiating training and an education on the limits and flexibility of Robinson-Patman. Blake dutifully pushed publishers for compromises while constantly reminding her boss that if publishers rebelled, Amazon could be hurt. “There was a period of time where inside Amazon, we were scared of how the publishing industry would take all this,” says Erick Goss, a senior manager of the books group. “Lyn was our ambassador. I credit her for maintaining these relationships.”[Vi]

Amazon approached large publishers aggressively. It demanded accommodations like steeper discounts on bulk purchases, longer periods to pay its bills, and shipping arrangements that leveraged Amazon’s discounts with UPS. To publishers that didn’t comply, Amazon threatened to pull their books out of its automated personalization and recommendation systems, meaning that they would no longer be suggested to customers. “Publishers didn’t really understand Amazon. They were very naïve about what was going on with their back catalog,” says Goss. “Most didn’t know their sales were up because their backlist was getting such visibility.”

Amazon had an easy way to demonstrate its market power. When a publisher did not capitulate and the company shut off the recommendation algorithms for its books, the publisher’s sales usually fell by as much as 40 percent. “Typically it was about thirty days before they’d come back and say, Ouch, how do we make this work?” says Christopher Smith, a senior book buyer at the time.

Bezos kept pushing for more. He asked Blake to exact better terms from the smallest publishers, who would go out of business if it weren’t for the steady sales of their back catalogs on Amazon. Within the books group, the resulting program was dubbed the Gazelle Project because Bezos suggested to Blake in a meeting that Amazon should approach these small publishers the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle.[Vi]

As part of the Gazelle Project, Blake’s group categorized publishers in terms of their dependency on Amazon and then opened negotiations with the most vulnerable companies. Three book buyers at the time recall this effort. Blake herself said that Bezos meant the cheetah-and-gazelle analogy as a joke and that it was carried too far. Yet the program clearly represented something real—an emerging realpolitik approach toward book publishers, an attitude whose ruthlessness startled even some Amazon employees. Soon after the Gazelle Project began, Amazon’s lawyers heard about the name and insisted it be changed to the less incendiary Small Publisher Negotiation Program.

Publishers were horrified by this. The company they had once viewed as a welcome counterbalance to the book chains was now constantly presenting new demands. The demands were introduced quite persuasively in the form of benefits to be passed on to Amazon’s customers, but even that could sound ominous. When Amazon passed on savings to customers in the form of shipping deals or lower prices, it had the effect of increasing the pressure on physical bookstores, including independent bookshops, and adding to Amazon’s growing market power.

Around this time, Amazon representatives made the rounds asking publishers to submit titles for its Search Inside the Book program. Meanwhile, Google had begun scanning library books without the permission of copyright owners, part of a massive effort to make the world’s literary output available online as a research tool.[Vi]

In 2005, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers filed dual lawsuits against Google in federal court. This was a separate drama with its own convoluted legal backstory, but it amplified some book publishers’ growing anxiety: they risked losing control of their own business to the well-capitalized Internet companies on the West Coast, who seemed to approach the cerebral pursuit of bookselling with all the literary nuance one might find in an algorithm.

Lyn Blake left Amazon in early 2005. She had achieved unexpected financial success and wanted to devote more time to her family. She admits that she also saw an approaching rupture in Amazon’s relationships with book publishers. “Maybe I was feeling like it was going to go that way,” she says. “I like to do business where both parties feel like they are going to get something valuable out of it, which means future negotiations can take place in a civilized way.”

Her successors would not channel the same advocacy for publishers inside Amazon or have the same deft political touch. Before she left, Blake promoted Randy Miller, one of the founders of Amazon’s jewelry store, to take over vendor relations in Europe. By his own admission, Miller took an almost sadistic delight in pressuring book publishers to give Amazon more favorable financial terms. He ranked all of the European publishers by their sales and by Amazon’s profit margins on their books. Then he and his colleagues persuaded the lagging publishers to alter their deals and give Amazon better terms, once again with the threat of decreased promotion on the site. Miller says he and his colleagues called the program Pay to Play. Once again, Amazon’s lawyers caught wind of this and renamed the program Vendor Realignment.[Vi]

Over the next year, Miller tangled with the European divisions of Random House, Hachette, and Bloomsbury, the publisher of the Harry Potter series. “I did everything I could to screw with their performance,” he says. He took selections of their catalog to full price and yanked their books from Amazon’s recommendation engine; with some titles, like travel books, he promoted comparable books from competitors. Miller’s constant search for new points of leverage exploited the anxieties of neurotic authors who obsessively tracked sales rank—the number on Amazon.com that showed an author how well his or her book was doing compared to other products on the site. “We would constantly meet with authors, so we’d know who would be watching their rankings.” Miller says. “I knew these people would be on their phones the second they saw their sales numbers drop.”

These tactics were not unique to Amazon. The company had finally learned the tricks of the century-old trade that is modern retail. Profit margin is finite. Better financial terms with suppliers translate directly into a healthier bottom line—and create the foundation on which everyday low prices become possible.

Walmart in particular had mastered this perpetual coercion of suppliers, and it did it with missionary zeal and the belief that it led to the low prices that made products like diapers affordable to lower- and middle-class Americans. Walmart is notorious for demanding that suppliers open offices in Bentonville, Arkansas, and integrate certain technologies, like RFID chips, into their products. The company is also known for specifying just how much it will pay for products and for demanding severe concessions if it believes a supplier’s profit margin is too high.[Vi]

In Amazon’s early years, when the likes of Sony and Disney refused to sell directly to the company, Bezos had been on the short end of this Darwinian dynamic. He had learned the game firsthand. Now the balance of power was shifting. Now suppliers needed Amazon more than Amazon needed them.

In the midst of this changing landscape, Amazon started to pitch publishers on the Kindle.

The first two Kindle emissaries to the New York–based publishers presented an unlikely picture. Dan Rose, a longtime Amazon business development executive, led the early effort to bring publishers on board. Rose was of medium height, sported dot-com casual clothes like khakis and royal blue oxford shirts, and spoke easily about the coming opportunities of the digital age. He visited publishers with a former Microsoft product manager named Jeff Steele, an openly homosexual six-foot-four bodybuilder who wore dark suits and ties and cut a menacing figure—but who in reality had an exceedingly gentle temperament.

Their goal, set in the first half of 2006, was to convince jittery publishers to place yet another bet on e-books, despite the many previous failures and false starts in digital publishing. They were handicapped in their mission: Bezos didn’t actually permit them to acknowledge the existence of the Kindle, which remained top secret.[Vi]

So Rose and Steele were forced to approach the topic circuitously, talking up Search Inside the Book and an e-book standard created by the French company Mobipocket, which Amazon acquired in 2005 to jump-start its e-book initiative. Owning Mobi technology allowed Amazon e-books to appear on a variety of different devices, like cell phones and PDAs.

Without any hint of why the prospects for e-books might soon brighten, publishers were reluctant to act. They already encoded their most popular titles in the standards supported by Sony, Adobe, Microsoft, and Palm, yet e-books remained an infinitesimally small part of their business. Digitizing backlist books also presented enormous legal challenges. For titles published prior to the late 1990s, it was sometimes unclear who actually owned the digital rights, and publishers were often loath to revisit the issue with authors and their agents, as they might view it as an opportunity to renegotiate their entire deal.

Rose and Steele’s progress was slow. Adding to the pressure, Bezos wanted biweekly reports on their march toward the goal of one hundred thousand e-books. “I described my job as dragging publishers kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century,” says Jeff Steele. “We found they really weren’t willing to do something interesting.” That summer, the duo finally convinced Bezos they couldn’t hide the ball any longer: they had to tell publishers about the Kindle. “Once they see it, they will get excited about it,” Steele argued. Bezos reluctantly agreed to allow them to show publishers a Kindle prototype, as long as it was within the confines of a strict nondisclosure agreement.[Vi]

In the fall of 2006, Amazon began showing the device to publishers. At the time, Fiona was unimpressive; it looked like the cream-colored bastard child of a BlackBerry and a calculator, and it froze up as often as it worked. Publishers thought Amazon might be hawking the e-book equivalent of Betamax, the failed Sony home-video format of the 1970s. They saw mostly what wasn’t there: no color, no video, no backlight. The early prototypes did not have working wireless access either, though Amazon executives described what the experience might be like while they feebly demonstrated the device by loading SD cards with sample e-books.

During these unproductive months, Amazon developers conceived of a potential shortcut to their goal, which they dubbed Topaz. Topaz was a program to take the scanned digital files from Search Inside the Book and repurpose them in a format suitable for the Kindle. Amazon offered this as an option to publishers, arguing that it would help them decrease the costs of digitizing their catalogs, although the digital file would remain exclusive to the Kindle. Large publishers like Simon and Schuster did not want to create a new dependency on Amazon, but some smaller publishers jumped at the option.[Vi]

By early 2007, Amazon could demonstrate the Kindle’s wireless access, and, finally, some publishers understood its potential. John Sargent, the CEO of Macmillan, and some other executives became converts when they recognized for the first time that giving customers instant gratification—the immediate download of any e-book at any time—might allow Amazon to succeed where Sony and others had failed. Of course, as Bezos had feared, it leaked. Engadget, the technology blog, had the first details about Amazon’s new e-reading device, and soon after, Victoria Barnsley, the CEO of HarperCollins UK, confirmed at an industry event that she had seen the device and was “rather impressed.”N12

The Kindle was supposed to go on sale for the 2006 holidays. But it was delayed another year as Bezos relentlessly pressured Steve Kessel and his team for fixes, new features, and a larger catalog of e-books. By that time, Dan Rose had departed Amazon to join the budding social network Facebook, and Jeff Steele and his group reported directly to Kessel. Steele also worked alongside the merchandising director from the physical books group, Laura Porco.

Porco, a graduate of Ohio State University and one of Lyn Blake’s hires, was a blunt and tenacious advocate for Amazon’s cause. She channeled the intensity of Bezos, ruthlessly aiming to exact profit margins from Amazon’s relationships with its suppliers wherever she could.[Vi]

Prior to joining the Kindle group, she battled with the movie studios, pulling Disney out of Amazon’s recommendations in the midst of one negotiation (a tactic that didn’t work) and clashing so fiercely with executives at Warner Home Video that the studio famously banned her from its buildings, according to several of Porco’s colleagues. One Random House executive called her Amazon’s “battering ram.” Even her colleagues were in awe of her Hyde-like transformation when conducting the company’s business. “Laura can be one of the kindest people, but when it comes to Amazon she wants to drink blood,” says Christopher Smith.

A few years after the original Kindle negotiations, a publishing-industry executive visited Amazon to discuss a job opening at the company. He was interviewed by a series of Amazon book executives, including Porco, who asked only one question: “What is your negotiation strategy?” The executive replied that he believed a successful negotiation must make both sides happy. Porco’s passionate view, according to this executive (who did not get the job), was that this was an “un-Amazon” response and that one party must always win.

This is not to pick on a particular Amazon executive, but to illustrate a point. Inside the company at the time, the culture was self-perpetuating, and those who couldn’t channel Bezos’s fervor on behalf of Amazon and its customers didn’t stay with the company. Those who could do it stayed and advanced.[Vi]

Erick Goss, a veteran of the book group, could no longer abide the Jeff Bots, and he moved to Nashville in 2006 to care for his ailing mother. He took a job at a competitor, Magazines.com, and Amazon threatened to sue him for violating his noncompete clause. (The matter was settled privately.) Goss admitted to mixed emotions about Amazon. He was proud of the difficult things he and his colleagues had accomplished. But he also found it increasingly hard to reconcile the company’s approach toward its partners with his own Christian values and says that for a year after leaving Amazon, he had post-traumatic stress disorder.

Jeff Steele, the gentle giant who spearheaded Amazon’s outreach to the publishers, also grew to dislike Amazon’s creeping aggressiveness. “I didn’t like to bully people. Every reasonable business-development deal should involve some sort of compromise, some give-and-take,” he says. “I just got uncomfortable.” In what became the final straw, Steele quarreled with Kessel over the terms of Amazon’s contract with Oxford University Press, which supplied the digital dictionary that was embedded in the Kindle. Kessel wanted to renegotiate the already completed contract to exact more favorable terms from the publisher. Steele bluntly told him that the deal had already been negotiated and that it was unethical to revisit the contract. Soon after, Steele got into a shouting match with Laura Porco and was asked by Kessel to collect his things and leave the company. Porco then took over the Kindle effort.[Vi]

The next few months were tense. Amazon’s inducements to publishers were followed by threats. Publishers that didn’t digitize enough of their catalogs, or didn’t do it fast enough, were told they faced losing their prominence in Amazon’s search results and in its recommendations to customers. Years earlier, the music labels had scampered into the arms of Apple despite their reservations, since they were facing the even more ominous threat of rampant music piracy. But books were not as easily pirated and shared online, and book publishers feared no similar bogeyman. So Bezos finally had to turn Amazon into one.

What had started out as Amazon’s soliciting publishers for help had evolved into the equivalent of a parent threatening a child. After realizing they did not yet have the Oprah Winfrey book club pick, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, Porco sent an e-mail to Random House’s head of sales demanding to know why there was no e-book version available. The note, which came during the middle of the night New York time, was so contemptuous and incendiary that it made the rounds within the publishing company. (Knopf, the Random House imprint that published the book, wouldn’t have the digital rights for another year.)

Publishers felt caught up in a schizophrenic assault by Amazon that combined supplication and threats and alternated urgency with delay. Porco and her team presented list after list of books that publishers needed to digitize, then screamed when e-books weren’t produced fast enough.[Vi]

Amazon also appealed directly to agents and authors, alienating publishers, who were uncomfortable seeing one of the world’s largest retailers speaking with their most prominent authors. “It seems clear to me that the insanity being directed at us was coming directly from Jeff Bezos, who had some mania about a magic number that needed to be hit about the number of titles available on the Kindle on the word go,” says one publishing executive.

Amazon and its publishing partners now occupied entirely different worlds. The e-book business didn’t exist in any meaningful way, so publishers couldn’t understand why they were being berated and punished for not embracing it. Amazon executives saw themselves as racing toward the future and fulfilling Bezos’s vision of making every book ever printed available for instant digital delivery, but at the same time they were trying desperately to beat Apple and Google to the next vital phase in the evolution of digital media.

And there was one other ingredient in this piquant stew. Bezos decided that the digital versions of the most popular books and new releases would have a flat price of $9.99. There was no research behind that number—it was Bezos’s gut call, fashioned after Apple’s successful ninety-nine-cent price tag for a digital single in iTunes and based on the assumption that consumers would expect to pay less for an e-book than they did for a traditional book, as an e-book had none of the costs associated with printing and storage.[Vi]

Since Amazon bought e-books from publishers at the same wholesale price as it bought physical books, typically paying around fifteen dollars for a book that would retail at thirty, that meant it would lose money on many of its sales. Bezos was fine with that—he believed publishers would eventually be forced to lower their wholesale prices on e-books to reflect the lower costs of publication. In the meantime, it was just the kind of investment in Amazon’s future that he loved. “Customers are smart, and we felt like they would expect and deserve digital books to be lower priced than physical books,” says Steve Kessel.

Amazon knew quite well that publishers would absolutely hate the $9.99 price. The $9.99 e-books were considerably more appealing to some customers than the more expensive hardcovers, the industry’s most profitable format, and the pricing pulled the rug out from under traditional retailers, particularly independent booksellers, who would suddenly find their shelves stocked with what some book buyers might soon view as overly expensive relics. Everyone had watched this precise dynamic play out in music, with disastrous consequences for physical retailers.

So Amazon decided not to let publishers know about the planned $9.99 price, lest they object. This was easily rationalized; retailers have no obligation to tell their suppliers how they plan to price products, and doing so could theoretically raise the specter of vertical price fixing and attract the attention of antitrust authorities. Still, Amazon had approached publishers as a partner, and now it was deliberately withholding a key piece of information. “We were instructed not to talk about pricing strategy,” Jeff Steele says. “We knew that if we priced e-books too low, they would fear it would devalue their product. So we just said pricing had not yet been decided.”[Vi]

Oblivious to the pricing plans, publishers slowly came aboard, digitizing larger parts of their catalog. By the fall of 2007, Amazon had ninety thousand books in the Kindle library, tantalizingly close to Bezos’s goal. Kindle owners would have the equivalent of a Barnes & Noble bookstore at their fingertips.

When Bezos finally stopped delaying and set the launch of the first Kindle, executives from all the major book publishers flocked to the press conference. They had been bruised and battered by Amazon over the past few years but they came together as an industry to take a cautious step toward what promised to be the inevitable future of the written word—a future with a major surprise waiting for them.

On November 19, 2007, Jeff Bezos stepped onto a stage at the W Hotel in lower Manhattan to introduce the Kindle. He spoke to an audience of a hundred or so journalists and publishing executives, a relatively small crowd compared to the reverential throngs who gathered for the product rollouts of Apple. Wearing a blue sport coat and khakis, Bezos stated that Amazon’s new device was the successor to the five-hundred-and-fifty-year-old invention of blacksmith Johannes Gutenberg, the movable-type printing press. “Why are books the last bastion of analog?” Bezos asked that day. “The question is, can you improve upon something as highly evolved and as well suited to its task as the book, and if so, how?”[Vi]

The original Kindle, priced at $399, was clearly the product of all the compromises and anxieties that had gone into its labored three-year development. It was meant to disappear in the reader’s hands, yet it sported a wedge-shaped body with a jumble of angular buttons, an attempt to make a bold design statement while allowing for the easy entry of text. Bezos wanted a device that did one thing extremely well. But the former Palm engineers at Lab126 had watched the PalmPilot get overtaken by more versatile gadgets, so at the last moment they packed the Kindle with other features, like a Web browser and an MP3 player, which were quarantined in an unusual “experimental” section of the device.

In retrospect, the first Kindle provided an exultant answer to Bezos’s question. In many respects, it was superior to its analog predecessor, the physical book. It weighed ten ounces and could carry two hundred titles. The E Ink screen was easy on the eyes. Whispernet, the name Amazon gave to the Kindle’s free 3G cellular network, allowed readers to painlessly download books in a flash. “I think the reason Kindle succeeded while others failed is that we were obsessive, not about trying to build the sexiest gadget in the world, but rather [about building] something that actually fulfilled what people wanted,” says Russ Grandinetti, a faithful Jeff Bot who later joined the Kindle team.[Vi]

Competitors were caught flat-footed by the success of the Kindle. A few weeks before the W Hotel event, I wrote about the forthcoming launch for the New York Times and spoke to Stephen Riggio, then the CEO of Barnes & Noble. Riggio and his brother were still bruised from their early foray into e-reading with the Rocketbook and felt that customers had flatly rejected the idea of e-books. “The physical value of the book is something that cannot be replicated in digital form,” Riggio told me. “People love to collect books and to have them in their home and on their shelves. I would say it could never be identically replicated because of the value of books as physical objects in consumers’ minds.”N13

Riggio had heard the rumors about the forthcoming Kindle but doubted Amazon’s prospects. “Certainly there’s an opportunity to get back into the business but we think it’s small at this moment and probably will be small for the next couple of years,” he said. “When the market is there, we’ll be there.”

It was an enormous tactical blunder. Barnes & Noble would have to scamper to meet Amazon’s challenge in the e-book market. It would follow a very similar blueprint, setting up a development office in Northern California as Amazon had done with Lab126. Ironically, to design the device, the retailer hired Robert Brunner, the former Apple designer who had left Pentagram to start his own agency, Ammunition. Brunner and his employees had battled with Bezos over putting a keyboard on the Kindle, so, perhaps not surprisingly, the new B&N device—dubbed the Nook—would leave out the keyboard in favor of a separate touch-based control pad, and its advertising would sport the tagline “Books don’t have buttons.”[Vi]

The Kindle wasn’t an overnight success, of course, but an avalanche of publicity and its prominent placement at the top of the Amazon website ensured that the company would quickly run through its stock of devices. Steve Kessel had studied the introductions of similar consumer electronics like the iPod and placed a conservative first order of twenty-five thousand units. The original batch sold out in hours. Amazon then discovered that the development of the Kindle had gone on for so long, one of its Taiwanese suppliers had discontinued a key component in the wireless module. The company spent months getting a replacement. When a new batch of Kindles arrived the following fall, Bezos appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s talk show, and that blew out the supply once again. “When we originally made the first manufacturing capacity for the Kindle one, we thought we were being very optimistic,” Bezos said. “It was just bad planning.”N14

The shortage led to some internal friction. Even after the device sold out, Bezos wanted to promote it heavily on the Amazon home page to continue educating customers and building the brand. Jeff Wilke, now head of North American retail, thought it was irresponsible to feature a product that wasn’t available, and also a waste of Amazon’s most precious real estate. Angry e-mails over the issue one day turned into a heated conversation in Bezos’s office. “We were both passionate and within five minutes we were both mad,” says Wilke, who later conceded that Bezos was right and the short-term pain had been worth it to build the Kindle franchise. Bezos won the argument, of course, but Wilke convinced him to at least make it clearer on the site that Amazon did not actually have any Kindles on hand.[Vi]

Just as Clayton Christensen had predicted in The Innovator’s Dilemma, technological innovation caused wrenching pain to the company and the broader industry. No one was feeling it more than the book publishers. Amazon had spent much of the last two years cajoling and threatening them to embrace its new digital format. But in all those conversations, the company had clearly withheld a crucial detail that Bezos divulged seventeen minutes into the forty-minute launch speech. “New York Times bestsellers and new releases are only nine dollars and ninety-nine cents,” Bezos said almost halfway through his presentation at the W Hotel.

Among the gathered publishing execs at the Kindle press conference, there was confusion. Was the $9.99 price a promotional discount for the launch? Was it only for bestsellers? Even after the event, Amazon executives told their publishing counterparts they didn’t know or couldn’t say. Soon it was clear to the bookselling industry that the flat price was not transitory at all—Amazon was pushing it as a new standard. Bezos went on a media tour after the Kindle event, appearing on programs like The Charlie Rose Show, trumpeting the $9.99 price for new releases and bestsellers and making a persuasive case for change in the book business. “It is not written anywhere that books shall forever be printed on dead trees,” he told Rose.[Vi]

Finally the grim reality sank in, and publishing executives kicked themselves for their own gullibility. “It left an incredibly bad taste in our mouths, that they would slip that one by us after hammering us for months and months with their goddamn lists,” says one executive of a major publishing house. “I don’t think they were doing the wrong thing, but I think the way they handled it was wrong. It was just one more nail in the coffin that no one realized was being closed over [us], even while we were engaged every single day in a conversation about it.”

“I think we were absolutely naïve in agreeing to supply those files without any caveats around them,” says another executive at a big-six publisher, one of the six trade houses with the largest market shares. “If I could rewrite history I would have said, ‘Thanks so much, I love the idea of the Kindle, but let’s have an agreement that says you will not sell below the cost.’ I feel like I was asleep at the tiller.”

The new low price for top-selling e-books changed everything. It tilted the playing field in the direction of digital, putting additional pressure on physical retailers, threatening independent bookstores, and giving Amazon even more market power. The publishers had seen over many years what Amazon did with this kind of additional leverage. It exacted more concessions and passed the savings on to customers in the form of lower prices and shipping discounts, which helped it amass even greater market share—and more negotiating leverage.[Vi]

All this would take a few years to sink in, but it became widely understood when the Kindle started gaining real momentum with the introduction of the Kindle 2 in early 2009. The gazelles were wounded, the cheetah was on the loose, and the subsequent high-profile business and legal dramas would shake the book industry to its foundation.

Amazon had grown from a beleaguered dot-com survivor battered by the vicissitudes in the stock market into a diversified company whose products and principles had an impact on local communities, national economies, and the marketplace of ideas. Like all powerful companies, it would now be subject to ongoing scrutiny of its corporate character, a perpetual test of not only how well it served its customers but also how well it treated all of the parties drafted into its whirling ecosystem, including employees, partners, and governments. The development of Fiona set the stage for this new phase in Amazon’s history and revealed the company as relentlessly innovative and disruptive, as well as calculating and ruthless. Amazon’s behavior was a manifestation of Bezos’s own competitive personality and boundless intellect, writ large on the business landscape.[Vi]

—ooOoo—

PART III

Missionary or Mercenary?
Nhà truyền giáo hay lính đánh thuê

—ooOoo—

CHAPTER 9

Liftoff!

The fulfillment center dubbed Phoenix 3 on the east side of Arizona’s largest city assaults the senses. It’s the physical manifestation of the everything store, a vision that most Amazon customers could never even imagine and will never behold: a 605,000-square-foot temple to the twin gods of efficiency and selection. Products are neatly arranged but seemingly randomly stowed on shelves. Star Wars action figures sit next to sleeping bags; bagel chips next to Xbox video games. In one high-risk-valuables area, monitored by overhead video cameras, a single Impulse Jack Rabbit sex toy is wedged between a Rosetta Stone Spanish CD and an iPod Nano. Amazon stocks dissimilar products next to one another to minimize the possibility of employees selecting the wrong item, but that seems unlikely to happen. Every product, shelving unit, forklift, roller cart, and employee badge has a bar code, and invisible algorithms calculate the most efficient paths for workers through the facility.

The aisles of Phoenix 3 are a bustling hive of activity, yet the cavernous space feels quiet. The prevailing sounds come from 102 humming rooftop air conditioners and a chorus of beeping electric carts. One employee manages to project his voice through this acoustic dead zone. Terry Jones, an inbound support associate making twelve dollars an hour, pushes a cart through aisles with towering stacks of products on each side and shouts his arrival in honeyed tones to everyone in his way: “Cart coming through. Yu-up! Watch yourself, please!”

Jones says he is making his time at Amazon “joyful and fun” while complying with the company’s rigorous safety rules. And those same warnings could have been shouted to the world’s retailers in 2007: Amazon was coming for them.[Vi]

Wall Street analysts first began to notice changes in the company’s financial numbers early that year. Amazon’s sales were accelerating while third-party sellers were reporting a surge of activity on the site and a corresponding decrease on rival platforms like eBay. Curiously, Amazon’s inventory levels were growing too. The company was keeping more merchandise in places like Phoenix 3, as if it confidently expected customers to start buying more.

Scott Devitt, then an analyst for the investment bank Stifel Nicolaus, spotted these shifts earlier than most and upgraded the stock from hold to buy in January 2007.N1 He changed his rating on the same day a Merrill Lynch adviser offered the far more conventional analysis that Amazon’s margins were hopeless and that it could not make any money. “I was laughed out of portfolio managers’ offices,” Devitt says. “People were ripping apart every component of my investment thesis. At that point, they thought Amazon was some kind of nonprofit scam.”

Inside Amazon, the pain endured over the previous seven years was paying off. Prime, the two-day shipping service, was an engine spinning the company’s flywheel ever faster. Amazon customers who joined Prime doubled, on average, their spending on the site, according to a person familiar with the company’s internal finances at the time. A Prime member was like a shopper who walked into a Costco warehouse for a case of beer and walked out with the beer plus an armful of DVDs, a nine-pound smoked ham, and a flat-screen television.[Vi]

Prime members bought more products across more categories, which in turn convinced sellers to let Amazon stock their merchandise and ship their orders from its fulfillment centers, since that meant their products qualified for Prime two-day shipping. Amazon was enjoying what analysts call operating leverage—it was getting more out of its assets, and its famously microscopic profit margins started to expand. (Although that was temporary—they would shrink again a few years later when Bezos started investing in new areas like tablets and streaming video.)

All of this became dramatically visible to the wider world for the first time on April 24, 2007, when Amazon announced surprisingly strong results from its first quarter. Quarterly sales topped $3 billion for the first time—a 32 percent jump in a year, well above its previously consistent 20-something percent annual growth rate and the 12 percent annual growth rate for the rest of e-commerce. That meant Amazon was stealing customers from other Internet players and likely even from the offline chains. During 2007, as investors came to understand the salubrious effects of Prime, Amazon’s stock jumped 240 percent—only to fall all the way back down again in the ensuing financial crisis and global recession.

At the same time that Amazon’s flywheel was accelerating, eBay’s was flying apart. The appeal of online auctions had faded; a customer wanted the convenience and certainty of a quickly completed purchase, not a seven-day waiting period to see if his aggressively low bid for a set of Cobra golf clubs had won the day.[Vi]

But eBay’s problems went beyond the overripening of the auctions format. Amazon and eBay had taken diametrically opposite paths. Amazon endured the pain of disrupting its own retail business with its eBay-like Amazon Marketplace, which allowed third-party sellers to list their products on the company’s single-detail pages; eBay, which had started as a third-party auctions platform, recognized that many of its customers wanted a more Amazon-like fixed-price alternative but failed to self-administer the necessary bitter medicine in a single dose. It spent two years working on a separate destination for fixed-price retail, called eBay Express, which got no traffic when it debuted in 2006 and was quickly shut down. Only then did eBay finally commit to allowing fixed-price sales to share space alongside auctions on the site and in search results on eBay.com.N2

Meanwhile, Amazon invested heavily in technology, taking aggressive swings with digital initiatives like the Kindle. Amazon also focused on fixing and improving the efficiency of its fulfillment centers. EBay executives searched for high-growth businesses elsewhere, acquiring the calling service Skype in 2005, the online-ticketing site StubHub in 2007, and a series of classified-advertising websites. But it let its primary site wither. Customers became happier over time with the shopping experience on Amazon and progressively more disgruntled with the challenges of finding items on eBay and dealing with sellers who overcharged for shipping. Amazon had battled and mastered chaos; eBay was engulfed by it.[Vi]

In 2008 Meg Whitman passed eBay’s reins to John Donahoe, a tall and gracious onetime Dartmouth College basketball player and a former consultant for Bain and Company. One of Donahoe’s first trips in his new capacity was to Seattle, where he went to pay a courtesy visit to Bezos at Amazon’s headquarters. The executives talked about innovation, hiring, and how they got enough exercise and dealt with stress. Bezos was now working out regularly and was on a strict lean-protein diet.

At the meeting, Donahoe paid his respects to the e-commerce pioneer. “I am always going to be less cool than you,” he told Bezos. “I have huge admiration for what you’ve done.” Bezos said that he did not view Amazon and eBay as fighting a winner-take-all battle. “Our job is to grow the e-commerce pie and if we do that there is going to be room for five Amazons and five eBays,” Bezos said. “I’ve never said a negative thing about eBay and I never will. I don’t want anyone to view this as a zero-sum game.”

That year, eBay’s stock lost over half its market value, and in July, Amazon’s valuation surpassed eBay’s for the first time in nearly a decade. Bezos had now accomplished many of his early goals, like turning Amazon into the primary storefront on the Web. The website was selling more kinds of things—and just generally selling more things—than ever before. Amazon reported $14.8 billion in sales in 2007, which was more than two of its earliest foes combined could boast: Barnes & Noble pulled in $5.4 billion that year, and eBay $7.7 billion.[Vi]

That meant nothing, of course. Despite the teeming abundance of merchandise at Phoenix 3, Bezos still saw broad gaps in Amazon’s product lineup. “In order to be a two-hundred-billion-dollar company, we’ve got to learn how to sell clothes and food,” Bezos said frequently to colleagues during this time. That figure was not randomly selected; it referred to the magnitude of Walmart’s sales in the middle years of the decade. To lead the new foray into consumable goods, Bezos hired Doug Herrington, a former executive at Webvan, the failed grocery-delivery business from the dot-com boom. After two years of work, Herrington’s group started testing AmazonFresh, a grocery-delivery service in Amazon’s hometown of Seattle.

At the same time that Bezos hired Herrington, he brought in veteran apparel executive Steven Goldsmith and acquired the luxury-goods website Shopbop to help Amazon learn the byzantine ways of the clothing business. Along with Goldsmith, Russ Grandinetti, as head of hard-lines, would lead the renewed charge into apparel.

In the midst of yet another retail expansion at Amazon, Bezos seemed to be trying to modulate his management style and keep his notoriously eviscerating assessments of employees in check. It was said he had hired a leadership coach, though the identity of this counselor was a closely guarded secret. “You could see the fact that he was getting feedback and taking it seriously,” says Diane Lye, then the director of infrastructure automation. During one memorable meeting, Bezos reprimanded Lye and her colleagues in his customarily devastating way, telling them they were stupid and saying they should “come back in a week when you figure out what you’re doing.” Then he walked a few steps, froze in midstride as if something had suddenly occurred to him, wheeled around, and added, “But great work, everyone.”[Vi]

The S Team was working together more smoothly now. Familiarity had bred trust and apparently quelled the acrimony among the Amazon managers. Bezos had at this point worked with executives like Jeff Wilke, Jeff Blackburn, Diego Piacentini, chief financial officer Tom Szkutak, and general counsel Michelle Wilson for the better part of a decade.

But one beloved S Team member was no longer with the company. At an all-hands meeting at the Moore Theater in November of 2007, Jeff Bezos announced to employees that Rick Dalzell, his longtime right-hand man, was retiring. The senior manager of the company’s engineers, Dalzell had been trying to exit for a while.

He was fifty years old, he had gained weight, and he was ready to spend more time with his family. After Bezos made the announcement, the two men got emotional and embraced onstage. On Dalzell’s last day at work, his colleagues threw him a low-key going-away party at Jillian’s bar in South Lake Union.

Four months later, enjoying retirement, Dalzell decided to visit his daughter in college in Oregon. His wife chartered a private plane for her husband, herself, and Dalzell’s parents. Strangely, their driver took them not to their usual airport but to a private airfield down the street from Boeing Field. Dalzell finally started to notice something was amiss when the car pulled up to a familiar hangar sheltering a Dassault Falcon. When he walked into the airplane, he found it full of friends, colleagues, and Jeff Bezos, all of whom shouted, “Surprise!” They were going to Hawaii for a gala given in appreciation of Dalzell’s longtime service, just like the Shelebration for Shel Kaphan nine years before. Bezos and MacKenzie invited Andy Jassy and his wife, former colleague Bruce Jones, and a bunch of Dalzell’s family friends and army buddies.[Vi]

They stayed in bungalows on a beach in Kona. Butlers were on call, and a sushi chef appeared at four o’clock every afternoon. Lengthy toasts were proffered over dinners, and one day they took an aerial tour of Volcanoes National Park, but in the jet, not a helicopter. “Jeff’s not a helicopter guy anymore,” says Bruce Jones.

Bezos worked his subordinates to exhaustion, supplied little in the way of corporate creature comforts, and allowed many key personnel to leave without showing any remorse. But he was also capable of deeply gracious and unexpected expressions of appreciation. Dalzell had performed heroically for a decade and kept the company on track in the gloomy days when the infrastructure was a mess and Google was poaching every other engineer.

Over the next few years, Dalzell watched Amazon from afar and marveled at how Bezos turned himself into one of the world’s most admired corporate chiefs. “Jeff does a couple of things better than anyone I’ve ever worked for,” Dalzell says. “He embraces the truth. A lot of people talk about the truth, but they don’t engage their decision-making around the best truth at the time.

“The second thing is that he is not tethered by conventional thinking. What is amazing to me is that he is bound only by the laws of physics. He can’t change those. Everything else he views as open to discussion.”[Vi]

Amid this renaissance of sales growth and continued category expansion, Amazon made very few acquisitions. The lessons learned from its early acquisition spree in the late 1990s were still felt inside the company. Amazon had impulsively spent hundreds of millions to buy unproven startups that it could not digest and whose executives almost all left. In the resulting retrenchment, Amazon became uniquely parsimonious in how it approached mergers and acquisitions. Between 2000 and 2008, it acquired just a few companies, among which were the Chinese e-commerce site Joyo (bought in 2004 for $75 million), the print-on-demand upstart BookSurge (bought in 2005 for an undisclosed amount), and audio-book company Audible (bought in 2008 for $300 million). These deals were paltry by the standards of the broader technology industry. During this span of time, for example, Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion and DoubleClick for $3.1 billion.

Jeff Blackburn, Amazon’s chief of business development, said that Amazon’s bruises from the 1990s helped to create a “building culture” there. Every major company faces decisions over whether it should build or buy new capabilities. “Jeff almost always prefers to build it,” Blackburn says. Bezos had absorbed the lessons of the business bible Good to Great, whose author, Jim Collins, counseled companies to acquire other firms only when they had fully mastered their virtuous circles, and then “as an accelerator of flywheel momentum, not a creator of it.”N3

Now that Amazon had finally mastered its flywheel, it was time to splurge. For Bezos and Amazon, the irresistible temptation was Zappos.com, the online footwear and apparel retailer founded in 1999 by a soft-spoken but unnaturally persistent entrepreneur named Nick Swinmurn.[Vi]

By all measures, Swinmurn’s unlikely idea—to let people buy shoes over the Web without trying them on first—should have drifted off with the other flotsam in the dot-com bust. But after getting turned away from a dozen venture-capital firms, Swinmurn finally solicited an investment from an equally tenacious entrepreneur named Tony Hsieh, the son of Taiwanese immigrants and a seasoned poker player who had sold his first company, LinkExchange, to Microsoft for $250 million in stock. Hsieh and Alfred Lin, a Harvard classmate and former chief financial officer of LinkExchange, placed a tentative $500,000 bet on the startup Zappos via their investment firm Venture Frogs, and Hsieh later joined it as CEO. In the grip of the dot-com downturn, Hsieh simply refused to let Zappos die, putting in $1.5 million of his own money and selling off some of his personal assets to keep it afloat. He moved the company from San Francisco to Las Vegas to cut costs and to make it easier to find workers for its customer-service call center.

In 2004, Hsieh attracted an investment from Sequoia Capital, the firm that had backed LinkExchange. Sequoia, which had rejected Zappos a few times before coming around, invested a total of $48 million in the startup across several rounds, and a partner, Michael Moritz, joined the board of directors. In Las Vegas, the company finally found its groove, and in the minds of Web shoppers, its name and website became synonymous with the novel idea of buying footwear online.[Vi]

In many ways, Zappos was the Bizarro World version of Amazon; everything was slightly similar but completely different. Hsieh, like Bezos, nurtured a quirky internal culture and frequently talked about it in public to reinforce the Zappos brand in customers’ minds. But he took it even further. New employees were each offered a flat one thousand dollars to quit during the first week on the job, the assumption being that those who took the bounty were not right for the firm anyway. Employees were encouraged to lavishly decorate their cubicles at Zappos headquarters in Henderson, Nevada, and each department would rise in rowdy salute to the visitors who toured the offices. Hsieh felt strongly that everyone, even senior executives, should take below-market compensation to work there because of the great internal culture the company offered.

Like Bezos, Hsieh was obsessed with the customer experience. Zappos promised free five-to seven-day delivery on orders and aimed to surprise customers with two-day delivery in most major urban areas. The website’s users could return items at no charge for up to a year after their purchases, allowing a customer to order four pair of shoes, try them all on, and return three of them. Hsieh encouraged his call-center representatives to spend as much time as necessary talking to customers to solve their problems. Bezos, of course, treated phone calls from customers as indications of defects in the Amazon system, and he tried vigorously to reduce the number of customer contacts for each unit sold. In fact, finding the toll-free number on the Amazon website can be something of a scavenger hunt.[Vi]

Zappos’ sales soared from $8.6 million in 2001 to $70 million in 2003 to $370 million in 2005.N4 Hsieh and his cohorts had outflanked Amazon in a key part of the apparel market, establishing Zappos as a strong, flexible presence in customers’ minds and forging good relationships with well-known shoe brands like Nike. For the first time in years, Bezos had a reason to admire and closely track an e-commerce upstart that had the potential to expand and take away some of his business.

In August of 2005, Bezos e-mailed Hsieh and told him he was going to be in Las Vegas and would like to pay him a visit. The meeting was held in a conference room at a DoubleTree hotel a few blocks from the Zappos office. Bezos brought Jeff Blackburn. Hsieh brought Nick Swinmurn, Michael Moritz, and Alfred Lin, who had just joined Zappos as chairman and chief operating officer. Playing off Amazon’s famous two-pizza-team culture, the Zappos executives served two pizzas, one with pepperoni and one with jalapeño peppers, from a local restaurant. The meeting was brief and awkward. The Zappos executives suggested potential partnership arrangements, but Bezos politely said he would rather own the whole business. Hsieh replied flatly that he was set on building an independent company. Later, Amazon executives got the impression that Zappos could be acquired for around $500 million, but Bezos, who’d become a chronically frugal acquirer, imagined paying only a fraction of that amount.[Vi]

At this point, the competitive landscape must have looked to Bezos like the chessboards of his youth. The positions of the pieces in this particular game heavily favored his opponent. By law, manufacturers are not allowed to set retail prices, but they can decide whom they want to carry their products, and they make those decisions judiciously. Shoe brands like Nike and Merrell viewed Amazon as a dangerous discounter, a company that would very likely consign their new in-season products to the bargain bin in an effort to garner new customers and gain market share. As a result, the top brands were reluctant to supply Amazon with merchandise, and the website’s shoe selection was sparse.

Amazon had other disadvantages in the shoe business. The Amazon website was not well suited to products that had lots of variations, like a shoe that comes in six colors, eighteen sizes, and several widths. Amazon.com listed all these variations on a single shoe as separate products, and customers couldn’t perform searches for multiple variables, like both color and size.

Navigating through this complex matrix, Bezos came up with an unlikely gambit. He decided to build an entirely separate website from scratch, devoted solely to the categories of shoes and handbags. Bezos brought that plan to the members of his board, who braced themselves to make another costly and impractical investment at the same time they were betting heavily on the Kindle and Amazon Web Services. “How much money do you want to spend on this?” asked chief financial officer Tom Szkutak in the board meeting. “How much do you have?” asked Bezos.[Vi]

The company worked on the new site for all of 2006, spending some $30 million to design it from scratch using the collection of Web tools known as AJAX, according to an employee who was on the project. Executives came close to calling it Javari.com, but then the owner of that URL reneged on a deal to sell it and demanded more money. The site finally launched in December as Endless.com. On its first day, Endless offered free overnight shipping and free returns. The deal ensured Amazon would lose money on each sale. But it would clearly apply pressure to a certain company in Las Vegas. The Zappos board members considered Amazon’s opening maneuver, gritted their teeth, and a week later matched it with free overnight shipping. The difference was that the new Endless.com, unlike its rival, enjoyed almost no traffic or sales volume and so lost little with its overnight-shipping offer; Zappos’ profit margins took a direct hit.[Vi]

Over the next year, Endless made little progress as an independent retail destination. The site attracted brands like Kenneth Cole and Nine West and developed features such as a more flexible search engine and product photos that expanded when customers hovered over them with their cursors. But Amazon was walking an almost impossible precarious tightrope, trying to assuage the fears of brand-name companies with industry-standard pricing while also using Endless as a way to undercut Zappos on price. In early 2007, with apparel brands watching closely for any signs of discounting, Amazon added a five-dollar bonus to its free overnight shipping. In other words, a customer was given five dollars just to buy something on the site. It was a clever but transparent ploy, an effort to inflict further pain on Zappos. Employees who worked on Endless say that, naturally, this was Jeff Bezos’s idea. Yet Zappos still continued to grow. Its 2007 gross sales hit $840 million and in 2008 it topped $1 billion. That year, Bezos learned that Zappos was advertising on the bottoms of the plastic bins at airport-security checkpoints. “They are outthinking us!” he snapped at a meeting.

But inside Zappos, a big problem had emerged. It had been acquiring inventory with a revolving $100 million line of credit, and the financial crisis, which intensified with the collapse of Lehman Brothers in the fall of 2008, froze the capital markets. With consumer spending declining, Zappos’ inventory constrained by new borrowing limits, and the competition with Amazon cutting into the company’s profit margins, Zappos’ previously spectacular annual growth rate collapsed to a modest 10 percent. The company rolled back its free-overnight-shipping guarantee, and Hsieh reluctantly laid off 8 percent of his workforce.[Vi]

In his bestselling book Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose, Hsieh wrote that Amazon continued to make acquisition offers during this time and that Zappos’ investors were increasingly interested because they were impatient to see a return on their investment. Michael Moritz has a slightly different take. When he invested in Zappos, he wanted it to become an independent, public company “that provided every item of clothing for consumers from head to toe.” But he had watched Amazon destroy one of his portfolio companies, eToys, a decade earlier and knew that to compete with Amazon, Zappos needed more engineers and more sophisticated fulfillment capabilities. “We just didn’t move quickly enough,” Moritz says. “You could sense it was going to be much harder to achieve, and we were squandering the opportunity. The hiring was too slow, the engineering department was not good enough, and the software was inferior to Amazon’s. It was very frustrating, and the Las Vegas location, plus an unwillingness to pay competitively, made it even harder to recruit talented people. We were starting to compete with the very best in the business and they had a lot of arrows in their quiver to make life painful. The last thing we wanted to do was to sell. It was mortifying.”[Vi]

Hsieh wanted to keep going but even he came to acknowledge that Amazon could be a good home for Zappos. One of the factors he considered was that Zappos employees in Las Vegas and near its distribution center in Kentucky lived at ground zero of the housing crisis. Many had seen the value of their homes plummet, and the only valuable thing they owned was Zappos stock. Hsieh saw that the acquisition could offer a sizable payout for employees at a moment when many desperately needed it. The Zappos board ultimately decided to sell to Amazon; the vote was bittersweet but unanimous.

Over the next few months, Alfred Lin negotiated the deal with Peter Krawiec, Amazon’s vice president of corporate development. Bezos and Krawiec consummated the deal at Hsieh’s house in Southern Highlands, a luxury residential neighborhood built around a golf course. A journey that had started with two pizzas ended with Hsieh cooking burgers on his patio. A few weeks later, Bezos recorded an eight-minute video for Zappos employees while traveling in Europe. “When given the choice of obsessing over competitors or obsessing over customers, we always obsess over customers,” he said, reciting a well-worn and, considering the past few years of competition with Zappos, credulity-straining Jeffism. “We pay attention to what our competitors do but it’s not where we put our energy.”[Vi]

Some of Amazon’s own executives were now shaking their heads in awe. Bezos had pursued and captured his prey, spending what one Amazon executive estimates was $150 million over two years on projects like Endless.com, which perhaps saved the company money, since it might have been a far more expensive battle or acquisition after the recession. Yet Hsieh, Lin, and Moritz had fought back fiercely, dueling Amazon to what might best be considered a draw. The acquisition price of around $900 million was higher than Bezos originally wanted, and the Zappos board wisely demanded that Amazon pay with equity instead of cash. By the time the deal closed, in November of 2009, the price of Amazon stock was once again zooming into the stratosphere, and Zappos executives, employees, and investors who had held on to their shares were lavishly rewarded. Amazon drew several lessons from its bloody battle with Zappos that it would tenaciously apply to its dealings with e-commerce upstarts in the years ahead.

The great recession that started in December 2007 and lasted until July 2009 was in some ways a gift to Amazon. The crisis not only drove Zappos into Amazon’s arms but also significantly damaged the sales of the world’s largest offline retail chains, sending executives scurrying into survival mode. Desperate to protect their profit margins, many retailers reacted by firing employees, cutting down their product assortment, and lowering the overall quality of their service, and this just as Bezos was investing in new categories and more rapid distribution. The economic crisis served as a kind of cloaking device, hiding Amazon’s evolution into a dangerous diversified competitor. Retailers were scared, but the bogeyman was the reeling global economy and declining consumer spending, not Amazon.[Vi]

The brutal recession claimed the weakest national retailers and extinguished several historic brands. Circuit City was once the largest electronics retailer in the country. At its peak, the Richmond, Virginia–based chain had more than seven hundred stores and reported $12 billion in sales. Then, in the 1990s, a wave of changes undermined its commission-centered sales model. Companies like Best Buy, Walmart, and Costco ushered in a new age of self-service shopping and big-box stores. Customers could grab a television off the shelf and haul it to the checkout counter, aided (maybe) by an associate being paid a low hourly wage. Circuit City waited too long to drop its commission-based sales force. PCs became a major draw in electronics stores, but Circuit City was reluctant to bring a low-margin product line into its high-margin mix. In addition, its executives were also heavily distracted in the 1990s, spinning off the retail chain CarMax and spending more than a hundred million dollars on a DVD-rental system called DIVX, which quickly failed.

Then Amazon came along with the ultimate self-service model, and again Circuit City was frozen by a disruptive change. Circuit City allowed Amazon to operate its website from 2001 to 2005 but afterward it didn’t establish a strong Internet presence. The company had lost touch with what customers wanted and it never embraced, as Rick Dalzell put it with regard to Bezos, “the best truth at the time.” When the chain needed to finance a turnaround in the midst of the financial crisis, the capital markets were dry. So in 2009, Circuit City, a sixty-year-old company lauded in one of Bezos’s favorite books, Good to Great, liquidated its operations and laid off thirty-four thousand employees.N5

A few years later, the book chain Borders traveled down the same dismal path.[Vi]

Brothers Louis and Tom Borders had founded the company in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1971 after developing a system to track book sales and inventory. The brothers left in 1992 when the company was acquired by Kmart, which later spun it out. All through the 1990s, Borders churned out huge, multistory bookstores in shopping centers around the United States and in Singapore, Australia, and the United Kingdom, among other countries, growing from $224.8 million in sales in 1992 to $3.4 billion by 2002.

But like Circuit City, Borders had a narrow operating philosophy and repeatedly missed the changing tastes of consumers. It was obsessively focused on opening new stores and increasing same-store sales while fighting Barnes & Noble on all fronts and dutifully guiding and meeting Wall Street’s quarterly expectations. The Internet didn’t fit into this traditional calculus and thus didn’t get the company’s capital or its most talented executives. Like Circuit City, Borders allowed Amazon to run its online business so it could focus on its physical stores. One longtime Borders executive, who asked for anonymity, says the early perception of Amazon was that it “was just another catalog—a version of Lands’ End.” The executive suggests that this sentiment was now suitable for a bumper sticker.[Vi]

In the last decade of its life, Borders was battered by rising online book sales, then by the Kindle, and then by the pullback in consumer spending after the financial crisis. Borders, like Circuit City, couldn’t cut costs fast enough because it was locked into fifteen- or twenty-year leases on its stores. At the time of its bankruptcy filing, half its stores were still highly profitable, according to its CEO, but the company couldn’t raise money to buy out the leases on its bad locations.N6 Borders’ decline accelerated during the recession, and it went out of business in 2011, laying off 10,700 employees.N7

Like some other chain stores, Target, the second-largest retailer in the United States, survived the downturn with layoffs at its Minneapolis headquarters and by closing one of its distribution centers.N8 Target had outsourced its online operations to Amazon in 2001 but the relationship was far from perfect, with joint projects frequently falling behind schedule. “We had no resources to build infrastructure for Target,” says Faisal Masud, who worked on the Target business at Amazon. “It was all about Amazon first and Target next.”[Vi]

But in 2006, Target came to the realization that it did not have the in-house capabilities to develop its own website, and, incredibly, it renewed its agreement with Amazon for another five years. After the new deal was signed, Jeff Bezos returned to Minneapolis to meet with Target executives Robert Ulrich and Gerald Storch and to give a presentation that was open to any Target employee who wanted to attend. Dale Nitschke, the executive running Target.com at the time, recalls that to fill the auditorium, he had to personally implore employees to attend. “These guys are going to be world-class competitors, you have to keep tracking them,” he told colleagues.

Target knew it had to master its own Web presence and wean itself away from a dangerous dependence on a competitor. In 2009, it belatedly announced it was leaving Amazon, and it finally ended the relationship when the contract expired two years later. It was a rocky breakup. The retailer’s new website, built and managed with the help of IBM and Oracle, went down a half a dozen times during the 2011 holiday season, and the president of its online division resigned.

No one had more to lose from Amazon’s ascendance than the folks in Bentonville, Arkansas. Despite years of being beaten by Amazon in the realm of e-commerce, Walmart had smartly resisted the temptation to outsource its website, and yet its Internet operation, established in 1999 in Brisbane, north of Silicon Valley, made little progress cutting into Amazon’s lead. After the recession, Walmart too began to view the Internet with renewed urgency.[Vi]

In September of 2009, I wrote a lengthy story for the New York Times entitled “Can Amazon Be the Wal-Mart of the Web?”N9 The headline apparently hit a nerve in Bentonville. A few weeks after it appeared, Raul Vazquez, then the chief executive of Walmart.com, told the Wall Street Journal, “If there is going to be a ‘Wal-Mart of the Web,’ it is going to be Walmart.com. Our goal is to be the biggest and most visited retail website.”N10 In the e-commerce equivalent of a preemptive military strike, Walmart then lowered prices on ten new books by high-profile authors, such as Stephen King and Dean Koontz, to ten dollars each. Amazon matched the price on those same books within a few hours. Walmart.com then lowered its prices again, to nine dollars, and Amazon matched it again. It was just the kind of price pressure from Walmart that Amazon executives had always worried about—but it came ten years too late to do Amazon any harm. Now Amazon was large enough that it could easily withstand such losses.

Over the next month, the tit-for-tat price war spread like a brushfire. Target joined the fracas, and all three companies cut prices on DVDs, video-game consoles, mobile phones, and even the humble Easy-Bake Oven, a forty-five-year-old toy from Hasbro known for heating up small cakes, not tensions between billion-dollar corporations.N11 With all three retailers now offering steep discounts on a range of hardcover books, the American Booksellers Association, a trade group of independent bookstores, wrote the U.S. Department of Justice to complain that “the entire book industry is in danger of becoming collateral damage” in a war among giants.N12

They hadn’t seen anything yet.[Vi]

***

In February 2009, Amazon took over a basement auditorium in New York’s Morgan Library and Museum to prepare for the announcement of the Kindle 2. The sequel to Fiona, the Kindle 2 (code-named Turing, after a castle in The Diamond Age) sported a thinner profile, a simpler and more intuitive layout, and none of the design excesses of the first device. Amazon had fixed its chronic manufacturing problems, but the company had yet to master the art of the product launch. In tension-filled rehearsals the night before the event, Bezos tore into his communications staff over a number of miscalculations, including the fact that the large screen behind the podium obscured his slides. “I don’t know if you guys don’t have high standards or if you just don’t know what you’re doing,” he said, sighing heavily.

If the original Kindle transformed Amazon and repositioned it for a digital future, then the Kindle 2 could fairly be considered the device that revolutionized the publishing business and changed the way people around the world read books. With instant brand recognition and broad availability, the new Kindle was coveted by customers and finally fulfilled Bezos’s vision of a mainstream electronic reader at an affordable price. With the Nook and the iPad yet to be introduced, Amazon had a commanding 90 percent of the digital reading market in the United States.N13

For the big book publishers, Amazon’s dawning monopoly in e-books was terrifying. As suppliers had learned over the past decade, no matter the category, Amazon wielded its market power neither lightly nor gracefully, employing every bit of leverage to improve its own margins and pass along savings to its customers.[Vi]

If the company didn’t get what it wanted, the reaction could be severe. When the Kindle 2 became available, Amazon UK was no longer selling some of the most popular books of French publishing giant Hachette Livre, part of a protracted and bitter dispute over the terms of the Amazon/Hachette relationship. Customers could buy these Hachette books only from third-party sellers on the Amazon website.N14

Publishers remained particularly troubled by Amazon’s $9.99 price for new releases and bestsellers. They were living the nightmarish reality of every manufacturer—this was the reason that, for example, Nike refused to supply shoes to Endless.com. Amazon, the publishing executives felt, was consigning their in-season products (new books, rather than shoes) to the bargain bin immediately upon their release. The lower price arguably reflected the decreased costs of printing and distributing digital books. But it neglected the new costs publishers faced in making the digital transition and also put enormous pressure on other retailers, particularly independent bookstores, and helped Amazon consolidate its control of the market. Publishers considered several ways to extricate themselves from this mess. In the early fall of 2009, two publishers, HarperCollins and Hachette, experimented with windowing select e-books—that is, delaying e-books’ release until the hardcover versions had been out for a few months. But consumers reacted badly and gave these titles withering reviews on Amazon.[Vi]

There was another reason for publishers’ mounting anxieties at the time. That year Amazon introduced the Kindle Digital Text Platform (later renamed KDP), a program that allowed authors to self-publish their works in the U.S. Kindle store. The company would soon expand the effort overseas and grant authors a 70 percent royalty on their sales. The service was widely interpreted as Amazon’s first step into publishing; for the moment, it was just unknown writers.

Similar efforts from other retailers had worried book publishers in the past. Barnes & Noble had its own publishing program too. But Amazon alone had the tools to cut the major houses entirely out of the bookselling process: a dominant position in e-books, via the successful Kindle, and an on-demand publishing unit called CreateSpace that could print a physical book when a customer ordered it on Amazon.com. Amazon seemed to be cultivating its relationships with agents and authors, and the company hired a former Random House executive named David Naggar to join the Kindle team. It all seemed to point toward Jeff Bezos’s outsize ambition to control every square on the publishing-industry chessboard. “Amazon is in a great place to carry out their program to almost any conceivable scale,” blogged Eoin Purcell, a Dublin-based book editor, after the introduction of AmazonEncore, which allowed authors to republish their works on the kindle. “Aside from what the author and their agents can grab, Amazon with Encore has successfully placed itself in control of the entire value chain.”N15

Publishers believed their necks were being fitted for the noose. This view, widely discussed in publishing circles at the time, accounts for what happened next: a sprawling, dramatic, multiyear imbroglio that would be laid bare in the thousands of pages of legal documents and weeks of courtroom testimony resulting from antitrust actions brought against the book publishers and Apple by the European Union and the U.S. Department of Justice.[Vi]

Over the course of 2009, the chiefs of the six major U.S. publishing houses—Penguin, Hachette, Macmillan, HarperCollins, Random House, and Simon and Schuster—gathered, allegedly to discuss their shared predicament. They communicated over the telephone, via e-mail, and in the private dining rooms of upscale New York City restaurants, and the DOJ later claimed that they took steps to avoid leaving evidence of these discussions, which might be construed as collusion. Publishing executives say the meetings were not held for the purpose of talking about Amazon and that they involved other business issues. But the U.S. government believed the executives were specifically addressing Amazon and its deleterious e-book pricing strategy, or, as the publishers termed it (per the court documents), “the $9.99 problem.”

According to the Justice Department’s filings, the publishing executives believed the only way to alter the balance of power with Amazon was for their industry to act, wielding the leverage that came from producing what amounted to 60 percent of the books Amazon sold. Court documents show that they considered a variety of options, including launching their own joint e-book venture. Then, in the fall of 2009, a white knight appeared in the form of Apple and its cancer-stricken leader, Steve Jobs.

Jobs had his own reasons to combat Amazon. He knew firsthand that Amazon could use its dominance in e-books to transition into other kinds of digital media—Jobs himself had used the iTunes monopoly in digital music to expand into podcasts, television shows, and movies. At the time Apple began reaching out to publishers, Jobs was preparing for the introduction of what would be his final masterstroke: the iPad. For Apple’s precious new invention, he wanted every kind of media available—including books.[Vi]

The publishing executives negotiated that winter with iTunes chief Eddy Cue and a deputy, Keith Moerer (ironically, a former employee of Amazon), and the resulting arrangements with Apple would solve the publishers’ $9.99 problem, relieve some of the pressure on physical bookstores, and allow Apple to enter the e-reading space without having to match Amazon’s subsidized pricing on bestsellers and new releases. In the new e-book model, publishers themselves would officially become the retailers and could set their own prices, typically in the more comfortable (for them) zone of between thirteen and fifteen dollars. Apple would act as the broker and receive a 30 percent commission, the same arrangement it had for mobile applications on the iPhone. As part of this shift to what was known as the agency model, Apple received a guarantee that other retailers would not undercut it on e-book prices. According to the DOJ, that meant publishers would have to force Amazon to adopt the same model. In his internal e-mails and to his biographer Walter Isaacson, Jobs proudly referred to this as an aikido move.

The CEOs of the publishing houses all said that, independently, each of them considered the costs of Amazon’s dominance as well as what was known of the ruthlessness of its corporate character, and then decided to move to the agency model. It was not a painless choice. By giving retailers a 30 percent commission, the publishers would actually make less money per e-book than they would if they stuck to the traditional wholesale model, in which they generally collected half of the list price. “Although agency was more costly in the short term, the strategic advantages were so compelling that we felt—independently—that this was the right way to go,” one publishing chief told me.[Vi]

There was one holdout: Markus Dohle, chief executive of Random House, worried that the economics of agency pricing were unfavorable and that he would be better off maintaining the status quo. Random House, alone among the six major publishers, decided to stick with the traditional wholesale model for the time being, so Apple declined to sell Random House’s books in its newly christened iBookstore.

Apple introduced the iPad on January 27, 2010, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. It was one of Jobs’s last public performances and a spellbinding swan song from an iconic entrepreneur—someone Jeff Bezos clearly admired and viewed as a primary rival. After the event, Wall Street Journal columnist Walter Mossberg asked Jobs why anyone would buy e-books from Apple when Amazon sold them at a lower price. “The prices will be the same,” Jobs said, carelessly raising a giant red flag for antitrust regulators by suggesting that the companies had all acted in concert. “Publishers are actually withholding their books from Amazon because they’re not happy.”N16

While other publishers informed Amazon of their new arrangements via e-mail or phone calls, Macmillan CEO John Sargent flew to Seattle to personally deliver the news of his company’s shift to an agency pricing model. In a tense twenty-minute meeting with Kindle executives that included Laura Porco, Russ Grandinetti, and David Naggar, Sargent offered Amazon the right to stick with the old terms and wholesale pricing, but at the cost of getting e-books several months after their publication. That clearly did not go over well.[Vi]

Amazon reacted to the agency move with overwhelming force, pulling the Buy buttons from Macmillan’s physical and electronic books on the website. Customers could still buy Macmillan’s print books on Amazon, but only from third-party sellers. The Kindle editions completely disappeared and remained unavailable for an entire weekend that January. For those unaware of the tense history between Amazon and publishers—the tortured “cheetah and gazelle” negotiations and so on—the sudden outbreak of hostility seemed shocking. “I think everyone thought they were witnessing a knife fight,” Sloan Harris, codirector of the literary department at International Creative Management, said at the time. “And it looks like we’ve gone to the nukes.”N17

A few days later, under a barrage of criticism for making authors and customers collateral damage in the fight, Amazon relented. Bezos and his Kindle team collaborated on a public message, which they posted on an Amazon online forum: “We have expressed our strong disagreement and the seriousness of our disagreement by temporarily ceasing the sale of all Macmillan titles. We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan’s terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books.… Kindle is a business for Amazon, and it is also a mission. We never expected it to be easy!”[Vi]

Ironically, the shift to the agency model made the Kindle business more profitable, since Amazon was forced to charge more for e-books, and Amazon held a near monopoly on e-book sales. That helped Amazon sustain the gradual decrease in the price of the Kindle hardware. Less than two years later, the cheapest Kindle e-reader would cost seventy-nine dollars.

But Amazon wasn’t sitting back or letting others dictate their own terms. Over the next year, Amazon responded forcefully in several ways. Russ Grandinetti, who had moved over to Kindle from apparel, and David Naggar, the new hire from Random House, made the rounds of midsize publishers like Houghton Mifflin. According to several executives at those firms, they were warned that they did not have the leverage to move to an agency pricing model and that Amazon would stop selling their books if they did. Amazon also intensified its focus on its own direct-publishing business, which would cause another wave of distress for publishers in the years ahead.

In trying to loosen Amazon’s grip on the e-book market, the publishers and Apple created a significant new problem for themselves. A day after the standoff with Macmillan, according to court documents, Amazon sent a white paper to the Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice laying out the chain of events and its suspicion that the publishers and Apple were engaged in an illegal conspiracy to fix e-book prices.[Vi]

Many publishing executives suspect that Amazon played a major role in provoking the legal brouhaha that resulted. But antitrust investigators likely didn’t need much nudging. Incredibly, even though Steve Jobs passed away in the fall of 2011, his earlier comments dug the legal hole deeper for Apple and the five agency publishers. In the biography Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson quoted Jobs as saying, “Amazon screwed it up… Before Apple even got on the scene, some booksellers were starting to withhold books from Amazon. So we told the publishers, ‘We’ll go to the agency model, where you set the price, and we get our 30%, and yes, the customer pays a little more, but that’s what you want anyway.’”

Jobs’s patronizing statement was potentially incriminating. If publishers had engaged in a joint effort to make customers pay “a little more,” that was the foundation on which antitrust cases were built. The Justice Department sued Apple and the five publishers on April 11, 2012, accusing them of illegally conspiring to raise e-book prices. All the publishers eventually settled without admitting liability while Apple alone held out, claiming that it had done nothing wrong and that its intent was only to expand the market for digital books.

The case against Apple was heard the following June in a Manhattan courtroom and lasted for seventeen days. District judge Denise Cote then found Apple liable, ruling that it had conspired with the book publishers to eliminate price competition and raise e-book prices and had therefore violated Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Apple vowed to appeal the verdict. A separate trial on damages was scheduled for 2014 at the time this book went to press.[Vi]

The e-book battle played out publicly in both the courtroom and the marketplace. But despite the case’s visibility in the media, it was a sideshow to the larger rise of Amazon at the time, an ascent interrupted by the great recession that resumed with renewed vigor afterward.

Beginning in 2009, as the fog of the economic crisis lifted, Amazon’s quarterly growth rate returned to its pre-recession levels, and over the next two years, the stock climbed 236 percent. The world was broadly recognizing Amazon’s potential—the power of Prime and of Amazon’s mighty fulfillment network, the promise of AWS, and the steady gains seen in Asia and Europe. In part because of the e-book pricing war, investors began to understand that the Kindle could grab an outsize share of the book business and that the device had the potential to do to bookstores what iTunes had done to record shops. Analysts en masse upgraded their ratings on Amazon’s stock, and mutual fund managers added the company to their portfolios. For the first time, Amazon was spoken in the same breath as Google and Apple—not as an afterthought, but as an equal. It had blasted off into high orbit.[Vi]

—ooOoo—

CHAPTER 10

Expedient Convictions

The spectacular rise of Amazon’s visibility and market power in the wake of the great recession brought the company more frequently into the public eye, but the attention was not always flattering. During the years 2010 and 2011, the company battled a growing chorus of critics over its avoidance of collecting state sales tax, the mechanics behind two of its large acquisitions, its move into the business of publishing books (in competition with its own suppliers), and what appeared to be its systematic disregard for the pricing policies of major manufacturers. Almost overnight, the company that viewed itself as the perennial underdog now seemed to many like a remote and often arrogant giant who was trying to play by his own set of rules.

Bezos (and the few Jeff Bots that Amazon allowed to speak in public) perfected an attitude of bemused perplexity when addressing criticisms. Bezos often said that Amazon had a “willingness to be misunderstood,” which was an impressive piece of rhetorical jujitsu—the implication being that its opponents just didn’t understand the company.N1 Bezos also deflected attacks by claiming that Amazon was a missionary company, not a mercenary one. That dichotomy originated with now former board member John Doerr, who formulated it after reading his partner Randy Komisar’s 2001 business-philosophy book The Monk and the Riddle. Missionaries have righteous goals and are trying to make the world a better place. Mercenaries are out for money and power and will run over anyone who gets in the way. To Bezos, at least, there was no doubt where Amazon fell.[Vi]

“I would take a missionary over a mercenary any day,” he liked to say. “One of those great paradoxes is that it’s usually the missionaries who end up making more money anyway.”N2

Amazon spokespeople approached these controversies with simple, direct points that they repeated over and over, rarely veering into the uncomfortable details of the company’s aggressive tactics. The arguments had the advantage of being completely rational while also serving Amazon’s strategic interests. And it was these expedient convictions that, to varying degrees, helped steer Amazon through the period of its greatest public scrutiny yet.

While the recession was in many ways a gift to Amazon, the deteriorating finances of local governments in the United States and Europe prompted a new fight over the collection of sales tax—the legal avoidance of which was one of the company’s biggest tactical advantages. It was a high-stakes battle where there were more than two sides, no one played it entirely straight, and Amazon’s deeply held convictions just happened to be conveniently expedient for its own long-term interests.

Beginning in late 2007, when governor of New York Eliot Spitzer introduced a proposal to raise millions of dollars by expanding the definition of what constituted a taxable presence in his state, Amazon was faced with the disconcerting possibility that its long exemption from adding 5 to 10 percent in sales tax onto the prices of most of its products—which had shaped its earliest decisions about where to conduct operations and place its headquarters—was about to end.[Vi]

Spitzer’s proposal flopped, at first. He withdrew it the day after introducing it, amid his own slumping approval ratings and a backlash over what his budget director said was concern that residents might consider the bill a tax increase.N3 But New York State had a $4.3 billion budget gap that desperately needed to be filled. The following February, a month before Spitzer’s political career imploded in a prostitution scandal, Spitzer reintroduced the bill. David Paterson, his successor, embraced the proposal, and in April it was passed by the state legislature in Albany.

The law cleverly eluded a 1992 Supreme Court ruling, Quill v. North Carolina, stipulating that only those merchants who had a physical presence or nexus, like a storefront or an office, in a state had to collect sales tax there. (Technically, the tax was still due for online purchases, but customers were supposed to pay it themselves.) The New York law specified that an affiliate website that took a commission for passing customers on to an online retailer was an agent of that retailer, and thus the retailer officially had a presence in that affiliate’s state. By this ruling, if a Yankees-fan website in New York made money every time a visitor clicked a link on its pages and bought former manager Joe Torre’s memoir on Amazon.com, then Seattle-based Amazon had an official storefront in New York and so had to collect sales tax on all purchases made in that state.[Vi]

Amazon was not amused. The New York law went into effect over the summer of 2008 and, along with Overstock.com, another retailer, it sued in state court—and lost. Publicly, the company complained that state-by-state tax collection was complex and impractical. “There are currently about seventy-six hundred different jurisdictions in the country that tax, including things like snow-removal and mosquito-abatement districts,” says Paul Misener, Amazon’s vice president of global public policy and the public face of its tax battles.

Amazon had avoided sales-tax collection for years with various clever tricks. In states where it had fulfillment centers or other offices, like Lab126, it skirted the definition of what constituted a physical presence by classifying those facilities as wholly owned subsidiaries that earned no revenue. For example, the fulfillment center in Fernley, Nevada, operated as an independent entity called Amazon.com.nvdc, Inc. These arrangements were unlikely to hold up under direct scrutiny, but Amazon had carefully negotiated with each state when opening its facilities, securing hands-off treatment in exchange for the company’s generating new jobs and economic activity. Bezos considered his exemption from collecting sales tax to be an enormous strategic advantage and brought a libertarian’s earnestness to what he believed was a battle over principle. “We’re not actually benefiting from any services that those states provide locally, so it’s not fair that we should be obligated to be their tax collection agent since we’re not getting any of the services,” he said at a shareholder meeting in 2008.[Vi]

Bezos also thought his exemption from collecting sales tax was a big benefit for customers, and the prospect of losing it triggered his apoplectic reaction to raising prices. He had good reason to be worried about the effects of sales-tax collection. When New York passed its Internet sales-tax law, Amazon’s sales in New York State dropped 10 percent over the next quarter, according to a person familiar with Amazon’s finances at the time.

New York’s law spread like a bad cold. Similarly cash-strapped states like Illinois, North Carolina, Hawaii, Rhode Island, and Texas tried the same bank-shot approach of declaring that affiliate websites constituted nexuses. In response, Amazon borrowed a hardnosed tactic that Overstock had used in New York and severed ties with its affiliates in each state. These sites were often run by bloggers and other entrepreneurs who needed their affiliate commissions, and they were angered to find themselves wedged between a cash-starved state government on one side and an online giant belligerently clinging to a blatant tax loophole on the other.

The affiliates were not the only victims at this stage of the sales-tax fight. Vadim Tsypin was an Amazon engineer who often worked from his home in Quebec, Canada. In late 2007, around the time Eliot Spitzer was proposing his tax bill and Amazon’s lawyers were growing more anxious, Tsypin’s manager showed him the company’s restrictive Canada policy, which declared that Amazon had no employees working in that country. His manager allegedly told Tsypin they had to cover up his history of working from home and, according to court documents, said that “Amazon can have multimillion-dollar problems. If we have even one employee on the ground there, it is a big violation of U.S. and Canadian law.”[Vi]

Tsypin refused to alter his old time sheets and evaluations, believing that it wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny. He claimed that his Amazon bosses then started to harass him into quitting, which led to his getting sick (“constant migraine headaches and frequent seizure-like blackouts”) and taking a medical leave of absence. In 2010, he sued Amazon in King County Superior Court for wrongful termination, breach of contract, emotional distress, and negligent hiring—and he lost. The judge acknowledged Tsypin’s condition was work related but said the claims were not strong enough to impose a civil liability.

Large companies like Amazon are frequent targets of wrongful-termination claims. But Vadim Tsypin’s case was unusual because it grew out of Amazon’s own growing sales-tax anxieties and because the discovery phase brought Amazon’s extensive tax-avoidance playbook into the public record. Dozens of pages of internal company rulebooks, flowcharts, and maps were filed with the King County Superior Court on Third Avenue in downtown Seattle. Together, they revealed a fascinating portrait of a company desperately contorting itself to accommodate a rapidly shifting tax climate.

The guidelines approached the surreal. 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.[Vi]

Then the seemingly arbitrary partitions in the company’s corporate structure became even more important. Traveling employees working for Amazon’s North American retail organization were told to say they worked for a company called Amazon Services, not Amazon.com, and to carry business cards to that effect. According to one document, they were instructed to say, “I’m with Amazon Services, the operator of the www.amazon.com website and provider of e-commerce solutions and services, and I’m here to gather information about the latest industry developments and trends,” if they were ever queried by the media regarding their attendance at a trade show.

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 (number 16: “Will you be holding a raffle?”). Amazon lawyers then either nixed the trip altogether or obtained a private letter ruling from that state spelling out its specific treatment of that particular situation.[Vi]

There was little internal discussion by management on whether it was right or wrong or if it was affecting morale among employees, according to senior employees at the time. It was just strategy, a way to preserve a significant tax advantage that enabled the company to offer comparatively low prices. “The economic outlook for many states is bleak,” read one early 2010 internal tax memo to employees that was filed in the Vadim Tsypin case record. “As a result, states are pursuing taxpayers more aggressively than before. Amazon’s recent public experiences with New York and Texas provide timely and pertinent examples of the heightened risk. That’s why our attention to nexus-related issues are more important than ever.”N4

That same year, 2010, fully alerted to the urgency of combating the Amazon threat, Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Home Depot, and Sears put aside their traditional enmities to join forces in an unusual coalition.N5 They jointly backed a new organization called the Alliance for Main Street Fairness, which shrouded itself in populist language and—somehow managing to conceal the dripping irony—touted the importance of preserving the vitality of small mom-and-pop retailers. The organization employed a team of well-financed lobbyists who set up a sophisticated website and ran print and television ads around the country. The CEOs of all these big retailers monitored the campaign closely. Mike Duke, Walmart’s CEO, requested frequent briefings on the sales-tax fight, according to two lobbyists involved in the battle.[Vi]

Amazon fought the sales-tax expansion aggressively, soliciting cooperation from politicians by deploying both carrot and stick in the area where they might feel it most—jobs. In Texas in 2011, the legislature passed a bill that would force online retailers with distribution facilities in the state to collect sales tax, and Amazon threatened to close its fulfillment center outside Dallas, fire hundreds of local workers, and scrap plans to build other facilities in the state. Texas governor Rick Perry promptly vetoed the bill. In South Carolina, Amazon won an exemption on a new law by using the same threats, and it agreed to send customers e-mails helpfully reminding them they were supposed to pay sales tax on their own. In Tennessee, legislators agreed to delay a bill when Amazon offered to build three new fulfillment centers in the state.

During these skirmishes, Bezos advocated for a federal bill that simplified the sales tax code and imposed it over the entire e-commerce industry. (This had the advantage of being a highly unlikely scenario, considering the political deadlock gripping Washington, DC, at the time.) “If I say to customers, ‘We’re not required to collect sales tax, the Constitution is crystal clear that states cannot force out-of-state retailers to collect sales tax and cannot interfere in interstate commerce, but we’re going to do it voluntarily anyway,’ that isn’t tenable,” Bezos told me in a 2011 interview. “Customers would rightly protest. The way this has to work is you either have to amend the Constitution or you have to pass federal legislation.”[Vi]

The fight came to a dramatic head in 2012. Amazon surrendered in Texas, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee, negotiating accommodations that allowed it to stay tax-free for a few more years in exchange for putting new fulfillment centers in each state. In California, the most populous state, where the company apparently thought it could stave off the inevitable, Amazon girded itself for a fight. After the state legislature passed its sales-tax bill, Amazon engineered a campaign to overturn the law with a ballot measure and spent $5.25 million gathering signatures and running radio advertisements. Observers projected the company would have to spend over $50 million to see the fight through to the end.N6

It quickly became evident that such a battle would be expensive, bitterly contested—and vicious. The Alliance for Main Street Fairness carpet-bombed the state with anti-Amazon advertisements, and editorial writers and bloggers largely sided with the big-box chains. “Amazon’s attempt to avoid sales tax is one more sad example of the short-term thinking that rules American business,” blogged Web evangelist Tim O’Reilly, knowing just how to push the buttons of Bezos, who prided himself on long-term thinking.N7 Inside Amazon, it was increasingly clear that the company was being fitted for the black hat of the bad guy. At the same time, Amazon was preparing to confront Apple in the high-stakes tablet market with the Kindle Fire. Colleagues insisted to Bezos that Amazon could not afford to see its brand tarnished at such a critical juncture.[Vi]

So that fall, Amazon reversed course and reached an agreement with California: the company would drop its ballot measure in exchange for one more tax-free Christmas season, and it promised to build new fulfillment centers outside San Francisco and Los Angeles.N8 Soon after, Paul Misener testified before the Senate Commerce Science and Transportation Committee and reiterated Amazon’s support for a federal bill—as did Amazon’s unlikely new bedfellows in the sales-tax battle, Best Buy, Target, and Walmart. Now eBay, another combatant in the sales-tax wars, stood alone in trying to protect its smallest merchants, like the stay-at-home mother bringing in extra money by selling handmade mosaics. It advocated that the law should not apply to businesses with fewer than fifty employees or less than $10 million in annual sales, though most of the proposed national sales-tax bills put the exemption at less than $1 million. As of this writing, a national sales-tax-collection bill has not yet passed both houses of Congress.

Amazon was losing a sizable advantage, but Bezos, ever the farsighted chess player, was compensating by cultivating new ones. Amazon’s new fulfillment centers would be close to large cities, allowing for the possibility of next-day or same-day delivery and the wider rollout of its grocery business, AmazonFresh. Amazon also expanded its test of Amazon Lockers—large, orange locked cabinets placed in supermarkets, drugstores, and chains like Radio Shack that customers could have their Amazon packages shipped to if they liked.[Vi]

As the era of tax-free online purchases was ending in many states, the true architect of Amazon’s tax strategy and chief of its eighty-person tax department, an attorney named Robert Comfort, stepped out of the shadows. Comfort, a Princeton alumnus who joined Amazon in 2000, had spent more than a decade employing every trick in the book, and inventing many new ones, to minimize the company’s tax burden. He created its controversial tax structure in Europe, funneling sales through entities in Luxembourg, which has a famously low tax rate. In 2012, this arcane tax structure nearly collapsed amid a wave of populist European anger directed at Amazon and other U.S. companies, including Google, who were trying to minimize their overseas tax burden.

Comfort announced his retirement and left Amazon in early 2012, just as the taxman was catching up with the company. (He has since taken a new job—a titular position as Seattle’s honorary consul for the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.)

And for the first time in its history, Amazon would have to fight its offline rivals on a level playing field.[Vi]

***

There is a clandestine group inside Amazon with a name seemingly drawn from a James Bond film: Competitive Intelligence. The group, which since 2007 has operated within the finance department under longtime executives Tim Stone and Jason Warnick, buys large volumes of products from competitors and measures the quality and speed of their services. Its mandate is to investigate whether any rival is doing a better job than Amazon and then present the data to a committee that usually includes Bezos, Jeff Wilke, and Diego Piacentini, who ensure that the company addresses any emerging threat and catches up quickly.

In the late 2000s, Competitive Intelligence began tracking a rival with a difficult to pronounce name and a strong rapport with female shoppers. Quidsi (quid si is Latin for “what if”) was a New Jersey company known for its website Diapers.com. Grammar-school friends Marc Lore and Vinit Bharara founded the startup in 2005 to allow sleep-deprived caregivers to painlessly schedule recurring shipments of vital supplies. By 2008, the company had expanded into selling all of the necessary survival gear for new parents, including baby wipes, infant formula, clothes, and strollers.

Dragging screaming children to the store is a well-known parental hassle, but Amazon didn’t start selling diapers until a year after Diapers.com, and neither Walmart.com nor Target.com was investing significantly in the category. Back when the dark clouds of the dot-com bust still hung over the e-commerce industry, retailers felt that they wouldn’t make any money shipping big, bulky, low-margin products like jumbo packs of Huggies Snug and Dry to people’s front doors.[Vi]

Lore and Bharara made it work by customizing their distribution system for baby gear. Quidsi’s fulfillment centers, designed by former Boeing operations manager Scott Hilton, used software to match every order with the smallest possible shipping box (there were twenty-three sizes available), minimizing excess weight and thus reducing the per-order shipping cost. (Amazon, which had to match box sizes to a much larger selection of products, was not as adept at this.) Quidsi selected warehouses outside major population centers to take advantage of inexpensive ground-shipping rates and was able to promise free overnight shipping in two-thirds of the country. The Quidsi founders studied Amazon closely and idolized Jeff Bezos, referring to him in private conversation as “sensei.”N9

Moms got hooked on the seemingly magical appearance of diapers on their doorsteps and enthusiastically told friends about Diapers.com. Several venture-capital firms, including Accel Partners, a backer of Facebook, bought into the possibility that Lore and Bharara had identified a weakness in Amazon’s armor, and they pumped over $50 million into the company. Around this time, Jeff Bezos and his business-development team, as well as Amazon’s counterparts at Walmart, started to pay attention.

Executives and official representatives from Amazon, Quidsi, and Walmart have all declined to discuss the ensuing scuffle in detail. Jeff Blackburn, Amazon’s mergers and acquisitions chief, said Quidsi was similar to Zappos, a “stubbornly independent company building an extremely flexible franchise.” He also said that everything Amazon subsequently did in the diapers market was planned beforehand and was unrelated to competing with Quidsi.[Vi]

The story that follows has been pieced together from the recollections of insiders at all three companies. They spoke anonymously and with a significant amount of trepidation, given the strength of Amazon’s and Walmart’s strict nondisclosure agreements and the possibility of legal consequences for them for speaking publically about it.

In 2009, Blackburn ominously informed the Quidsi cofounders over an introductory lunch that the e-commerce giant was getting ready to invest in the category and that the startup should think seriously about selling to Amazon. Lore and Bharara replied that they wanted to remain private and build an independent company. Blackburn told the Quidsi founders that they should call him if they ever reconsidered.

Soon after, Quidsi noticed Amazon dropping prices up to 30 percent on diapers and other baby products. As an experiment, Quidsi execs manipulated their prices and then watched as Amazon’s website changed its prices accordingly. Amazon’s famous pricing bots were lasered in on Diapers.com.

Quidsi fared well under Amazon’s assault, at least at first. It didn’t try to match Amazon’s low prices but capitalized on the strength of its brand and continued to reap the benefits of strong word of mouth. It also used its trusting relationship with customers and its expertise in fulfillment to open two new websites, Soap.com for home goods and BeautyBar.com for makeup. But after a while, the heated competition began to take a toll on the company. Quidsi had grown from nothing to $300 million in annual sales in just a few years, but with Amazon focusing on the category, revenue growth started to slow. Investors were reluctant to furnish Quidsi with additional capital, and the company was not yet mature enough for an IPO. For the first time, Lore and Bharara had to think about selling.[Vi]

At around this point, Walmart was looking for ways to make up the ground they’d lost to Amazon, and the retailer was shaking up its online division. Walmart vice chairman Eduardo Castro-Wright took over Walmart.com, and one of his first calls was to Marc Lore at Diapers.com to initiate acquisition talks. Lore said that Quidsi wanted a chance to get “Zappos money”—$900 million, which included bonuses spread out over many years tied to performance goals. Walmart agreed in principle and started due diligence. Mike Duke, Walmart’s CEO, even visited a Diapers.com fulfillment center in New Jersey. However, the subsequent formal offer from Bentonville was well under the requested amount.

So Lore picked up the phone and called Amazon. In September 2006, Lore and Bharara traveled to Seattle to pitch Jeff Bezos on acquiring Quidsi. While they were in that early-morning meeting with Bezos, Amazon sent out a press release introducing a new service called Amazon Mom. It was a sweet deal for new parents: they could get up to a year’s worth of free two-day Prime shipping (a program that usually cost $79 to join), and there was a wealth of other perks available, including an additional 30 percent off the already-discounted diapers, if they signed up for regular monthly deliveries of diapers as part of a service called Subscribe and Save. Back in New Jersey, Quidsi employees desperately tried to call their founders to discuss a public response to Amazon Mom. It was no accident that they couldn’t reach them. They were sitting blithely unaware in a meeting in Amazon’s own offices.[Vi]

Quidsi could now taste its own blood. That month, Diapers.com listed a case of Pampers at forty-five dollars; Amazon priced it at thirty-nine dollars, and Amazon Mom customers with Subscribe and Save could get a case for less than thirty dollars.N10 At one point, Quidsi executives took what they knew about shipping rates, factored in Procter and Gamble’s wholesale prices, and calculated that Amazon was on track to lose $100 million over three months in the diapers category alone.

Inside Amazon, Bezos had rationalized these moves as being in the company’s long-term interest of delighting its customers and building its consumables business. He told business-development vice president Peter Krawiec not to spend over a certain amount to buy Quidsi but to make sure that Amazon did not, under any circumstances, lose the deal to Walmart.

As a result of Bezos’s meeting with Lore and Bharara, Amazon now had an exclusive three-week period to study Quidsi’s financial results and come up with a proposal. At the end of that period, Krawiec offered Quidsi $540 million and said that this was a “stretch price.” Knowing that Walmart hovered on the sidelines, he gave Quidsi a window of forty-eight hours to respond and made it clear that if the founders didn’t take the offer, the heightened competition would continue.

Walmart should have had a natural advantage in this fight. Jim Breyer, the managing partner at one of Quidsi’s venture-capital backers, Accel, was also on the Walmart board of directors. But Walmart was caught flat-footed. By the time Walmart upped its offer to $600 million, Quidsi had tentatively accepted the Amazon term sheet. Mike Duke called and left messages for several Quidsi board members, imploring them not to sell to Amazon. Those messages were then transcribed and sent to Seattle, since Amazon had stipulated in the preliminary term sheet that Quidsi was required to turn over information about any subsequent offers.[Vi]

When Amazon executives learned of Walmart’s counterbid, they ratcheted up the pressure even further, threatening the Quidsi founders that “sensei,” being such a furious competitor, would drive diaper prices to zero if they went with Walmart. The Quidsi board convened to discuss the Amazon proposal and the possibility of letting it expire and then resuming negotiations with Walmart. But by then, Bezos’s Khrushchev-like willingness to take the e-commerce equivalent of the thermonuclear option in the diaper price war made Quidsi worried that it would be exposed and vulnerable if something went wrong during the consummation of a shotgun marriage to Walmart. So the Quidsi executives stuck with Amazon, largely out of fear. The deal was announced on November 8, 2010.

The money-losing Amazon Mom program was obviously introduced to help dead-end Diapers.com and force a sale, and if anyone at the time had doubts about that, those doubts were quickly dispelled by Amazon’s subsequent actions.

A month after it announced the acquisition of Quidsi, Amazon closed the program to new members. But by then the Federal Trade Commission was reviewing the deal, and a few weeks after it closed the program, Amazon reversed course and reopened it, though with much smaller discounts.[Vi]

The Federal Trade Commission scrutinized the acquisition for four and a half months, going beyond the standard review to the second-request phase, where companies must provide more information about a transaction. The deal raised a host of red flags, according to an FTC official familiar with the review. A significant head-to-head competition and the subsequent merger had led to the demise of a major player in the category. But the deal was eventually approved, in part because it did not result in a monopoly. There was a plethora of other companies, like Costco and Target, that sold diapers both online and offline.

Bezos had won again, neutralizing an incipient competitor and filling another set of shelves in his everything store. Like Zappos, Quidsi was permitted to operate independently within Amazon (from New Jersey), and soon it expanded into pet supplies with Wag.com and toys with Yoyo.com. Walmart had missed the chance to acquire a talented team of entrepreneurs who had gone toe to toe with Amazon in a key product category. And insiders were once again left with their mouths agape, marveling at how Bezos had ruthlessly engineered another acquisition by driving his target off a cliff. Says one observer who had a seat close to the battle, “They have an absolute willingness to torch the landscape around them to emerge the winner.”[Vi]

***

Anxiety over Amazon isn’t restricted to New Jersey, Las Vegas, and other American places. The industrial city of Solingen, Germany, halfway between Dusseldorf and Cologne, is famous for the production of high-quality razors and knives. The local blacksmith trade dates back two millennia, and today the city is the seat of the European knife industry and home to renowned brands like Wusthof, a two-hundred-year-old firm that’s been run by seven successive generations of the Wusthof family. In the 1960s, Wolfgang Wusthof introduced the company’s high-end products to North America, riding a bus from town to town with a suitcase full of knives. Forty years later, his grandnephew Harald Wusthof took over the firm and started selling to chains like Williams-Sonoma and Macy’s. Then, in the early 2000s, Wusthof began supplying its wares to Amazon.com.

Over the course of its fifty years in America, Wusthof has established itself as a premium brand, winning frequent commendations from the likes of Consumer Reports and Cook’s Illustrated. For that reason it can charge a hundred and twenty-five dollars for an eight-inch hollow-ground cook’s knife made of high-carbon laser-tested steel, even though similar-size kitchen knives sell for twenty dollars each at Target. Maintaining that lofty price is vital for a company that employs hundreds of skilled artisans in its factory but that competes in a category full of inferior products that, to an untrained eye, all look roughly the same.

Which is why Amazon’s five-year association with Wusthof—like its relationship with so many brands and manufacturers around the world—has been about as bloody as an actual knife fight.[Vi]

Manufacturers are not allowed to enforce retail prices for their products. But they can decide which retailers to sell to, and one way they wield that power is by setting price floors with a tool called MAP, or minimum advertised price. MAP requires offline retailers like Walmart to stay above a certain price threshold in their circulars and newspaper ads. Online retailers have a higher burden. Their product pages are considered advertisements, so they have to set their promoted prices at or above MAP or else face the manufacturer’s wrath and risk the firm’s limiting the number of products allocated or withdrawing them altogether.

Over its first few years selling Wusthof knives, Amazon respected the German firm’s pricing wishes. Amazon was a good partner, placing large orders as its traffic grew and settling its bills on time. It quickly became Wusthof’s top online retailer and second-largest U.S. seller overall, after Williams-Sonoma. Then tensions in the relationship emerged. As Amazon pricing-bot software got better at scouring the Web and finding and matching low prices elsewhere, Amazon repeatedly violated Wusthof’s MAP requirements, selling products like the $125 Grand Prix chef’s knife for $109. Wusthof felt it needed MAP to defend the value of its brand and protect the small independent knife shops that were responsible for about a quarter of the company’s sales and were not capable of matching such discounts. “These are the guys that built my brand,” says René Arnold, the CFO of Wusthof-Trident of America. “Amazon cannot sell a new knife. They can’t explain it like a store.”[Vi]

Wusthof finally stopped allocating products to Amazon in 2006. “It was painful for us,” Arnold says. “Those were lost sales, at least in the short term. But we believed our product and our brand were stronger than the brand of our distributors.” For the next three years—until 2009, when Wusthof changed its mind and initiated part two of its tortured relationship with Amazon—Wusthof knives were absent from the shelves of the everything store.

Companies that make things and companies that sell them have waged versions of this battle for centuries. With its commitment to everyday low prices and the ingenious marriage of direct retail with a third-party marketplace, Amazon has taken these historic tensions to a new level. Like Sam Walton, Bezos sees it as his company’s mission to drive inefficiencies out of the supply chain and deliver the lowest possible price to its customers. Amazon executives view MAPs and similar techniques as the last vestiges of an old way of doing business, gimmicks that inefficient companies use to protect their bloated margins. Amazon has come up with countless workarounds, including a technique called hide the price. In some cases, when Amazon breaks MAP, it doesn’t list the price on its product page. A customer can see the low price only when he places the item in his shopping cart.[Vi]

It’s an inelegant solution, driven by Amazon’s age-old desire to have the lowest prices anywhere and the novel ability of its pricing algorithms to quickly match any major seller that goes lower. “We know it’s in the customer’s best interest that we have a cost structure that allows us to match competitors and be known for low prices,” says Jeff Wilke. “That’s our objective.” Wilke acknowledges that not everyone is happy with this approach but says Amazon is consistent about it and that manufacturers should understand that it is the nature of the Internet itself—not just Amazon—that allows customers to easily find the lowest price.

“If vendors or brands leave Amazon, they will eventually come back,” Wilke predicts, because “customers trust Amazon to be great providers of information and customer reviews about a vast selection of products. If you have customers ready to buy, and if you have a chance to tell them about your product, what brand ultimately doesn’t want that?”

Dyson, the British vacuum maker, is one example of a brand that appears to treat Amazon with caution. It sold on Amazon for years and then an irate Sir James Dyson, its founder, visited Amazon’s offices personally to vent his frustrations over repeated violations of MAP. “Sir James said he trusted us with his brand and we had violated that trust,” says Kerry Morris, a former senior buyer who hosted Dyson on that memorable visit. Dyson pulled its vacuums from Amazon in 2011, though some models are still sold on the Amazon Marketplace by approved third-party merchants. Over the past few years, companies such as Sony and Black and Decker have taken turns yanking various products from the site. Apple in particular keeps Amazon on a tight leash, giving it a limited supply of iPods but no iPads or iPhones.[Vi]

Amazon’s booming marketplace is a primary source of tension between Amazon and other companies. Over the holiday months in 2012, 39 percent of products sold on Amazon were brokered over its third-party marketplace, up from 36 percent the year before. The company said that over two million third-party sellers worldwide used Amazon Marketplace and that they sold 40 percent more products in 2012 than in 2011.N11 The Marketplace business is a profitable one for the company, since it takes a flat 6 to 15 percent commission on each sale and does not bear the expense of buying and holding the inventory.

Some of the retailers who sell via the Amazon Marketplace seem to have a schizophrenic relationship with the company, particularly if they have no unique and sustainable selling point, such as an exclusive on a particular product. Amazon closely monitors what they sell, notices any briskly selling items, and often starts selling those products itself. By paying Amazon commissions and helping it source hot products, retailers on the Amazon Marketplace are in effect aiding their most ferocious competitor.

In 2003, Michael Ross was chief executive of Figleaves.com, a London-based online lingerie and swimwear site that sold popular sports bras made by the British brand Shock Absorber. Figleaves had Amazon’s attention early on. To promote the company’s debut in the United States on Amazon’s Marketplace, Ross helped arrange a lopsided exhibition tennis match between Jeff Bezos and Shock Absorber’s celebrity endorser Anna Kournikova.[Vi]

Figleaves sold its wares on Amazon’s Marketplace for a few years but left unhappily at the end of 2008. By then, Amazon.com was carrying a wide assortment of Shock Absorber bras and swimsuits, and Figleaves was selling very little on the site. “In a world where consumers had limited choice, you needed to compete for locations,” says Ross, who went on to cofound eCommera, a British e-commerce advisory firm. “But in a world where consumers have unlimited choice, you need to compete for attention. And this requires something more than selling other people’s products.”

Even sellers who thrive in Amazon’s Marketplace tend to regard it warily. GreenCupboards, a seller of environmentally responsible products, like eco-friendly laundry detergents and pet supplies, has built a sixty-person company almost entirely via Amazon, despite the fact that founder Josh Neblett says that Marketplace enables “a race to zero.” His company is constantly competing with other sellers and with Amazon’s own retail organization to provide the lowest possible price and to capture the “buy box”—to be the default seller of a particular product on the site. That furious price competition tends to drive prices down and eliminate profit margin. As a result, GreenCupboards has had to get more Amazon-like to survive. Neblett says the company has gotten better at sourcing hot new products, locking up exclusives, and building a lean organization. “I’ve just always considered it a game and we are figuring out how to best play it,” he says.[Vi]

Still, as Wilke says, some of the companies that disavow selling on Amazon ultimately return, irresistibly drawn to its 200 million active customers and brisk sales. Amazon’s own employees have compared third-party selling on the site to heroin addiction—sellers get a sudden euphoric rush and a lingering high as sales explode, then progress to addiction and self-destruction when Amazon starts gutting the sellers’ margins and undercutting them on price. Sellers “know they should not be taking the heroin, but they cannot stop taking the heroin,” says Kerry Morris, the former Amazon buyer. “They push and bitch and complain and threaten until they finally see they have to cut themselves off.”

Wusthof, the German knife maker, had its relapse in 2009, after an intensive courtship by Amazon that included promises of obedience in regard to the manufacturer’s suggested price. The company reallocated product to the online retailer, but the earlier pattern repeated itself; for example, Wusthof’s gourmet twelve-piece knife set, with a MAP of $199, showed up on the site at $179. René Arnold, the CFO, was overwhelmed with complaints from his other retail partners, whose prices remained 10 percent higher. These small shop owners either lost sales to Amazon or were forced by their customers to match Amazon’s price. In their angry calls to Arnold, they threatened to lower their retail prices as well, and now it was easy for Arnold and his colleagues to envision a day when all these retailers would start demanding lower wholesale prices on Wusthof knives, cutting into the company’s profit margins. The economics of its traditional-manufacturing operation in Germany would no longer make sense.[Vi]

When Arnold complained, his counterpart at Amazon, a merchandising manager named Kevin Bates, responded that the company was merely finding and matching lower prices on the Web and in its third-party Marketplace. Arnold argued that many of those sellers were not authorized retailers and urged Amazon not to match them. Bates said that he was required to—Amazon always matched the lowest price.

Arnold was frustrated. He was monitoring Amazon’s third-party Marketplace and tracking several unfamiliar low-priced sellers, including one called Great Deals Now Online. This mysterious entity always seemed to have Wusthof knives for sale, yet Arnold had no idea who they were, and Amazon provided no way to contact them. “He might know someone who has gotten a hold of surplus product, or he might have someone working at Bed, Bath and Beyond stealing from the distribution center,” says Arnold. “Customers would never give their credit card to this guy, but because he’s on the Amazon platform, they figure he’s clean, he must be good.” Arnold felt that Amazon’s own Marketplace was enabling the destructive discounting that its retail business was using as an excuse to undercut MAP.

In 2011, Wusthof decided, again, to end its relationship with Amazon. To help explain to his bosses why Wusthof was cutting off one of its best sales channels, René Arnold requested a meeting with Amazon and brought Harald Wusthof over from Germany. Wusthof, in his mid-forties with wavy, white hair and an avuncular smile, has quite possibly never in his life been photographed without a sharp blade in his hands.[Vi]

The meeting, at Amazon’s offices in Seattle, was tense. Kevin Bates was joined by his boss Dan Joy, a director of hard-line categories like kitchen and dining. Bates and Joy seemed genuinely surprised to hear that Wusthof was walking away and vowed to acquire Wusthof knives through the gray market. They also threatened the company, as Arnold recalls, saying that every time a customer searched on Amazon for the Wusthof brand, Amazon would show advertisements for competitors like J. A. Henckels, another knife company based in Solingen, and Victorinox, maker of Swiss army knives.

Wusthof and Arnold were shocked by the fierceness of Amazon’s stance and held firm on their decision to withdraw. “Anyone can sell more Wusthof at half the price. It’s easy,” Arnold says. “But if you start selling at the lower price, maybe you have a heyday for a few years, but within two or three years you drive a two-hundred-year-old family business into a wall. We had to protect our brand. That was the main decision point. So we pulled out.”

At a kitchen-and-bath trade show in Chicago the following spring, Arnold was surprised to receive an outpouring of support from sympathetic vendors who were also tussling with Amazon over issues like MAPs and mysterious third-party sellers. Meanwhile, Amazon followed through on its threats to show ads for Wusthof rivals. In mid-2012, an enterprising Amazon buyer somehow managed to get someone at Wusthof headquarters in Germany to ship him a large crate of knives meant to go to Dubai. That supply lasted about six weeks.[Vi]

By the end of 2012, an Amazon merchandising representative began courting Wusthof once more, begging the company to reconsider. The knife maker declined. But here’s the kicker: Customers can still find a decent selection of Wusthof knives on Amazon from a handful of third-party sellers and even from Amazon itself. In 2010, Amazon started a unit called Warehouse Deals. The unit buys refurbished and used products and sells them in the Amazon Marketplace and on the Web at Warehousedeals.com. The goal of the project, according to an executive who worked on it, is to become the largest liquidator on the planet. These products are often advertised as “good as new”—a package of diapers with a tear in the shrink wrap, for example—and Amazon is not required to sell them at MAP.

As of this writing, Warehouse Deals has a selection of more than sixty Wusthof products at steep discounts. Third-party merchants, mostly other authorized Wusthof retailers, also sell their knives on Amazon, often through Fulfillment by Amazon, which allows the products to qualify for Prime shipping. So even when partners flee, the groundwork that Amazon has laid ensures that the hallowed shelves of the everything store are never completely bare.[Vi]

***

Back in the anxious years after the dot-com bust, when Wusthof was still happily selling its knives on Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos was tracking a firm he viewed as a potentially dangerous new rival: Netflix. At the time, Amazon was making a little extra money by inserting paper advertisements into its delivery boxes, and Bezos himself received a package that contained a flyer for the DVD-rental firm. He brought the flyer into a meeting and said irritably of the managers running the advertising program, “Is it easy for them to ruin the company or do they have to work at it?”

Bezos was clearly nervous about Netflix’s gathering momentum. With its recognizable red envelopes and late-fee-slaying DVD-by-mail program, it was forging a bond with customers and a strong brand in movies, a key media category. Bezos’s lieutenants met with CEO Reed Hastings several times during Netflix’s formative years but they always reported back that Hastings was “painfully uninterested” in selling, according to one Amazon business-development exec. Hastings himself says that Amazon was never truly serious about an acquisition of Netflix because “the basic operating rhythms” of the DVD-rental space, which required multiple small fulfillment centers to send discs out and then receive them back, were so different from Amazon’s core retail business. “It made no sense for them to be an aggressive bidder because it didn’t really leverage their strengths,” he says.[Vi]

Like everyone else, Amazon executives knew that the days of selling and shipping physical DVDs were numbered, but they wanted to be prepared and well positioned for whatever came next. So Amazon opened DVD-rental services in the United Kingdom and Germany, with the idea that it would learn the rental business and establish its brand in markets that Netflix had not yet entered. But local companies were ahead there too, and the cost to acquire new customers was higher than Amazon had anticipated. In February 2008, Amazon seemingly waved the white flag of surrender, selling those divisions to a larger competitor, Lovefilm, in exchange for about $90 million in stock and a 32 percent ownership position in the European firm. Jeff Blackburn says that by then Amazon suspected there was little future for the rental model and that “we sold them the DVD business because they seemed to be overvaluing it.”

Lovefilm was a kind of Frankenstein corporate creation, the combination of numerous Netflix clones that had gradually merged with one other and come to control a majority of the British and German rental market. As a result, it had many shareholders (including several prominent venture-capital firms), a large board of directors, and plenty of conflicting internal opinions about its strategic moves. Amazon became the largest shareholder after the deal and later consolidated its grip on the startup when another investor, the European venture-capital firm Arts Alliance, sold the company a 10 percent stake. Greg Greeley, the former finance executive who was running Amazon’s European operation, joined the Lovefilm board. As it is wont to do, Amazon watched from the sidelines, learned, and patiently waited for an opening.[Vi]

By early 2009, the home-video market was inexorably tilting toward streaming movies online and away from sending discs in the mail. Like Netflix, Lovefilm planned to transition to video on demand. It had arranged streaming deals with movie studios like Warner Brothers and put access to its catalog on devices like Sony’s PlayStation 3. But the company needed additional capital to execute such a shift in its business, so that year it hired the investment bank Jefferies and started entertaining acquisition and investment offers.

While private equity firms like Silver Lake Partners expressed interest, Google was the most prominent bidder for Lovefilm. The search giant’s executive team was developing a plan over the summer of 2009 to acquire both Lovefilm and Netflix and add a significant new focus that was unrelated to its core advertising business. Nikesh Arora and David Lawee, business-development executives at Google, had several meetings with people at both companies that year and produced a preliminary letter of Google’s intent to buy Lovefilm for two hundred million pounds (about three hundred million dollars), according to three people with knowledge of the offer. But these efforts ultimately fizzled; there was opposition from Google’s YouTube division and fear that the company might be able to acquire one streaming-video business but not the other.

That left Lovefilm still in need of additional capital. So over the summer of 2010, the company’s executives decided to pursue an initial public offering. Then Amazon decided it wanted to buy Lovefilm, and everything changed.[Vi]

Amazon had watched the explosion in popularity of Internet-connected Blu-ray players and video-game consoles in its own electronics store and knew it had to get off the sidelines. Its incipient streaming service, Amazon Video on Demand, was the successor to an overly complicated video download store called Amazon Unbox, which required users to download entire movies to their PCs or TiVo set-top boxes before they could start watching. The streaming service (which did not require downloads) was showing early promise but the company still lagged behind Apple and Hulu in the online-video market. Buying Lovefilm would give it a beachhead in Europe. “They went from having a financial interest, where they thought they might make a financial return on their investment, to a strategic interest,” says Dharmash Mistry, a former partner at the London venture-capital firm Balderton Capital and a Lovefilm board member. “They wanted to own the asset.”

Now the Lovefilm board members would witness the same ruthless tactics observed by the founders of Zappos and Quidsi. Amazon pointed out, quite sensibly, that Lovefilm needed to invest hundreds of millions to acquire content and hold off deep-pocketed rivals like the massive cable conglomerate BSkyB and, when it finally entered the European market, Netflix. Amazon also argued that Lovefilm needed to invest in its long-term prospects and should not spend time and money gussying itself up for the conservative public markets in Europe, which would want to see profits before an IPO. The best path forward was for Lovefilm to sell itself to Amazon. It was more Bezos-style expedient conviction—the arguments had the advantage of being completely rational while also serving Amazon’s own strategic interests.[Vi]

In the midst of this debate, Amazon found a technical way to prevent a Lovefilm IPO. If the company was going to free up stock to sell to the public, it needed to amend its own bylaws, or articles of association—and as the largest shareholder, Amazon could block this change. It effectively had a veto over an IPO, and Amazon made it clear that it was not going to authorize or publicly endorse the move, according to multiple board members and people close to the company. This was an enormous problem. Potential investors were likely to balk if the company’s biggest shareholder was not visibly showing its support for the offering.

Lovefilm executives had several meetings with attorneys to try to find a way to extricate themselves from the situation. They also attempted to entice other potential acquirers, hoping to spark a bidding war, but without success. Everyone saw that Amazon was squatting over the asset.

Though Lovefilm was a prestigious European company with a strong brand and solid momentum, Amazon offered an opening bid of a hundred and fifty million pounds, the very bottom of Lovefilm’s price range. With no alternatives, Lovefilm started negotiating. In the protracted discussions that followed, Amazon characteristically argued every point, such as compensation packages for management and the timing of escrow payments. Lovefilm’s attorneys were astonished at the intractable positions taken by Amazon’s negotiators. The talks lasted more than seven months, and the acquisition was finally announced in January 2011. Amazon ended up paying close to two hundred million pounds, or about three hundred million dollars—roughly the same amount Google had offered despite the fact that Lovefilm had expanded its subscriber base and its digital catalog of movies in the intervening year and a half.[Vi]

Amazon now had a strong foothold in the European video market just as it unveiled its most serious play for the living room. A month after it announced the purchase of Lovefilm, the company introduced a video-streaming service for Amazon Prime in the United States. Members of the two-day shipping service could watch for free a selection of movies and television shows, a catalog that would grow steadily over the next few years as Amazon inked deals with content providers such as CBS, NBC Universal, Viacom, and the pay-TV channel Epix.

Inside the company, Bezos rationalized the giveaway by saying that it sustained and even complemented the seventy-nine-dollar fee for Prime at a time when customers were buying fewer DVDs. But Prime Instant Video played another role. Amazon was now providing, as a supplementary perk, something Reed Hastings and his colleagues at Netflix priced at five to eight dollars a month. The service exerted direct pressure on a key rival and worked to prevent it from appropriating an important section of the everything store. Amazon too would offer films and TV shows in any form that customers could possibly want—all with the click of a button.

To Jeff Bezos, perhaps the only thing more sacrosanct than offering customers these kinds of choices was selling them products and services at the lowest possible prices. But in the fractious world of book publishing, Amazon, it seemed in early 2011, was losing its ability to set low prices. That March, Random House, the largest book publisher in the United States, followed the other big publishers and adopted the agency pricing model, which allowed them to set their own price for e-books and remit a 30 percent commission to retailers. Amazon executives had spent considerable time pleading in vain with their Random House counterparts to stick with the wholesale model. Bezos now no longer had control over a key part of the customer experience for some of the biggest books in the world.[Vi]

With no stark price advantage and increased competition from Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Apple’s iBookstore, and the Toronto-based startup Kobo, Amazon’s e-book market share fell from 90 percent in 2010 to around 60 percent in 2012. “For the first time, a level playing field was going to get forced on Amazon,” says James Gray, the former chief strategy officer of the Ingram Content Group. Amazon executives “were basically spitting blood and nails.”

Amazon felt major book publishers were limiting its ability to experiment with new digital formats. For example, the Kindle 2 was introduced with a novel text-to-speech function that read books aloud in a robotic male or female voice. Roy Blount Jr., the president of the Authors Guild, led a protest against the feature, writing an editorial for the New York Times that argued authors were not getting paid for audio rights.N12 Amazon backed off and allowed publishers and authors to enable the feature for specific titles; many declined.

Book publishers were refusing to play by Amazon’s rules. So Amazon decided to reinvent the rulebook. It started a New York–based publishing imprint with the lofty ambition to publish bestselling books by big-name authors—the bread-and-butter of New York’s two-century-old book industry.[Vi]

In April of 2011, a month after Random House moved to the agency model, an Amazon recruiter sent e-mails to several accomplished editors at New York publishing houses. She was looking for someone to launch and oversee an imprint that “will focus on the acquisition of original commercially oriented fiction and non-fiction with the goal of becoming bestsellers,” according to the e-mail. “This imprint will be supported with a large budget and its success will directly impact the success of Amazon’s overall business.” Most of the e-mail’s recipients politely declined the offer, so Kindle vice president Jeff Belle asked the man who’d been steering him toward possible recruits if he himself might be interested in the job. “Well, the thought had crossed my mind,” replied Larry Kirshbaum, a literary agent and, before that, the head of Time Warner’s book division.

Kirshbaum, sixty-seven at the time, was the ultimate insider, widely known and, until then, almost universally liked. He had a well-honed instinct for big, mass-culture books and an intuitive feel for survival inside large corporations. When AOL acquired Time Warner in 2000, he directed the staff of Warner Books to wear I Heart AOL T-shirts and made a video of everyone standing around a piano singing “Unforgettable” (the company had just published Natalie Cole’s autobiography). He was thinking about e-books—and losing money on them—long before almost anyone else in the industry.

Kirshbaum reentered a very different environment than the one he had left in 2005 when he departed AOL Time Warner to become an agent. Animosity toward Amazon had become a defining fact of life in the book business. So he was considered by many of his former peers to be a defector, someone who had gone over to the dark side, a sentiment they did not hesitate to express to him, sometimes in pointed terms.[Vi]

“There have been a few brickbats I’ve had to duck,” Kirshbaum says, “but I have a message I really believe in, which is that we’re trying to innovate in ways that can help everybody. We are trying to create a tide that will lift all boats.” He points to the industry’s similarly negative reaction to Barnes & Noble’s acquisition of the publisher Sterling back in 2003, which raised the same fear that a powerful retailer was trying to monopolize the attention of readers. “We all worried the sun wasn’t going to come up the next day, but it did,” he says. Of Amazon, he says, “We certainly want to be a major player, but there are thousands of publishers and millions of books. I think it’s a little bit of a stretch to say we are cornering the market.”

Kirshbaum’s bosses in Seattle sounded a similarly conciliatory note. “Our entire publishing business is an in-house laboratory that allows us to experiment toward the goal of finding new and interesting ways to connect authors and readers,” Jeff Belle told me for a Businessweek cover story on Amazon Publishing in early 2012. “It’s not our intention to become Random House or Simon & Schuster or HarperCollins. I think people have a hard time believing that.”N13

Amazon executives charged that the book publishers were irrationally consumed with the possibility of their own demise and noted that resisting changes, like paperback books and discount superstores, was something of a hallmark for the industry. And when it came to fielding questions on the topic, Amazon executives perfected a sort of passive-aggressive perplexity, insisting that the media was overplaying the issue and giving it undue attention—sometimes with explanations that compounded and confirmed publishers’ concerns.[Vi]

“The iceman was a really important part of weekly American culture for years and his purpose was to keep your food from spoiling,” says Donald Katz, the founder and chief executive of Amazon’s Audible subsidiary. “But when refrigerators were invented, it was not about what the iceman thought, nor did anyone spend a lot of time writing about it.”

Book publishers needed only to listen to Jeff Bezos himself to have their fears stoked. Amazon’s founder repeatedly suggested he had little reverence for the old “gatekeepers” of the media, whose business models were forged during the analogue age and whose function it was to review content and then subjectively decide what the public got to consume. This was to be a new age of creative surplus, where it was easy for anyone to create something, find an audience, and allow the market to determine the proper economic reward. “Even well meaning gatekeepers slow innovation,” Bezos wrote in his 2011 letter to shareholders. “When a platform is self-service, even the improbable ideas can get tried, because there’s no expert gatekeeper ready to say ‘that will never work!’ And guess what—many of those improbable ideas do work, and society is the beneficiary of that diversity.”

A few weeks after that letter was published, Bezos told Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, “I see the elimination of gatekeepers everywhere.” In case there was any doubt about the nature of Bezos’s convictions, Friedman then imagined a publishing world that includes “just an author, who gets most of the royalties, and Amazon and the reader.”N14

“At least it’s all out in the open now,” one well-known book agent said at the time.[Vi]

A kind of industrywide immune response then kicked in. The book world rejected Amazon’s new publishing efforts en masse. Barnes & Noble and most independent bookstores refused to stock Amazon’s books, and New York–based media and publishing executives widely scoffed at the preliminary efforts of Kirshbaum and his fledgling editorial team. Their $800,000 acquisition of a memoir by actress and director Penny Marshall, for example, was targeted for particular ridicule and later sold poorly.

Meanwhile, Amazon continued to experiment with new e-book formats and push the boundaries of publishers’ and authors’ tolerance. It introduced the Kindle Single, a novella-length e-book format, and the Prime Lending Library, which allowed Prime members who owned a Kindle reading device to borrow one digital book a month for free. But Amazon included the books of many mid-tier publishers in its lending catalog without asking for permission, reasoning that it had purchased those books at wholesale and thus believed it could set any retail price it wished (including, in this case, zero). In the imbroglio that ensued, the Authors Guild called the lending library “an exercise of brute economic power,” and Amazon backed off.N15

Bezos and colleagues dismissed the early challenges Kirshbaum’s New York division faced and said they would gauge its success over the long term. They were likely positioning their direct-publishing efforts for a future where electronic books made up a majority of the publishing market and where chains like Barnes & Noble might not exist in their present form. In that world, Amazon alone will still be standing, publishing not just scrappy new writers but prominent brand-name authors as well. And Larry Kirshbaum could once again be one of the most popular—and possibly one of the only—publishing guys left in New York City. Even as Kirshbaum announced his departure from Amazon in October 2013, the company vowed to continue building its publishing arm in the very cradle of book publishing—New York City.[Vi]

***

In December of 2011, as if seeking a fitting conclusion to a year filled with controversy over sales tax, acquisitions, MAPs, and the economics of electronic books, Amazon ran a ham-fisted promotion of its price-comparison application for smartphones. The app allowed users to take pictures or scan the bar codes of products in local stores and compare those prices with Amazon’s. On December 10, Amazon offered a discount of up to fifteen dollars to anyone who used the application to buy online instead of in a store. Although certain categories, like books, were exempt, the move stirred up an avalanche of criticism.

Senator Olympia Snowe called the promotion “anti-competitive” and “an attack on Main Street businesses that employ workers in our communities.” An employee of Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon, created an Occupy Amazon page on Facebook. An Amazon spokesperson noted that the application was meant primarily for comparing the prices of big retail chains, but it didn’t matter. The critics piled on, charging that Amazon was using its customers to spy on competitors’ prices and was siphoning away the sales of mom-and-pop merchants. “I first attributed Amazon’s price-comparison app to arrogance and malevolence, but there’s also something bizarrely clumsy and wrong-footed about it,” wrote the novelist Richard Russo in a scathing editorial for the New York Times.N16

The conflagration over the price-checking app diminished quickly. But it raised larger questions: Would Amazon continue to be viewed as an innovative and value-creating company that existed to serve and delight its customers, or would it increasingly be seen as a monolith that merely transferred dollars out of the accounts of other companies and local communities and into its own gilded coffers?[Vi]

During these years of conflict, Jeff Bezos sat down to consider this very question. When Amazon became a company with $100 billion in sales, he wondered, how could it be loved and not feared? As he regularly does, Bezos wrote up his thoughts in a memo and distributed it to his top executives at an S Team retreat. I received a copy through a person close to the company who wished to remain anonymous. The memo, which Bezos titled Amazon.love, lays out a vision for how the Amazon founder wants his company to conduct itself and be perceived by the world. It reflects Bezos’s values and determination, and perhaps even his blind spots.

“Some big companies develop ardent fan bases, are widely loved by their customers, and are even perceived as cool,” he wrote. “For different reasons, in different ways and to different degrees, companies like Apple, Nike, Disney, Google, Whole Foods, Costco and even UPS strike me as examples of large companies that are well-liked by their customers.” On the other end of spectrum, he added, companies like Walmart, Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, and ExxonMobil tended to be feared.

Bezos postulated that this second set of companies was viewed, perhaps unfairly, as engaging in exploitative behavior. He wondered why Microsoft’s large base of users had never come out in any significant way to defend the company against its critics and speculated that perhaps customers were simply not satisfied with its products. He theorized that UPS, though not particularly inventive, was blessed by having the unsympathetic U.S. Postal Service as a competitor; Walmart had to deal with a “plethora of sympathetic competitors” in the small downtown stores that competed with it.[Vi]

But Bezos was dissatisfied with that simplistic conclusion and applied his usual analytical sensibility to parse out why some companies were loved and others feared.

Rudeness is not cool.
Defeating tiny guys is not cool.
Close-following is not cool.
Young is cool.
Risk taking is cool.
Winning is cool.
Polite is cool.
Defeating bigger, unsympathetic guys is cool.

Inventing is cool.
Explorers are cool.
Conquerors are not cool.
Obsessing over competitors is not cool.
Empowering others is cool.
Capturing all the value only for the
ompany is not cool.
Leadership is cool.
Conviction is cool.

Straightforwardness is cool.
Pandering to the crowd is not cool.
Hypocrisy is not cool.
Authenticity is cool.
Thinking big is cool.
The unexpected is cool.
Missionaries are cool.
Mercenaries are not cool.[Vi]

On an attached spreadsheet, Bezos listed seventeen attributes, including polite, reliable, risk taking, and thinks big, and he ranked a dozen companies on each particular characteristic. His methodology was highly subjective, he conceded, but his conclusions, laid out at the end of the Amazon.love memo, were aimed at increasing Amazon’s odds of standing out among the loved companies. Being polite and reliable or customer-obsessed was not sufficient. Being perceived as inventive, as an explorer rather than a conqueror, was critically important. “I actually believe the four ‘unloved’ companies are inventive as a matter of substance. But they are not perceived as inventors and pioneers. It is not enough to be inventive—that pioneering spirit must also come across and be perceivable by the customer base,” he wrote.

“I propose that one outcome from this offsite could be to assign a more thorough analysis of this topic to a thoughtful VP,” Bezos concluded. “We may be able to find actionable tasks that will increase our odds of being a stand out in that first group of companies. Sounds worthy to me!”[Vi]

—ooOoo—

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.[Vi]

This somewhat grandiosely named establishment sits in a shoe-box-shaped space in an otherwise ordinary shopping center next to the Hot Cutz Salon and Spa 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.[Vi]

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.[Vi]

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.[Vi]

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.[Vi]

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.”[Vi]

***

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.[Vi]

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.N1 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.[Vi]

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.[Vi]

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.[Vi]

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.N2

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.[Vi]

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.[Vi]

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.[Vi]

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.[Vi]

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.[Vi]

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.”[Vi]

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.[Vi]

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!”[Vi]

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.[Vi]

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.[Vi]

“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.”[Vi]

***

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.[Vi]

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.N3

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.N4

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.[Vi]

“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.”N5

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.[Vi]

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.[Vi]

***

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 run its own delivery trucks? Yes, it already does in cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. And it will expand its fleet when it has so many customers in other urban areas that operating its own trucks, instead of relying on carriers like UPS and Federal Express, makes economic sense.

Will Amazon roll out its grocery service, AmazonFresh, 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, in fact it did both in 2014 after the initial publication of this book. 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.[Vi]

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.[Vi]

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.[Vi]

—ooOoo—

Epilogue

On Thursday, November 21, 2013, at 2:00 p.m., mourners gathered under the Byzantine domed ceiling of the Stanford Memorial Church on the lush campus of Stanford University. They were there to say a final good-bye to a cherished friend, colleague, and family member. Two months earlier, Joy Covey, mother, environmentalist, and Amazon.com’s first chief financial officer, had been killed in a tragic bicycle accident.

Covey had been riding her bike down wooded Skyline Boulevard, southwest of Palo Alto, when a white Mazda minivan driving in the other direction made a sharp left turn in front of her. Though she was wearing a helmet, she hit the side of the van with tremendous force and died at the scene. In a terrible irony, the minivan was in service for OnTrac,N1 a local logistics company that delivers packages for Amazon and other online retailers.

The Stanford ceremony was deeply moving and full of warm, personal tributes. Several of Covey’s friends, fellow parents, and neighbors from the nearby suburb of Woodside remembered Covey as a devoted mom, a lover of adventurous pursuits, and an impulsive maker of plans. A teenage girl, a family friend, sang “Amazing Grace” and struggled to finish all the verses while fighting back tears. Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, where Covey had worked as treasurer, spoke of harnessing’s Covey’s limitless wellspring of energy on environmental causes. She said that working with her was like “stepping into a reality distortion field where those lucky enough to get whisked along inevitably got the ride of our lives.”

A few speeches centered on Covey’s role at Amazon, where she was a key figure in the early years of go-for-broke growth and a partner for Jeff Bezos as he first sought to stock the shelves of the everything store. Mary Meeker, a former Morgan Stanley analyst and now venture capitalist, recalled when Covey raised Amazon’s first debt offering of $550 million in high-yield junk bonds back in 1998. “It was a white-knuckle affair,” Meeker said. “Joy knew it was going to be difficult from the start. She assumed it would be so difficult, she made sure Jeff was safely out of the country.”

Bezos himself attended the ceremony with wife, MacKenzie, and also spoke. Former Amazon executives sometimes wondered whether the focused and driven Bezos even remembered their contributions, but from his speech, it was clear that he valued his three-year collaboration with Covey. “Joy was substance over optics,” he said. “Joy was a long-term thinker. Joy was bold.”

Bezos continued, choking up: “Joy and I talked often about a day in the future when we would sit down together with our grandkids and tell the Amazon story. I still want that to happen.”

The memorial was a bittersweet reunion of sorts. Employees and executives from all the eventful chapters of Amazon’s twenty-year odyssey packed into the church. Current S Team members like Jeff Wilke, Andy Jassy, Jeff Blackburn, and Russ Grandinetti were there. So were former Amazonians like David Risher, who led the first expansion into retail in the ’90s; Warren Jenson, Covey’s short-lived successor as CFO; and Rick Dalzell, the former Army Ranger who was Amazon’s CIO for a decade.

Afterward many attended a private reception at the Stanford Faculty Club, where the group listened to more eulogies and reminisced. The reception was supposed to last until 6:30 but stretched well into the evening. Bezos, though typically guarded with his personal time, stayed until the very end, catching up with former employees and surprising many of them with the intensity of his emotion.

One executive, who had departed from Amazon several years before to join a rival e-commerce company, says that at the reception, Bezos approached and embraced him.

The executive’s wife, who for years had heard stories of tense senior management meetings at Amazon, was shocked. Afterward, she turned to her husband and marveled, “Did Jeff Bezos just give you a hug?”

In January 2013, eight months before her accident, I received a lengthy e-mail from Joy Covey. She had been generous with her memories and insights as I crafted the first few chapters of this book and was wondering how my writing was progressing. She was reading the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson and was thinking about how Bezos’s leadership style compared to the late Apple cofounder’s famously brusque and direct demeanor.

When I rediscovered Covey’s e-mail after her death, I was struck by its thoughtfulness and eloquence. Here it is, lightly edited for clarity.

Hello Brad,

I have been wondering how your writing is coming along. Also, I thought of your project (and Jeff) while beginning the Jobs biography recently.

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.

I think about the early days and the level of clarity, vision, potential, and values that Jeff brought. And then I look at Amazon today, and reflect on some conversations I have had with him in the intervening years. It is easy to draw a straight line from the vision he had back then to the Amazon of today. There were a few little wobbles and detours in places, but really I don’t know any other company that has created such a juggernaut that is so consistent with the original ideas of the founder. It is almost like he fired an arrow and then followed that arc.

Can we really think of any other company approaching Amazon’s size or age that continues to move forward with the boldness, risk-taking, innovation, and the long-term perspective that Amazon shows? Jeff’s clarity, intensity of focus, and ability to prioritize, which has no doubt become ingrained in his key team, is unusual and behind his ability to keep leaping forward versus protecting existing ground.

Seeing the future, he put in place the critical DNA that would help the whole company embody his vision. His focus was on very bright, high-growth-potential and fluid-minded people, with the right values as “builders.” He looked for people that absolutely prioritized customer trust and delight, who at all times were long-term focused and driven to be bold and innovative.

All of this was lived and modeled every day by Jeff and the senior team. Personal wealth was never discussed or really thought about. I see companies these days where thoughts of “exits” are foremost in the minds of top management and board, and it is so clear that this value will infect the decision making down to the smallest choice by the most junior employee. Do we create something that is good, or just that seems good and might get us acquired or funded?

At Amazon it was always abundantly clear what the goals and values were, and as I reflect on discussions and decisions throughout my time there, it is easy to imagine how different so many small choices might have been otherwise. Now he has tens of thousands of employees, and I would bet a large sum that the same messages and values are still well understood and driving decisions broadly today. I also reflect on how effective the values were as a screening tool for hiring. People who were highly focused on their titles, traditional status metrics, security, or their own wealth stood out vividly in the process.

We talked a lot about whether Jeff was difficult to work with. Yet Jeff attracted people like me, who really need to work on things they can internalize and adopt as mission, who had to leave the path they thought they were on, and who poured their hearts and souls and best efforts into building Amazon. And he has kept a terrific and close team now for years. We believed in what we were building, and felt that our very best was needed to have a hope of accomplishing the enormous potential ahead of us. Jeff’s style always read as completely pure—never a self-interest or political dimension, all purely focused on the best outcomes for Amazon and our customers.

As I read the Jobs book I really had to wonder if that (sometimes-harsh) intensity isn’t an essential element when so much of what you want to do requires boldness, immediacy, ruthless prioritization, and risk. It seems counterintuitive to everyone who has pursued traditional corporate goals in the past. I even had an insight and question about myself, that maybe I haven’t begun to really find my own limits, since I have not, aside from those times of highest stakes and intensity at Amazon, really run free following my own insights and directions without being too accommodating of others.

I think Jeff is one of the most capable and effective founders ever, and I think the Amazon juggernaut is still in its early stages.

Cheers,
JoyN2

In the immediate months surrounding the publication of this book in October 2013, Amazon and its founder were almost constantly in the headlines. In September, the company had introduced a new Kindle e-book reader and several new models of its Kindle Fire tablet. A few weeks later, the company started delivering packages in select major cities in the U.S. on Sundays, in partnership with the United States Postal Service. It was an added convenience for customers and a characteristically brilliant tactical move. One way to look at it: Bezos was propping up a weakened Post Office, which serves as a counterweight to two of Amazon’s most powerful partners—UPS and FedEx.

In the same blur of company announcements, the company expanded AmazonFresh, its grocery delivery service, beyond Seattle to Los Angeles and San Francisco. It is now expected to roll out the service throughout the country in competition with grocers like Safeway and Walmart. In November, the company unveiled a program called Amazon Source, which allows independent booksellers to sell Kindle e-readers and tablets and keep a 10 percent commission on any resulting e-book sale from those devices. Bookshop owners, whose trade has been gradually eroded by Amazon, reacted with predictable suspicion. “At first glance, this looks like a Faustian bargain,” Bradley Graham, coowner of Politics & Prose Bookstore in Washington, DC, told Publishers Weekly.N3

Over the New Year’s holiday, Bezos made news for a reason that had nothing to do with his company. On January 4, he was airlifted off a private yacht near the Galápagos Islands by a helicopter from the Ecuadorian navy, taken to his jet, and flown to the United States. The medical crisis at the root of the emergency: kidney stones. “Galápagos: five stars. Kidney stones: zero stars,” he wrote in an e-mailed statement to reporters after the incident became public.

Nothing better defined this period in Amazon history than a quixotic interview of Bezos by 60 Minutes, the CBS News program. In the fifteen-minute segment, which aired on December 1, a day before the online shopping frenzy known as Cyber Monday, Bezos unleashed a flood of earnest Jeffisms, those well-worn portions of positivity that he has been reliably meting out for years. “I would define Amazon by our big ideas, which are customer centricity, putting the customer at the center of everything we do, and invention,” Bezos recited, when interviewer Charlie Rose asked him to define Amazon today.

Later, when asked why there was so much animosity toward Amazon in the book world, Bezos was unapologetic. “The Internet is disrupting every media industry, Charlie,” he said. “You know, people can complain about that, but complaining is not a strategy.”

Bezos had promised 60 Minutes a big surprise, and at the end of the segment, he delivered. Amazon’s CEO ushered Rose into a darkened room that housed… two aerial drones, each with a set of eight rotors. The idea, Bezos said, was to use these so-called octocopters to ferry packages weighing up to five pounds from fulfillment centers to customers’ backyards within thirty minutes. “I know this looks like science fiction,” Bezos said. “It’s not.”

A video demonstrating Amazon’s drone program was later watched fourteen million times on YouTube. Yet skeptics pounced, accusing 60 Minutes of serving up high-altitude propaganda for Amazon right before the biggest online shopping day of the year. Such drone delivery systems won’t be legally or technically plausible for years. Critics imagined drones getting shot out of the air for sport, dropping onto the heads of unsuspecting neighbors, or even getting felled by inclement winds or rain. “I guess it could work on nice days,” said Ronald Arkin, director of the mobile robot laboratory at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “I wish Amazon fair weather in their future endeavors.”

Current and former executives in Amazon’s operations group insisted the drone program inside Amazon was real and designed to solve a pressing problem in the company’s rapidly growing supply chain. Members of Amazon Prime, the free two-day shipping program, were increasingly indulging their shopping urges and buying a single item at a time. Amazon could no longer rely on efficiently combining products in boxes.

One of Bezos’s signature strengths was combining technology and a penchant for bold, risky bets. He did so first in retail, and then in the book publishing industry with the Kindle. An army of unmanned octocopters darkening the skies over major cities could help control Amazon’s growing shipping expenses and give Prime members a way to indulge their basest shopping impulses. Drones also promised to take expensive, sometimes dangerous trucks off congested streets.

Such ambitious dreaming is represented among Amazon’s thirteen leadership principles.

Think Big

Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Leaders create and communicate a bold direction that inspires results. They think differently and look around corners for ways to serve customers.

And yes, it was also brilliant PR. As the holiday shopping season kicked into high gear, everyone, it seemed, was talking about Amazon.

One of the new features in Amazon’s updated Kindle Fire HDX tablets allowed device owners to see a member of Amazon’s customer service team on their screens via a live video chat. Amazon technicians, talking into their webcams, could access a customer’s tablet, draw pictures on the device’s screen to demonstrate a point, and remotely fix any problems. Reviewers hailed the service, dubbed Mayday, as an innovative feature for customers and a breakthrough in customer service. Amazon highlighted it in ubiquitous television advertisements starring “Amy,” a young, attractive customer service representative whose smiling visage materialized on the screens of male Kindle Fire owners.

Yet for many of the low-wage employees in Amazon’s customer service call center in Kennewick, Washington, the story of Mayday was a considerably less happy one.

Kennewick is one of the so-called Tri-Cities in eastern Washington, an agricultural region at the confluence of the Yakima, Snake, and Columbia rivers. Amazon opened a call center in Kennewick in 2005, taking over an old Walmart building and renovating it with a warren of cubicles and offices. It’s home to about five hundred workers during off-peak months and a thousand or more when call volumes spike during and after the holidays.

Employees earn a starting wage of $11 an hour, with part of their salary in small grants of stock that vest over a four-year period. They do intense, exhausting work, taking call after call from the 3 percent or so of Amazon customers who either have a serious problem with a service or are just inclined to seek out a friendly voice at the other end of the phone.

Like their blue-collar colleagues in the fulfillment centers, Amazon’s customer service associates live under a tyrannical regime. The tyrant is cold, hard data—what workers refer to internally as “the metrics.” For years, customer service reps were graded on a formula that attempted to measure their productivity, taking into account how many calls they took per hour and the average length of each call. Then Amazon started putting more weight on the most desired outcome: customer satisfaction. Now an associate’s job performance is based almost entirely on how customers answer an e-mailed survey they receive after they hang up the phone.

Did I solve your problem?

Yes.

or

No.

Amazon sets targeted goals for the ratio of yesses and nos, and call center employees are ranked based on their number. (Associates cannot ask customers to answer the survey or click yes—that is a dismissible offense according to numerous interviews with employees in Kennewick.) If an associate falls into the lowest 15 percent of the rankings, they are placed on a “PIP”—a performance improvement plan—and can be fired if they don’t boost their numbers.

Many customer service representatives describe this system as unfair. They feel that they are penalized for unfixable technology problems that they have nothing to do with and can find their careers jeopardized by callers who know that clicking no is a way to get additional attention from Amazon’s customer service department. “It’s such a stressful environment,” says Trisha Powers, who worked in the Kennewick call center for eight years. “Their standards are so, so high.”

“I’ve worked at call centers for Verizon and Qwest. I was never treated the way I was treated at Amazon,” says Troy Eaton, who worked at the center for four and a half years before leaving for another job and described getting sent home several times for alleged infractions, such as hanging up on a customer, only to be exonerated after an investigation. “Amazon is an amazing company, but the way that call center was run was a nightmare.”

Workers at Kennewick heard about Mayday only a few days before the rest of the world. It was introduced internally as a clandestine project dubbed “Secret Squirrel.” The company asked its call center employees for volunteers but didn’t explain the details, promising only that employees would “make history.” There were no volunteers, according to six associates who were there at the time. A few brave souls investigated, then promptly backed out when they learned what the project was.

The new tablets were announced in September and set to go on sale in November. Amazon’s capacity planners had no idea how many device owners would use Mayday, so after the feature was publicly announced, an edict was handed down from Seattle: everyone in Kennewick and at a new call center in Winchester, Kentucky, had to be Mayday trained. A second computer monitor and a webcam were delivered to each desk in both facilities. Promotional posters of “Amy” were hung on the walls, with a caption that read “This could be you!”

Employees in Kennewick did not take the news well, according to the associates who were there. They filled the “Voice of the Associates” whiteboard in the facility with strenuous objections and organized a group to talk to management about their concerns. “There are certain reasons why a lot of people will take a call center job instead of a face-to-face job,” said Nick McFaddin, a customer service rep who worked at the facility for three years and was among those who complained, without success. “Either they have anxiety issues or have a certain lifestyle where they have tattoos or piercings or wear their hair a certain way. It’s just easier for them to be a voice on the phone.”

A call center associate named Sharyn Altshuler had perhaps the worst experience. Altshuler, fifty, has a master’s degree in fine arts from Yale University. She says she “works the phone because I don’t want to be seen,” in part because she is overweight and prone to panic attacks, and because her “face tells every emotion. I don’t play poker.”

Altshuler complained to her managers that Mayday posed a health issue for her. They insisted she take the training or use her personal days and not get paid. Meetings with the facility’s senior leaders and human resources executives devolved into shouting matches. At one point, Altshuler says, she started popping Xanax in front her bosses. A kindly human resources manager finally excused her from Mayday duty, but by then Altshuler’s attitude was poor and she believed she was already being targeted for termination. She lost her job in February 2014 for an alleged infraction unrelated to Mayday.

She had worked at the company for a little under four years. “One of their values is disagree and commit, but they don’t really like that,” Altshuler says. “What they really mean is do what we say. If you are my rank, the last thing they really want is for you to have ideas.”

In Jeff Bezos’s annual letter to shareholders in March 2014, Amazon’s CEO lauded Mayday, writing, “Nothing gives us more pleasure at Amazon than reinventing normal—creating inventions that customers love and resetting their expectations for what normal should be.” He boasted that Mayday tech advisers had received 35 marriage proposals, been serenaded by customers 648 times, and asked 109 times for assistance ordering a pizza.

“Pretty cool,” he wrote.

On the corner of 7th Avenue and Westlake Avenue North in Seattle, in an area that locals call the Denny Triangle, the future of Amazon is rising from a construction site. The company is building a 3.3-million-square-foot high-rise urban campus it calls Rufus 2.0, after the long-dead corgi that affectionately patrolled its first offices many years ago. At the center of the new headquarters will be three majestic glass domes, which will be completely transparent and filled with greenery.

Jeff Bezos had been almost religiously frugal with Amazon’s offices over the years. Not anymore. When the campus is completed, Amazon will have an iconic headquarters on par with other such tech giants as Apple, Facebook, and Google. With Rufus 2.0, it is as if Bezos finally understands that Amazon can no longer hide in plain sight.

When visitors and employees encounter the new campus, they will likely be filled with awe at an architectural wonder. But will they be filled with admiration for the company and its founder?

The character of any company is a difficult thing to judge. Amazon has satisfied millions of loyal customers over two decades. As Joy Covey pointed out, it has done so by focusing ferociously on a set of values that stress constant innovation and customer orientation, and then by continuing to refine and distill these values in pursuit of the only things in business that really matter. Was the customer happy? Will they return again? “Did I solve your problem? Yes or no?”

The approach has worked beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. Amazon now employs 124,000 people and by 2015 will likely be the fastest retailer in history to surpass $100 billion in revenue. It has over 200 million customers, many of whom love to evangelize about the ease and simplicity of shopping on Amazon. The stock price may occasionally make investors anxious, as it did over the first half of 2014, when shares fell by 20 percent amid concerns over Amazon’s anemic profit. But the company’s low-margin, low-price approach and its rapidly growing cloud computer business are still warping the daily reality of nearly every industry all around the world.

Yet there is another side to the Amazon fairy tale. In the spring of 2014, in the midst of fractious negotiations over e-book prices with several major book publishers in the United States and Europe (including Hachette, the owner of Little, Brown and Company, the publisher of this book), Amazon made it more difficult for customers to buy thousands of titles on its website. Amazon said in a statement that it was negotiating on behalf of its customers, but its tactics were criticized by authors and onlookers for punishing readers, the very constituency whose interests Amazon claimed to be protecting.

In its fulfillment centers, Amazon’s reputation hasn’t fared much better. Workers picketed outside the company’s warehouses in Germany in 2013 and 2014, demanding a better wage. In 2013, a group of twenty-seven technicians at a fulfillment center in Middletown, Delaware, tried to join the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers to demand more clarity on hiring and promotions. The workers said they faced intense pressure in mandatory all-hands meetings run by company managers to formally vote against joining the union. “Our employees have made it clear that they prefer a direct connection with Amazon,” an Amazon spokesperson said after the technicians voted against joining the union by a decisive 21 to 6 margin. “This direct connection is the most effective way to understand and respond to the wants and needs of our employees.”

Amazon’s culture has been engineered to cater obsessively to its customers. The company’s loyal patrons enjoy the fruits of that focus every time they interact with it. Suppliers who view Amazon as a bully are perfectly free to sell their wares elsewhere. Employees who feel marginalized or mistreated can leave at any time, and many do, sometimes after their first taste of the relentless corporate culture. Yet with so many other retailers in retreat, or tailoring their own operations to get as lean and efficient as Amazon, both suppliers and employees may find their opportunities elsewhere are increasingly limited.

Like it or not, they are living in the age of Amazon. This story is just beginning. And there is no such thing as the last word.

San Francisco
August 2014

—ooOoo—

Jeff Bezos, childhood portrait. (Courtesy of Amazon)

Bezos in 1982, as a senior at Miami Palmetto High School. (Seth Poppel/Yearbook Library)

Ted Jorgensen in his bike shop, the Roadrunner Bike Center, March 27, 2013. (Photograph by Benjamin Rasmussen)

Jackie and Mike Bezos at the 29th Annual Aspen Institute Awards in 2012. (© Patrick McMullan/Photograph by Patrick McMullan)

Jeff Bezos and Amazon employees. (Courtesy of Laurel Canan)

Founding employee Shel Kaphan (left) with an early Amazon engineer. (Courtesy of Laurel Canan)

Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos (center) celebrate with Amazon employees at a company costume party. (Courtesy of Amazon)

Amazon and Deutsche Bank employees who worked on Amazon’s 1997 IPO celebrate with family members in Cabo, Mexico. (Courtesy of J. William Gurley)

Jeff Bezos with Junglee executives (l-r) Brian Lent, Rakesh Mathur, and Ram Shriram, an early Google investor. (Photograph courtesy of Brian Lent)

Bezos helps process toy orders at the short-lived fulfillment center in McDonough, Georgia. (© David Burnett/Contact Press Images)

Senior vice president Jeff Wilke, who rebuilt Amazon’s fulfillment network. (© Brian Smale)

Bezos stands on a Segway in 2002 as the ill-fated electric-powered transporter goes on sale exclusively at Amazon for $5,000. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)

Jeff Bezos rings the bell to open the NASDAQ trading session on Friday, September 7, 2001. (Bloomberg)

Jeff Bezos demonstrates an educational toy called Gus Gutz to talk-show host Jay Leno during his appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno at the NBC studios in Burbank on December 29, 1999. (Reuters)

Bezos and tennis pro Anna Kournikova after an exhibition round of tennis at New York’s Grand Central Terminal to promote Amazon’s new apparel store, August 22, 2003. (Evan Agostini/Getty Images)

Jeff Bezos laughs with Google cofounder Sergey Brin at the Allen and Co. conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, in 2007. Bezos was among the original investors in Google. (Rick Wilking/Reuters)

Bezos introduces the original Kindle e-reader at a news conference in New York City on November 19, 2007. (Mark Lennihan/AP Photo)

Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos in 2009. (© Patrick McMullan/Photograph by Patrick McMullan)

Bezos introduces the Kindle Fire tablet in 2011. The device intensified the brewing competition between Amazon and Apple. (Bloomberg)

An Amazon employee demonstrates the Kindle Fire to reporters after a news conference. (EPA/Justin Lane)

NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver (third from right) takes a tour of the Kent, Washington, headquarters of Blue Origin, Bezos’s private space-exploration company. (Bill Ingalls/NASA)

An Amazon fulfillment center in Milton Keynes, forty-five miles northwest of London. (David Levene/Eyevine/Redux)

In 2013, Amazon proposed radical designs for a new headquarters in downtown Seattle. (NBBJ)

—ooOoo—

Acknowledgments

For years I talked about writing a book about Amazon. And that’s probably what I’d still be doing—talking—if it weren’t for the help and support of my wonderful friends, family, and colleagues.

Two years ago, my agent Pilar Queen gently instructed me to stop procrastinating and deliver a book proposal. She then became a tenacious champion for this project. At Little, Brown, executive editor John Parsley gave this book the kind of careful editorial attention that is supposedly going out of style at traditional publishers, at least according to certain critics of the book business. Additional thanks go to Reagan Arthur, Michael Pietsch, Geoff Shandler, Nicole Dewey, Fiona Brown, Pamela Marshall, Tracy Roe, and Malin von Euler-Hogan at Little, Brown for steering this book through the birthing process with professionalism and enthusiasm.

I owe an enormous debt to Craig Berman and Drew Herdener in Amazon’s public-relations department. While they were always stubborn advocates for the company, they also saw the need for, and perhaps the inevitability of, a definitive book-length look at Amazon’s remarkable rise. I’m grateful to Jeff Wilke, Diego Piacentini, Andy Jassy, Russ Grandinetti, Jeff Blackburn, and Steve Kessel at Amazon, who all took the time to talk to me, and of course to Jeff Bezos, for approving innumerable interviews with his friends, family, and employees.

Over the course of 2012 and 2013, I spent considerable time in Seattle, and a few families there made me feel especially welcome. Nick and Emily Wingfield put me up in their cozy spare bedroom, and I got to play Trivial Pursuit Star Wars over breakfast with their wonderful kids, Beatrice and Miller. Scott Pinizzotto and Ali Frank were great hosts on several occasions.

In Silicon Valley, Jill Hazelbaker, Shernaz Daver, Dani Dudeck, Andrew Kovacs, Christina Lee, Tiffany Spencer, Chris Prouty, and Margit Wennmachers provided helpful connections. Susan Prosser at DomainTools helped me to scour the domain-name archives for the early alternatives to Amazon.com. My old Columbia classmate Charles Ardai gave me a head start on untangling the long-ago D. E. Shaw days. Like so many other journalists trying to decipher the modern enigma that is Amazon, I relied heavily on the wisdom of Scott Devitt of Morgan Stanley, Scot Wingo of ChannelAdvisor, and Fiona Dias of ShopRunner.

At Bloomberg Businessweek, I’ve found a comfortable home that not only offers a great platform for serious business journalism but also accommodates ambitious projects like this one. Josh Tyrangiel, Brad Wieners, Romesh Ratnesar, Ellen Pollock, and Norman Pearlstine gave me incredible support and leeway to write this book. My editor Jim Aley provided a careful first read. Diana Suryakusuma helped me assemble the photographs under a tight deadline. My friend and colleague Ashlee Vance proved an invaluable sounding board when I needed to discuss the thornier challenges of telling this story.

I also want to thank fellow journalists Steven Levy, Ethan Watters, Adam Rogers, George Anders, Dan McGinn, Nick Bilton, Claire Cain Miller, Damon Darlin, John Markoff, Jim Brunner, Alan Deutschman, Tom Giles, Doug MacMillan, Adam Satariano, Motoko Rich, and Peter Burrows. Nick Sanchez provided stellar research and reporting assistance for this book, and Morgan Mason from the journalism program at the University of Nevada at Reno assisted with interviews of Amazon associates at the fulfillment center in Fernley, Nevada.

My family was remarkably helpful and patient throughout this process, particularly in taking up the slack when I disappeared into reporting and writing. My parents Robert Stone and Carol Glick have always been wonderfully supportive and nurturing. Josh Krafchin, Miriam Stone, Dave Stone, Monica Stone, Jon Stone, and Steve Stone were great sounding boards. My brothers, Brian Stone and Eric Stone, and Becca Zoller Stone, Luanne Stone, and Jennifer Granick were awesome, as always.

While they were only vaguely aware of a distraction they called “Daddy’s book,” my twin daughters, Calista and Isabella Stone, provided the motivation behind this work. My hope and belief is that it will remain relevant history when they are old enough to find it interesting.

And I couldn’t have made it across the finish line without the loving support of Tiffany Fox.

—ooOoo—

About the Author

Brad Stone is senior executive editor of global technology at Bloomberg News. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, winner of the 2013 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. He has covered Silicon Valley for nearly twenty years, writing for Bloomberg Businessweek, the New York Times, and Newsweek. He lives in San Francisco.

—ooOoo—

Notes

Prologue

1 Jeff Bezos, keynote address at Tepper School of Business graduation, Carnegie Mellon University, May 18, 2008.

Part I
Chapter 1: The House of Quants

1 Jeff Bezos, speech at Lake Forest College, February 26, 1998.

2 Mark Leibovich, The New Imperialists (New York: Prentice Hall, 2002), 84.

3 Rebecca Johnson, “MacKenzie Bezos: Writer, Mother of Four, and High-Profile Wife,” Vogue, February 20, 2013.

4 Eerily, here is how Bezos described the third-market opportunity to Investment Dealers’ Digest on November 15, 1993: “We wanted something to differentiate our product. We think there is a desire for one stop shopping.”

5 Michael Peltz, “The Power of Six,” Institutional Investor (March 2009). “David Shaw envisioned D. E. Shaw ‘as essentially a research lab that happened to invest, and not as a financial firm that happened to have a few people playing with equations.’ ”

6 Leibovich, The New Imperialists, 85.

7 Peter de Jonge, “Riding the Perilous Waters of Amazon.com,” New York Times Magazine, March 14, 1999.

8 John Quarterman, Matrix News.

9 Jeff Bezos interview, Academy of Achievement, May 4, 2001.

10 Jeff Bezos, speech at Lake Forest College, February 26, 1998.

11 Jeff Bezos, speech to Commonwealth Club of California, July 27, 1998.

12 Jeff Bezos, speech to the American Association of Publishers, March 18, 1999.

Chapter 2: The Book of Bezos

1 Robert Spector, Amazon.com: Get Big Fast (New York: HarperCollins, 2000). Spector’s book offers a comprehensive account of Amazon’s early years.

2 Jeff Bezos, speech to the American Association of Publishers, March 18, 1999.

3 David Sheff, “The Playboy Interview: Jeff Bezos,” Playboy, February 1, 2000.

4 Ibid.

5 Adi Ignatius, “Jeff Bezos on Leading for the Long-Term at Amazon,” HBR IdeaCast (blog), Harvard Business Review, January 3, 2013, http://blogs.hbr.org/ideacast/2013/01/jeff-bezos-on-leading-for-the.html.

6 Jeff Bezos, speech to the American Association of Publishers, March 18, 1999.

7 Jeff Bezos, speech at Lake Forest College, February 26, 1998.

8 Ibid.

9 Amazon.com Inc. S-1, filed March 24, 1997.

10 Mukul Pandya and Robbie Shell, eds., “Lasting Leadership: Lessons from the 25 Most Influential Business People of Our Times,” Knowledge@Wharton, October 20, 2004, http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1054.

11 Ibid.

12 James Marcus, Amazonia (New York: New Press, 2004).

13 Jeff Bezos, speech to Commonwealth Club of California, July 27, 1998.

14 Cynthia Mayer, “Investing It; Does Amazon = 2 Barnes & Nobles?,” New York Times, July 19, 1998.

15 Jeff Bezos, interview by Charlie Rose, Charlie Rose, PBS, July 28, 2010.

16 Justin Hibbard, “Wal-Mart v. Amazon.com: The Inside Story,” InformationWeek, February 22, 1999.

17 Jeff Bezos interview, Academy of Achievement, May 4, 2001.

Chapter 3: Fever Dreams

1 One explanation, according to Wikipedia, is that “a round manhole cover cannot fall through its circular opening, whereas a square manhole cover may fall in if it were inserted diagonally in the hole.”

2 Ron Suskind, “Amazon.com Debuts the Mother of All Bestseller Lists,” Washington Post, August 26, 1998.

3 Ibid.

4 Jeff Bezos, speech to Commonwealth Club of California, July 27, 1998.

5 Jeff Bezos, speech to the American Association of Publishers, March 18, 1999.

6 Steven Levy, In the Plex (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011), 34.

7 Jacqueline Doherty, “Amazon.bomb,” Barron’s, May 31, 1999.

8 George Anders, Nikhil Deogun, and Joann S. Lublin, “Joseph Galli Will Join Amazon, Reversing Plan to Take Pepsi Job,” Wall Street Journal, June 25, 1999.

9 Joshua Cooper Ramo, “Jeff Bezos: King of the Internet,” Time, December 27, 1999.

10 Stefanie Olsen, “FTC Fines E-Tailers $1.5 Million for Shipping Delays,” CNET, July 26, 2000.

11 Michael Moe, “Tech Startup Secrets of Bill Campbell, Coach of Silicon Valley,” Forbes, July 27, 2011.

Chapter 4: Milliravi

1 Jeremy Kahn, “The Giant Killer,” Fortune, June 11, 2001.

2 Evelyn Nussenbaum, “Analyst Finally Tells Truth about Dot-Coms,” New York Post, June 27, 2000.

3 Mark Leibovich, “Child Prodigy, Online Pioneer,” Washington Post, September 3, 2000.

4 Ibid.

5 Steven Levy, “Jeff Bezos Owns the Web in More Ways Than You Think,” Wired, November 13, 2011.

6 “Amazon.com Auctions Helps Online Sellers Become Effective Marketers,” PR Newswire, August 18, 1999.

7 Scott Hillis, “Authors Protest Amazon’s Practices, Used-Book Feature Comes under Fire,” Reuters, December 28, 2000.

8 Jennifer Waters, “Amazon Faces ‘Creditor Squeeze,’ ” CBS MarketWatch, February 6, 2001.

9 Gretchen Morgenson, “S.E.C. Is Said to Investigate Amazon Chief,” New York Times, March 9, 2001.

10 Sinegal’s comments are drawn from my July 2012 interview with Sinegal, the recollections of Amazon executives, and Andrew Bary, “King of the Jungle,” Barron’s, March 23, 2009.

11 Monica Soto, “Terrorist Attacks Overwhelm Amazon’s Good News about Deal with Target,” Seattle Times, September 27, 2001.

12 Saul Hansell, “Amazon Decides to Go for a Powerful Form of Advertising: Lower Prices and Word of Mouth,” New York Times, February 10, 2003.

Part II
Chapter 5: Rocket Boy

1 Chip Bayers, “The Inner Bezos,” Wired, March 1999.

2 Mark Leibovich, The New Imperialists (New York: Prentice Hall, 2002), 79.

3 “Local Team Wins Unicycle Polo Match,” Albuquerque Tribune, November 23, 1961.

4 Albuquerque Tribune, April 24, 1965.

5 Leibovich, The New Imperialists, 73–74.

6 Ibid., 71.

7 Ibid., 74.

8 Jeff Bezos interview, Academy of Achievement, May 4, 2001.

9 “The World’s Billionaires,” Forbes, July 9, 2001.

10 Bayers, “The Inner Bezos.”

11 Brad Stone, “Bezos in Space,” Newsweek, May 5, 2003.

12 Mylene Mangalindan, “Buzz in West Texas Is about Bezos and His Launch Site,” Wall Street Journal, November 10, 2006.

13 Jeff Bezos, “Successful Short Hop, Setback, and Next Vehicle,” Blue Origin website, September 2, 2011.

14 Adam Lashinsky, “Amazon’s Jeff Bezos: The Ultimate Disrupter,” Fortune, November 16, 2012.

Chapter 6: Chaos Theory

1 Saul Hansell, “Listen Up! It’s Time for a Profit; a Front-Row Seat as Amazon Gets Serious,” New York Times, May 20, 2011.

2 Jeff Bezos, speech to the American Association of Publishers, March 18, 1999.

3 In 2012, my research assistant Nick Sanchez filed a comprehensive FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request with the U.S. Department of Labor for any complaints or compliance violations for Amazon.com from 1995 through the present day. In addition to the much-publicized heat complaints reviewed by the Allentown Morning Call, regional and subregional OSHA offices returned a few dozen employee complaints, including bathroom-break issues at a call center in Washington; forklift horseplay in New Hampshire; improper tornado sheltering in Pennsylvania; and concerns like water-cooler mineral buildup, break-room mold, inadequate protective headgear, and harmful levels of noise and fumes. In all cases, Amazon responded to OSHA with evidence of compliance or immediately remedied the situation, and it settled the vast majority of concerns without need for OSHA inspection or citation. A $3,000 citation given to an Amazon Fresh center in Washington for not having an adequate emergency evacuation plan to deal with ammonia fumes was the most serious citation we found. But multijurisdiction FOIA requests have to be forwarded by the federal OSHA office to state and regional offices, and it is nearly impossible to obtain all such records for a company with a nationwide footprint as big as Amazon’s, even with a year of lead time.

4 In July of 2012, Amazon established its Career Choice tuition-reimbursement program to help fulfillment-center employees with three consecutive years of service return to school to continue their education. Amazon said it would cover up to $2,000 a year in tuition for up to four years for each employee.

Chapter 7: A Technology Company, Not a Retailer

1 Gary Rivlin, “A Retail Revolution Turns Ten,” New York Times, July 27, 2012.

2 Gary Wolf, “The Great Library of Amazonia,” Wired, October 23, 2003.

3 Ibid.

4 Luke Timmerman, “Amazon’s Top Techie, Werner Vogels, on How Web Services Follows the Retail Playbook,” Xconomy, September 29, 2010.

5 Shobha Warrier, “From Studying under the Streetlights to CEO of a U.S. Firm!,” Rediff, September 1, 2010.

6 Tim O’Reilly, “Amazon Web Services API,” July 18, 2002, http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/1707.

7 Damien Cave, “Losing the War on Patents,” Salon, February 15, 2002.

8 O’Reilly, “Amazon Web Services API.”

9 Steve Grand, Creation: Life and How to Make It (Darby, PA: Diane Publishing, 2000), 132.

10 Hybrid machine/human computing arrangement patent filed October 12, 2001; http://www.google.com/patents/US7197459.

11 “Artificial Artificial Intelligence,” Economist, June 10, 2006.

12 Katharine Mieszkowski, “I Make $1.45 a Week and I Love It,” Salon, July 24, 2006.

13 Jason Pontin, “Artificial Intelligence, with Help from the Humans,” New York Times, March 25, 2007.

14 Jeff Bezos, interview by Charlie Rose, Charlie Rose, PBS, February 26, 2009.

Chapter 8: Fiona

1 Calvin Reid, “Authors Guild Shoots Down Rocket eBook Contract,” Publishers Weekly, May 10, 1999.

2 Steve Silberman, “Ex Libris,” Wired, July 1998.

3 Steven Levy, “It’s Time to Turn the Last Page,” Newsweek, December 31, 1999.

4 Jane Spencer and Kara Scannell, “As Fraud Case Unravels, Executive Is at Large,” Wall Street Journal, April 25, 2007.

5 David Pogue, “Trying Again to Make Books Obsolete,” New York Times, October 12, 2006.

6 Jeff Bezos, speech at Lake Forest College, February 26, 1998.

7 Walt Mossberg, “The Way We Read,” Wall Street Journal, June 9, 2008.

8 Mark Leibovich, “Child Prodigy, Online Pioneer,” Washington Post, September 3, 2000.

9 Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 1997).

10 Jeff Bezos, interview by Charlie Rose, Charlie Rose, PBS, February 26, 2009.

11 David D. Kirkpatrick, “Online Sales of Used Books Draw Protest,” New York Times, April 10, 2002.

12 Graeme Neill, “Sony and Amazon in e-Books Battle,” Bookseller, April 27, 2007.

13 Brad Stone, “Envisioning the Next Chapter for Electronic Books,” New York Times, September 6, 2007.

14 Jeff Bezos, The Oprah Winfrey Show, ABC, October 24, 2008.

Part III:
Chapter 9: Liftoff!

1 Ben Charny, “Amazon Upgrade Leads Internet Stocks Higher,” MarketWatch, January 22, 2007.

2 Victoria Barrett, “Too Smart for Its Own Good,” Forbes, October 9, 2008.

3 Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 180.

4 Zappos Milestone: Timeline, Zappos.com, http://about.zappos.com/press-center/media-coverage/zappos-milestone-timeline.

5 Parija B. Kavilanz, “Circuit City to Shut Down,” CNN Money, January 16, 2009.

6 Ben Austen, “The End of Borders and the Future of Books,” Bloomberg Businessweek, November 10, 2011.

7 Annie Lowrey, “Readers Without Borders,” Slate, July 20, 2011.

8 Scott Mayerowitz and Alice Gomstyn, “Target Among the Latest Chain of Grim Layoffs,” ABC News, January 27, 2009.

9 Brad Stone, “Can Amazon Be the Wal-Mart of the Web?” New York Times, September 19, 2009.

10 Miguel Bustillo and Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, “Wal-Mart Strafes Amazon in Book War,” Wall Street Journal, October 16, 2009.

11 Brad Stone and Stephanie Rosenbloom, “Price War Brews Between Amazon and Wal-Mart,” New York Times, November 23, 2009.

12 American Booksellers Association, Letter to Justice Department, October 22, 2009.

13 Spencer Wang, Credit Suisse First Boston analyst report, February 16, 2010.

14 Mick Rooney, “Amazon/Hachette Livre Dispute,” Independent Publishing Magazine, June 6, 2008.

15 Eoin Purcell, “All Your Base Are Belong to Amazon,” Eoin Purcell’s Blog, May 14, 2009, http://eoinpurcellsblog.com/2009/05/14/all-your-base-are-belong-to-amazon/.

16 According to court testimony, on Jannuary 29, 2010, the general counsel of Simon & Schuster wrote to CEO Carolyn Kroll Reidy that she “cannot believe that Jobs made the statement” and considered it “incredibly stupid,” http://www.nysd.uscourts.gov/cases/show.php?db=special&id=306, page 86.

17 Motoko Rich and Brad Stone, “Publisher Wins Fight with Amazon Over E-Books,” New York Times, January 31, 2010.

Chapter 10: Expedient Convictions

1 Jeff Bezos, interview by Charlie Rose, Charlie Rose, PBS, July 28, 2010.

2 Fireside Chat with Jeff Bezos and Werner Vogels, Amazon Web Services re: Invent Conference, Las Vegas, November 29, 2012.

3 “Editorial: Spitzer’s Latest Flop,” New York Sun, November 15, 2007.

4 Vadim Tsypin and Diana Tsypin v. Amazon.com et al., King County Superior Court, case 10-2-12192-7 SEA.

5 Miguel Bustillo and Stu Woo, “Retailers Push Amazon on Taxes,” Wall Street Journal, March 17, 2011.

6 Aaron Glantz, “Amazon Spends Big to Fight Internet Sales Tax,” Bay Citizen, August 27, 2011.

7 Tim O’Reilly, blog post, Google Plus, September 5, 2011, https://plus.google.com/+TimOReilly/posts/QypNDmvJJq7.

8 Zoe Corneli, “Legislature Approves Amazon Deal,” Bay Citizen, September 9, 2011.

9 Bryant Urstadt, “What Amazon Fears Most: Diapers,” Bloomberg Businessweek, October 7, 2010.

10 Nick Saint, “Amazon Nukes Diapers.com in Price War—May Force Diapers’ Founders to Sell Out,” Business Insider, November 5, 2010.

11 Amazon, “Amazon Marketplace Sellers Enjoy High-Growth Holiday Season,” press release, January 2, 2013.

12 Roy Blount Jr., “The Kindle Swindle?,” New York Times, February 24, 2009.

13 Brad Stone, “Amazon’s Hit Man,” Bloomberg Businessweek, January 25, 2012.

14 Thomas L. Friedman, “Do You Want the Good News First?,” New York Times, May 19, 2012.

15 “Contracts on Fire: Amazon’s Lending Library Mess,” AuthorsGuild.org, November 14, 2011.

16 Richard Russo, “Amazon’s Jungle Logic,” New York Times, December 12, 2011.

Chapter 11: The Kingdom of the Question Mark

1 George Anders, “Inside Amazon’s Idea Machine: How Bezos Decodes the Customer,” Forbes, April 4, 2012.

2 Amazon’s Leadership Principles, http://www.amazon.com/Values-Careers-Homepage/b?ie=UTF8&node=239365011.

3 Luisa Kroll and Kerry A. Dolan, “The World’s Billionaires,” Forbes, March 4, 2013.

4 David Dykstra, “Bezos Completes $28 Million Home Improvement,” Seattle-Mansions.Blogspot.com, October 1, 2010, http://seattle-mansions.blogspot.com/2010/10/bezos-completes-28-million-home.html.

5 Rebecca Johnson, “MacKenzie Bezos: Writer, Mother of Four, and High-Profile Wife,” Vogue, February 20, 2013.

Epilogue

1 David Streitfeld, Joy Covey, “Top Executive in Amazon.com’s Early Days, Dies at 50.” New York Times, September 19, 2013, http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/19/former-amazon-executive-dies-in-bicycle-accident.

2 E-mail from Covey to Stone, January 14, 2013. Reprinted with permission of the Joy Covey estate.

3 Judith Rosen, “Booksellers Say ‘No’ to Amazon Source,” Publishers Weekly, November 5, 2013, http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bookselling/article/59888-booksellers-say-no-to-selling-kindles.html.

—ooOoo—

Contents

Welcome

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

PART I—FAITH

Chapter 1: The House of Quants

Chapter 2: The Book of Bezos

Chapter 3: Fever Dreams

Chapter 4: Milliravi

PART II—LITERARY INFLUENCES

Chapter 5: Rocket Boy

Chapter 6: Chaos Theory

Chapter 7: A Technology Company, Not a Retailer

Chapter 8: Fiona

PART III—MISSIONARY OR MERCENARY?

Chapter 9: Liftoff!

Chapter 10: Expedient Convictions

Chapter 11: The Kingdom of the Question Mark

Epilogue

Photos

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Praise for Brad Stone’s The Everything Store

Notes

—ooOoo—

Chú thích

[←1]

Dành tặng Isabella và Calista Stone

Khi bạn sống đến 80 tuổi và trong khoảnh khắc yên tĩnh hồi tưởng ký ức bản thân trong nhiều năm qua, những câu chuyện ngắn gọn, súc tích và ý nghĩa nhất cuộc đời về hàng loạt chọn lựa trong quá khứ sẽ hiện ra. Cuối cùng, chúng ta là lựa chọn của chính chúng ta.

- JEFF BEZOS
Bài phát biểu tại Đại học Princeton,
Ngày 30 tháng 05 năm 2010

—ooOoo—

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LỜI TỰA

Vào đầu những năm 1970, Julie Ray, người phụ trách quảng cáo siêng năng bị cuốn hút vào một chương trình độc đáo dành cho trẻ em năng khiếu của trường công tại Houston, bang Texas, Mỹ. Con trai của cô nằm trong số những học viên đầu tiên tham gia chương trình. Sau này chương trình mang tên Vanguard, có mục tiêu hướng tới thúc đẩy sự sáng tạo và tính độc lập ở mỗi học viên, nuôi dưỡng những ý tưởng sáng tạo. Ray thực sự say mê chương trình giảng dạy và môi trường có những giáo viên và cha mẹ đầy lòng nhiệt tình, nên cô nghiên cứu những trường học có chương trình tương tự trong bang để viết một cuốn sách về sự chuyển mình trong giáo dục tài năng trẻ tại bang Texas.

Một vài năm sau, khi con trai cô học tiểu học, Ray tiếp tục tham gia tìm hiểu chương trình của trường tiểu học River Oaks nằm ở phía tây khu thương mại Houston. Hiệu trưởng của trường chọn một học sinh đi cùng với cô trong chuyến thăm, một cậu bé lớp 6 có mái tóc hung và ăn nói trôi chảy. Cha mẹ cậu bé yêu cầu không sử dụng tên thật nên Ray đã gọi cậu bé là Tim.

Trong cuốn sách Bật sáng những bộ óc thông minh: Góc nhìn của cha mẹ vào chương trình đào tạo tài năng tại Texas (Turning On Bright Minds: A Parent Looks at Gifted Education in Texas), Julie Ray mô tả Tim là “một học sinh có trí thông minh tuyệt vời, thân thiện nhưng nghiêm túc”. Theo lời giáo viên của cậu thì cậu bé “đặc biệt không có năng khiếu lãnh đạo”, nhưng cậu lại bước đi tự tin giữa các bạn đồng trang lứa và tán dương mạch lạc về sự hấp dẫn một cuốn tiểu thuyết của tác giả J.R.R. Tolkien mang tên The Hobbit mà cậu đang đọc dở.

[←3]

Cậu bé 12 tuổi thực sự mang trong mình tính tranh đua. Cậu nói với Ray rằng cậu đang đọc rất nhiều loại sách khác nhau để được nhận danh hiệu người đọc sách đặc biệt, nhưng lại so sánh bản thân bị bất lợi với một bạn nữ cùng lớp, vì cô bé tuyên bố thông tin chưa được kiểm chứng rằng mỗi tuần cô đọc hàng tá cuốn sách. Tim cũng cho Ray xem một dự án khoa học mà cậu bé đang thực hiện, được gọi là khối hộp vô tận. Đó là một chiếc máy chạy bằng pin với những chiếc gương quay tạo ra ảo giác quang học về một đường hầm vô tận. Tim mô phỏng thiết bị theo sản phẩm bán tại cửa hàng có giá 22 đô la, và tự tin nói với Ray rằng “của cháu rẻ hơn”. Giáo viên phụ trách nói rằng, ba trong số những dự án của Tim đang tham gia tranh tài với những ứng viên là học sinh tiểu học và trung học khác tại cuộc tranh giải khoa học của địa phương.

Nhà trường ca ngợi năng lực sáng tạo của Tim, nhưng có người đã dè chừng tài năng của cậu. Cậu đã thực hiện khảo sát đánh giá những giáo viên lớp 6 trong một bài tập thống kê bảng của môn Toán. Theo lời của Tim, mục tiêu khảo sát là để đánh giá giáo viên về “cách thức họ giảng dạy, không phải là một cuộc đua để nổi tiếng”. Đối tượng khảo sát là bạn học cùng lớp. Vào thời điểm Ray tiến hành khảo sát, cậu đang trong giai đoạn tính toán kết quả và sơ đồ hóa năng lực giảng dạy của mỗi giáo viên.

[←4]

Một ngày bình thường của Tim, theo như miêu tả của Ray, diễn ra với những hoạt động cố định. Cậu thức dậy sớm để bắt xe buýt tới trường lúc 7 giờ. Cậu tới trường cách nhà khoảng 32 km và tham gia hàng loạt lớp học như toán, tập đọc, thể dục, khoa học, tiếng Tây Ban Nha và nghệ thuật. Cậu vẫn có thời gian dành cho những dự án cá nhân và thảo luận nhóm nhỏ. Julie Ray miêu tả, trong một tiết học, bảy học sinh bao gồm cả Tim, ngồi trong một vòng tròn hẹp bên trong văn phòng hiệu trưởng để luyện tập bài tập dành cho tư duy hiệu quả. Học sinh được yêu cầu đọc thầm những câu chuyện ngắn mà chúng nhận được, sau đó thảo luận. Câu chuyện đầu tiên về những nhà khảo cổ học quay về sau một chuyến thám hiểm và thông báo họ đã khám phá ra nơi cất giấu những đồ tạo tác quý giá của người xưa, tuy nhiên sau đó, những phát biểu trên hóa ra đều là ngụy tạo. Ray ghi lại những mẩu thông tin nhỏ của cuộc đối thoại sau đó:

“Họ muốn trở lên nổi tiếng. Họ bỏ qua những thứ họ không muốn đối mặt.”

“Một số người trải qua những năm tháng cuộc đời với suy nghĩ không thay đổi.”

“Bạn nên bình tĩnh. Phân tích những gì bạn phải làm”. Tim nói với Julie Ray rằng, cậu thực sự thích những bài tập kiểu này. “Thế giới xung quanh vận hành như vậy, một ai đó có thể yêu cầu bạn làm gì đó. Bạn phải có khả năng suy nghĩ những điều bạn sẽ làm cho bản thân.”

Ray nhận thấy không thể thuyết phục một nhà xuất bản quan tâm tới cuốn Bật sáng những bộ óc thông minh. Những biên tập viên tại các nhà xuất bản lớn nói rằng chủ đề của sách quá hẹp. Do vậy, vào năm 1977, cô đã tự bỏ tiền túi từ thu nhập viết quảng cáo cho một catalog trong lễ Giáng Sinh và in một nghìn cuốn sách bìa mềm rồi tự tay phân phát chúng.

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Hơn 30 năm sau, tôi đã tìm thấy một bản sao tại Thư viện Công Houston. Tôi cũng tìm hiểu thông tin về Julie Ray. Cô đang sống tại Trung tâm Texas, lập kế hoạch và truyền thông trong lĩnh vực môi trường và văn hóa. Cô nói rằng cô đã quan sát Tim trưởng thành, sau đó trở lên nổi tiếng và giàu có trong vòng 20 năm qua với sự ngưỡng mộ và sửng sốt, nhưng không quá bất ngờ. “Khi gặp Tim lúc cậu còn nhỏ, tôi biết rằng khả năng của cậu là không có gì cần bàn cãi, và tài năng này hoàn toàn được nuôi dưỡng và khuyến khích bởi chương trình mới đó,” Ray nói. “Chương trình cũng nhận được lợi ích khi ghi nhận những phản hồi và niềm thích thú đam mê học hỏi của cậu bé. Điều này hoàn toàn phù hợp với mục tiêu chương trình.”

Ray hồi tưởng về câu nói của một giáo viên nhiều năm trước, khi được yêu cầu tiên đoán về khả năng của cậu bé. “Tôi thực sự không thể nói bất cứ điều gì,” giáo viên trả lời. “Tôi chỉ có thể nói rằng dường như khả năng của cậu bé là không giới hạn, khi chỉ nhận được một chút chỉ dẫn.”

Cuối năm 2011, tôi tới thăm “Tim” – tên thật là Jeff Bezos – tại trụ sở công ty Amazon.com ở Seattle của cậu. Mục đích của chuyến thăm là nhằm thuyết phục Jeff hợp tác thực hiện cuốn sách này, một nỗ lực để ghi chép những mốc chính trong quá trình tạo dựng một đế chế công nghệ đầy cải tiến, đột phá. Amazon.com nằm trong danh sách những công ty đầu tiên nắm bắt cơ hội phát triển đầy hứa hẹn của Internet, và đem lại lợi ích thay đổi vĩnh viễn cách thức chúng ta mua sắm và đọc sách.

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Amazon hiện diện ngày càng nhiều nơi trong xã hội hiện đại. Hàng triệu người thường xuyên truy cập trực tiếp website của công ty hoặc những trang vệ tinh như Zappos.com và Diapers.com, đóng vai trò chủ đạo thúc đẩy trong bất kỳ xã hội tư bản nào: đó là để tiêu dùng. Trang web Amazon cung cấp lựa chọn đa dạng bao gồm sách, phim, dụng cụ làm vườn, đồ nội thất, thực phẩm và những vật dụng kỳ quặc như chiếc mũ hình sừng con kỳ lân dành cho mèo (có giá 9,5 đô la) và tủ đựng súng an toàn có khóa điện tử nặng khoảng 454kg (có giá 903,53 đô la) mà khách hàng có thể nhận được sau từ 3-5 ngày đặt hàng. Công ty cung cấp dịch vụ gần như hoàn hảo, đem đến sự hài lòng cho khách hàng, giao các sản phẩm kỹ thuật số chỉ trong một vài giây và sản phẩm thông thường chỉ trong một vài ngày. Sẽ thật khó để tìm thấy bất kỳ lời phàn nàn nào của khách hàng về đơn hàng, vì đơn giản hàng hóa đã được giao đến cửa nhà trước thời điểm khách hàng dự tính.

Amazon đạt doanh thu 61 tỉ đô la trong năm 2012, năm thứ 17 công ty đi vào hoạt động, và sẽ trở thành nhà bán lẻ tăng trưởng nhanh nhất lịch sử khi vượt qua con số 100 tỉ đô la. Cái tên Amazon được khách hàng yêu thích và gây ra nỗi sợ hãi cho những đối thủ cạnh tranh. Thậm chí, Amazon đã trở thành thuật ngữ kinh doanh một cách không chính thức và không hoàn toàn mang nghĩa tích cực. To be Amazoned (Bị Amazon hóa) có nghĩa là “phải bất lực đứng nhìn một công ty mới phất từ Seattle chiếm được khách hàng và lợi nhuận của công ty kinh doanh sử dụng mạng lưới phân phối truyền thống”.

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Đối với đa số công chúng, lịch sử của Amazon là một trong những câu chuyện điển hình cho kỷ nguyên Internet. Công ty khởi nghiệp khiêm tốn khi ban đầu chỉ bán sách trực tuyến. Sau đó, bắt kịp làn sóng đang lên đầu tiên trong giai đoạn huy hoàng của kỷ nguyên dot-com vào cuối những năm 1990, công ty tham gia kinh doanh âm nhạc, phim ảnh, đồ điện tử và đồ chơi. Tránh được thảm họa bong bóng dot-com vỡ vào năm 2000, 2001 và bất chấp làn sóng hoài nghi về tương lai của kinh doanh trực tuyến, công ty hoàn thiện hệ thống phân phối hàng hóa và triển khai mở rộng kinh doanh sang lĩnh vực phần mềm, trang sức, quần áo, đồ dùng thể thao, phụ tùng ô tô – bất kỳ hàng hóa gì mà bạn có thể nghĩ tới. Ngay khi vừa trở thành nhà bán lẻ hàng đầu trên Internet và cổng giao dịch hàng đầu dành cho những nhà bán hàng khác kinh doanh hàng hóa của họ, Amazon đã tái định vị bản thân một lần nữa để trở thành một công ty công nghệ linh hoạt bán hạ tầng điện toán đám mây với tên gọi Amazon Web Services (Dịch vụ Web Amazon) và những thiết bị kỹ thuật số thiết thực có mức giá vừa phải, như thiết bị đọc sách điện tử Kindle và máy tính bảng Kindle Fire.

“Đối với cá nhân tôi, Amazon là câu chuyện của một người sáng lập đầy tài năng đã hoàn toàn tự mình định hướng tầm nhìn chiến lược,” Eric Schmidt, chủ tịch của Google – một đối thủ cạnh tranh trực tiếp của Amazon, phát biểu. Chính bản thân ông cũng là thành viên của dịch vụ Amazon Prime – giao hàng trong hai ngày của Amazon. “Sẽ chẳng có ví dụ nào hay hơn. Có lẽ chỉ có thể là Apple, nhưng người ta quên rằng hầu hết mọi người tin Amazon đã sụp đổ do không đạt được quy mô kinh doanh cần thiết để trang trải kết cấu chi phí. Công ty liên tục thua lỗ hàng trăm triệu đô la. Nhưng Jeff quả thực là người có tài ăn nói và rất thông minh. Ông là một mẫu người sáng lập doanh nghiệp có chuyên môn điển hình nên hiểu từng chi tiết nhỏ nhất và cẩn trọng xem xét mọi khía cạnh hơn bất kỳ ai.”

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Mặc dù giá cổ phiếu của công ty tăng cao chóng mặt trong thời gian gần đây, nhưng Amazon vẫn là công ty ẩn chứa các vấn đề kỳ lạ. Những chỉ số quan trọng trên bảng cân đối kế toán nổi tiếng là thiếu sức sống, và việc mở rộng vào thị trường cùng phân mục sản phẩm mới thậm chí khiến công ty có kết quả kinh doanh thua lỗ trong năm 2012. Nhưng phố Wall dường như không quan tâm đến số liệu này. Jeff Bezos đưa ra những tuyên bố mạnh mẽ về việc đầu tư xây dựng công ty dài hạn, nên đã tạo dựng lòng tin từ những cổ đông. Những nhà đầu tư sẵn sàng kiên nhẫn chờ đợi một ngày Jeff quyết định làm chậm lại quá trình mở rộng và nhận được lợi nhuận bền vững.

Bezos hoàn toàn không để ý tới ý kiến của người khác. Ông có khả năng giải quyết vấn đề, có tầm nhìn bao quát của một vị tướng chỉ huy trong cuộc chiến cạnh tranh, luôn hướng tới làm hài lòng khách hàng và cung cấp dịch vụ như giao hàng miễn phí. Ông có những tham vọng vô cùng lớn – không chỉ đối với Amazon, mà còn để thúc đẩy mở rộng giới hạn của khoa học và xây dựng lại lĩnh vực truyền thông. Không chỉ thành lập công ty nghiên cứu vũ trụ Blue Origin của riêng mình, Bezos còn thâu tóm tờ báo gặp khó khăn Washington Post vào tháng 8 năm 2013 với giá 250 triệu đô la, một thương vụ gây choáng váng cho giới truyền thông.

Như nhiều nhân viên dưới quyền chứng thực, làm việc với Bezos rất khó khăn và vất vả. Mặc dù nổi tiếng với nụ cười nồng nhiệt và vui vẻ, Bezos có thể nổi giận gay gắt giống như người sáng lập của Apple, Steve Jobs, người có thể làm khiếp sợ bất kỳ nhân viên nào bước vào thang máy cùng ông. Bezos theo chủ nghĩa lãnh đạo hoàn hảo, quan tâm theo dõi đến từng chi tiết nhỏ nhất, liên tục cho ra các ý tưởng mới và phản ứng gay gắt với những nỗ lực làm việc không đáp ứng được yêu cầu nghiêm ngặt của ông.

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Giống như Jobs, Bezos thuộc tuýp người có khả năng bóp méo thực tại – vẽ ra viễn cảnh tươi sáng đầy thuyết phục, nhưng rút cuộc thì lại chẳng mấy khi khiến họ thỏa mãn về công ty. Ông thường nói rằng sứ mệnh của Amazon là “phải nâng cao chuẩn mực trong các lĩnh vực và trên toàn thế giới, với mục tiêu tập trung hướng tới khách hàng”. Bezos và nhân viên thực sự tập trung hướng tới đem lại lợi ích cho khách hàng, nhưng đồng thời cũng cạnh tranh không ngừng với đối thủ và thậm chí với cả đối tác. Bezos thích nói rằng thị trường Amazon tham gia cạnh tranh kinh doanh rộng lớn, với rất nhiều cơ hội cho nhiều công ty thành công. Điều này có lẽ đúng, nhưng rõ ràng Amazon góp phần gây thiệt hại hoặc làm phá sản những đối thủ cạnh tranh dù có quy mô kinh doanh lớn hay nhỏ, rất nhiều trong số đó là các thương hiệu được thế giới biết đến: Circuit City. Borders. Best Buy. Barnes & Noble.

Người Mỹ nói chung cảm thấy lo lắng về việc tập trung sức mạnh của những tập đoàn lớn, đặc biệt khi các tập đoàn đó có trụ sở ở những thành phố xa xôi. Thành công của những công ty này có thể thay đổi phong cách sống của toàn thể cộng đồng dân cư. Walmart là trường hợp điển hình phải đối mặt với sự hoài nghi này cùng với những cái tên khác như Sears, Woolworth’s, và gã bán lẻ tạp phẩm khổng lồ A&P phải đối mặt với vụ kiện chống độc quyền có thể gây phá sản trong suốt những năm 1940. Người Mỹ đổ xô tới những nhà bán lẻ lớn vì sự tiện lợi và giá thành thấp. Nhưng ở một mức giá nhất định, những công ty này nhận được lợi nhuận lớn gây mâu thuẫn trong cộng đồng. Chúng tôi muốn hàng hóa giá rẻ, nhưng chúng tôi cũng không thực sự muốn bất kỳ ai phải từ bỏ những cửa hàng độc lập, quy mô gia đình trên những con phố, hoặc những cửa hàng sách nhỏ đã kinh doanh trong nhiều thập kỷ, do sự phổ biến của chuỗi cửa hàng sách như Barnes & Noble và giờ đây là Amazon.

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Bezos là người giao tiếp cẩn trọng trong chính công ty mình. Là người bí hiểm về những chi tiết trong kế hoạch kinh doanh, ông giữ suy nghĩ và mối quan tâm cho riêng mình. Ông cũng được biết đến là doanh nhân khó hiểu trong giới kinh doanh Seattle và rộng hơn là trong ngành công nghệ. Bezos hiếm khi phát biểu tại hội nghị và ít khi tham gia phỏng vấn truyền thông. Thậm chí, những người ngưỡng mộ ông và thường xuyên theo sát câu chuyện Amazon vẫn mắc lỗi phát âm sai họ của ông (chính xác phải là “Bay-zose”, không phải “Bee-zose”).

John Doerr, nhà đầu tư mạo hiểm chống lưng phía sau Amazon ngay từ những ngày đầu và trở thành thành viên trong hội đồng quản trị của công ty trong một thập kỷ, đã đặt tên cho phong cách quan hệ công chúng có chừng mực của Amazon là “thuyết Bezos về truyền thông”. Ông nói rằng Bezos sử dụng một chiếc bút mực màu đỏ khi xem thông cáo báo chí, mô tả sản phẩm, bài diễn thuyết và thư gửi cổ đông để gạch bỏ bất kỳ chữ nào rườm rà và không thân thiện với khách hàng.

Chúng ta nghĩ rằng chúng ta biết toàn bộ câu chuyện của Amazon, nhưng thực sự chúng ta chỉ biết đến những câu chuyện được kể lại, những dòng chữ trong thông cáo báo chí, bài diễn thuyết và phỏng vấn mà Bezos không gạch đỏ.

Amazon sở hữu một tá những tòa nhà hiện đại nằm ở phía nam hồ Lake Union của Seattle, một hồ băng nhỏ, nước trong vắt, nối với vịnh Puget ở phía Tây và hồ Washington ở phía Đông. Khu vực này từng là nơi tập trung những xưởng xẻ gỗ vào thế kỷ XIX và trước đó từng là nhà tù giam người Mỹ bản địa. Phong cảnh đồng quê trước đây bây giờ không còn, nhường chỗ cho các công ty sinh dược mới thành lập, trung tâm nghiên cứu ung thư và Trường Y của Đại học Washington. Tất cả hợp thành khu vực dân cư đông đúc.

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Nhìn từ bên ngoài, những văn phòng hiện đại của Amazon không có gì đặc biệt, nhưng khi bước vào bên trong tòa nhà Day One North, tổng hành dinh của các quản lý cấp cao tại đại lộ Terry và đường Cộng hòa, bạn sẽ được chào đón với hình logo mặt cười của Amazon trên tường, phía sau chiếc bàn tiếp tân dài hình chữ nhật. Bên cạnh chiếc bàn đón tiếp, công ty cho đặt tô chứa bánh quy dành cho những chú chó đáng yêu của nhân viên (một chế độ hiếm có trong công ty yêu cầu nhân viên trả tiền chỗ đỗ xe và đồ ăn vặt). Cạnh cầu thang máy có một tấm bảng màu đen với dòng chữ trắng thông báo cho khách tham quan rằng họ đang tiến dần vào vương quốc của nhà triết lý – Tổng giám đốc điều hành. Tấm bảng viết rằng:

Vẫn còn nhiều thứ chưa được tạo ra.
Vẫn còn nhiều điều mới mẻ sẽ đến.
Con người vẫn chưa hiểu sức mạnh thực sự của Internet đem lại và vẫn chỉ ở chặng đầu của con đường dài.

JEFF BEZOS

Tập quán nội bộ của Amazon thực sự rất khác biệt. Thuyết trình bằng PowerPoint không bao giờ được sử dụng trong những cuộc họp. Thay vào đó, nhân viên được yêu cầu viết bản tường thuật dài sáu trang, tóm tắt những ý kiến cá nhân. Bezos tin rằng làm như vậy sẽ nuôi dưỡng tư duy phản biện trong mỗi nhân viên Amazon. Khi sản phẩm mới ra đời, nhân viên xây dựng tài liệu trình bày ban đầu dưới dạng bài thông cáo báo chí. Mục đích là hướng tới xây dựng nội dung được đưa ra ban đầu theo góc nhìn mà khách hàng có thể cảm nhận về sản phẩm. Mỗi cuộc họp bắt đầu bằng việc mọi người đọc thầm tài liệu và cuộc thảo luận bắt đầu ngay sau đó – giống như bài tập về tư duy hiệu quả trong văn phòng hiệu trưởng tại trường tiểu học River Oaks. Trong buổi làm việc đầu tiên của tôi với Bezos về dự án này, tôi quyết định học theo cách thức làm việc ở Amazon và chuẩn bị bài tường thuật theo phong cách Amazon của riêng mình, một thông cáo báo chí hư cấu cho cuốn sách sắp ra đời.

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Bezos tiếp tôi tại phòng họp tầng tám và chúng tôi trò chuyện tại một chiếc bàn ghép từ nhiều tấm gỗ vuông hình cánh cửa, cùng loại gỗ màu vàng mà Bezos sử dụng để gây dựng Amazon trong gara của ông từ 20 năm trước. Những chiếc bàn biểu tượng cho tính căn cơ tiết kiệm của ông. Lần đầu tôi phỏng vấn Bezos vào năm 2000, thời điểm mà ông phải liên tục di chuyển nhiều nơi trên thế giới nên trông nhợt nhạt và phát phì. Hiện tại, trông ông thon thả và cân đối; ông áp dụng phương pháp để biến đổi cơ thể tương tự như ông đã áp dụng để điều chỉnh Amazon. Anh ấy thậm chí còn cạo cái đầu đang hói của mình một cách vụng về ngay xuống mái vòm, tạo cho anh ấy một cái nhìn bóng bẩy gợi liên tưởng đến một trong những anh hùng khoa học viễn tưởng của anh ấy, Captain Picard của Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Chúng tôi ngồi xuống và tôi đẩy bài thông cáo báo chí về phía ông. Khi nhận ra điều tôi đang làm, ông cười lớn.

Trong nhiều năm qua, ông đã thực hiện nhiều điều với kiểu cười nổi tiếng đó. Tiếng cười inh tai thành tràng dài, khiến người khác giật mình. Ông nghiêng người khi vươn cổ ra phía sau, nhắm mắt và thả lỏng cho âm thanh phát ra từ yết hầu. Ông thường cười kiểu này khi có điều gì đó mà chẳng ai khác thấy buồn cười. Tình huống khiến Bezos cười vẫn là bí ẩn chưa có lời giải đáp; chẳng ai hi vọng người khác giao tiếp với mình bằng điệu cười này cả, và không ai trong gia đình ông có kiểu cười này.

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Những nhân viên biết rằng điệu cười đó giống như âm thanh thử sức mạnh con tim, len lỏi trong suốt buổi nói chuyện và nhắm đến yếu điểm của họ. Khá nhiều cộng sự của ông ám chỉ rằng ở mức độ nào đó, Bezos biến điệu cười thành vũ khí. “Bạn sẽ chẳng thể hiểu nhầm được đâu,” Rick Dalzell, cựu giám đốc phụ trách thông tin Amazon, nói. “Nó sẽ lột sạch mọi vũ khí tự vệ và trừng phạt đối phương. Ông ta đang trừng phạt bạn.”

Bezos đọc thông cáo báo chí của tôi trong một hoặc hai phút và chúng tôi bắt đầu thảo luận về tham vọng của cuốn sách – mong muốn đem đến câu chuyện chi tiết đầu tiên về Amazon, khởi đầu từ phố Wall vào đầu những năm 1990 cho tới thời điểm hiện tại. Buổi trò chuyện diễn ra trong một giờ. Chúng tôi nói về những cuốn sách kinh doanh chuyên đề khác có thể sử dụng làm mẫu và về cuốn tiểu sử Steve Jobs của Walter Isaacson – cuốn sách được xuất bản ngay sau khi vị Tổng giám đốc điều hành Apple mất.

Chúng tôi cũng thừa nhận sự lúng túng vốn có trong việc viết và bán sách về Amazon vào thời điểm đặc biệt này. (Tất cả những người bán sách trực tuyến và ngoại tuyến của The Everything Store chắc chắn đều có ý kiến mạnh mẽ về chủ đề này. Trên thực tế, gã khổng lồ truyền thông Pháp Hachette Livre, sở hữu Little, Brown and Company, nhà xuất bản cuốn sách, gần đây đã định cư từ lâu - bất chấp các vụ kiện chống độc quyền với Bộ Tư pháp Hoa Kỳ và các cơ quan quản lý ở Liên minh Châu Âu xuất phát từ tranh chấp của tập đoàn với Amazon về việc định giá sách điện tử. Giống như rất nhiều công ty khác trong nhiều ngành bán lẻ và truyền thông khác, Hachette đã phải xem Amazon vừa là một đối tác bán lẻ có sức mạnh vừa là một đối thủ cạnh tranh nguy hiểm. Tất nhiên, Bezos cũng có suy nghĩ về điều này. “Amazon không làm với ngành kinh doanh sách”, ông ấy thích nói với các tác giả và nhà báo. "Tương lai thì sẽ bán sách. ”)

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Tôi đã trò chuyện với Bezos nhiều lần trong suốt một thập kỷ qua và lần nào cũng vậy, câu chuyện luôn hào hứng, vui vẻ và thường bị chen ngang bởi tràng cười lớn bất chợt cất lên. Ông là người bận rộn, bực dọc và tràn đầy năng lượng (nếu bạn gặp ông trong hành lang, ông không ngần ngại nói với bạn rằng ông không bao giờ sử dụng thang máy công ty, chỉ đi cầu thang bộ). Ông chú tâm hoàn toàn vào cuộc trò chuyện, và không như nhiều tổng giám đốc điều hành khác, ông không bao giờ tạo cho bạn cảm giác ông đang bận hoặc bị phân tâm – nhưng ông thận trọng khi cuộc nói chuyện kéo dài và nói ngắn gọn súc tích. Một vài trong số những câu nói có sức sống lâu bền đến nỗi được tổng hợp thành tư tưởng Jeff. Vài câu trong số đó đã sống trong cả thập kỷ hoặc hơn.

“Nếu bạn muốn biết sự thật đằng sau khiến chúng tôi khác biệt, nó chính là đây,” Bezos nhắc đến câu nói quen thuộc trong tư tưởng Jeff: “Chúng tôi thành tâm đặt khách hàng làm trung tâm, chúng tôi thành tâm hướng tới định hướng phát triển lâu dài và chúng tôi thành tâm hướng tới sáng tạo. Đa số các công ty khác không đề cao những vấn đề này. Họ tập trung vào đối thủ cạnh tranh hơn là khách hàng. Họ luôn muốn hướng mục tiêu kinh doanh để trả cổ tức hai hoặc ba lần trên một năm, và nếu không thể tạo ra kết quả kinh doanh như vậy, họ sẽ chuyển hướng khác. Và họ thích trở thành người theo sau hơn là người sáng tạo dẫn đầu, bởi vì như vậy sẽ an toàn, giảm thiểu rủi ro. Nên nếu bạn muốn thực sự hiểu Amazon, thì đó là lý do tại sao chúng tôi khác biệt. Rất ít công ty hội tụ cả ba nhân tố trên.”

Gần cuối buổi trò chuyện, chúng tôi dành thời gian thảo luận về cuốn sách này. Bezos nghiêng người về phía trước, chống khuỷu tay xuống bàn và hỏi: “Anh dự định giải quyết vấn đề hư cấu tường thuật ra sao?”

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Ồ vâng, tất nhiên, hư cấu tường thuật. Trong giây lát, tôi đã được trải nghiệm cảm giác đổ mồ hôi vì lo lắng của nhân viên Amazon trong hơn hai thập kỷ qua khi phải ứng phó với những câu hỏi bất ngờ từ ông chủ cực kỳ thông minh. Hư cấu tường thuật, Bezos bắt đầu giải thích, là thuật ngữ lần đầu được nhắc đến bởi Nassim Nicholas Taleb trong cuốn sách Thiên Nga Đen (The Black Swan) xuất bản năm 2007, miêu tả khuynh hướng của con người khi chuyển thực tại phức tạp thành câu chuyện nhẹ nhàng nhưng cực kỳ đơn giản. Taleb đưa ra ý kiến rằng, sự giới hạn của bộ não con người sinh ra khuynh hướng nhào nặn thực tại và sự kiện không liên quan đến nhau thành phương trình nguyên nhân – kết quả, sau đó chuyển hóa chúng thành ngôn ngữ tường thuật dễ hiểu. Taleb viết rằng, những câu chuyện này ngăn cản con người tiếp cận hiện tượng ngẫu nhiên thực tế của thế giới xung quanh, sự phức tạp trong trải nghiệm sống của chúng ta và ở mức độ nào đó, nhân tố may rủi tham gia vào tất cả thành công hay thất bại.

Bezos gợi ý rằng sự thành công của Amazon ở mức độ nào đó có thể trở thành câu chuyện phức tạp không tưởng. Không có giải thích nào dễ hiểu về nguyên nhân sản phẩm và dịch vụ được sinh ra, ví dụ như trong trường hợp của Dịch vụ Web Amazon. Dịch vụ kinh doanh điện toán đám mây tiên phong hiện nay được nhiều công ty Internet khác sử dụng trong hoạt động kinh doanh. “Khi một công ty nảy ra ý tưởng, đó là cả quá trình phức tạp. Chẳng có khoảnh khắc “bất chợt” nào cả,” Bezos nói. Ông lo rằng việc gói gọn lịch sử Amazon thành câu chuyện đơn giản có thể tạo ra ấn tượng về sự rõ ràng, mạch lạc hơn là câu chuyện thực sự.

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Trong cuốn sách của Taleb – tình cờ toàn bộ quản lý cấp cao của Amazon phải đọc – tác giả đưa ra ý kiến rằng cách tránh hiện tượng hư cấu tường thuật là phải kiểm định và dựa trên những hiểu biết thực tiễn về câu chuyện và ký ức. Đối với tác giả tham vọng này, có lẽ có một giải pháp thực tế hơn, đó là chấp nhận ảnh hưởng có thể xảy ra và sau đó tiếp tục tiến về phía trước.

Và như vậy, tôi bắt đầu với một lời từ chối. Ý tưởng xây dựng Amazon được thai nghén từ năm 1994 ở tầng 40 của tòa nhà chọc trời tại trung tâm thành phố New York. Gần 20 năm sau, công ty đã có trên 90.000 nhân viên và trở thành một trong những tập đoàn được biết đến nhiều nhất trên thế giới, với sự đa dạng về hàng hóa và mức giá thấp dành cho khách hàng cùng chất lượng dịch vụ tuyệt vời, đồng thời tái cơ cấu ngành kinh doanh và khiến những nhà lãnh đạo của một số thương hiệu nổi tiếng trên thế giới phải e dè. Cuốn sách là một nỗ lực mô tả quá trình trên diễn ra. Nội dung đưa ra sau đây được dựa trên 300 cuộc phỏng vấn với những nhà quản lý cấp cao và nhân viên hiện tại, cùng những người đã từng làm việc với Bezos, bao gồm cả những buổi trò chuyện của tôi với Bezos trong nhiều năm qua. Bezos đã đồng ý hỗ trợ dự án mặc dù ông đánh giá thời điểm này là “quá sớm” cho cái nhìn phản chiếu toàn bộ Amazon. Tuy nhiên, việc ông đồng ý cho tôi phỏng vấn nhiều quản lý cấp cao, gia đình và bạn bè khiến tôi thực sự cảm kích. Tôi cũng sử dụng những thông tin tổng hợp từ các bài viết về công ty trong 15 năm qua từ Newsweek, the New York Times và Bloomberg Businessweek.

Cuốn sách sẽ kể lại câu chuyện phía sau sự thành công của một trong những công ty vĩ đại nhất, kể từ khi Sam Walton bay xuyên qua Nam Mỹ trên chiếc phi cơ hai chỗ ngồi để chọn địa điểm cho những cửa hàng Walmart sắp thành lập. Một câu chuyện về hành trình của đứa trẻ tài năng lớn lên và trở thành tổng giám đốc điều hành đa tài. Cùng với đó, cuốn sách cũng đề cập đến câu chuyện về cách Bezos, gia đình và cộng sự đánh cược gia sản vào Internet cũng như vào tầm nhìn vĩ đại về cửa hàng bán tất cả mọi thứ.

—ooOoo—

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NGÔI NHÀ CỦA NHỮNG CHUYÊN GIA

Trước khi tự phong là cửa hàng sách lớn nhất thế giới hoặc siêu thị sách lớn nhất trên web, Amazon.com chỉ là ý tưởng xuất hiện trong văn phòng làm việc tại thành phố New York của một trong những công ty lạ thường nhất trên phố Wall có tên D. E. Shaw & Co.

Quỹ đầu cơ định lượng DESCO, cách gọi trìu mến của nhân viên công ty, được David E. Shaw, cựu giáo sư khoa học máy tính của Đại học Columbia, sáng lập vào năm 1988. Cùng với những nhà sáng lập của các tổ chức phân tích số liệu thị trường tiên phong cùng thời như Renaissance Technologies và công ty đầu tư Tudor, Shaw tiên phong trong việc sử dụng máy tính và những công thức toán học phức tạp để phân tích xu hướng bất thường của thị trường tài chính toàn cầu. Ví dụ, khi giá một cổ phiếu ở châu Âu cao hơn chút ít so với giá giao dịch tại Mỹ, hệ thống máy tính của công ty sẽ viết chương trình để nhanh chóng thực hiện giao dịch và kiếm lợi nhuận dựa trên số chênh lệch.

Cộng đồng tài chính ít biết về sự hiện diện của D.E. Shaw và người sáng lập muốn giữ mọi việc theo hướng như vậy. Công ty thích hoạt động ngoài vùng phủ sóng, chú trọng vào nguồn vốn tư nhân từ các nhà đầu tư giàu có như tỉ phú tài chính Donald Sussman và gia đình Tisch, giữ những thuật toán kinh doanh độc quyền khỏi rơi vào tay đối thủ cạnh tranh. Shaw tin tưởng rằng một khi DESCO trở thành công ty tiên phong trong phương pháp tiếp cận đầu tư kiểu mới, thì cách duy nhất để duy trì vị thế dẫn đầu là phải giữ bí mật kinh doanh và tránh dạy cho đối thủ cách nghĩ đến những giới hạn ứng dụng của hệ thống máy tính mới.

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David Shaw xuất hiện vào thời kỳ sơ khai của những chiếc siêu máy tính mới đầy sức mạnh. Ông nhận bằng tiến sĩ khoa học máy tính của Đại học Stanford năm 1980 và sau đó chuyển tới New York giảng dạy tại khoa Khoa học máy tính của Đại học Columbia. Trong suốt những năm đầu thập niên 80, những công ty công nghệ cao cố gắng mời ông về làm việc. Nhà phát minh Danny Hillis, người sáng lập công ty Thinking Machines Corporation và là một trong những người bạn thân nhất của Jeff Bezos, đã cố thuyết phục Shaw về thiết kế hệ thống máy tính song song cùng ông. Shaw lưỡng lự chấp nhận đề nghị và sau đó thay đổi ý định. Ông nói với Hillis rằng ông muốn làm một việc gì đó sinh lợi nhuận cao hơn và có thể sẽ quay lại lĩnh vực siêu máy tính khi đã trở lên giàu có. Hillis cho rằng thậm chí khi Shaw giàu có – một khả năng khó xảy ra – ông cũng sẽ không quay trở lại với khoa học máy tính. (Shaw đã giữ lời sau khi trở thành tỉ phú và chuyển giao công việc quản lý hàng ngày của D. E. Shaw cho người khác.) “Tôi hoàn toàn sai về Shaw,” Hillis nói.

Morgan Stanley cuối cùng đã can thiệp thành công và Shaw rời khỏi môi trường học thuật năm 1986, tham gia nhóm làm việc lừng danh về phần mềm thống kê chênh lệch giá trị dành cho xu hướng giao dịch đầu tư tự động mới. Nhưng Shaw quyết định tự mình phát triển. Ông rời Morgan Stanley năm 1988 và với 28 triệu đô la tiền vốn từ nhà đầu tư Donald Sussman, ông thành lập cửa hàng riêng trên hiệu sách Communist tại làng phía Tây của Manhattan.

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Theo kế hoạch phát triển ban đầu, D. E. Shaw sẽ hoàn toàn khác biệt so với những công ty kiểu phố Wall. Shaw không chỉ tuyển dụng chuyên gia tài chính mà cả nhà khoa học và toán học – những bộ óc siêu phàm cùng kiến thức nền tảng chuyên sâu, có chứng chỉ học thuật cao và hầu như ít mối liên hệ với xã hội. Bob Gelfond, thành viên tham gia DESCO sau khi công ty chuyển tới khu Park Avenue South, nói rằng: “David muốn thấy sức mạnh kết hợp giữa công nghệ và máy tính áp dụng trong tài chính theo một cách khoa học nhất” và ông ấy “ngưỡng mộ Goldman Sachs và muốn xây dựng một công ty phố Wall mẫu mực”.

Theo sát những tôn chỉ trên và nhiều lý luận khác, David Shaw thổi vào đội ngũ quản lý công ty những cảm nhận và quan điểm cá nhân. Ông thường xuyên gửi tới nhân viên thư hướng dẫn đánh vần tên công ty một cách tỉ mỉ – với một dấu cách giữa chữ D. và E. Ông cũng yêu cầu tất cả nhân viên sử dụng nội dung sứ mệnh công ty chuẩn mực theo đúng thứ tự câu chữ như sau: “Kinh doanh cổ phiếu, trái phiếu, hàng hóa có kỳ hạn, quyền chọn cổ phiếu và những công cụ tài chính khác”. Shaw cũng đưa ra yêu cầu đối với những vấn đề quan trọng khác: Bất kỳ ai trong số những nhà khoa học máy tính đều có thể đưa ra gợi ý kinh doanh, nhưng phải vượt qua các bài kiểm tra khoa học và kiểm tra thống kê kỹ lưỡng để chứng minh rằng những gợi ý đó phù hợp.

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Trong năm 1991, D. E. Shaw phát triển nhanh chóng và chuyển tới tầng thượng của tòa nhà chọc trời Manhattan, cách quảng trường Thời đại một tòa nhà. Công ty phát triển ấn tượng nhưng trang trí văn phòng đơn giản theo thiết kế của kiến trúc sư Steven Holl, bao gồm sảnh lớn hai tầng sơn màu sáng, từng được dự định chia nhỏ thành những bức tường vách trắng. Mùa thu năm đó, Shaw tổ chức một buổi gây quỹ thông qua bán vé vào cửa giá 1.000 đô, ủng hộ ứng cử viên tổng thống Bill Clinton. Những khách mời tham dự sự kiện gồm những nhân vật tầm cỡ như Jacqueline Onassis. Nhân viên được yêu cầu thu dọn sạch sẽ văn phòng vào buổi tối trước khi sự kiện diễn ra. Jeff Bezos, một trong những phó chủ tịch trẻ tuổi nhất của công ty, rời sự kiện để tham gia chơi bóng chuyền cùng đồng nghiệp. Nhưng trước đó ông đã nán lại và chụp ảnh chung với vị tổng thống tương lai.

Bezos thời điểm đó mới 29 tuổi, cao 1m73, bị hói và xuất hiện trong dáng vẻ xanh xao, nhàu nhĩ của người nghiện công việc. Ông trải qua bảy năm tại phố Wall và gây ấn tượng với bất kỳ ai từng gặp ở sự thông minh, sắc bén và vô cùng quả quyết. Ngay sau khi tốt nghiệp Đại học Princeton năm 1986, Bezos làm việc cho hai giáo sư Đại học Columbia trong công ty Fitel đang phát triển hệ thống mạng máy tính xuyên Đại Tây Dương để giao dịch cổ phiếu. Graciela Chichilnisky, một trong những sáng lập viên và ông chủ của Bezos, ấn tượng sâu sắc về một nhân viên tài năng và lạc quan, làm việc không biết mệt mỏi và đã quản lý công việc kinh doanh của công ty ở Luân Đôn và Tokyo vào những thời điểm khác nhau. “Anh chàng không bận tâm người xung quanh nghĩ gì,” Chichilnisky nói. “Khi bạn giao cho Bezos một vấn đề cần vận dụng trí óc, anh chàng sẽ nhanh chóng giải quyết thành công.”

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Bezos chuyển sang công ty tài chính Bankers Trust năm 1988, nhưng nản chí vì cho rằng công ty chỉ miễn cưỡng thách thức hiện trạng ổn định. Ông đã sẵn sàng tìm kiếm cơ hội khởi nghiệp cho riêng mình. Vào giữa năm 1989 và 1990, ông dành một vài tháng làm việc trong công ty mới thành lập cùng Halsey Minor, nhân viên trẻ của Merrill Lynch, người sau này tiếp tục phát triển mạng tin tức trực tuyến CNET. Công ty non nớt mới thành lập của họ hướng tới cung cấp dịch vụ gửi thư cá nhân hóa thông qua máy fax và bị sụp đổ khi Merrill Lynch rút số vốn đã được hứa đầu tư trước đó. Nhưng Bezos đã gây ấn tượng sâu sắc. Minor nhớ rằng Bezos đã nghiên cứu tỉ mỉ vài doanh nhân giàu có và ông ấy đặc biệt ngưỡng mộ người đàn ông có tên Frank Meeks, doanh nhân Virginia đã xây dựng khối gia sản lớn khi sở hữu chuỗi cung ứng Domino’s Pizza. Bezos tôn sùng nhà khoa học máy tính tiên phong Alan Kay và thường trích dẫn kết quả quan sát của ông ấy rằng “quan điểm thì đáng giá 80 điểm IQ” – nhắc nhở mọi người rằng quan sát mọi thứ xung quanh theo góc nhìn mới mẻ có thể nâng cao hiểu biết. “Ông ấy học hỏi từ những người xung quanh,” Minor nói. “Tôi không nghĩ rằng sẽ có ai Jeff biết mà ông ấy không học được gì từ họ.”

Bezos gần như đã sẵn sàng rời hẳn phố Wall khi một tay săn đầu người thuyết phục ông đến gặp thêm nhà quản lý cấp cao của công ty tài chính. Một công ty có nhà lãnh đạo khác thường. Bezos sau này nói rằng ông cảm thấy đồng điệu tâm giao trong công việc với David Shaw – “một số ít những người mà tôi biết có cả não trái và phải phát triển đầy đủ nhất”.

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Tại DESCO, Bezos thể hiện những phẩm chất riêng mà sau này nhân viên của ông quan sát thấy ở Amazon. Ông là người có kỷ luật và luôn rõ ràng, thu thập và lưu giữ những ý tưởng trong một cuốn sổ mang theo bên người, như thể sợ ý tưởng bay mất khỏi đầu nếu không ghi chúng lại ngay. Ông nhanh chóng từ bỏ những ý tưởng cũ và hướng tới tập trung vào cái mới nếu đó là lựa chọn tốt hơn. Ông cũng cho thấy tính cách “hiếu động” như trẻ con và điệu cười có thể cắt ngang cuộc trò chuyện mà sau này cả thế giới biết đến.

Bezos suy nghĩ phân tích về mọi thứ, bao gồm cả vấn đề xã hội. Lúc đó còn độc thân nên ông bắt đầu tham gia vào lớp khiêu vũ. Ông tính toán rằng việc này sẽ tăng cơ hội tiếp xúc với những phụ nữ mà ông gọi là n+. Sau này, ông đưa ra lời thú nhận nổi tiếng, đề cập đến suy nghĩ về cách làm tăng tỉ lệ khách hàng nữ. Jeff Holden, người làm việc cho Bezos đầu tiên tại D. E. Shaw & Co. và sau này tại Amazon, nói rằng Bezos là “một anh chàng hay xem xét nội tâm nhất mà tôi từng biết. Ông làm mọi thứ trong cuộc đời đều theo trật tự và phương pháp.”

D. E. Shaw không có thủ tục vô cớ như các công ty Phố Wall khác; về tính cách hướng ngoại, ít nhất, nó gần giống với một công ty khởi nghiệp ở Thung lũng Silicon. Các nhân viên mặc quần jean hoặc kaki, không mặc vest và cà vạt, và hệ thống phân cấp là phẳng (mặc dù thông tin chính về công thức giao dịch được giữ chặt chẽ).

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Bezos dường như yêu thích ý tưởng về một ngày làm việc không ngừng nghỉ; anh ấy cất một chiếc túi ngủ cuộn lại trong văn phòng và một ít xốp đựng trứng trên bệ cửa sổ phòng khi anh ấy cần nằm ngủ qua đêm. Nicholas Lovejoy, một đồng nghiệp sau này làm việc cùng anh ấy tại Amazon, tin rằng chiếc túi ngủ “thực sự hữu dụng như một chỗ dựa”. Khi họ rời văn phòng, Bezos và các đồng nghiệp ở DESCO thường giao lưu cùng nhau, chơi cờ hậu hoặc đánh cầu cho đến đầu giờ sáng, thường là vì tiền.

Khi công ty lớn mạnh, David Shaw bắt đầu nghĩ đến việc làm sao để mở rộng nguồn nhân lực. Ông tìm kiếm các chuyên viên toán học và khoa học, những người có tầm nhìn rộng, luôn đứng đầu trong lớp và thể hiện năng khiếu trong những môn học đặc biệt. Công ty cũng tuyển dụng nhân viên nhận học bổng của chương trình Fulbright và danh sách sinh viên do trưởng khoa các trường đại học hàng đầu gợi ý. Công ty gửi hàng trăm thư mời nhằm giới thiệu về công ty và tuyên bố “chúng tôi tiến hành tuyển dụng theo cách đặc biệt nhất”.

Những người hồi đáp thư có lý lịch thành tích nổi bật, điểm số trung bình môn học và điểm bài kiểm tra khả năng đạt yêu cầu sẽ bay đến New York, tham dự các cuộc phỏng vấn đầy áp lực và mệt mỏi trong một ngày. Các thành viên công ty rất thích thú hỏi các ứng viên những câu hỏi ngẫu nhiên như: “Ở nước Mỹ có bao nhiêu máy fax?” Mục đích là để xem các ứng viên giải quyết tình huống khó xử ra sao. Kết thúc phỏng vấn, những người tham gia vào quá trình tuyển dụng sẽ tiến hành họp và đánh giá từng ứng viên dựa trên bốn mức: rất không nên tuyển, không nên tuyển; nên tuyển và tuyển ngay. Sự từ chối của một thành viên công ty tham gia phỏng vấn cũng có thể loại ngay ứng viên.

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Bezos cũng áp dụng quy trình tuyển dụng của DESCO và những phương thức quản lý tinh hoa của Shaw vào Amazon. Thậm chí, ngày nay nhân viên Amazon vẫn sử dụng những hạng mục này để đánh giá và thông qua danh sách tuyển dụng.

Việc tuyển dụng quy mô lớn và quy trình phỏng vấn của DESCO được Bezos thấm nhuần; ngay cả khi tìm kiếm người bạn đời. MacKenzie Tuttle, tốt nghiệp Đại học Princeton chuyên ngành tiếng Anh năm 1992 và học cùng nữ nhà văn Toni Morrision. Bà tham gia quỹ đầu tư rủi ro ở vị trí trợ lý hành chính và sau đó làm chính thức cho Bezos. Lovejoy, đồng nghiệp cũ của Bezos, nhớ lại rằng Bezos đã thuê chiếc limousine trong một buổi tối và cùng vài đồng nghiệp tới câu lạc bộ đêm. “Ông ấy đã mời cả nhóm nhưng rõ ràng ông ấy chỉ chú ý tới MacKenzie mà thôi,” ông nói.

MacKenzie sau này chia sẻ rằng chính bà mới là người chú ý tới Bezos trước. “Văn phòng của tôi ngay kế bên văn phòng của ông ấy, và cả ngày tôi đều nghe thấy tiếng cười sảng khoái đó,” bà trả lời phỏng vấn trên tạp chí Vogue năm 2012. “Làm sao mà bạn không yêu tiếng cười đó được cơ chứ?” Bà bắt đầu chiến dịch chiếm lấy trái tim ông bằng việc mời ăn trưa. Cặp đôi đính hôn ba tháng sau khi chính thức hẹn hò; và họ kết hôn ba tháng sau đó. Đám cưới được diễn ra vào năm 1993 tại khu nghỉ dưỡng Breakers ở bờ biển West Palm. Chương trình đám cưới bao gồm trò chơi cho khách mời là người lớn và có tiệc đêm tại bể bơi của khách sạn. Bob Gelfond và một lập trình viên máy tính tên là Tom Karzes đã theo học tại D. E. Shaw.

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Vào thời điểm đó, DESCO phát triển nhanh chóng dẫn đến những khó khăn trong quản lý. Vài đồng nghiệp tại thời điểm đó nhớ lại rằng D. E. Shaw có thuê cố vấn. Ông ấy thực hiện bài kiểm tra tính cách cá nhân Myers-Briggs đối với toàn bộ thành viên trong đội ngũ lãnh đạo. Không ngạc nhiên khi kết quả bài kiểm tra đều cho thấy đa phần họ là người hướng nội. Người ít hướng nội nhất là Jeff Bezos. Tại D. E. Shaw vào đầu những năm 1990, ông được xem là người có biểu hiện hướng ngoại hơn cả.

Bezos là lãnh đạo tài năng của DESCO. Năm 1993, ông đã điều hành từ xa nhóm giao dịch quyền chọn ở Chicago và sau đó chuẩn bị vững chắc để bước vào kinh doanh trong thị trường phi tập trung, thị trường cho phép giao dịch những cổ phiếu chưa niêm yết trên thị trường tập trung. Các nhà đầu tư nhỏ lẻ có thể giao dịch cổ phần mà không phải trả hoa hồng cho sàn giao dịch chứng khoán New York. Brian Marsh, lập trình viên công ty, sau này làm việc tại Amazon, nói rằng Bezos “là người thực sự có sức ảnh hưởng và đưa ra lập luận đầy thuyết phục về dự án thị trường phi tập trung. Khá dễ dàng để thấy ông là nhà lãnh đạo tuyệt vời.” Tuy nhiên, Bezos cũng đối mặt với nhiều thách thức. Đối thủ chính trong sân chơi mới là Bernard Madoff (kiến trúc sư của một sơ đồ Ponzi lớn sẽ được tiết lộ vào năm 2008). Madoff đã khẳng định vị thế dẫn đầu và giữ vững vị trí trong thị trường phi tập trung. Bezos và nhóm của ông có thể nhìn thấy các văn phòng của Madoff trong Tòa nhà Lipstick ở phía Đông qua cửa sổ của họ ở trên cao của thành phố.

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Trong khi, toàn bộ phần còn lại của phố Wall nhìn nhận D. E. Shaw như quỹ dự phòng bí mật, công ty tự coi bản thân là thứ gì đó khác biệt hơn. Theo hoạch định của David Shaw, công ty không thực sự là quỹ đầu tư rủi ro mà là phòng thí nghiệm công nghệ đa năng với nhiều nhà cải cách và những kỹ sư tài năng, những người có thể áp dụng khoa học máy tính để giải quyết nhiều vấn đề khác nhau. Đầu tư tài chính là một trong những lĩnh vực đầu tiên mà họ áp dụng kỹ năng này.

Vì thế vào năm 1994, thời điểm mà cơ hội kinh doanh dựa trên Internet chỉ dành cho số ít công ty, Shaw cảm thấy rằng công ty của ông có những nhân tố đặc biệt để tiếp cận lĩnh vực mới mẻ này. Và Jeff Bezos là người ông tin tưởng có thể đứng đầu dự án.

D. E. Shaw có trong tay những điều kiện lý tưởng để tận dụng triệt để lợi thế của Internet. Hầu hết các nhân viên tại Shaw đã sử dụng những công cụ Internet sơ khai như Gopher, Usenet, email và Mosaic, một trong những trình duyệt web đầu tiên. Công ty đã sử dụng công cụ chuyên dụng LaTeX để viết báo cáo. Bezos từ chối sử dụng chương trình vì ông cho rằng nó là công cụ phức tạp không cần thiết. D. E. Shaw cũng là một trong những công ty phố Wall đầu tiên đăng ký tên miền URL. Ghi chép lịch sử Internet chỉ ra rằng trang Deshaw.com thành lập năm 1992. Goldman Sachs đăng ký tên miền năm 1995, và Morgan Stanley nối gót một năm sau đó.

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Shaw, người đã sử dụng Internet và trình tiền nhiệm của nó, ARPANET, trong những năm làm giáo sư, rất đam mê về các tác động thương mại và xã hội của một mạng máy tính toàn cầu. Bezos có những trải nghiệm Internet đầu tiên trong lớp học vật lý học thiên thể tại Đại học Princeton năm 1985. Nhưng ông không hề nghĩ đến tiềm năng phát triển thương mại cho tới khi bước chân vào DESCO. Shaw và Bezos gặp nhau vài giờ mỗi tuần để đưa ra một vài ý tưởng về những làn sóng công nghệ mới, rồi Bezos sẽ xem xét những ý tưởng đề xuất và nghiên cứu tính khả thi.

Vào đầu năm 1994, vài dự án kinh doanh đã manh nha từ những cuộc thảo luận giữa Bezos và Shaw cùng một số nhân vật khác của D. E. Shaw. Trong đó có ý tưởng về dịch vụ thư điện tử miễn phí cài thêm quảng cáo cho khách hàng. Ý tưởng này có nhiều điểm tương đồng với Gmail và Yahoo Mail. Dựa trên ý tưởng đó, DESCO thành lập công ty Juno, chính thức đưa vào hoạt động năm 1999 và không lâu sau đó sáp nhập với đối thủ NetZero.

Một ý tưởng khác là tạo ra dịch vụ tài chính cho phép người sử dụng Internet có thể giao dịch cổ phiếu và trái phiếu trực tuyến. Năm 1995, Shaw đã hiện thức hóa ý tưởng khi thành lập công ty con Dịch vụ tài chính FarSight, hình mẫu cho các công ty sau này như E-Trade. Sau này, ông bán FarSight cho Merrill Lynch.

Shaw và Bezos cũng thảo luận về một ý tưởng khác. Họ gọi nó là “cửa hàng mọi thứ”.

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Một vài giám đốc làm việc tại DESCO thời điểm đó cho rằng ý tưởng về cửa hàng triệu đồ dường như rất đơn giản: Một công ty Internet đóng vai trò trung gian giữa khách hàng và nhà sản xuất, bán gần như tất cả mặt hàng trên phạm vi toàn thế giới. Yếu tố quan trọng của sứ mệnh đặt ra trong thời gian đầu đó là khách hàng có thể viết nhận xét sản phẩm. Đây sẽ là phiên bản đáng tin cậy và tuyệt vời hơn phiên bản đánh giá nhà cung cấp của Montgomery Ward. Bản thân Shaw xác nhận ý tưởng về cửa hàng trực tuyến trong bài viết trên tờ New York Times vào năm 1999. “Ý tưởng này luôn luôn cho phép ai đó tạo lợi nhuận trên cương vị người trung gian. Câu hỏi đặt ra là: Ai sẽ là người trung gian đó?”

Bị kích thích bởi niềm tin vững chắc của Shaw về sự quan trọng của Internet, Bezos bắt đầu nghiên cứu sự phát triển của nó. Tác giả đồng thời là chủ bút, John Quarterman ở Texas gần đây bắt đầu xuất bản tờ Matrix News – bản tin định kỳ hàng tháng ca ngợi và thảo luận những hướng phát triển thương mại của Internet. Số đặc biệt xuất bản tháng Hai năm 1994 thực sự cung cấp những thông tin gây ngạc nhiên. Lần đầu tiên, Quarterman đã phân tích sự phát triển của web và chỉ ra rằng web có giao diện đơn giản, thân thiện, phù hợp hơn với đa số người dùng so với những công nghệ Internet khác. Trong một biểu đồ, ông chỉ ra rằng một số lượng byte truyền đi trên web đã tăng tới con số 2.057 lần từ tháng Một năm 1993 đến tháng Một năm 1994. Một biểu đồ khác cho thấy số lượng gói dữ liệu – đơn vị dữ liệu – được gửi qua web tăng lên con số 2.650 lần trong cùng khoảng thời gian.

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Bezos phân tích những thông tin trên và cho rằng hoạt động trên web nhìn chung đã tăng vọt lên so với năm trước khoảng 2.300 – 230.000% tăng trưởng. “Mọi thứ không nhanh đến thế đâu,” Bezos sau đó phát biểu. “Nó hoàn toàn bất thường và khiến tôi bắt đầu suy nghĩ. Dự án kinh doanh nào thực sự khả thi trong tình hình tăng trưởng như thế này?” (Bezos cũng thích đề cập về mức tăng trưởng thường niên của web là 2.300%, đây cũng chính là tỉ lệ lôi ông ra khỏi sự tự mãn trong các phát biểu hồi Amazon mới được thành lập. Điều đó đã tạo nên một chi tiết thú vị về lịch sử khởi đầu của công ty: Amazon đã khởi đầu bằng một phép toán sai.)

Bezos kết luận rằng cửa hàng thực sự có mọi thứ sẽ là phi thực tế – ít nhất là vào thời gian đầu. Ông lập danh sách 20 danh mục sản phẩm khả thi bao gồm: phần mềm vi tính, đồ dùng văn phòng, sản phẩm may mặc và âm nhạc. Cuối cùng, sách là lựa chọn tốt nhất. Sách là hàng hóa thuần túy; một cuốn sách trong cửa hàng này cũng giống hệt cuốn sách được mua ở nơi khác, vì thế người mua hàng luôn biết rằng họ đang mua cái gì. Vào thời điểm đó, trên thị trường có hai nhà phân phối sách chính là Ingram và Baker & Taylor. Vì vậy, nhà bán lẻ mới gia nhập thị trường sẽ không phải tiếp cận từng nhà xuất bản riêng lẻ. Điều quan trọng nhất là có ba triệu cuốn sách được in trên toàn thế giới. Số lượng sách nhiều hơn nhiều lượng sách mà cửa hàng của Barnes & Noble hay của Borders có thể chứa.

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Nếu không thể thành lập cửa hàng triệu đồ ngay lập tức, ông vẫn có thể nắm bắt thứ cốt yếu – cung cấp lựa chọn không giới hạn – ít nhất trong một danh mục sản phẩm quan trọng. “Với sự đa dạng khổng lồ đó của các sản phẩm, nên bạn chỉ có thể lựa chọn xây dựng cửa hàng trực tuyến,” Bezos nói. “Bạn có thể xây dựng cửa hàng rất lớn với vô vàn lựa chọn và khách hàng có thể đánh giá sản phẩm họ chọn.”

Trong văn phòng ở tầng 40 tại số 120 trên đường West Forty-Fifth, Bezos khó có thể nén lại nhiệt huyết của mình. Giám đốc phụ trách tuyển dụng của DESCO, Charles Ardai đã nghiên cứu trang web của vài mô hình cửa hàng trực tuyến ra đời trước như Book Stacks Unlimited, trụ sở tại Cleveland, bang Ohio và WordsWorth ở Cambridge, Massachusetts. Ardai vẫn còn giữ những bản lưu giao dịch họ thực hiện trong khi đánh giá những trang web đó. Ông mua cuốn Isaac Asimov’s Cyberdreams từ trang web cửa hàng Future Fantasy ở Palo Alto, bang California. Giá sách là 6,04 đô la. Cuốn sách được gửi đến hai tuần sau đó. Ardai xé hộp các-tông và đưa cho Bezos xem. Trông nó thật tồi tệ và rách nát trong quá trình vận chuyển. Chẳng ai đưa ra được giải pháp bán sách trực tuyến tốt nhất. Như Bezos nhận định trước đó, đây là cơ hội lớn chưa được khai thác.

Bezos biết rằng ông sẽ không bao giờ có công ty của riêng mình nếu theo đuổi dự án của D. E. Shaw. Quả thực, công ty sở hữu toàn bộ Juno và Farsigh và Shaw làm chủ tịch của cả hai. Nếu Bezos muốn trở thành chủ sở hữu thực sự hay nhà khởi nghiệp nắm giữ cổ phần chính và đạt được thành công về tiền bạc như ông trùm pizza, Frank Meeks thì ông phải rời bỏ “ngôi nhà” thoải mái và đang sinh lợi trên phố Wall.

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Những điều xảy ra tiếp theo trở thành một trong những huyền thoại gây dựng nền móng của Internet. Mùa xuân năm đó, Bezos nói với David Shaw rằng ông chuẩn bị rời khỏi công ty để thành lập cửa hàng sách trực tuyến. Shaw đề nghị họ đi dạo cùng nhau và đã thảo luận về dự án cũng như những động lực thúc đẩy kinh doanh riêng của Bezos. Shaw nói rằng ông hiểu và thông cảm những gì Bezos đang trải qua – như lúc ông rời Morgan Stanley. Ông cũng nhấn mạnh rằng D. E. Shaw đang phát triển nhanh chóng và Bezos đang có công việc tuyệt vời. Ông nói rằng công ty mới của Bezos cuối cùng có thể cạnh tranh với công ty con của ông. Cả hai đồng ý rằng Bezos sẽ dành vài ngày suy nghĩ về điều đó.

Trong thời gian Bezos suy nghĩ phải làm gì tiếp theo, ông đọc gần hết cuốn tiểu thuyết Tàn dư ngày ấy (Remains of the Day) của Kazuo Ishiguro. Cuốn sách nói về một người quản gia buồn bã kể lại những quyết định về cuộc sống cá nhân và công việc trong những năm tháng phục vụ ở nước Anh. Trong lúc hồi tưởng về những sự kiện quan trọng trong cuộc đời, Bezos chợt nảy ra suy nghĩ về điều mà ông gọi là “tối thiểu hóa sự hối tiếc” để quyết định thực hiện những bước tiếp theo trong sự nghiệp cá nhân.

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“Khi đứng trước quá nhiều thứ, bạn có thể bị xáo trộn bởi những thứ nhỏ nhất,” Bezos phát biểu vài năm sau đó. “Tôi biết khi 80 tuổi, tôi sẽ không bao giờ nghĩ về việc tại sao tôi lại rời phố Wall vào thời điểm nhận tiền thưởng giữa năm 1994. Khi bạn 80 tuổi, bạn sẽ chẳng lo lắng về những điều tương tự như vậy. Cùng thời điểm đó, tôi chỉ biết rằng có thể sẽ cực kỳ hối tiếc vì không chọn Internet mà tôi cho rằng sẽ trở thành cuộc cách mạng. Khi tôi nghĩ theo hướng này thì tôi dễ dàng đưa ra quyết định.”

Cha mẹ Bezos, Mike và Jackie, nhận điện thoại của Bezos vào thời điểm họ đã sống gần ba năm tại Bogota, Colombia, nơi Mike làm kỹ sư dầu khí cho Tập đoàn Exxon. Theo như lời Mike Bezos kể lại, phản ứng đầu tiên của họ là: “Ý con là gì, con định bán sách qua Internet ư?” Họ đã từng sử dụng dịch vụ trực tuyến Prodigy để trao đổi thông tin với các thành viên trong gia đình và tổ chức tiệc đính hôn cho Jeff và MacKenzie. Vì vậy, họ không quá ngù ngờ về công nghệ mới này. Thay vào đó, họ lo lắng về việc đứa con trai thành đạt rời bỏ công việc có thu nhập tốt tại phố Wall để theo đuổi ý tưởng hoàn toàn điên rồ. Bà Jackie Bezos góp ý rằng Bezos nên điều hành công ty vào buổi tối hoặc cuối tuần. “Không, mọi thứ đang thay đổi chóng mặt mẹ à,” Bezos trả lời. “Con cần phải nhanh hơn.”

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Và Jeff Bezos đã bắt đầu kế hoạch cho cuộc hành trình của mình. Ông tổ chức một bữa tiệc nhỏ tại căn hộ Upper West Side để xem tập cuối phim Du hành giữa các vì sao – Thế hệ mới (Star Trek – The next generation). Sau đó, ông bay tới Santa Cruz, bang California để gặp hai lập trình viên dày dạn kinh nghiệm do Peter Laventhol, nhân viên đầu tiên của David Shaw, giới thiệu và cùng tìm kiếm mặt bằng văn phòng ở Santa Cruz. Nhưng sau đó Bezos biết đến quyết định của Tòa án Tối cao Hoa Kỳ năm 1992 về việc giữ nguyên điều luật trước đó, cụ thể các công ty không phải thu thuế tiêu thụ của khách hàng ở những bang họ không có trụ sở kinh doanh. Ngành kinh doanh đặt hàng qua thư dĩ nhiên tránh những bang đông dân cư như California và New York, và Bezos cũng sẽ như vậy.

Trở về New York, ông thông báo cho đồng nghiệp rằng sẽ rời khỏi D. E. Shaw. Bezos và Jeff Holden, người vừa tốt nghiệp Đại học Illinois tại Urbana – Champaign, đang làm việc cho Bezos trong dự án thị trường phi tập trung, đi uống với nhau. Hai người rất thân thiết. Holden đến từ Rochester Hills, bang Michigan. Khi còn niên thiếu, dưới bí danh Nova, ông khá lão luyện trong việc phá mã bảo vệ bản quyền trên phần mềm. Là người có nhiều khát vọng và nói nhanh, ông nói liên tục đến nỗi Bezos thích đùa với Holden: “Dạy tôi làm sao nghe nhanh hơn với.”

Giờ đây, họ đang ngồi đối diện nhau tại Virgil, quán thịt nướng nằm trên đường Forty-Fourth. Ban đầu Bezos quyết định đặt tên công ty là Cadabra nhưng chưa chắc chắn về cái tên đó. Holden viết kín hai mặt tờ giấy những cái tên khác nhau. Trong danh sách đó, Bezos thích nhất MakeItSo.com, khẩu lệnh thường dùng của thuyền trưởng Picard trong phim Du hành giữa các vì sao (Star Trek).

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Sau khi uống bia, Holden nói muốn sát cánh cùng Bezos. Nhưng Bezos khá lo lắng vì hợp đồng với D. E. Shaw quy định rằng nếu rời khỏi công ty, ông không được phép tuyển dụng bất cứ nhân viên nào của DESCO ít nhất trong hai năm. David Shaw không phải là người mà ông muốn vượt mặt. “Cậu vừa tốt nghiệp, giờ vẫn mắc nợ. Và điều này thật mạo hiểm,” Bezos nói. “Ở đây đi. Hãy tích lũy tài sản và tôi sẽ giữ liên lạc với cậu.”

Cuối tháng đó, Bezos và MacKenzie đóng gói đồ đạc trong nhà và nói với bên vận chuyển bắt đầu chở đồ đạc đi dọc đất nước – họ nói sẽ gọi điện thông báo điểm đến cụ thể vào ngày hôm sau. Đầu tiên, họ bay tới Fort Worth, bang Texas, và mượn chiếc Chevy Blazer 1988 của cha Bezos. Sau đó, họ lái xe về phía tây bắc, Bezos ngồi ghế phía sau, ước tính doanh thu bằng Excel – những con số hoàn toàn khác xa con số thực tế sau này. Họ thu xếp nghỉ lại tại khách sạn Motel 6 tại Shamrock, bang Texas nhưng đã kín phòng. Vì thế họ nghỉ ở nhà nghỉ bên đường Rambler. Ngày hôm sau, họ dừng chân tại Grand Canyon và cùng ngắm mặt trời mọc. Bezos lúc đó mới 31 tuổi và MacKenzie chỉ mới 24. Họ cùng nhau viết lên câu chuyện khởi nghiệp mà hàng triệu người sử dụng Internet và các nhà khởi nghiệp ghi nhớ sâu đậm.

Đã hơn một năm trôi qua trước khi Jeff Holden nghe tin về người bạn. Bezos đã định cư ở Seattle và gửi email cho Holden một đường dẫn đến trang web. Giờ họ gọi nó là Amazon.com. Trang web còn khá sơ sài, hầu như chỉ có chữ và vài thứ khác chẳng mấy ấn tượng. Holden mua một vài cuốn sách trên trang web và để lại ý kiến phản hồi. Một năm nữa trôi qua, và cuối cùng khi cam kết giữa Bezos và David Shaw về việc không xâm phạm sau nghỉ việc ở D. E. Shaw hết hạn được vài tháng, điện thoại của Holden vang lên.

Đó là Bezos. “Đến lúc rồi,” ông nói. “Nó bắt đầu đi vào hoạt động rồi”.

—ooOoo—

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CUỐN SÁCH CỦA BEZOS

Trên bảng thông báo ngày 21 tháng 8 năm 1994:

Công ty chúng tôi cần tìm những lập trình viên tài năng lập trình C/C++/ Unix để trợ giúp hoạt động kinh doanh qua Internet. Ứng viên bắt buộc phải có kinh nghiệm về thiết kế và xây dựng các hệ thống lớn, phức tạp; khả năng hoàn thành công việc trong 1/3 thời gian mà hầu hết những người thành thạo có thể làm. Ứng viên phải có bằng đại học, thạc sỹ hoặc tiến sỹ chuyên ngành công nghệ thông tin hoặc tương đương. Khả năng giao tiếp tốt là cần thiết. Có kinh nghiệm làm việc với các máy chủ của trang web hoặc HTML nhưng không bắt buộc.

Chào đón những đồng nghiệp tài năng, tận tụy, nhiệt huyết và thú vị. Ứng viên phải sẵn sàng làm việc tại Seattle (chúng tôi sẽ chi trả chi phí đi lại).

Nhân viên sẽ được hưởng quyền lợi xứng đáng, bao gồm sở hữu cổ phần của công ty.

Hãy gửi sơ yếu lý lịch và thư xin việc của bạn cho Jeff Bezos theo địa chỉ: Cadabra, 10704 N.E. đường 28, Bellevue, WA 98004.

Cơ hội dành cho tất cả mọi người.

“Xây dựng tương lai dễ hơn nhiều so với ngồi dự đoán nó”.

– Alan Kay

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Ngay từ đầu, họ đã biết cần một cái tên công ty hay hơn. Todd Tarbert, luật sư đầu tiên của Bezos, sau khi họ đăng ký tên công ty tại bang Washington vào tháng 7 năm 1994 nói rằng, sự ám chỉ chết chóc của cái tên Cadabra Inc. khiến nó quá tối nghĩa, và nghe qua điện thoại mọi người có xu thế nghe thành Cadaver (tử thi). Nên kết thúc mùa hè năm đó, sau khi thuê ngôi nhà trang trại với ba phòng ngủ tại ngoại ô phía đông Seattle thuộc Bellevue, Bezos và MacKenzie bắt đầu nảy ra ý tưởng mới. Hồ sơ lưu trữ Internet cho thấy trong thời gian đó, họ đăng ký tên miền Awake.com, Browse.com và Bookmall.com. Bezos cũng xem qua tên Aard.com, một từ có nguồn gốc từ tiếng Hà Lan, giúp thăng hạng vào bảng xếp hạng website hàng đầu, vì thời điểm đó thứ tự sắp xếp dựa theo bảng chữ cái.

Bezos và vợ dần chuyển hướng sang cái tên khác Relentless.com. Bạn bè góp ý rằng nghe âm của từ mang chút điềm xấu. Nhưng cái tên đó để lại ấn tượng say mê trong Bezos: Ông đăng ký đường dẫn vào tháng 9 năm 1994 và giữ nó cho đến bây giờ. Gõ Relentless.com vào bất kỳ trình duyệt web nào bây giờ, bạn sẽ truy cập Amazon.

Bezos chọn thành lập công ty của mình ở Seattle vì danh tiếng của thành phố là một trung tâm công nghệ và vì bang Washington có dân số tương đối nhỏ (so với California, New York và Texas), điều đó có nghĩa là Amazon sẽ phải thu tiền bán hàng của bang. chỉ đánh thuế từ một phần nhỏ khách hàng. Trong khi khu vực này vẫn còn là một tiền đồn đô thị hẻo lánh, nổi tiếng với đá grunge hơn là cộng đồng doanh nghiệp của nó, Microsoft đã đạt được bước tiến của mình ở Redmond gần đó và Đại học Washington đã sản xuất một lượng ổn định sinh viên tốt nghiệp ngành khoa học máy tính.

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Seattle cũng gần kề một trong hai nhà phân phối sách lớn nhất: Ingram có một nhà kho cách 6 giờ lái xe tại Roseburg, Oregon. Và doanh nhân địa phương Nick Hanauer, người mà Bezos mới gặp gần đây thông qua một người bạn đã cố gắng thuyết phục Bezos cho Seattle cơ hội. Sau này, ông trở thành người chủ chốt giới thiệu Bezos với những nhà đầu tư tiềm năng.

Mùa thu năm đó, Shel Kaphan lái chiếc U-Haul chở đầy đồ đạc từ Santa Cruz và chính thức gia nhập cùng Bezos và vợ với tư cách nhân viên sáng lập Amazon và chịu trách nhiệm chính về kỹ thuật. Kaphan lớn lên tại vùng vịnh San Francisco và có niềm đam mê máy tính khi còn thiếu niên. Ông đã khám phá ra ARPANET, sản phẩm của Bộ Quốc phòng Mỹ và sản phẩm tiền thân của Internet. Khi học trung học phổ thông, Kaphan gặp Stewart Brand, một nhà văn và nhà tổ chức văn hóa đối lập. Vào mùa hè năm tốt nghiệp, Kaphan nhận việc tại Whole Earth Catalog, ấn phẩm của Brand đăng tải nội dung về thiết bị và sách của kỷ nguyên thông tin mới. Với một mái tóc dài mang phong cách hippi và râu mọc rậm rạp, Kaphan làm việc tại Whole Earth Truck Store của Brand tại công viên Menlo, một thư viện cho mượn di động, cung cấp dịch vụ giáo dục. Ông có hướng xây dựng hệ thống đăng ký tiền mặt, điền đầy đủ thông tin, sau đó đóng gói sách và catalog chuyển tới khách hàng.

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Nhận bằng cử nhân toán học của Đại học California sau quá trình học-bỏ học một thập kỷ tại Santa Cruz, Kaphan dành thời gian làm việc cho những công ty tại vùng vịnh, bao gồm công ty Kaleida Labs liên doanh chết yểu giữa Apple và IBM, chuyên phát triển phần mềm nghe nhìn cho máy tính cá nhân. Ông thường thể hiện sự thất vọng về trải nghiệm trong thời gian này theo cách mà bạn bè ông gọi đó là vẻ mặt u ám. Khi tới Seattle, do cá tính của mình, Kaphan cảm thấy nghi ngờ về tương lai thành công của một công ty non trẻ mới thành lập. Ông ngay lập tức lo lắng về tên công ty. “Tôi đã từng làm việc trong một công ty tư vấn nhỏ có tên Symmetry Group, và ai cũng nghĩ rằng chúng tôi có tên là Cemetery (nghĩa trang) Group,” Kaphan nói. “Khi nghe tên Cadaver Inc., tôi nghĩ Ôi Chúa ơi, không phải lại thế nữa chứ.” Nhưng Kaphan (giờ đang ở tuổi 40 đã xén đi mớ tóc dài và râu rậm, bắt đầu hói) đã được truyền cảm hứng từ những điều ông nhìn nhận về tiềm năng của Amazon trong việc sử dụng web đáp ứng sứ mệnh của Whole Earth Catalog, xây dựng hệ thống cung cấp thông tin và công cụ có thể tiếp cận ở bất cứ đâu trên thế giới.

Ban đầu, Kaphan chỉ ra rằng ông sẽ lập trình một phần và quay về Santa Cruz làm việc từ xa, nên ông để lại một nửa đồ đạc ở nhà. Và khi đến Seattle, ông phải ở với Bezos và MacKenzie tại Bellevue vài ngày trong lúc tìm kiếm chỗ thuê. Họ dựng chỗ làm việc tại gara đã được cải tạo ở nhà Bezos.

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Bezos dựng hai chiếc bàn đầu tiên từ tấm gỗ màu vàng trị giá 60 đô la của Home Depot. Sau này, câu chuyện khởi đầu này được lưu truyền trong Amazon và sánh ngang với việc Noah xây dựng chiếc thuyền lớn trong kinh thánh. Vào cuối tháng Chín, Bezos lái xe xuống Portland, Oregon để tham gia khóa học bốn ngày về bán sách được tài trợ bởi Hiệp hội những người bán sách ở Mỹ, tổ chức dành cho những cửa hàng sách độc lập. Chuyên đề nghiên cứu bao gồm những chủ đề như “Chọn lựa mở kho” và “Quản lý kho”. Đồng thời, Kaphan bắt đầu tìm kiếm máy tính, cơ sở dữ liệu và học cách lập trình trang web – vào những ngày này, mọi thứ trên Internet đều phải xây dựng riêng.

Mọi việc được thực hiện chỉ dựa trên ngân sách ít ỏi. Ban đầu Bezos tự mình góp vốn 10.000 đô la tiền mặt, và trong vòng 16 tháng, ông sử dụng thêm khoản vay không lãi suất trị giá 84.000 đô la để trang trải trong giai đoạn ban đầu (thông tin dựa trên tài liệu công khai). Hợp đồng của Kaphan ràng buộc ông phải cam kết mua cổ phiếu trị giá 5.000 đô la ngay sau khi gia nhập công ty. Ông chuyển quyền mua thêm 20.000 đô la cổ phiếu bởi vì đã nhận cắt giảm 50% lương trả trong giai đoạn ban đầu, và giống như Bezos chỉ nhận mức lương 64.000 đô la một năm. “Mọi việc dường như không chắc chắn trong giai đoạn đó,” Kaphan nói, khá nhiều người coi ông là người đồng sáng lập Amazon. “Chẳng có gì thực sự ngoại trừ một anh chàng với điệu cười lớn, dựng bàn từ những tấm gỗ hình chiếc cửa trong một gara đã được cải tạo, khung cảnh giống như trong văn phòng tại nhà của tôi tại Santa Cruz. Tôi chấp nhận rủi ro lớn khi chuyển tới đây và chấp nhận mức lương thấp, nên mặc dù tôi có tiền tiết kiệm, nhưng tôi vẫn không cảm thấy thoải mái cam kết đầu tư hơn những gì tôi có.”

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Vào đầu năm 1995, cha mẹ Bezos, Jackie và Mike Bezos, đầu tư 100.000 đô la vào Amazon. “Chúng tôi đã xem kế hoạch kinh doanh, nhưng tất cả nội dung có vẻ quá chung chung,” Mike Bezos nói. “Dường như nó không thực sự hấp dẫn khi chúng tôi đặt cược vào Jeff.” Bezos trao đổi với bố mẹ rằng có 70% khiến họ mất tất cả. “Con muốn nói với bố mẹ về rủi ro gặp phải, bởi vì con vẫn muốn về nhà vào lễ Tạ ơn nếu kế hoạch không thành công,” ông nói.

Theo một cách khác, Amazon là câu chuyện gia đình. MacKenzie, một tiểu thuyết gia đầy tham vọng trở thành kế toán viên chính thức đầu tiên của công ty, xử lý vấn đề tài chính, viết séc và hỗ trợ tuyển dụng. Nhân viên sẽ đi tới một nơi gần Barnes & Noble trong những buổi cà phê giải lao và họp hành, một sự mỉa mai mà Bezos sau này thường nhắc tới trong các bài phát biểu và phỏng vấn.

Ít nhất trong giai đoạn đầu, công việc dường như chỉ có đôi chút căng thẳng. Kaphan hồi tưởng về thời điểm xuất hiện tại ngôi nhà ở Bellevue sáng sớm một ngày tháng Mười, chỉ để nghe Bezos thông báo rằng tất cả họ sẽ nghỉ một ngày để đi bộ đường dài. Bezos, MacKenzie và Kaphan đã lái xe 112 km tới núi Rainier và dành cả ngày lang thang giữa màn tuyết trên đỉnh núi lửa uy nghiêm. Vào những ngày trời quang, ngọn núi sẽ chiếm trọn đường chân trời Seattle.

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Cuối mùa thu năm đó, họ thuê Paul Davis, lập trình viên người Anh đã từng làm việc tại khoa Khoa học máy tính và ứng dụng khoa học của Đại học Washington. Đồng nghiệp của Davis hoài nghi về tương lai của ông, khi chuyển tới một cửa hàng sách trực tuyến chưa chính thức cung cấp dịch vụ, nên họ quyên góp một vài đô la vào hộp cà phê phòng khi khó khăn. Davis tham gia cùng Kaphan và Bezos trong gara, làm về mảng máy chủ trạm SPARC từ Sun Microsystems, những chiếc máy giống hình hộp đựng pizza và tiêu thụ nhiều điện năng đến nỗi cầu chì trong nhà liên tục cháy. Thậm chí, họ đã phải sử dụng dây điện màu vàng từ những phòng khác để cắm những chiếc máy tính vào những mạch điện khác nhau, khiến cho không thể chạy máy sấy tóc hoặc máy hút bụi trong nhà.

Davis, người đạp xe đến Bellevue mỗi ngày với đôi tất Gore-Tex bên ngoài gấu quần của mình, cho biết: “Ban đầu nó không thực sự có nhiều năng lượng mà một người thường gắn bó với một công ty khởi nghiệp. Chúng tôi đã khởi động trước. Chỉ có Shel, tôi và Jeff trong một văn phòng, ngồi quanh chiếc bàn có bảng trắng và thảo luận về cách phân chia công việc lập trình”.

Một trong những mục tiêu thúc đẩy họ là phải tạo ra một thứ gì đó siêu việt hơn những cửa hàng sách trực tuyến lúc đó. “Thách thức đầu tiên là phải tạo ra cái gì đó tốt hơn những cái hiện tại,” David nói. “Có sự cạnh tranh khốc liệt ở đây. Nó không giống như việc Jeff nảy sinh những ý tưởng hoàn toàn mới.”

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Trong suốt thời gian đó, cái tên Cadabra vẫn tồn tại tạm thời. Tuy nhiên, vào cuối tháng 10 năm 1994, Bezos tra cứu kỹ phân mục chữ cái A trong từ điển và ông thấy lóe lên trong đầu khi đọc đến từ Amazon. Con sông lớn nhất hành tinh; cửa hàng sách lớn nhất hành tinh. Ông bước vào gara vào một buổi sáng và thông báo với hai đồng nghiệp về cái tên mới. Ông đưa ra ám hiệu rằng sẽ không lắng nghe ý kiến của bất kỳ ai và đăng ký đường dẫn URL mới vào ngày 1 tháng 11 năm 1994. “Nó không chỉ là con sông lớn nhất thế giới, nó lớn hơn nhiều lần so với con sông lớn thứ hai. Nó thổi bay tất cả những con sông khác,” Bezos nói.

Trong khi gara Bellevue ban đầu sẽ trở thành hình tượng cho giai đoạn lãng mạn trong lịch sử sơ khai của Amazon – khởi đầu đầy khiêm tốn giống công ty huyền thoại Apple và Hewlett Packard – thì Amazon chỉ đóng quân tại đó trong vỏn vẹn vài tháng. Khi Kaphan và Davis gần như hoàn thành trang web phiên bản thử nghiệm đầu tiên, Bezos bắt đầu nghĩ về việc thuê thêm nhân viên – đồng nghĩa với việc phải tìm một văn phòng làm việc chuyên nghiệp hơn. Mùa xuân năm đó, họ chuyển tới một văn phòng nhỏ nằm trên cửa hàng bán lẻ Color Tile, gần trung tâm Seattle. Amazon chính thức có nhà kho đầu tiên nằm trong tầng hầm tòa nhà: rộng 18,5m2, không cửa sổ, đã từng là studio luyện tập của một ban nhạc. Ngay lập tức, Bezos và MacKenzie rời ngôi nhà Bellevue, cố gắng bắt nhịp lại với cuộc sống thành phố khi còn ở New York, và chuyển đến căn hộ rộng 83,6m2 vuông trên đường Vine trong khu Belltown của Seattle.

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Mùa xuân 1995, Bezos và Kaphan gửi đường dẫn trang web phiên bản thử nghiệm đến vài chục người, bao gồm bạn bè, thành viên trong gia đình và đồng nghiệp cũ. Trang web có nội dung nghèo nàn, nhiều chữ, phù hợp với những trình duyệt sơ khai và tốc độ internet chậm chạp của thời điểm đó. Dòng chữ “Một triệu danh mục, luôn cam kết giá thấp” được gạch chân màu xanh, xuất hiện ngay trên trang chủ. Tiếp theo là logo biểu trưng trông rất nghiệp dư: Một chữ A nằm trên nền xanh cẩm thạch có hình con sông lượn qua. Trang web dường như không thân thiện và thu hút những người có học thức, đã dành cả cuộc đời tìm kiếm trên giá sách của các cửa hàng sách và thư viện. Susan Benson, vợ của Eric, từng là đồng nghiệp của Kaphan’s, nói: “Tôi nhớ mình đã nghĩ rằng rất không thể xảy ra khi mọi người muốn làm điều này. Cả hai đều trở thành nhân viên ban đầu của Amazon.”

Kaphan đã mời John Wainwright, đồng nghiệp cũ dùng thử dịch vụ và Wainwright được ghi danh khi trở thành khách hàng đặt hàng đầu tiên: cuốn sách khoa học Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies của tác giả Douglas Hofstadter. Lịch sử tài khoản giao dịch tại Amazon ghi nhận ngày mua hàng lịch sử đó là ngày 3 tháng 4 năm 1995. Ngày nay, trong đại bản doanh của Amazon ở Seattle có tòa nhà Wainwright.

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Do nội dung trang web còn sơ sài nên Kaphan và Davis phải hoàn thiện nhiều vấn đề trong vòng vài tháng. Họ phải xây dựng giỏ mua sắm ảo, cách an toàn để nhập số thẻ tín dụng vào một trình duyệt web và công cụ tìm kiếm sơ khai sẽ lướt qua danh mục trong CD-ROMs có tên Books in Print (Những cuốn sách bản giấy), nguồn cơ sở tra cứu phát hành bởi R. R. Bowker, nhà cung cấp số nhận dạng chuẩn ISBN cho những cuốn sách ở Mỹ. Kaphan và Davis cũng phát triển một hệ thống cho phép người sử dụng những dịch vụ trực tuyến sơ khai như Prodigy và AOL truy cập thông tin về sách và đặt hàng qua email – mặc dù chúng không bao giờ được sử dụng.

Những cải tiến trên đều mang tính đỉnh cao trong những ngày đầu khó khăn phát triển trang web, thời điểm khi công cụ còn sơ khai và kỹ thuật luôn luôn phát triển. Chuẩn HTML, ngôn ngữ chung của web, vừa mới ra đời nửa thập kỷ và ngôn ngữ hiện đại như JavaScript và AJAX còn phải được hoàn thiện trong tương lai. Những kỹ sư đầu tiên của Amazon lập trình trên ngôn ngữ C và quyết định lưu trữ trang web trên cơ sở dữ liệu sẵn có Berkeley DB, và không thể biết lượng truy cập.

Mỗi lệnh đặt hàng trong những tháng đầu tiên hoạt động mang đến cảm xúc bồi hồi khó tả cho nhân viên của Amazon. Khi ai đó mua hàng, tiếng chuông ngân lên trên những chiếc máy tính của Amazon và mọi người trong văn phòng sẽ tụ tập lại để xem liệu có ai biết về vị khách hàng vừa xong. (Điều này chỉ diễn ra trong vài tuần trước khi chuông rung quá thường xuyên đến nỗi họ phải tắt nó đi.) Sau khi nhận đơn đặt hàng, Amazon sẽ mua sách của một trong hai nhà phân phối sách chính, trả 50% giá bán lẻ (giá in trên bìa sách) theo tỉ lệ chiết khấu bán buôn.

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Chẳng có gì quá phức tạp trong phương pháp phân phối hàng hóa của Amazon những ngày đầu. Ban đầu công ty không giữ hàng trong kho của mình. Khi khách hàng mua sách, Amazon đặt hàng, cuốn sách được chuyển đến trong vài ngày và Amazon sẽ lưu kho trong tầng hầm, sau đó chuyển đến khách hàng. Như vậy, Amazon phải mất một tuần để chuyển phần lớn hàng hóa tới khách hàng và có thể mất tới vài tuần hoặc hơn một tháng cho những hàng hóa khan hiếm.

Thời điểm đó, Amazon chỉ có lợi nhuận ít ỏi trên hầu hết đơn hàng. Công ty đưa ra chính sách bán hàng giảm 40% trên giá niêm yết cho những cuốn sách bán chạy nhất và trong danh mục Nổi bật. Tính năng hiển thị những cuốn sách mới mỗi ngày xuất hiện trên trang web ngay từ những ngày đầu. Công ty giảm 10% trên giá niêm yết cho những cuốn sách khác; và cũng tính phí vận chuyển ít nhất 3,95 đô la trên đơn hàng đặt một cuốn sách.

Thách thức đầu tiên nảy sinh khi nhà phân phối sách yêu cầu nhà bán lẻ phải đặt hàng 10 cuốn trên mỗi đơn hàng. Amazon chưa đạt mức bán hàng như vậy và sau này Bezos thích kể về cách họ đã vượt qua thử thách ra sao. “Chúng tôi đã phát hiện một thủ thuật né tránh,” ông nói. “Hệ thống của họ được lập trình theo cách, bạn không phải nhận 10 cuốn sách, bạn chỉ cần phải đặt hàng 10 cuốn sách. Do đó chúng tôi tìm cuốn sách có nội dung về địa y ít người biết đến có trên hệ thống, nhưng đang trong tình trạng hết hàng. Chúng tôi đặt hàng cuốn sách mà chúng tôi muốn mua và chín bản cuốn sách địa y. Họ sẽ chuyển cuốn sách mà chúng tôi cần và một ghi chú: “Xin lỗi, nhưng chúng tôi hết cuốn địa y”.

Đầu tháng 6, Kaphan thêm tính năng đánh giá mà ông lập trình chỉ trong một tuần. Bezos tin rằng nếu Amazon.com có thêm tính năng cho phép người dùng đánh giá sách thì sẽ hơn những trang khác. Điều đó sẽ tạo lợi thế lớn; khách hàng sẽ ít tìm đến những trang kinh doanh sách trực tuyến khác.

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Họ đã thảo luận liệu nội dung đánh giá của người dùng mà không được kiểm duyệt trước có thể khiến công ty gặp rắc rối không. Bezos quyết định theo sát những đánh giá có từ ngữ xúc phạm thô tục hơn là đọc hết mọi thứ trước khi hiển thị chúng công khai.

Nhận xét đánh giá của những nhân viên đầu tiên và bạn bè họ chiếm đa số trong những ngày đầu. Kaphan cũng tự mình lấy sách ra khỏi giá cho khách hàng, cuốn sách về ký ức Trung Hoa Ngọn gió lạnh buốt:Ký ức về những năm tháng ở trại cải tạo tại Trung Quốc (Bitter Winds: A Memoir of My Years in China’s Gulag) và viết nhận xét.

Tất nhiên, có một số nhận xét mang tính tiêu cực. Trong bài thuyết trình của mình sau này, Bezos đề cập đến việc nhận được bức thư đầy phẫn nộ từ một nhà quản lý của nhà xuất bản. Bức thư ám chỉ rằng Bezos phải hiểu rằng công việc kinh doanh của ông là phải bán sách chứ không phải biến nó thành rác rưởi. “Chúng tôi có cách nhìn khác nhau,” Bezos nói. “Khi tôi đọc bức thư đó, tôi nghĩ chúng tôi không kiếm tiền khi chỉ đơn thuần bán hàng hóa. Chúng tôi kiếm tiền khi chúng tôi giúp khách hàng đưa ra quyết định mua sắm.”

Trang web chính thức bắt đầu cho người sử dụng truy cập vào ngày 16 tháng 7 năm 1995. Và khi được lan truyền, nhóm nhân viên Amazon ngay lập tức thấy rằng họ đã mở một cửa sổ kỳ lạ về tiếp cận hành vi con người. Những người dùng Internet đầu tiên đặt hàng hướng dẫn sử dụng máy tính, tuyển tập truyện hài Dilbert, những cuốn sách về hướng dẫn sửa chữa dụng cụ âm nhạc cổ và hướng dẫn về tình dục. (Cuốn sách bán chạy nhất trên Amazon.com trong năm đầu có tựa đề Cách thiết lập và duy trì một trang web: Hướng dẫn dành cho nhà cung cấp thông tin (How to Set Up and Maintain a World Wide Web Site: The Guide for Information Providers) của Lincoln D. Stein.)

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Cũng có những đơn đặt hàng từ lính Mỹ ở nước ngoài và từ anh chàng sống ở Ohio, người đã viết rằng anh sống cách cửa hàng sách gần nhất 80km và rằng Amazon.com là món quà của Chúa. Một nhân viên thuộc Tổ chức Nghiên cứu vũ trụ châu Âu tại bán cầu Nam ở Chi Lê đặt hàng cuốn sách của Carl Sagan – hiển nhiên mục đích để kiểm tra – và sau khi đơn đặt hàng thành công, khách hàng này đặt lệnh thứ hai, tiếp tục đặt hàng vài chục cuốn sách trên. Amazon dần gây dựng hình ảnh về trang web có đồ thị phân bố doanh số sản phẩm kiểu “chiếc đuôi dài” – có lượng lớn sách khó đọc, thu hút sự quan tâm của tương đối ít người. Paul Davis ngay lập tức mở cuộc điều tra những cuốn sách để không trên giá trong tầng hầm và thở dài gọi đó là “cửa hàng sách nhỏ nhất và lộn xộn nhất trên thế giới”.

Công ty không thuê ai sắp xếp sách nên khi số lượng sách tăng lên và không kịp giao hàng, Bezos, Kaphan và những nhân viên khác sẽ xuống tầng hầm buổi tối để đóng gói sách theo đơn đặt hàng của khách hàng. Ngày hôm sau, Bezos, MacKenzie hoặc một nhân viên sẽ lái xe chuyển những hộp đóng gói sách cho UPS hoặc bưu điện.

Công việc đóng gói sách thường khó khăn và kéo dài đến tận đêm. Nhân viên sẽ đóng gói sách theo đơn đặt hàng trên sàn nhà kho, bọc sách bằng bìa các-tông rồi gấp thành hộp. Mùa hè năm đó, Nicholas Lovejoy, nhân viên cũ của D. E. Shaw, đã rời quỹ đầu tư phòng rủi ro, đến dạy toán tại một trường trung học phổ thông tại Seattle và trở thành nhân viên bán thời gian của Amazon. Lovejoy đưa ra đề xuất thêm bàn đóng gói trong nhà kho.

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Câu chuyện đề xuất nhanh chóng xuất hiện trong bài thuyết giảng tư tưởng Jeff và vẫn còn được nhắc lại 20 năm sau. “Tôi nghĩ rằng đó là một ý tưởng thông minh nhất mà mình được nghe trong đời,” Bezos nói trong một bài thuyết giảng, ý tưởng nảy sinh mới mẻ bất ngờ đến nỗi ông ấy bật ra tiếng cười chói tai.

Bezos đề nghị Lovejoy hỗ trợ tuyển dụng và thuê những người thông minh nhất anh ta biết – giống như David Shaw, Bezos muốn tất cả nhân viên của mình có chỉ số IQ cao. Lovejoy giới thiệu bốn người bạn học cùng trường Reed College, một trong số đó là Laurel Canan, thợ mộc 24 tuổi, có kế hoạch quay lại trường giành học bổng Chaucer (điều này không bao giờ xảy ra). Canan giúp đóng phần lớn những chiếc bàn để đóng gói vô cùng cần thiết, sau đó anh chính thức gia nhập công ty và đảm nhiệm vị trí vận hành nhà kho. (Chủ nhà cuối cùng cũng cho phép Amazon mở rộng khỏi phòng Sonic Jungle và sử dụng toàn bộ tầng hầm.) Bỏ cà phê là một trong những việc đầu tiên Canan làm sau khi được tuyển dụng. “Bạn không thể làm công việc như vậy nếu nghiện cà phê. Bạn phải dồn toàn bộ sức lực vào công việc,” ông nói.

Đó là một đội năng động, hoạt động dưới điều kiện bất thường, trong một môi trường thách thức, đã cùng nhau bước những bước đầu tiên tiếp cận dòng sông kỳ lạ có tên Internet. Trước sự ngỡ ngàng của mọi người, họ kết thành một khối. Theo Eric Dillon, một trong những nhà đầu tư đầu tiên của Amazon, tuần đầu tiên sau khi chính thức ra mắt, họ nhận được tổng giá trị đơn hàng là 12.000 đô la và vận chuyển tổng giá trị sách là 846 đô la. Tuần kế tiếp, họ nhận 14.000 đô la đơn hàng và vận chuyển 7.000 đô la giá trị sách. Họ xuất phát sau và đang nỗ lực cạnh tranh quyết liệt để đuổi kịp những công ty khác.

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Một tuần sau khi trang web ra mắt, Jerry Yang và David Filo, những sinh viên tốt nghiệp Đại học Stanford, gửi thư điện tử hỏi liệu họ có muốn xuất hiện nổi bật trên trang Yahoo, trang liệt kê những thứ thú vị trên web không. Vào thời điểm đó, Yahoo là một trong những trang web có lượng truy cập rất lớn trên web và trang chủ trình duyệt web mặc định của nhiều người sử dụng Internet đầu tiên. Dĩ nhiên, Bezos và nhân viên biết về Yahoo. Họ cùng nhau ăn tối và thảo luận liệu họ đã sẵn sàng cho hướng kinh doanh mới khi mà hiện tại đang ngập đầu trong đơn đặt hàng. Kaphan đưa ra ý kiến rằng điều đó sẽ như “uống nước qua vòi cứu hỏa”. Nhưng họ vẫn quyết định đồng ý và trong tháng đầu tiên, họ đã bán sách cho khách hàng tại tất cả 50 bang ở Mỹ và 45 nước trên thế giới.

Số lượng đơn đặt hàng tăng theo từng ngày và những công ty lớn trong ngành – đối thủ của công ty trong vài năm tới – bắt đầu thắt chặt vòng vây những công ty còn non trẻ. Bezos kiên định đưa ra chính sách, Amazon phải có điều khoản dịch vụ thân thiện với khách hàng khi cho phép hoàn trả trong 30 ngày nhưng không có quy trình để giải quyết hàng trả lại.

Tom Schonhoff, nhân viên gia nhập vào mùa hè năm đó sau khi nhận bằng khoa học máy tính của Đại học Washington nhớ lại rằng, Bezos mang một ly cà phê latte mạnh tới văn phòng mỗi sáng và ngồi ở bàn làm việc bừa bộn. Một ngày, vị giám đốc điều hành trẻ tuổi lấy nhầm cốc và uống phải cốc cà phê vón cục để hàng tuần. Anh chàng phàn nàn cả tuần rằng mình có thể phải vào bệnh viện. Mọi người đều làm việc nhiều tiếng trong ngày, cố gắng bắt kịp nhịp độ công việc và không được ngủ đủ giấc.

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Vào ngày 9 tháng 8 năm 1995, Netscape Communications, công ty con của công ty tiên phong phát triển trình duyệt web Mosaic, bắt đầu phát hành cổ phiếu. Trong ngày đầu tiên, giá cổ phiếu tăng từ giá khởi điểm 28 đô la lên 75 đô la, và cả thế giới mở to mắt hướng về trào lưu mang tên web.

Trong khi cùng nhân viên của mình làm việc cật lực, Bezos luôn nghĩ về việc huy động vốn đầu tư. Mùa hè năm đó, gia đình Bezos sử dụng quỹ tín thác gia đình Gise (Gise là tên thời con gái của Jackie) đầu tư thêm 145.000 đô la vào Amazon. Nhưng công ty không thể tiếp tục tuyển dụng và phát triển chỉ dựa trên tiền tiết kiệm của gia đình Bezos. Mùa hè năm đó, Nick Hanauer, một người lâu năm trong cộng đồng doanh nghiệp Seattle, có cha kinh doanh thành công công ty sản xuất gối, đã giúp đỡ dàn xếp nhiều buổi chào mời đầu tư cho Bezos. Ông đã mời 60 nhà đầu tư tiềm năng, tiền đầu tư một triệu đô la là từ khoản đóng góp 50.000 đô la của mỗi cá nhân.

Trong những buổi gặp gỡ, Bezos trình bày bức tranh phát triển đầy tham vọng trong tương lai của Amazon. Lúc đó, công ty có tài sản trị giá khoảng 139.000 đô la, trong đó có 69.000 đô la tiền mặt. Công ty lỗ 52.000 đô la trong năm 1994 và nguy cơ tiếp tục thua lỗ 300.000 đô la trong năm đó.

Trái ngược với sự thật khởi đầu nghèo nàn không mấy triển vọng, Bezos nói với những nhà đầu tư rằng ông ước tính công ty đạt 74 triệu đô la doanh thu trước năm 2000 nếu phát triển bình thường, và 114 triệu đô la doanh thu nếu họ phát triển hơn kỳ vọng. (Doanh thu thực tế năm 2000 là 1,64 tỉ đô la.) Bezos cũng dự đoán công ty đạt lợi nhuận khiêm tốn (lỗ ròng năm 2000 là 1,4 tỉ đô la). Ông muốn định giá công ty ở 6 triệu đô la – con số tham vọng ông chợt nghĩ ra, không dựa trên cơ sở thực tế lúc đó. Và ông cũng nói với nhà đầu tư điều tương tự như với cha mẹ: công ty có 70% khả năng thất bại.

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Mặc dù, họ có thể chưa hiểu rõ về mô hình kinh doanh của công ty, nhưng các nhà đầu tư đang nhìn vào cơ hội dài hạn. Chàng trai trẻ tuổi tràn đầy nhiệt huyết, ăn nói mạch lạc, thuyết phục về triển vọng của Internet trong việc cung cấp trải nghiệm mua sắm, thuận tiện hơn của những cửa hàng đông đúc, nơi nhân viên thường lờ đi khách hàng. Bezos dự đoán khả năng công ty sẽ cá nhân hóa trang web theo từng người mua sắm, dựa trên lịch sử mua hàng, và cũng tiên đoán về một xã hội hiện đại: mọi người sẽ sử dụng Internet tốc độ cao, không phải sử dụng mô-đem quay số, và về không gian chứa sách trên web đủ đáp ứng giấc mơ của những người kinh doanh buôn bán về – cửa hàng không giới hạn lựa chọn.

Bezos bắt đầu hành trình kêu gọi đầu tư tại Mercer Island, quê hương của Dillon, nhà môi giới chứng khoán có dáng người cao ráo, mái tóc vàng và là một trong những người bạn thân nhất của Hanauer. “Anh ta dường như chiếm trọn cảm tình của tôi,” Dillon nói. “Anh ta nói thuyết phục đến nỗi như thể đây là công việc của Chúa và rằng bằng cách này hay cách khác, tiền sẽ được sinh ra. Tôi chỉ băn khoăn duy nhất một điều là liệu anh ta có thể thực sự quản lý kinh doanh? Điều đó không phải dễ dàng. Tất nhiên, khoảng hai năm sau tôi thốt lên: ‘Trời đất, chúng tôi đã đi đúng đường!’”

Bezos cũng tiếp cận Bob Gelfond, đồng nghiệp cũ tại D. E. Shaw. Gelfond tìm lời khuyên từ cha, người có suy nghĩ hoài nghi về việc thành công của dự án, do có thời gian làm việc lâu dài trong ngành xuất bản sách và trải qua nỗi đau khi công ty của ông chuyển sang sử dụng máy tính cá nhân. Người cha đã khuyên không nên đầu tư, nhưng Gelfond từng chứng kiến khả năng điều hành tuyệt vời của Bezos trong quỹ phòng ngừa rủi ro và đánh cược vào người bạn. “Có một ý tưởng tốt thì không quá khó, nhưng sẽ hoàn toàn khác khi một người tự tin thực hiện nó,” Gelfond nói.

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Nhiều người từ chối đề nghị của Bezos. Hanauer và mẹ của ông đã đầu tư, nhưng một trong những người anh của Hanauer và người cha lại từ chối. Tom Alberg, cựu quản lý tại McCaw Cellular, gặp Bezos nhưng vẫn còn hoài nghi vì ông thích khám phá những cửa hàng sách truyền thống. Vài ngày sau, khi không thể tìm thấy cuốn sách kinh doanh cho con trai ở cửa hàng địa phương, ông thay đổi suy nghĩ và quyết định đầu tư. Luật sư nói với Alberg về thỏa thuận đã mời Bezos tới nói chuyện tại câu lạc bộ đầu tư, họp mặt thường xuyên ở câu lạc bộ Rainier Club sang trọng của Seattle. Alberg nghĩ rằng công ty được định giá quá cao và bỏ qua đề nghị.

Bezos sau đó trao đổi trên báo trực tuyến của Đại học Wharton: “Chúng tôi nhận những phản hồi bình thường từ những cá nhân thiện chí, những người không tin vào kế hoạch kinh doanh; họ đơn thuần nghĩ rằng nó sẽ không thành công.” Những mối quan tâm của các nhà đầu tư tương lai đều nằm trong dự liệu trước đó: “Nếu bạn thành công, bạn sẽ cần một nhà kho có diện tích của Thư viện Quốc hội,” một nhà đầu tư đã nói với Bezos như vậy.

Todd Tarbert, luật sư đầu tiên của Amazon, thở dài nặng nề khi nhớ về quyết định liệu có nên trở về công ty. Lần đầu tiên trong sự nghiệp, ông muốn đầu tư vào công ty của khách hàng và đã nhận được đảm bảo cho phép bằng văn bản của Hiệp hội luật sư bang Washington. Ông cũng kể với cha mình về khoản vay thế chấp trang trại đồng sở hữu của họ. Nhưng sau đó con trai Tarbert bị sinh non và ông phải tạm ngừng công việc trong một tháng và không bao giờ có cơ hội viết tấm séc 50.000 đô la đầu tư. Trước khi Tarbert quay trở lại, Bezos đã huy động đủ một triệu đô la, thấp hơn đôi chút mức định giá đã được kỳ vọng là năm triệu đô la trước đó.

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Một ngày cuối năm 1997, sau đợt phát hành cổ phiếu lần đầu ra công chúng của Amazon, Tarbert đang chơi gôn với cha mình. “Con có biết công ty Amazon vừa lên sàn giao dịch không?” cha Tarbert hỏi. “Có phải công ty mà chúng ta đã từng nhắc tới? Chuyện gì xảy ra với nó vậy?”

“Vâng, thưa cha. Cha sẽ không muốn biết đâu,” Tarbert đáp lại.

“À, nếu đầu tư ngày đó thì hôm nay nó có trị giá bao nhiêu vậy?” cha Tarbert tiếp tục hỏi.

“Ít nhất vài triệu đô la ạ,” Tarbert trả lời.

Cuối mùa hè năm đó, Nicolas Lovejoy đề nghị Bezos cho phép chuyển từ nhân viên bán thời gian sang toàn thời gian. Nhưng Lovejoy thực sự bất ngờ khi người đồng nghiệp cũ tại D. E. Shaw không đồng ý. Lovejoy đang làm 35 giờ một tuần, chơi ném đĩa bay Frisbee, đi xuồng Caiac và hẹn hò với bạn gái. Bezos đang hình dung về kiểu văn hóa khác trong công ty, nơi nhân viên làm việc không mệt mỏi để xây dựng công ty bền vững và tăng giá trị cổ phần sở hữu. Lovejoy tự thấy mình phù hợp và nói rằng ông sẵn sàng làm 60 giờ một tuần như những nhân viên khác. Nhưng ông cũng không thể thay đổi suy nghĩ của Bezos. Bezos thậm chí đề nghị Lovejoy tìm kiếm nhân viên toàn thời gian thay thế vị trí khuyết đó. Điều này có vẻ cực kỳ tàn nhẫn. Thậm chí, Lovejoy đưa Bezos cả chồng hồ sơ xin việc và đặt hồ sơ của ông lên đầu. Ông cũng thuyết phục MacKenzie, Kaphan và Davis giúp thay đổi suy nghĩ của ông chủ. Lovejoy làm nhiều công việc khác nhau tại Amazon vài năm sau đó, từ lập trình, đánh giá sách, vận chuyển hàng hóa đến bưu điện vào ban đêm, và thậm chí thanh toán.

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Bezos thấy rằng chỉ tuyển dụng những cá nhân xuất sắc nhất và thông minh nhất chính là chìa khóa thành công của Amazon. Trong nhiều năm, ông tự mình phỏng vấn tất cả ứng viên tiềm năng và yêu cầu điểm SAT. “Mỗi khi chúng tôi thuê ai đó thì anh ta hoặc cô ta sẽ nâng tiêu chuẩn tuyển dụng cho lần sau. Do vậy, chất lượng những ứng viên tài năng sẽ luôn tăng lên,” ông nhắc đi nhắc lại. Phương thức này cũng gây ra nhiều cản trở. Khi Amazon đã phát triển, công ty cần thêm nhiều nhân lực, và những nhân viên đầu tiên háo hức giới thiệu bạn bè, nhiều người trong số đó có đủ năng lực. Bezos phỏng vấn kỹ lưỡng từng ứng viên, xen kẽ vào đó là những câu hỏi bất ngờ từng được hỏi tại D. E. Shaw như: “Có bao nhiêu trạm đổ xăng trên toàn nước Mỹ?” Đây là bài kiểm tra khả năng suy nghĩ tư duy của ứng viên. Bezos không chờ đợi câu trả lời chính xác. Mục đích thực sự để dành cho mỗi ứng viên chứng tỏ sự sáng tạo khi phải chợt nảy sinh phương án trả lời theo cách phù hợp nhất. Và nếu nhân viên tương lai phạm sai lầm khi nói về mong muốn có công việc cân bằng giữa công việc và cuộc sống gia đình, Bezos sẽ từ chối họ.

Paul Davis thì hoài nghi. Vào thời điểm đó, Amazon trả lương khoảng 60.000 đô la một năm, quyền chọn mua cổ phiếu bỏ ngỏ giá trị, kế hoạch chăm sóc sức khỏe nghèo nàn với phí đóng góp cao, và nhịp độ công việc tăng chóng mặt. “Chúng tôi nhìn ông ta và hỏi, ‘ông nghĩ thế nào khi muốn thu hút nhân lực có nền tảng tốt vào công ty không có doanh thu và trong tương lai ngắn hạn không sinh ra bất kỳ khoản doanh thu nào?’”, Davis nói. “Tôi không nhìn thấy đặc điểm nào của công ty thu hút ứng viên tài năng ở đây!”

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Vị tổng giám đốc điều hành với điệu cười chói tai, mái tóc mỏng và thái độ bực dọc dần dần bộc lộ bản thân với nhân viên dưới quyền. Ông cực kỳ tự tin, ngoan cố hơn những gì họ nghĩ ban đầu, và tự tin mặc định rằng tất cả nhân viên sẽ làm việc không mệt mỏi và viết lên những bài ca hào hùng bất tận. Dường như ông giữ những tham vọng và kế hoạch thận trọng, không tiết lộ nhiều, thậm chí cả với Kaphan.

Khi mục tiêu sứ mệnh được tiết lộ, chúng hoàn toàn vĩ đại một cách khó tin, mặc dù mục tiêu tập trung ban đầu của công ty rõ ràng là sách. Davis nhớ Bezos nói rằng, ông muốn xây dựng “một Sears tiếp theo,” một công ty phát triển bền vững và trở thành chủ lực trong ngành bán lẻ. Lovejoy, người say mê xuồng kayak, nhớ Bezos từng nói với mình rằng, ông hình dung một ngày khi trang web sẽ bán không chỉ sách về kayak mà còn cả thuyền kayak, đăng ký mua tạp chí kayak và đặt chỗ trước cho chuyến đi chèo thuyền kayak – mọi thứ liên quan tới thể thao.

“Tôi nghĩ rằng anh ta hơi điên,” Lovejoy nói. “Vào thời điểm đó, chúng tôi cung cấp 1,5 triệu cuốn sách. Nhưng chỉ có khoảng 1,2 triệu cuốn sách bạn có thể đặt hàng thực sự. Cơ sở dữ liệu sách được lấy từ Baker và Taylor và chúng tôi có khoảng 40 cuốn trong kho.”

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Bezos cũng chứng tỏ bản thân mình có một phần tính cách của kẻ phá đám. Năm đó, những kỹ sư đưa lệnh rwerich vào cơ sở dữ liệu để trích xuất dữ liệu số lượng mua bán hàng ngày và đơn đặt hàng trong khoảng thời gian từ khi công ty hoạt động. Họ theo dõi những con số tăng lên một cách ám ảnh – một trong những niềm vui của mỗi ngày làm việc vất vả, quay cuồng. Bezos cuối cùng yêu cầu họ dừng làm việc này, một phần vì như vậy sẽ gây sức ép trên máy chủ. Và khi lần đầu tiên Amazon đạt được con số đơn đặt hàng trị giá 5.000 đô la, Lovejoy muốn tổ chức một bữa tiệc, nhưng Bezos đã từ chối ý tưởng này. “Còn có nhiều mốc quan trọng sắp đến và đó không phải là cách tôi muốn điều hành mọi việc,” ông nói.

Đầu năm 1996, công ty non trẻ lớn mạnh vượt quá không gian trong tòa nhà Color Tile. Nhân viên ngộp thở trong ba phòng nhỏ, bốn chiếc bàn mỗi phòng và kho hàng trong tầng hầm đang quá tải sách. Kaphan, Davis và Bezos chia nhau lái xe và đi tìm văn phòng lớn hơn ở khu vực công nghiệp quanh hồ Washington. Bezos thấy tất cả tòa nhà đã xem đều quá nhỏ, Davis nhớ lại. Ông muốn đặt mọi thứ của công ty trên đường.

Tháng Ba năm đó, cuối cùng Amazon chuyển đến một tòa nhà lớn hơn với nhà kho rộng rãi, cách chỗ cũ vài tòa nhà. Văn phòng mới nằm cạnh Pecos Pit, tiệm đồ nướng nổi tiếng tỏa mùi thơm phảng phất vào nhà kho bắt đầu vào khoảng 10 giờ sáng hàng ngày.

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Nhưng một nhân viên đầu tiên đã không chuyển đến. Paul Davis, sau này ủng hộ phần mềm mã nguồn mở và phản đối phê chuẩn bằng sáng chế 1-Click của Amazon, ông đã nói với Bezos rằng muốn dành thêm thời gian với con gái mới sinh. Rời khỏi Amazone quá sớm khiến ông mất cả gia tài vì quyền mua cổ phiếu chưa thực hiện. Vài tháng sau, ông giải thích rằng nguyên nhân xuất phát từ sơ suất bị cưa cắt mất ngón tay trong khi chuẩn bị bán nhà. Bezos và Tom Schonhoff đến thăm ông tại bệnh viện.

Bằng cách nào đó, Davis, một người đến từ London, miễn dịch với những tư tưởng của Jeff. Ông nghi ngờ lòng cuồng tín với công việc và chú ý đến việc Bezos đang thay đổi khéo léo từ ngữ trong các bài phát biểu xây dựng động lực làm việc, về chọn lựa một trong ba cách làm việc. Trong ngôi nhà Bellevue cũ, Bezos đã nói với Kaphan và Davis: “Bạn có thể làm việc trong nhiều giờ, chăm chỉ và thông minh nhưng tại Amazon.com bạn chỉ có thể chọn hai trong ba lựa chọn trên.” Bây giờ vị Tổng giám đốc điều hành trẻ thích nói: “Bạn có thể làm việc trong nhiều giờ, bạn có thể làm việc chăm chỉ, bạn có thể làm việc thông minh, nhưng tại Amazon bạn không thể chọn hai trên ba lựa chọn trên.”

Davis có một miếng dán KHÔNG DÙNG TIVI trên chiếc Honda Civic. Vậy nên, để ghi nhớ sự ra đi của Davis, Bezos rải miếng bạt xanh chống nước trong khu vực đỗ xe và đặt một chiếc máy tính cũ và bàn phím trên đó. Ông đưa Davis một chiếc búa tạ cán dài và rồi quay phim Davis đập vỡ vụn chiếc máy. Sau đấy, Davis giữ phím Escape (Thoát).

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Trước khi bước sang những tuần đầu tiên của năm 1996, doanh thu tăng 30 đến 40% một tháng, tốc độ tăng trưởng chóng mặt ngầm phá hoại nỗ lực làm việc theo kế hoạch. Và điều này đòi hỏi tốc độ làm việc nhanh chóng mặt của nhân viên công ty. Sau này, những nhân viên trải qua giai đoạn đầu tiên chỉ thấy mảng trắng trong ký ức về quãng thời gian quay cuồng này. Không ai đưa ra được bất kỳ suy nghĩ nào về cách thức ứng phó với sự tăng trưởng chóng mặt, nên họ phải cùng nhau lấp đầy khoảng trống ký ức.

Mùa xuân năm đó, trong hội nghị hàng năm của Hiệp hội các nhà xuất bản Mỹ, Alberto Vitale, chủ tịch Nhà xuất bản Random House, nói với nhà báo tờ Wall Street Journal (WSJ) thông tin về nhà bán sách trực tuyến mới, đến từ vùng tây bắc Thái Bình Dương. Vài tuần sau đó, Amazon xuất hiện nổi bật trên trang nhất tờ WSJ “Cách phố Wall tìm ra nhà bán sách trên Internet,” và Bezos trong bức chân dung vẽ chì xuất hiện đầu tiên trên tờ báo tài chính lớn nhất nước Mỹ. Số lượng đơn đặt hàng hàng ngày lập tức tăng gấp đôi. Giờ đây, thế giới biết về Amazon.com và dường như trong đó có cả hai chuỗi phân phối sách lớn nhất nước Mỹ, Barnes & Noble và Borders.

Với số vốn đầu tư một triệu đô la, công ty nâng cấp phần mềm và máy chủ, và quan trọng hơn là tuyển dụng thêm người mới. Bezos bổ sung một loạt nhân viên mới vào bộ phận dịch vụ khách hàng, kho hàng và đội kỹ thuật của Kaphan. Ông bắt đầu xây dựng đội ngũ biên tập – các tay viết và biên tập viên sẽ khiến khách hàng quay trở lại sau khi ghé thăm trang web.

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Sứ mệnh của nhóm là biến Amazon trở thành nguồn thông tin trực tuyến chính xác nhất về sách và tạo dựng niềm tin cho các nhà sách độc lập với “khẩu vị” văn chương chọn lọc. “Chúng tôi đang yêu cầu mọi người cho thẻ tín dụng vào máy tính, và một lúc nào đó điều này trở thành hành vi tự nhiên,” Susan Benson – quản lý nhóm biên tập nói. Biên tập “quan trọng trong cả hai khía cạnh: từ việc tạo ra trải nghiệm mua sắm tuyệt vời cho đến tạo ra cảm giác thoải mái khi khách hàng nghĩ rằng có những người khác mà họ có thể tin tưởng.”

Mùa hè năm đó, công ty ra mắt dịch vụ cho phép những trang web khác thu phí khi dẫn khách hàng trực tiếp tới Amazon mua sách. Đây có thể coi là bước tiến lớn nhất, đầu tiên của công ty. Amazon chi 8% tiền hoa hồng cho những trang web này. Chương trình liên kết của Amazon không phải dịch vụ ra đời đầu tiên, nhưng xuất chúng nhất và giúp tạo ra ngành công nghiệp sinh lợi hàng tỉ đô la mỗi năm có tên marketing liên kết. Đồng thời, dịch vụ cũng cho phép Amazon sớm mở rộng tiếp cận những trang web khác, xây dựng lợi thế kinh doanh trước những đối thủ cạnh tranh lớn.

Cuối mùa xuân năm đó, công ty đang gần như đốt sạch tiền vào tuyển dụng nhân sự và mua sắm thiết bị, cũng như chỗ để máy chủ, nên Bezos quyết định tăng vốn góp. Ông bắt đầu đàm phán với General Atlantic có trụ sở tại Boston, và cổ đông hợp tác định giá công ty 10 triệu đô la, phù hợp với một công ty mới thành lập có doanh thu 15,7 triệu đô la và 5,8 triệu đô la tiền lỗ trong năm đó. John Doerr, một cổ đông chính tại công ty vốn đầu tư mạo hiểm huyền thoại của Thung lũng Silicon, Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, đã nghe tin về Amazon và bay tới Seattle thăm công ty.

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“Tôi bước qua cánh cửa, anh chàng với điệu cười ầm ĩ và năng lượng tràn đầy bước đến,” Doerr, nhà tài trợ cho những thương vụ thành công như Netscape và Intuit, nhớ lại. Bezos giới thiệu ông với MacKenzie và Kaphan, sau đó dẫn ông tham quan nhà kho, nơi toàn bộ đơn đặt hàng nước ngoài được xếp gọn gàng ngăn nắp trên những chiếc bàn làm từ tấm gỗ hình cánh cửa. Khi Doerr hỏi khối lượng giao dịch hàng ngày, Bezos nghiêng người gõ lệnh grep cạnh một dấu nhắc UNIX, ngay lập tức dữ liệu trích xuất báo cáo sẵn sàng – điều này chứng tỏ kỹ năng thành thạo của ông. Doerr thực sự choáng váng.

Vài tuần sau, Kleiner và General Atlantic tranh chấp tay đôi quyết liệt để giành quyền đầu tư, đẩy giá trị của Amazon tăng chóng mặt đến nỗi Bezos không bao giờ tưởng tượng ra kịch bản này. Ông chọn Kleiner vì danh tiếng trong giới công nghệ. Công ty đầu tư tám triệu đô la, chiếm 13% tiền góp vốn và định giá công ty ở mức 60 triệu đô la. Kleiner muốn đưa một thành viên khác vào hội đồng quản trị của Amazon, nhưng theo thỏa thuận chung, Bezos khăng khăng muốn Doerr nắm giữ vị trí này. Sự tham gia trực tiếp của Doerr sẽ thêm phiếu ủng hộ từ giới dành cho bất kỳ công ty công nghệ mới khởi nghiệp nào.

Trong đầu Bezos chợt nảy ra ý gì đó. Những suy nghĩ lạc quan về tương lai của Internet tại Thung lũng Silicon đang tạo ra môi trường độc nhất để huy động vốn ở mức giá thấp kỷ lục. Sự lạc quan của Doerr về web hòa trộn với lòng nhiệt tình lạc quan về triển vọng tăng giá của bản thân Bezos đã châm ngòi cho ngọn lửa khai phá và kế hoạch mở rộng đầy tham vọng.

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Bezos có kế hoạch không chỉ dừng lại ở cửa hàng sách trực tuyến; giờ đây ông đang trong quá trình xây dựng một trong những công ty Internet phát triển bền vững đầu tiên trên thế giới. “Jeff luôn là người có suy nghĩ mở rộng, nhưng tiếp cận nguồn vốn để thực hiện kế hoạch thì phải là người có khả năng,” Doerr nói. James Marcus, biên tập viên của công ty cũng nhận ra điều này, và đã viết trong cuốn hồi ký Amazonia xuất bản năm 2004 rằng “tiền từ Kleiner Perkins đến kịp thời như liều thuốc quan trọng cho công ty, khiến Jeff trở nên quyết đoán hơn bao giờ hết.”

Nhân viên sớm nhận ra phương châm phát triển mới: Trở lên lớn mạnh nhanh chóng. Bezos giải thích, khi quy mô công ty càng lớn, thì giá bán càng thấp, ngang bằng giá từ Ingram và Baker & Taylor, những công ty bán sỉ sách, và năng lực phân phối càng tăng. Khi công ty càng lớn mạnh nhanh, phạm vi ảnh hưởng càng lớn thì sẽ gia nhập cuộc chạy đua thiết lập những thương hiệu mới trong thế giới số.

Bezos đề cập đến sự cấp bách trong những bài thuyết giảng của ông: Công ty nắm giữ vị trí đứng đầu bây giờ sẽ gần như giữ vững lâu dài và sau đó sử dụng vị thế đó để xây dựng dịch vụ siêu việt cho khách hàng.

Tất nhiên, điều đó đồng nghĩa với việc toàn bộ thành viên Amazon phải làm việc chăm chỉ hơn nữa. Giả thuyết đặt ra rằng không ai nghỉ ngày cuối tuần. “Không ai nói rằng bạn không thể nhưng không ai nghĩ bạn có thể,” Susan Benson nói.

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Trong nhà kho, nhóm nhân viên rất đa dạng và liên tục được bổ sung thêm người để chạy đua theo kịp lượng đơn đặt hàng cao chóng mặt. Đại diện của Amazon thậm chí nói với trung tâm giới thiệu việc làm ngắn hạn: “Gửi cho chúng tôi bất cứ ai cũng được”. Nhân viên đeo trang sức, xăm hình và nhuộm tóc trả lời điện thoại đặt hàng, làm việc cả ngày lẫm đêm trong nhà kho bên cạnh Pecos Pit và lần lượt chọn nhạc phát trên loa thùng. Xếp hạng của họ bao gồm một giọng nam trung nặng ba trăm pound, đi qua căn phòng và thắt lại các điệu nhạc Nga.

Christoper Smith, 23 tuổi, nhân viên nhà kho làm việc tạm thời, có hình xăm chữ Trung Quốc trên cánh tay, bắt đầu làm việc tại Amazon. Anh chàng sẽ ở lại công ty và đảm nhiệm nhiều vị trí công việc khác nhau trong 14 năm. Anh chàng bắt đầu một ngày bình thường vào lúc 4 giờ 30 phút buổi sáng, đạp xe tới chỗ làm nhận hàng từ nhân viên giao hàng của Ingram vào lúc 6 giờ 30 phút, và thường ở lại quá nửa đêm, đóng gói liên tục và trả lời thư điện tử khách hàng trước khi uống vài ly bia trong nhà kho và đạp xe trở về nhà. “Hình ảnh chủ đạo trong tâm trí tôi chỉ là… chạy. Và hàng đống bìa cứng và vật liệu đóng gói nhanh,” anh nói.

Smith đã làm việc không mệt mỏi trong suốt 8 tháng đến nỗi anh ấy quên mất chiếc xe ga Peugeot màu xanh nhạt của mình mà anh ấy đã đậu gần căn hộ của mình ở khu phố Capitol Hill của Seattle. Số phận của chiếc xe sau đó sẽ được tiết lộ trong đống thư chất thành đống bên trong cửa trước của anh ta. Cuối cùng, khi anh ta mở thư trong đống giấy đó, Smith liên tiếp tìm thấy một số vé đỗ xe, một thông báo rằng chiếc xe đã được kéo, một vài cảnh báo từ công ty kéo xe, và cuối cùng là một lá thư thông báo rằng chiếc xe đã được bán tại đấu giá bảy trăm đô la. Anh ta vẫn còn nợ mười tám trăm đô la tiền vay mua ô tô của mình, và vụ việc đã làm giảm xếp hạng tín dụng của anh ta. Anh ấy không nhớ là đã bận tâm quá nhiều vào thời điểm đó.

“Cuộc sống chỉ dừng lại thôi,” Smith nói. “Bạn mắc kẹt trong nhựa hổ phách. Nhưng ẩn sâu bên trong lớp hổ phách đó là những hoạt động sôi động mà người khác không thể thấy được.”

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Hàng ngày, Eric và Susan Benson không tới văn phòng Amazon làm việc một mình – họ mang theo chú chó Rufus xứ Wales. Bởi vì cả hai làm việc nhiều giờ tại công ty nên Bezos đã hứa rằng họ có thể mang Rufus theo. Điều đó không có vấn đề gì trong các tòa nhà SoDo, nhưng sau đó Amazon lại chuyển đến vào cuối mùa hè năm 1996, đến một tòa nhà ở trung tâm thành phố, và công ty phải ghi Rufus vào hợp đồng thuê với chủ nhà mới. Chú chó có vẻ ngoài dễ thương, thích tham gia vào các buổi họp và thường xuyên đau dạ dày vì bị nhân viên công ty cho ăn quá nhiều. Chú trở thành hình ảnh biểu tượng của công ty trong giai đoạn đầu. Trong công ty có niềm tin rằng khi tính năng mới ra đời, ngón chân của chú được yêu cầu chạm nhẹ vào bàn phím để lấy may mắn. Mặc dù Rufus đã qua đời từ lâu, nhưng trong khuôn viên của Amazon tại Seattle vẫn có một tòa nhà mang tên chú. (Có vẻ như Bezos mang một nét hoài cổ; một tòa nhà được gọi là Fiona, tên mã của Kindle ban đầu, và tòa nhà khác là Obidos, cái mà Shel Kaphan gọi là cơ sở hạ tầng máy tính ban đầu của công ty, theo tên một thị trấn ở Brazil nơi có các nhánh sông của sông Amazon hội tụ.)

Amazon lúc đó có khoảng gần 150 nhân viên toàn thời gian, trong số đó gần 1/3 làm việc trong nhà kho. Vài tháng sau, nhà kho cũng di dời đến địa điểm rộng 8640 m2 tại phố Dawson phía nam Seattle (một tòa nhà khác của Amazon có tên Dawson). Vị trí mới trong trung tâm không thực sự cao cấp. Amazon thuê tòa nhà Columbia ở đại lộ số 2 trong khu trung tâm buôn bán buồn tẻ, xung quanh có nhiều hộp đêm và cách chợ du lịch Pike Place hai khối nhà. Vào ngày công ty chuyển đến, một người đàn ông vô gia cư đang ngủ gần cửa trước đã chỉ cho nhân viên cách sử dụng thẻ chìa khóa mới của họ để vào sảnh.

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Tòa nhà nằm đối diện với một trung tâm trao đổi kim tiêm và phòng khám methadone và một cửa hàng tóc giả thu hút hoạt động buôn bán chuyển giới. Kay Dangaard, một người New Zealand đã chuyển sang nghề phóng viên và giám đốc điều hành quảng cáo, đã gia nhập công ty với tư cách là người đăng báo đầu tiên của công ty và từ văn phòng của mình trong tòa nhà mới, cô có thể nhìn ra cửa sổ bên kia ngõ, vào căn hộ của một cô gái điếm hành nghề buôn bán sớm mỗi tối dưới ngọn đèn công suất thấp chập chờn.

Chỗ đậu xe thì cực kỳ hiếm hoi và đắt đỏ. Nicholas Lovejoy khuyên Bezos rằng công ty nên trợ cấp tiền xe buýt cho nhân viên, nhưng Bezos chế giễu đề nghị đó. “Ông không muốn nhân viên rời công ty để bắt kịp xe buýt,” Lovejoy nói. “Ông muốn họ sử dụng xe riêng để không có bất kỳ sức ép trở về nhà nào.”

Mùa thu năm đó, công ty tập trung vào phát triển tính năng tùy biến trang web theo từng khách truy cập như những gì Bezos hứa với các nhà đầu tư đầu tiên. Tính năng Bookmatch của Amazon yêu cầu khách hàng đánh giá vài chục cuốn sách và sau đó hệ thống sẽ đưa ra gợi ý dựa trên sở thích cá nhân. Hệ thống chạy chậm và Amazon nhận thấy rằng khách hàng miễn cưỡng mất thêm thời gian và công sức để đánh giá sách.

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Do vậy, Bezos gợi ý rằng nhóm cá nhân hóa nên phát triển hệ thống đơn giản hơn, thứ sẽ đưa ra gợi ý dựa vào những cuốn sách mà khách hàng đã mua. Eric Benson mất hai tuần để xây dựng phiên bản sơ bộ, trong đó chia nhóm khách hàng theo lịch sử mua sắm sách tương tự nhau và sau đó tìm những cuốn sách phù hợp cho toàn bộ thành viên trong mỗi nhóm. Tính năng này được gọi là Similarities (Tương tự), ngay lập tức tăng doanh thu một cách đáng kể và cho phép Amazon hướng khách hàng tới những cuốn sách có thể không tìm thấy. Greg Linden, một kỹ sư làm việc trong dự án, nhớ lại Bezos khi bước vào văn phòng của mình, khuỵu gối xuống và nói đùa, “Tôi không xứng đáng.”

Tính năng Similarities cuối cùng thay thế Bookmatch và trở thành hạt giống cơ sở cho việc phát triển tính năng cá nhân hóa tinh vi của Amazon. Bezos tin rằng nó sẽ trở thành một trong những lợi thế không thể vượt qua của thương mại điện tử so với kinh doanh cửa hàng truyền thống. “Những nhà kinh doanh lớn sẽ không bao giờ có cơ hội thực sự hiểu khách hàng theo từng cá nhân,” ông nói. “Thương mại điện tử đang khiến điều này trở thành hiện thực.”

Trong giai đoạn công ty và công nghệ sở hữu phát triển, Shel Kaphan trải qua quãng thời gian tuyệt vời. Khi đó, ông 43 tuổi và cống hiến đáng kể trong công cuộc biến tầm nhìn của Bezos thành hiện thực, trải nghiệm mua sắm hoàn hảo trong cửa hàng sách với không gian chứa sách không giới hạn và phổ biến kiến thức tới từng ngóc ngách trên trái đất. Ông là người đã tạo ra hệ thống công nghệ của Amazon: Trong thời gian chuyển tới tòa nhà Pecos Pit, ông đặt hai máy chủ của công ty, tên là Bert và Ernie, vào sau chiếc xe Acura Integra và tự tay lái xe chở chúng tới văn phòng mới.

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Kaphan đã dính ghi chú lên màn hình máy tính ở bàn làm việc có nội dung: Đừng để ai khiến bạn thay đổi mã lập trình của bạn.

Kaphan và Bezos thường cùng nhau dạo bộ quanh thành phố, thảo luận việc kinh doanh và những lo lắng của Kaphan về vấn đề kỹ thuật và kế hoạch tương lai. Trong một lần đi bộ, Kaphan hỏi Bezos tại sao khi họ đã hoàn thành một số mục tiêu ban đầu đặt ra, Bezos vẫn hướng tới việc mở rộng nhanh chóng. “Khi anh nhỏ bé, những kẻ lớn hơn luôn có thể nhanh chóng áp sát và lấy đi những gì anh đang có,” Bezos trả lời. “Chúng ta phải xác định mức độ cạnh tranh của thị trường theo sức mua đối với những nhà kinh doanh sách truyền thống lâu đời.”

Có một điều khiến Kaphan bận tâm vào khoảng thời gian đó. Ông có đủ kinh nghiệm với các công ty khởi nghiệp công nghệ để biết rằng sự xuất hiện của các nhà đầu tư mạo hiểm thường đồng thời với một loạt các giám đốc điều hành mới, có năng lực cao. Năm đó, anh bước vào văn phòng của Bezos và tự hỏi: “Hiện tại, chúng tôi đang phát triển khá nhanh. Anh định thay tôi à?”

Bezos không dao động. “Shel, công việc là của bạn miễn là bạn muốn nó.”

Đầu năm 1997, Mark Breier, cựu quản lý tại Cinnabon và một trong những quản lý mới mà Kaphan dự đoán trước, mời toàn bộ bộ phận kỹ thuật đến ngôi nhà Bellevue tham gia cuộc họp một ngày. Chiều hôm đó, phó chủ tịch marketing của Amazon giới thiệu với toàn bộ nhân viên về một trò chơi bóng trên băng. Cha của Breier từng là kỹ sư của IBM ở Bethesda và đã xem trò chơi này được chơi trên băng trong các chuyến đi đến văn phòng của IBM ở Canada. Trong phiên bản trên đất liền của Breier, người chơi dùng chổi và các dụng cụ ngẫu nhiên khác từ nhà để xe của anh ta ném một quả bóng trên bãi cỏ.

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Dường như đó chỉ là trò giải trí gây cười, nhưng trong đó có cạnh tranh ngầm khốc liệt. Nói cách khác, trò chơi bộc lộ hoàn hảo tính khí của Jeff Bezos, người ghé qua cuộc họp và thích thú tham gia vào lễ khai mạc cuộc thi đấu bóng trên đất của Amazon. Andy Jassy, nhân viên mới được tuyển dụng từ trường Harvard, tạo ấn tượng sâu đậm đầu tiên trong công ty khi tình cờ đánh trúng đầu Bezos bằng chiếc mái chèo thuyền kayak. Sau đó, Bezos đã lao theo quả bóng vào hàng rào và làm rách toạc mất chiếc áo sơ mi oxford màu xanh.

Nhiệm kỳ công tác của Breier tại Amazon khá ngắn. Bezos muốn xây dựng lại hoàn toàn marketing và đưa ra đề xuất, ví dụ như, công ty sẽ thực hiện đánh giá hàng năm các công ty quảng cáo để khiến họ luôn cạnh tranh hợp tác kinh doanh với Amazon. Breier giải thích ngành công nghiệp quảng cáo không hoạt động theo phương thức như vậy. Ông chỉ đảm nhiệm vị trí khoảng một năm. Trong suốt thập niên đầu tiên hoạt động của Amazon, phó chủ tịch marketing luôn giống như tay chơi trống chịu số phận bi đát trong ban nhạc châm biếm Spinal Tap. Bezos đánh gục họ nhanh chóng và tìm kiếm người mới có cái nhìn làm việc tương tự Bezos. Tuy nhiên, việc tạo ra bóng quét của Breier đã trở thành một trò tiêu khiển thường xuyên tại các buổi dã ngoại của nhân viên Amazon và các cuộc họp bên ngoài, với các nhân viên chia phe và bản thân Bezos cũng tham gia vào trò chơi.

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Như Shel Kaphan nghi ngờ, việc Breier đến Amazon chỉ là khởi đầu cho làn sóng tham gia của những nhà quản lý kinh doanh có kinh nghiệm. Với vốn đầu tư gửi trong ngân hàng, Bezos luôn muốn đưa công ty trở thành công ty đại chúng bằng đợt phát hành cổ phiếu ra công chúng, và ông tiếp tục tuyển dụng. Cuối cùng khi điều khoản không cạnh tranh với D. E. Shaw hết hạn, ông gọi cho Jeff Holden và đề nghị đóng gói hành lý đến Seattle. Holden thuyết phục vài nhân viên khác của DESCO đi cùng mình. Mặc dù, Paul Kotas đã đặt toàn bộ đồ đạc vào chiếc U-Haul của Holden nhưng cuối cùng để thay đổi ý định. (Hai năm sau, Kotas chuyển tới Washington và trở thành quản lý lâu dài của Amazon. Sự do dự của Kotas đã khiến ông mất 10 đô la tiền cổ phiếu.)

Mặc dù, Bezos bắt đầu lấp đầy vị trí quản lý cấp cao, xây dựng nhóm quản lý chính thức được biết đến với tên gọi J Team. Amazon tuyển dụng quản lý từ Barnes & Noble, Symantec và hai vị trí từ Microsoft – Joel Spiegel, phó chủ tịch kỹ thuật, và David Risher, cuối cùng đảm nhận vị trí đứng đầu bộ phận bán lẻ. Risher bị mê hoặc bởi tầm nhìn tham vọng của người sáng lập Amazon. “Nếu chúng ta thực hiện điều này đúng cách, chúng ta có thể trở thành công ty một tỉ đô la trước năm 2000,” Bezos nói với Risher. Risher thông báo tới Bill Gates, người đồng sáng lập Microsoft, về sự ra đi đến công ty bán sách ven hồ. Gates, người đánh giá thấp ảnh hưởng của Internet trong thời gian dài, thực sự kinh ngạc. “Tôi nghĩ ông ấy đã thực sự sửng sốt,” Risher nói. “Ở một mức độ nào đó, ông ấy đúng. Điều đó chẳng hợp lý gì cả.”

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Một trong những nhiệm vụ đầu tiên của Risher là đàm phán với gã khổng lồ Starbucks. Amazon đưa ra đề nghị đặt giá đựng hàng hóa của công ty cạnh quầy thu ngân của Starbucks, đổi lại Starbucks có quyền sở hữu công ty. Risher và Bezos gặp Howard Schultz, tổng giám đốc điều hành của Starbucks. Schultz trao đổi với cả hai rằng Amazon tồn tại một vấn đề lớn và Starbucks có thể giải quyết được. “Anh không hiện diện hữu hình,” người sáng lập Starbucks có dáng vẻ cao và gầy vừa nói vừa pha cà phê mời khách. “Điều đó đang kéo anh lại.”

Bezos không đồng ý. Ông nhìn thẳng vào Schultz và nói rằng: “Chúng tôi sẽ đưa thứ này lên mặt trăng.” Họ quyết định thảo luận hợp tác, nhưng không đi tới đâu. Vài tuần sau, quản lý của Schultz yêu cầu 10% cổ phần sở hữu Amazon và một ghế trong hội đồng quản trị. Bezos đã nghĩ về ngưỡng sở hữu tối đa thấp hơn 1%. Thậm chí cho tới bây giờ, Amazon vẫn theo đuổi việc đánh giá khả năng hiện diện hữu hình trong chuỗi kinh doanh bán lẻ. “Chúng tôi luôn sẵn lòng xem xét bất kỳ cơ hội nào,” Risher nói.

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Joy Covey, một nhân vật mới khác xuất hiện và trở thành trưởng bộ phận tài chính. Có tinh thần cầu tiến và thường răn đe nhân viên cấp dưới, Covey trở thành người trợ thủ tài trí cho Bezos và là kiến trúc sư chủ chốt của quá trình mở rộng Amazon trong giai đoạn đầu. Bà có nền tảng giáo dục khá đặc biệt không theo thông lệ. Một đứa trẻ cực kỳ thông minh nhưng bị xa lánh đến từ San Mateo, California. Bà bỏ nhà khi đang là học sinh trung học năm hai và làm thư ký cho cửa hàng tạp hóa tại Fresno. Bà gia nhập trường Cal State, Fresno ở tuổi 17, tốt nghiệp trong hai năm và sau đó tham gia kỳ thi sát hạch để nhận chứng chỉ kế toán viên ở tuổi 19, đạt điểm số cao thứ nhì toàn quốc mà không học hành gì. Sau đó, bà nhận bằng luật và hợp tác kinh doanh từ Đại học Harvard. Khi Bezos phát hiện ra bà, bà đang làm giám đốc tài chính cho Digidesign ở tuổi 30. Đây là công ty chuyên về âm thanh kỹ thuật số tại Thung lũng Silicon.

Trong vài năm tiếp theo, Covey tập trung mạnh vào thực hiện mệnh lệnh của Bezos “Trở nên lớn mạnh nhanh chóng” đến nỗi những thứ khác trong cuộc sống trở nên không quan trọng. Một buổi sáng, bà đỗ xe trong gara công ty và mất tập trung đến mức vẫn mở máy xe cả ngày. Tối hôm đó, bà không thể tìm thấy chìa khóa xe. Bà cho rằng đã đánh mất chìa khóa, đi về nhà và bỏ xe lại. Bảo vệ trong gara gọi cho bà một vài giờ sau đó và nói rằng bà có thể muốn trở về văn phòng để lấy lại chiếc xe vẫn nổ máy.

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Covey bắt đầu triển khai vụ phát hành cổ phiếu lần đầu ra công chúng một tháng sau khi gia nhập công ty. Vào thời điểm đó, Amazon không đòi hỏi cấp bách vốn đại chúng – công ty chưa tung ra phân mục sản phẩm mới và nhà kho 8640 m2 tại phía nam Seattle vẫn đang phục vụ tốt nhu cầu của công ty. Nhưng Bezos tin rằng vụ chào bán ra công chúng có thể trở thành sự kiện xây dựng thương hiệu toàn cầu, củng cố vững chắc thương hiệu Amazon trong tâm trí khách hàng. Vào những ngày đó, Bezos tận dụng mọi cơ hội xuất hiện trước công chúng và thuật lại câu chuyện của Amazon.com (Luôn luôn sử dụng Amazon.com, chứ không bao giờ chỉ có Amazon; ông kiên định theo như cách David Shaw đặt khoảng cách giữa chữ D. và chữ E. trong tên công ty). Đế chế hùng mạnh của ngành kinh doanh sách Barnes & Noble đang mon men tham gia phân phối sách trực tuyến cũng khiến Bezos thúc đẩy việc tiếp cận công chúng.

Chuỗi cửa hàng sách được điều hành bởi Len Riggio, một doanh nhân có tính cách mạnh mẽ và kiên định sinh ra tại quận Bronx, có sở thích mặc comple đắt tiền và sưu tầm các tác phẩm mỹ thuật. Ông phung phí tiền vào những tác phẩm treo trên tường trong văn phòng Manhattan. Trong vòng hai thập kỷ, Barnes & Noble đã tạo ra cuộc cách mạng kinh doanh sách. Công ty đưa ra mức giá chiết khấu cho những đầu sách mới xuất bản và cạnh tranh trực tiếp với đối thủ Borders, truyền bá khái niệm về quy mô đại cửa hàng, đẩy nhiều trung tâm buôn bán và cửa hàng độc lập kinh doanh sách ra khỏi thị trường. Theo thông tin từ Hiệp hội các nhà kinh doanh sách ở Mỹ, giai đoạn từ năm 1991 đến 1997, thị phần của các cửa hàng độc lập tại Mỹ giảm từ 33% xuống còn 17%. Số lượng thành viên giảm từ 4.500 xuống còn 3.300 vào thời điểm đó.

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Giờ đây, Barnes & Noble đang phải đối mặt với đối thủ tầm thường mới phất. Amazon có doanh số bán hàng không đáng kể, 16 triệu đô la năm 1996; Barnes & Noble đạt con số đáng nhớ 2 tỉ đô la doanh số cùng năm. Sau khi Amazon xuất hiện trên tờ Wall Street Journal năm 1996, Riggio đã gọi cho Bezos và nói rằng muốn đến Seattle cùng anh trai Stephen bàn chuyện hợp tác. Không có kinh nghiệm trong những cuộc đối thoại kiểu như vậy tại thời điểm đó, Bezos gọi cho nhà đầu tư kiêm thành viên Hội đồng quản trị, Tom Alberg và đề nghị ông đi cùng đến bữa tối với hai anh em Riggio. Trước khi đến buổi gặp mặt, họ đã nhất trí đưa ra chiến lược đối thoại thận trọng và nói lời tốt đẹp.

Tại buổi đó, Riggio nói với Bezos và Alberg rằng họ sẽ sớm tung ra trang web trong thời gian sắp tới và sẽ tiêu diệt Amazon. Tuy nhiên, họ ngưỡng mộ những gì Bezos đã làm và gợi ý một số khả năng hợp tác, như nhượng quyền công nghệ của Amazon hoặc mở trang web chung. “Họ không đề nghị mua chúng tôi ngay. Điều này không rõ ràng lắm,” Alberg nói. “Nó giống như một bữa tối thân thiết hơn là dè chừng.”

Sau đó, Alberg và Bezos nói với nhà Riggio rằng họ sẽ suy nghĩ về mối quan hệ hợp tác. Cuối cùng, Alberg và Bezos trao đổi qua điện thoại và đồng ý rằng mối quan hệ hợp tác như vậy dường như không hiệu quả. Alberg nói: “Jeff luôn là một người tin tưởng lớn rằng các công ty nhỏ có khả năng đột phá có thể chiến thắng. “Đó không phải là ngày tận thế. Chúng tôi biết rằng chúng tôi đã gặp một thách thức.”

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Bị từ chối dứt khoát, anh em nhà Riggio trở về nhà và bắt đầu triển khai trang web riêng, nhưng họ đã mất nhiều thời gian sửa chữa và khắc phục các vấn đề phát sinh. Trong suốt thời gian đó, đội của Bezos tăng tốc tiến trình cải cách và mở rộng.

Joy Covey xem xét cả Morgan Stanley và Goldman Sachs để trở thành ngân hàng bảo lãnh phát hành cho vụ chào bán cổ phiếu đại chúng đầu tiên của Amazon, nhưng cuối cùng bà chọn ngân hàng Deutsche Bank và Frank Quattrone. Nhà phân tích chuyên nghiệp về vốn đầu tư rủi ro cho Quattrone, Bill Gurley đã theo dõi Amazon hàng năm trời và tiên đoán rằng công ty sẽ trở thành một trong những “người cưỡi sóng” khai phá sức mạnh của Interrnet.

Mùa xuân năm đó, Bezos và Covey đi khắp nước Mỹ và châu Âu để chào hàng Amazon đến những nhà đầu tư tiềm năng. Với lịch sử dữ liệu doanh số trong ba năm, hiện tại họ nhận thấy họ là một câu chuyện độc nhất vô nhị. Không giống như những nhà bán lẻ truyền thống, Amazon giới thiệu mạnh mẽ về chu kỳ kinh doanh hoạt động âm. Khách hàng thanh toán bằng thẻ tín dụng khi sách được chuyển đến, nhưng Amazon thanh toán dư nợ với nhà cung cấp sách sau đó theo chu kỳ vài tháng. Càng nhiều đơn đặt hàng, Amazon càng có nhiều tiền trong ngân hàng, giúp công ty nhận được luồng vốn ổn định để chi trả hoạt động và mở rộng kinh doanh. Công ty cũng có thể có được mức tỉ lệ lợi tức cao trên vốn đầu tư. Amazon không như những nhà bán lẻ trực tiếp bán hàng qua hệ thống cửa hàng phân phối, nơi mà hàng tồn kho chất trong hàng trăm, thậm chí hàng nghìn cửa hàng trên toàn quốc. Vào thời điểm đó, Amazon có một trang web và duy nhất một kho hàng.

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Tỉ lệ chi phí cố định của Amazon để doanh thu nhiều hơn đáng kể so với các đối thủ cạnh tranh bán hàng theo phương thức truyền thống. Nói cách khác, Bezos và Covey đã lập luận rằng một đô la “đi vào” Amazon có thể dẫn đến lợi nhuận tăng theo cấp số nhân, lớn hơn so với việc một đô la đó đi vào cơ sở của các nhà bán lẻ khác trên thế giới.

Dường như ở mỗi điểm dừng chân, các nhà đầu tư đều hỏi cặp đôi về khả năng mở rộng sang những phân mục hàng hóa khác. Bezos lưỡng lự và nói rằng ông ấy chỉ tập trung vào sách. Để làm sáng tỏ trường hợp của mình, họ đã so sánh các nguyên tắc cơ bản của họ với Dell, nhà sản xuất PC đang phát triển mạnh vào thời điểm đó. Tuy nhiên, Bezos, đặc trưng là bí mật, chỉ tiết lộ mức tối thiểu hợp pháp và giữ lại một số dữ liệu, như chi phí của Amazon để thu hút người dùng mới và số tiền khách hàng trung thành thường chi tiêu trên trang web. Anh ta muốn có vốn từ một đợt IPO nhưng không muốn cung cấp cho các đối thủ của mình một bản đồ lộ trình để theo bước anh ta. Covey nói: “Có rất nhiều sự hoài nghi về triển lãm trên đường. Nhiều người nói rằng, bạn sẽ thất bại, Barnes và Noble sẽ giết bạn, và bạn nghĩ mình là ai mà không chia sẻ những thứ này?”

Việc phát hành cổ phiếu lần đầu ra công chúng (IPO) thực sự gây ra sự khó chịu theo một cách khác: Trong suốt “thời kỳ im lặng” diễn ra trong bảy tuần theo yêu cầu của SEC (Ủy ban Chứng khoán và Giao dịch Mỹ), Bezos không được phép tiếp xúc với giới truyền thông. “Tôi không thể tin rằng chúng tôi phải trì hoãn công việc kinh doanh bảy năm,” ông phàn nàn. Bezos coi thời gian mỗi tuần là một năm bởi ông tin rằng Internet đang phát triển ở tốc độ nhanh như vậy.

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Cách ly khỏi giới truyền thông sớm khiến mọi việc thậm chí trở nên khó khăn hơn. Ba ngày trước vụ IPO của Amazon, Barnes & Noble đệ đơn kiện Amazon tại Tòa án liên bang. Họ đưa ra luận điểm rằng Amazon quảng cáo bản thân sai lệch khi đưa ra thông điệp “Cửa hàng sách lớn nhất hành tinh”. Riggio lo lắng chính xác về Amazon, tuy nhiên với vụ kiện này, cuối cùng ông càng khiến đối thủ cạnh tranh nhỏ bé hơn nhận được sự chú ý của công chúng. Cuối tháng đó, nhà Riggio ra mắt trang web của riêng mình và nhiều người dường như đã sẵn sàng nhìn thấy sự ra đi của Amazon. Giám đốc điều hành của Forrester Research, một công ty nghiên cứu công nghệ được nhiều người theo dõi, đã đưa ra một báo cáo trong đó ông gọi công ty là “Amazon.Toast”.

Mệt mỏi, căng thẳng với những ngăn cản pháp lý yêu cầu phải giữ im lặng, Bezos muốn gửi những chú hề mặc áo phông Amazon đến sự kiện ra mắt của anh em Riggio.

Sau đó, Bezos tham gia phát biểu trong cuộc họp các bên của công ty về cuộc tấn công của Barnes & Noble. “Nghe này, bạn nên thức dậy với nỗi lo lắng mỗi sáng,” ông nói với nhân viên. “Nhưng đừng lo lắng về đối thủ cạnh tranh của chúng ta, bởi vì họ không bao giờ gửi cho chúng ta bất kỳ đồng xu nào cả. Hãy lo lắng về khách hàng và luôn luôn giữ tâm trí tập trung.”

Năm sau, Amazon.com và BarnesandNoble.com cạnh tranh, mỗi trang đều quả quyết rằng mình đưa ra lựa chọn tốt hơn và giá thấp hơn. Barnes & Noble dựa vào những cuốn catalog chuyên sâu; Amazon tăng cường nỗ lực tìm kiếm những cuốn sách hiếm và không xuất bản nữa, phân công nhân viên theo sát những cuốn sách trong cửa hàng sách độc lập và những người buôn bán sách cổ. Năm 1998, Barnes & Noble tách riêng mảng kinh doanh trên Internet với nguồn vốn 200 triệu đô la từ tập đoàn truyền thông khổng lồ Bertelsmann của Đức và sau đó đưa công ty con mới thành lập trở thành công ty đại chúng. Sau đó Amazon đã tập kích mạn sườn đối thủ bằng cách nhanh chóng mở rộng sang những phân mục sản phẩm khác như âm nhạc và đĩa DVD.

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Bezos dự đoán rằng chuỗi bán lẻ sẽ gặp vấn đề trầm trọng khi cạnh tranh trong lĩnh vực kinh doanh trực tuyến, và cuối cùng ông đã đúng. Anh em nhà Riggio không sẵn sàng mất tiền vào công việc kinh doanh chiếm tỉ trọng nhỏ và không muốn đưa những nhân viên tài năng nhất phụ trách kế hoạch. Vì như vậy, doanh số của những cửa hàng đem lại lợi nhuận lớn hơn sẽ bị giảm. Lý do quan trọng nhất là hệ thống giao sách vẫn hoàn toàn giới hạn việc phục vụ các cửa hàng hữu hình khi vận chuyển số lượng lớn sách đến hàng loạt địa điểm. Việc chuyển từ hình thức phân phối số lượng lớn sang gửi qua đường bưu điện có số lượng đặt hàng nhỏ tới từng cá nhân khách hàng trở nên tốn nhiều thời gian, công sức và gây nhiều lỗi dịch vụ khách hàng. Còn với Amazon, đó là công việc hàng ngày.

IPO của Amazon, vào ngày 15 tháng 5 năm 1997, là một thành công, mặc dù là một sự thành công tương đối nhẹ nhàng so với các vụ bong bóng dot-com sau này. Bezos đã chiến đấu với các chủ ngân hàng của mình để tăng giá chào bán lên 18 đô la một cổ phiếu và cổ phiếu được giao dịch dưới sàn - thấp hơn giá IPO - trong hơn một tháng. Nhưng đợt IPO đã huy động được 54 triệu đô la và thu hút được sự chú ý rộng rãi, đưa công ty đến một năm bom tấn với mức tăng trưởng 900% doanh thu hàng năm. Bezos, cha mẹ và anh trai và em gái của anh ấy (những người từng mua số cổ phiếu trị giá 10 nghìn đô la từ rất sớm) giờ đã chính thức trở thành những triệu phú. Và những người ủng hộ ban đầu của Amazon và Kleiner Perkins đều nhận thấy lợi nhuận tốt từ các khoản đầu tư của họ. Nhưng thậm chí đó còn là hạt lạc so với sự tăng trưởng theo cấp số nhân sắp tới trong cổ phiếu của Amazon.

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Từ New York, Bezos đã gọi điện đến văn phòng Amazon vào ngày phát hành IPO và yêu cầu nhân viên không quá tán dương thời điểm này hoặc ám ảnh về giá cổ phiếu. Bia Henry Weinhard được chiêu đãi, một loại bia địa phương rẻ tiền, đã được đưa đi khắp các văn phòng ở Seattle và sau đó mọi người quay trở lại làm việc, mặc dù họ thỉnh thoảng liếc trộm về giá cổ phiếu của Amazon.

Cuối tháng đó, tất cả những người làm việc trong đợt IPO đều nhận được một hộp gỗ chứa một chai rượu tequila. Trên chai có một nhãn với lời mời đến một "Fiesta Mexicana," một ngày cuối tuần tại Palmilla Resort ở Los Cabos, Mexico, với sự cho phép của Frank Quattrone và nhóm công nghệ Deutsche Bank.

Bezos, MacKenzie, Joy Covey, Shel Kaphan và Nicholas Lovejoy đã tham dự, cũng như Jeff Blackburn, cộng sự của Deutsche Bank và cựu quản lý của Đại học Dartmouth, người sẽ sớm gia nhập Amazon và trở thành giám đốc phát triển kinh doanh. Cuối tuần bao gồm một chuyến du ngoạn trong ngày, trong đó Quattrone dạy cho Bezos điệu Macarena, và hai người đàn ông, mặc dù chênh lệch độ cao đáng kể, đã khiêu vũ bên cạnh nhau trên boong tàu. Một đêm nọ, có một bữa tối thịnh soạn trên bãi biển, và các nhân viên ngân hàng xuất hiện trong trang phục hải tặc. Vào cuối buổi tối, gió bão bắt đầu mạnh và đại dương trở nên ngột ngạt. Một cơn sóng dữ dội vào bờ và cuốn trôi dây cáp điện, làm chập thiết bị âm thanh nổi và làm khay tráng miệng rơi xuống cát. Khi những người dự tiệc nhốn nháo tìm nơi trú ẩn, một Bezos vui vẻ quan sát hiện trường, tiếng cười của anh ta cắt ngang màn đêm Mexico.

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Đầu năm 1997, trong khi Amazon đang phải chống trả chuỗi cửa hàng sách lớn nhất thế giới, Covey và Bezos dụ dỗ Rick Dalzell, cựu lính biệt kích Mỹ tham ra Amazon. Dalzell đến từ thành phố Georgetown bang Kentucky và đã từng làm kỹ sư thông tin trong suốt những năm 1980 tại Fort Gamble và sau này là sĩ quan thông tin tại Tây Đức. Sau khi giải ngũ, cuối cùng ông chọn làm việc trong bộ phận hệ thống thông tin của nhà bán lẻ sử dụng công nghệ phức tạp nhất trên thế giới: Walmart.

Ban đầu, ông liên tiếp từ chối Bezos và Covey. Khi tới thăm Seattle mùa xuân năm đó, do hãng hàng không làm mất hành lý nên Dalzell phải mượn áo khoác và cà vạt từ nhân viên xách hành lý tại khách sạn. Sau đó, ông xuất hiện sớm tại văn phòng Amazon nhưng không ai có mặt ở đó cả. Không như Walmart, nhân viên tại Amazon làm việc khuya và thức dậy muộn. Khi Bezos đến văn phòng, ông và Dalzell ngồi xuống nói chuyện và người sáng lập Amazon vô tình đánh đổ toàn bộ cốc cà phê vào chiếc áo khoác đi mượn của Dalzell.

Mặc dù màn chào hỏi có vẻ không thuận buồm xuôi gió, nhưng Dalzell đã rời Seattle cùng với tầm nhìn và sức hút cá nhân khác biệt từ Bezos. Tuy nhiên, trở về Bentonville, Arkansas, Dalzell dễ dàng chịu tác động từ những nhà quản lý Walmart. Lee Scott, vị tổng giám đốc điều hành tương lai của Walmart, người đang điều hành hệ thống cung ứng phân phối, nói với Dalzell rằng Amazon là một ý tưởng mới lạ nhưng nó chỉ có tiềm năng giới hạn. Don Soderquist, giám đốc điều hành của Walmart, nói rằng vì Amazon không lưu trữ hàng tồn kho của riêng mình - vào thời điểm đó, họ chỉ đặt hàng từ các nhà phân phối và sau đó nhanh chóng vận chuyển nó trở lại - mô hình này sẽ thành công khi đạt 100 triệu đô la trong bán hàng. Anh ta cũng nói rằng Dalzell là một trong hàng tá kẻ mà họ đang đặt cược, và anh ta nói thêm một cách đáng ngại, “Nếu bạn quyết định rời đi, bạn không còn là thành viên của gia đình Walmart nữa.”

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Dalzell đã ghi nhớ lời khuyên đó. Nhưng sự say mê của anh ấy với bán lẻ trực tuyến sẽ không biến mất. Vào thời điểm đó, đầu năm 1997, Walmart và Sam’s Club đang bước những bước đầu tiên của riêng họ vào thế giới thương mại điện tử, nhưng Dalzell có thể thấy rằng nỗ lực này không có sự hỗ trợ đầy đủ của công ty.

Bezos không từ bỏ việc theo đuổi Dalzell hay ngừng tìm kiếm những người phụ trách kỹ thuật dày dặn khác. Ông tìm kiếm bất kỳ ai phù hợp nhưng vẫn yêu cầu Covey gọi cho vợ Dalzell, Kathryn, vài tuần một lần và John Doerr thì cố gắng dụ dỗ Dalzell. Bezos và Covey bay tới Bentonville nhằm mục đích gây bất ngờ cho Dalzell và mời ông ăn tối. Sau bữa ăn, Dalzell đồng ý gia nhập Amazon – nhưng sau đó thay đổi ý định. “Sẽ phải cần đến bom nguyên tử để khiến gia đình tôi rời khỏi Arkansas,” ông nói vào thời điểm đó.

Tuy nhiên, Dalzell không thể đẩy Amazon ra khỏi tâm trí mình. “Vợ tôi nói với tôi rằng nếu tôi đam mê điều gì, tôi sẽ không ngừng nói về nó,” ông nói. “Một ngày cô ấy quay về phía tôi và nói, ‘Tại sao anh vẫn còn ở Walmart?’” Vào tháng Tám, cuối cùng ông cũng chấp nhận đề nghị, thực tế là vào thời điểm này, và CIO của Walmart đứng trong văn phòng của Dalzell khi anh thu dọn đồ đạc của mình và sau đó đưa anh ra khỏi cửa.

Vào tháng Tám năm 1997, Dalzell bắt đầu công việc mới ở vị trí giám đốc thông tin Amazon và trở thành thành viên chủ chốt của đội J Team. Ông là giám đốc dày dặn kinh nghiệm, giỏi trong việc tuyển dụng nhanh chóng và xây dựng những nhóm lớn để hoạch định và hoàn thành mục tiêu đầy tham vọng. Dalzell thường xuyên ngồi cạnh Bezos trong những cuộc họp và chịu trách nhiệm lựa chọn, sắp xếp nhân lực phù hợp nhất cho ý tưởng của người sáng lập. “Jeff đưa ra những ý tưởng lớn nhanh hơn bất kỳ ai có thể đưa chúng vào thực tiễn,” Bruce Jones, kỹ sư làm việc lâu năm tại Amazon và là bạn của Dalzell, nói. “Rick đảm bảo cho chúng tôi sẽ hoàn thiện những yếu tố quan trọng.”

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Dalzell gia nhập Amazon vào mùa hè năm đó đã đem đến hiệu quả công việc lớn, và điều này gây ra nỗi lo lắng cho Shel Kaphan. Trước lần IPO diễn ra, Bezos đi dạo cùng người cộng sự đầu tiên và chia sẻ với ông rằng, công ty cần quản lý kỹ thuật chuyên sâu hơn và sau đó đề nghị ông trở thành giám đốc công nghệ của Amazon. Điều này nghe có vẻ giống như đề bạt, nhưng trên thực tế Kaphan sẽ đóng vai trò tư vấn, không có ngân sách hay trách nhiệm trực tiếp. Kaphan đã suy nghĩ về điều đó trong vài ngày và sau đó đăng ký phản đối, nhưng theo Kaphan, Bezos nói: “Đã xong rồi” và sẽ không nói về nó nữa.

Kaphan ở lại và giữ cương vị giám đốc kỹ thuật trong vài năm tiếp theo và vẫn nằm trong ban quản lý. Tuy nhiên, Kaphan bị cho ra rìa bởi không còn nhân viên nào báo cáo cho ông hay ông có quyền tác động đến phân bổ nguồn lực chủ chốt. Tâm trạng thất vọng và cảm giác không quyền lực lớn lên. Ông đã xây dựng hệ thống ban đầu cho Amazon trong điều kiện khó khăn dựa trên quan điểm tiết kiệm, giờ đây, khi Amazon đang tiến tới mốc 60 triệu đô la doanh thu một năm, thì hệ thống cơ sở vật chất trở thành thảm họa. Kaphan muốn dành thời gian xây dựng lại cẩn thận. Bezos từ chối và muốn toàn bộ đội ngũ kỹ sư phát triển những tính năng mới, không phải sửa chữa lại cái cũ. Sau đó, Bezos tiếp tục gây sức ép với Kaphan khi phê chuẩn vài dự án của ông, như tái xây dựng hệ thống cơ sở hạ tầng của Amazon từ nền tảng cũ, nhưng lại để những giám đốc khác phụ trách thực hiện. Kaphan chỉ ngồi và quan sát.

Bezos không còn tin tưởng người lập trình viên hướng nội vào bất kỳ trách nhiệm quản lý thực tế nào, nhưng ông bày tỏ lòng biết ơn và sự yêu mến dành cho Kaphan. Vào mùa thu năm 1998, Bezos nói với Kaphan hãy sắp xếp hành lý và tháp tùng mình trong chuyến công tác kiểm tra đối tượng thôn tính tiềm năng. Nhưng sau đó, ông làm Kaphan bất ngờ với sự kiện mà ông gọi là Shelebration, kỳ nghỉ cuối tuần tại Hawaii để kỷ niệm bốn năm Kaphan ở Amazon.

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Bezos đã bay cùng các đồng nghiệp, gia đình và bạn bè của Kaphan và đưa mọi người lên cabin riêng trong ba ngày trên bãi biển Maui. Mỗi người tham dự đều nhận được một tấm lót gạch trang trí có trang trí hình Kaphan đội một con Mèo ngốc nghếch trong chiếc mũ Hat.

Cuối tuần đó đã tạo ra một mối quan hệ tình cờ cho Bezos. Một trong những người bạn của Kaphan đã đến trong chuyến đi là Stewart Brand, người sáng lập ra Whole Earth Catalog. Brand và vợ của anh, Ryan, đã gắn bó với Bezos và MacKenzie, tạo ra mối liên hệ dẫn đến việc Bezos tham gia vào Clock of the Long Now, một dự án đầy tham vọng nhằm chế tạo một chiếc đồng hồ cơ học khổng lồ được thiết kế để đo thời gian trong mười nghìn năm, một cách để thúc đẩy tư duy dài hạn. Một vài năm sau, kết quả trực tiếp của cuối tuần đó, Bezos trở thành người ủng hộ tài chính lớn nhất cho Đồng hồ 10.000 năm và đồng ý lắp đặt nó trên tài sản mà ông sở hữu ở Texas.

Nhưng Kaphan tỏ ra khó chịu trong suốt chuyến đi Hawaii. Ông cảm thấy như “người chưa nghỉ hưu nhận đồng hồ vàng”.

Hai lời hứa của Bezos giờ đây xung đột nhau. Bezos từng cam kết với Kaphan rằng ông có thể giữ vị trí này mãi mãi. Nhưng người sáng lập Amazon cũng hứa với công ty và nhà đầu tư rằng, ông sẽ luôn tăng tiêu chuẩn tuyển dụng và Amazon sẽ sống hoặc chết dựa trên khả năng tuyển dụng những kỹ sư đại tài. Rick Dalzell và Joel Spiegel đã quá hiểu nghệ thuật tranh đấu chính trị thường xuất hiện trong những công ty lớn. Kaphan là một hacker nhút nhát, với tính cách lý tưởng hóa và ít khả năng lãnh đạo trực giác. Trên thực tế, ông không thể tuyển dụng và phát triển nhân sự cho bộ phận của mình theo kế hoạch. Tuy nhiên, ông cũng lặng lẽ góp phần phát triển Amazon ra toàn thế giới từ khi mới thành lập và không chắc chắn về tương lai phát triển trong những trang tính toán của Jeff Bezos.

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Kaphan không thể tưởng tượng có ngày ông sẽ ra đi. Tuy nhiên, ông nhận ra ngày đó đến gần khi tự mình đếm từng tuần cho đến ngày kỷ niệm 5 năm làm việc tại Amazon. Ông chính thức ở lại Amazon cho đến mùa thu năm 1999. Ông gọi điện cho Bezos vào một buổi sáng nói rằng ông xin nghỉ việc. Kaphan nhớ lại rằng Bezos đã nói xin lỗi vì để ông nghĩ rằng cần phải đưa ra quyết định ra đi khó khăn và đã không cố gắng hết mình thuyết phục ông ở lại.

Bezos coi Kaphan là “người quan trọng nhất trong lịch sử của Amazon.com.” Nhưng Kaphan cảm thấy oán giận chua xót về cuộc phiêu lưu 5 năm cùng Amazon. Kaphan gọi quyết định loại bỏ ông, không cho tham gia làm việc tích cực tại Amazon của Bezos là “sự phản bội niềm tin thiêng liêng” giữa những con người cùng nhau khởi nghiệp, và cách ông bị đối xử là “một trong những điều đáng thất vọng nhất trong cuộc đời”.

Cảm nhận của Kaphan cũng là cảm nhận thất vọng chung của nhiều nhân viên Amazon gia nhập thời kỳ đầu. Với khả năng thuyết phục thần thánh, Bezos đã thuyết phục họ rằng nếu trung thành thì sẽ được trả công xứng đáng sau này. Sau đó, nhà sáng lập có ánh mắt kiên định thay thế họ bằng những nhóm khác có niềm tin mới và có kinh nghiệm hơn. Đứng ngoài và nhìn công ty phát triển khiến họ dâng trào cảm giác giày vò, như thể những đứa trẻ của họ đã rời bỏ gia đình và chuyển đến gia đình khác. Nhưng rút cuộc, khi Bezos quyết định dứt khoát số phận với Shel Kaphan, thì Amazon chỉ còn duy nhất một đấng sinh thành.

—ooOoo—

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“GIẤC MƠ PHÁT SỐT”

Đầu năm 1997, Jeff Bezos bay đến Boston để thuyết trình tại Đại học Kinh doanh Harvard. Ông nói chuyện với lớp Quản trị thị trường, và những sinh viên vờ như ông không ở đó trong khi mổ xẻ phân tích tỉ mỉ triển vọng phát triển của nhà bán lẻ trực tuyến. Cuối giờ, họ đi tới kết luận chung: Amazon có vẻ sẽ không sống sót qua khỏi làn sóng những nhà bán lẻ truyền thống chuyển sang kinh doanh trực tuyến. “Ông dường như là một người tốt, tử tế nên đừng hiểu nhầm vấn đề nêu trên. Tuy nhiên, ông cần bán công ty cho Barnes & Noble và rời bỏ thị trường,” một sinh viên thẳng thắn trao đổi với Bezos.

Brian Birtwistle, sinh viên trong lớp, nhớ rằng Bezos đã phản ứng khiêm tốn và thận trọng. “Các bạn có thể đúng,” nhà sáng lập Amazon đáp lại. “Nhưng tôi nghĩ rằng các bạn đã đánh giá thấp mức độ khó khăn của những công ty bán lẻ truyền thống đang phân phối qua kênh cửa hàng trên phố hay bất kỳ công ty nào muốn gia nhập. Họ phải làm quen, thích nghi bản thân theo phương thức mới và sẽ gặp khó khăn để trở nên linh hoạt hoặc tập trung vào kênh kinh doanh mới. Tôi đoán chúng ta sẽ sớm thấy điều đó thôi.”

Kết thúc buổi học, chỉ vài sinh viên nói chuyện với Bezos, ít hơn nhiều so với đám đông đổ tới chào đón hầu hết các khách mời khác. Một trong số những sinh viên đó là Jason Kilar (người sẽ làm việc cho Amazon trong chín năm tiếp theo, phấn đấu nằm trong đội ngũ quản lý của công ty trước khi trở thành giám đốc điều hành của trang web video Hulu). Khi đến lượt Birtwistle bước đến gặp Bezos thì đã đến lúc ông phải ra sân bay. Vị giáo sư phụ trách lớp gợi ý Birtwistle chở Bezos ra sân bay. “Tuyệt,” Bezos đồng ý. “Tôi có thể tiết kiệm tiền taxi.”

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Trong suốt 15 phút lái xe, Bezos nghĩ rằng Birtwistle đang quan tâm tới cơ hội nghề nghiệp tại Amazon và bắt đầu phỏng vấn anh chàng. “Tại sao cậu muốn làm việc tại Amazon.com?” ông hỏi.

Birtwistle không nghĩ sẽ tham gia phỏng vấn lúc đó nhưng anh chàng vẫn bắt nhịp theo. “Tôi theo học chuyên ngành lịch sử,” anh nói. “Nếu tôi có cơ hội gia nhập một công ty đang ở giai đoạn đầu phát triển giống như công ty của ông, tôi sẽ cảm thấy như tham gia vào điều gì đó mang tính lịch sử.”

Bezos gần như thét lên. “Đó chính xác là cách chúng tôi tư duy tại Amazon.com! Cậu xem, trên thế giới có vô số công ty và phần lớn sẽ phá sản. Chỉ có vài thương hiệu trường tồn với thời gian, và chúng tôi sẽ là một trong số chúng.”

Sau vài giây im lặng, Bezos hỏi: “Vậy, tại sao nắp cống hình tròn?”

“Jeff, nếu ông muốn đến sân bay đúng giờ, ông đừng hỏi tôi những câu hỏi kiểu như vậy.”

Bezos cười lớn như tiếng súng nổ, làm Birtwistle giật mình trượt xe trên đường cao tốc. “Không, nghiêm túc đấy,” Bezos nói. “Cậu sẽ trả lời ra sao?”

“Chúng có hình tròn bởi vì như vậy người ta sẽ dễ lăn chúng vào vị trí cần đặt hơn?”

“Không đúng rồi, nhưng đó không phải là giả thuyết tồi,” Bezos nói.

Khi Birtwistle tốt nghiệp Harvard, ông gia nhập Amazon, cùng với Kilar và Andy Jassy, những người nhiều năm sau đó sẽ điều hành mảng kinh doanh đám mây tiên phong của Amazon. Họ là một trong số những sinh viên tốt nghiệp trường kinh doanh đầu tiên được thuê tại Amazon, nơi trước đây đã ưa chuộng các tài năng kỹ thuật địa phương. Họ cũng là một nguồn lực hữu ích cho Bezos ở thời điểm quan trọng trong lịch sử của công ty.

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Đầu năm 1998, phó chủ tịch phụ trách marketing, Mark Breier đưa cho Bezos kết quả một nghiên cứu chỉ ra rằng, phần lớn người tiêu dùng không sử dụng Amazon.com và trong tương lai sẽ không sử dụng, bởi vì đơn giản họ mua rất ít sách. Breier nói rằng Bezos dường như không quá lo lắng về số liệu nghiên cứu ảm đạm về sở thích văn chương của người Mỹ. Ông yêu cầu Breier phân công nhóm nhân viên mới tốt nghiệp Đại học Kinh doanh Harvard vào “nhóm SWAT”. Nhóm có nhiệm vụ nghiên cứu các nhóm sản phẩm có chỉ số SKU (số lượng mặt hàng có khả năng tồn kho) cao đang có trong kho hàng, và có thể gửi dễ dàng qua đường bưu điện. “Tôi thông báo cho ông ấy tin tức rất tồi tệ về việc kinh doanh của công ty, và tôi thực sự bất ngờ khi ông tỏ ra vui vẻ,” Breier nói.

Hiện tại, Bezos cảm thấy cần mở rộng ngay sang những phân nhóm sản phẩm mới. Trong tâm trí khách hàng, thương hiệu Amazon chỉ gắn liền với sách. Ông muốn nó linh hoạt, đa dạng, giống như Virgin của Richard Branson gắn liền với mọi thứ từ âm nhạc, hàng không cho đến rượu. Bezos cũng cần Amazon tạo ra doanh thu cho phép ông đầu tư vào công nghệ và vượt trước đối thủ cạnh tranh. “Trước đó, Jeff đã tính toán hết trên giấy và biết rằng điều này phải xảy ra. Công ty phải phát triển, quy mô lớn hoặc ‘về vườn’,” Joel Spiegel, phó chủ tịch kỹ thuật, người đã từng làm việc cho cả Microsoft và Apple nói.

Joy Covey tin rằng ngay từ đầu, Bezos đã lên kế hoạch mở rộng kinh doanh các sản phẩm ngoài sách, nhưng ông chờ đúng thời điểm để thực hiện. “Ông luôn có những tham vọng lớn,” cô nói. “Câu hỏi chỉ là phải nắm bắt cơ hội vào đúng thời điểm.”

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Mùa xuân năm đó, Jassy nghiên cứu âm nhạc, Kilar tập trung vào video tại nhà, Victoria Pickett, bạn cùng lớp tại Harvard, khảo sát phần mềm đóng gói màng mỏng, và danh sách sản phẩm khảo sát còn kéo dài. Trong một cuộc họp ngoài văn phòng ở khách sạn Westin, nhóm MBA thuyết trình những khám phá của họ trước ban lãnh đạo cấp cao của công ty. Sứ mệnh công ty giờ đây là phải trở nên toàn diện hơn. Phương châm hoạt động xuất hiện trên đầu trang web thay từ Cửa hàng sách lớn nhất thế giới thành Sách, âm nhạc và hơn thế nữa, và ngay sau đó là đến Sự lựa chọn lớn nhất hành tinh – cửa hàng triệu đồ.

Gần kết thúc buổi họp trong nhiều giờ, Bezos yêu cầu mọi người viết ra dự đoán doanh thu công ty trong 5 năm. Eugene Wei, nhà phân tích kế hoạch chiến lược, tham gia họp với vai trò thư ký, nhớ rằng Bezos đưa ra con số cao nhất trong tất cả người tham gia. Nhưng ông đã nghi ngờ rằng không ai đưa ra con số dự đoán đúng. Họ đơn giản không biết điều gì đang diễn ra.

Để mở ra phân nhóm sản phẩm mới và xây dựng thêm nhà kho, Amazon không chỉ cần kế hoạch: Công ty cần thêm vốn. Do vậy, vào tháng Năm năm đó, công ty huy động 326 triệu đô la thông qua phát hành trái phiếu có mức rủi ro cao, và tháng Hai năm sau, Amazon tiếp tục huy động 1,25 tỉ đô la thông qua vụ chào bán nợ chuyển đổi lớn nhất trong lịch sử. Với lãi suất chỉ 4,75% cho vụ phát hành sau, Amazon đã huy động được khoản vốn rẻ vào lúc đó. Covey và Bezos thực sự ngạc nhiên khi không phải tiến hành thu hút vốn từ cổ đông tổ chức qua những chuyến đi quảng bá câu chuyện Amazon. Nhà đầu tư hưởng lợi từ làn sóng tăng giá cổ phiếu của những công ty kinh doanh trên Internet trong năm qua, sẵn sàng xếp hàng dài để mua trái phiếu Amazon.

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Randy Tinsley, thủ quỹ và giám đốc phát triển công ty của Amazon, đã gặp đồng nghiệp tài chính Tim Stone vào thứ Bảy tại một cửa hàng sửa chữa ô tô ở Issaquah để ký các kỳ phiếu cho thỏa thuận trái phiếu chuyển đổi. Tinsley đang lắp một dàn âm thanh xe hơi trong xe jeep của mình và anh ta đưa giấy tờ cho người phục vụ ngơ ngác ngồi sau bàn làm việc. “Bạn muốn biết đây là gì?” anh khoe khoang. “Đây là 1,25 tỷ đô la.”

Hai năm điên cuồng tiếp theo được biết đến là thời kỳ bong bóng dot-com.

Vào cuối những năm 1990, web đã phát triển vượt ra ngoài khuôn khổ, từ chỗ chỉ dành riêng cho những chuyên viên kỹ thuật thì sau đó đã chuyển sang xuất hiện trên trang đầu của các tờ báo, các bài viết liên quan đến giao dịch. Sau chuỗi ngày phát triển quá nhanh chóng và thổi bùng bong bóng tài sản vốn góp, các nhà quan sát lý trí đặt ra câu hỏi về giá trị thực sự. Yahoo được định giá cao hơn Disney; Amazon trị giá cao hơn Sears. Ở Thung lũng Silicon, những doanh nhân và nhà đầu tư say sưa trong niềm lạc quan thái quá và vốn góp dư thừa trong bữa tiệc kéo dài hai năm. Vốn đầu tư được huy động với chi phí thấp, cơ hội dường như kéo dài bất tận, và rượu martini pha giữa vodka và dứa xuất hiện khắp nơi.

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Trong suốt thời gian huy hoàng đó, không ai đặt cược lớn và liều lĩnh hơn vào Internet như Jeff Bezos. Bezos hơn ai hết tin rằng web sẽ thay đổi toàn bộ hình ảnh của công ty và khách hàng, nên ông cố gắng chạy hết tốc lực, không chút chần chừ. “Tôi nghĩ công ty chúng tôi đang bị định giá thấp hơn giá trị” đã trở thành một trong những câu nói mà Jeff thường nhắc đi nhắc lại. “Thế giới chỉ không hiểu Amazon sẽ trở thành gì trong tương lai.” Trong những năm bong bóng công nghệ đạt đỉnh điểm, từ năm 1998 đến đầu năm 2000, Amazon huy động số vốn ngoạn mục, 2,2 tỉ đô la, trong ba đợt phát hành trái phiếu riêng rẽ. Công ty sử dụng phần lớn số tiền đó vào mua bán sáp nhập, nhưng thậm chí vài năm sau, khó có thể chứng minh rằng những vụ mua bán trên đem lại lợi ích cho mảng kinh doanh chính của công ty. Năm trung tâm phân phối hiện đại bậc nhất mới được mở ra trên toàn nước Mỹ và sau đó phải đóng cửa hai trung tâm, dẫn tới sa thải hàng trăm công nhân trong đợt cắt giảm không thể tránh được.

Vấp phải những thất bại trên, Bezos dường như không hề nao núng. Sự suy giảm càng khiến ông đẩy công ty mạnh mẽ hơn để tiến tới những cột mốc mới. Ông nói với Rick Dalzell, cựu biệt kích Mỹ, người gia nhập Amazon từ Walmart, rằng: “Về mặt thể chất, tôi là kẻ nhút nhát. Về mặt suy nghĩ, tôi là một người liều lĩnh.” Susan Benson nhớ vào một buổi sáng đi thang máy của Tòa nhà Columbia với người sáng lập Amazon. Cô có Rufus đi cùng, và Bezos lặng lẽ nghiên cứu con chó corgi. “Bạn là một con chó rất ngọt ngào, Rufus,” anh nói. Sau đó, anh ta nhìn lên Benson. “Nhưng bạn biết đấy, anh ấy không liều lĩnh.”

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Bezos đã sử dụng từ liều lĩnh rất nhiều. Trong lá thư đầu tiên của công ty gửi cho các cổ đông đại chúng, do Bezos và Joy Covey cộng tác viết và được thủ quỹ Russ Grandinetti đánh máy vào đầu năm 1998, từ liều lĩnh đã được sử dụng nhiều lần. Họ viết: “Nếu nhận thấy xác suất thành công đủ lớn để giành lợi thế dẫn đầu thị trường, chúng ta sẽ liều lĩnh đầu tư hơn là quyết định rụt rè. Một số khoản đầu tư này sẽ thành công, những khoản khác thì không, và chúng tôi sẽ học được một bài học quý giá khác trong cả hai trường hợp”. Bức thư cũng nêu rõ rằng công ty sẽ đưa ra quyết định dựa trên triển vọng dài hạn về việc thúc đẩy dòng tiền tự do và tăng thị phần thay vì dựa trên lợi nhuận ngắn hạn, và một phần đặc biệt được coi là kim chỉ nam cho cách thức không chính thống mà công ty đã lên kế hoạch tiếp cận Phố Wall.

Chúng tôi tin rằng thước đo nền tảng thành công của chúng tôi sẽ là giá trị cổ đông nhận được trong dài hạn. Giá trị này sẽ là kết quả trực tiếp của nỗ lực mở rộng và củng cố vị trí dẫn đầu thị trường hiện nay của Amazon. Vị trí dẫn đầu thị trường càng mạnh thì mô hình kinh tế của công ty càng mạnh. Việc thống lĩnh thị trường có thể hiểu trực tiếp thành: Doanh thu cao hơn, lợi nhận cao hơn, vòng quay vốn lớn hơn, và đương nhiên, lợi nhuận trên vốn đầu tư cao hơn.

Quyết định chúng tôi đưa ra đều phản ánh sự tập trung này. Đầu tiên, chúng tôi tính toán hoạt động công ty theo các chỉ số quan trọng để xác định vị trí thống lĩnh thị trường: tăng khách hàng và doanh thu, tỉ lệ khách hàng tiếp tục tái mua hàng và sức mạnh của thương hiệu. Chúng tôi đã, đang, và sẽ tiếp tục đầu tư mạnh mẽ để mở rộng và sử dụng tối đa nguồn khách hàng, thương hiệu và cơ sở hạ tầng kỹ thuật, hướng tới chuyển sang thiết lập đặc quyền kinh doanh bền vững, lâu dài.

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Bức thư gửi cổ đông đầu tiên của công ty trở thành thánh kinh trong nội bộ Amazon. Bezos tiếp tục đưa bức thư vào báo cáo hàng năm của công ty, và Amazon bám sát các cam kết cùng triết lý kinh doanh nêu ra.

Amazon bắt đầu thúc đẩy kỷ nguyên dot-com của bản thân công ty khi cung cấp dịch vụ những đơn hàng siêu lớn. Công ty trả hàng chục triệu đô la để trở thành nhà bán sách độc quyền cho những trang phổ biến như AOL, Yahoo, MSN và Excite vào cuối những năm 1990. Những trang web này được gọi là cổng thông tin điện tử, bởi chúng là trang web xuất phát truy cập chính đối với cộng đồng người mới sử dụng và không tinh thông web. Những cổng thông tin điện tử quen với việc nhận tỉ lệ cổ phần cho những thỏa thuận kinh doanh kiểu này. Nhưng Bezos từ chối – ông không muốn phát hành cổ phiếu cho những thỏa thuận kiểu trên, do có dự định dành lợi ích này cho nhân viên. Thay vào đó, ông trả tiền và thuyết phục mỗi cổng thông tin điện tử cho hiển thị đường dẫn đến sách của Amazon trong kết quả tìm kiếm. Ví dụ, nếu ai đó tìm kiếm kỳ nghỉ trượt tuyết trên AOL.com, họ sẽ nhận được một đường dẫn về những cuốn sách liên quan tới trượt tuyết trên Amazon.

Bezos thực thi tính tiết kiệm nghiêm ngặt trong các hoạt động hàng ngày của Amazon; ông bắt nhân viên trả tiền đậu xe và yêu cầu tất cả các giám đốc điều hành phải lái xe. Nhưng theo một số cách, anh ta phung phí thật đáng ngạc nhiên. Vào đầu năm 1998, khi anh ấy thuê Randy Tinsley từ Intel về làm giám đốc phát triển công ty, một trong những điều đầu tiên anh ấy nói với anh ấy là “Tôi thực sự mong muốn được đi mua sắm cùng bạn”.

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Kết quả của họ là rất hoành tráng. Amazon đã mua cơ sở dữ liệu phim IMDB.com, hiệu sách trực tuyến BookPages của Anh, hiệu sách trực tuyến Telebuch của Đức, thị trường trực tuyến Exchange.com, dịch vụ mạng xã hội tiên phong PlanetAll và công ty thu thập dữ liệu có tên là Alexa Internet — trong số nhiều giao dịch mua khác . Các thương vụ mua lại đã mang lại những giám đốc điều hành có kinh nghiệm, nhưng Amazon đã di chuyển quá nhanh và quá hỗn loạn trong nội bộ, để tích hợp hợp lý các công ty và công nghệ của họ. Hầu hết các giám đốc điều hành rời đi sau một hoặc hai năm, bị đẩy lùi bởi tốc độ điên cuồng, không khí ảm đạm ở Seattle, hoặc cả hai.

Amazon cũng xoay hướng vào lĩnh vực đầu tư mạo hiểm. Năm 1998, Bezos và nhà đầu tư mạo hiểm, John Doer, nhận thấy cơ hội phát triển của lĩnh vực dược phẩm trực tuyến. Cặp đôi phát hiện ra Drugstore.com và đã tuyển dụng Peter Neupert, quản lý của Microsoft, điều hành dự án. Amazon sở hữu một phần ba cổ phần công ty. Việc đầu tư mạo hiểm có khởi đầu đầy hứa hẹn nên trong hai năm tiếp theo, Tinsley và Bezos đã đầu tư hàng chục triệu đô la tiền mặt của Amazon vào nhiều công ty thương mại điện tử triển vọng, bao gồm Pets.com, Gear.com, Wineshopper.com, Greenlight.com, Homegrocer.com, và dịch vụ giao hàng trong thành phố Kozmo.com. Đổi lại, Amazon sẽ nhận sở hữu thiểu số và một ghế trong hội đồng quản trị tại mỗi công ty và công ty tin rằng mình sẽ có chỗ đứng tốt trên thị trường trong tương lai, nếu những phân nhóm sản phẩm trên thành công trên Internet. Người sáng lập của các công ty nhận vốn của Amazon tin rằng, họ đã hợp tác với một đối tác tiềm năng và sẽ đem đến thành công cho họ.

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Đa số các công ty đi xuống trong giai đoạn vỡ bong bóng dot-com năm 2000. Bezos còn có những vấn đề riêng và ông cũng không sở hữu khí chất trượng nghĩa hay thời gian để cố gắng cứu vớt các công ty trên. Amazon mất hàng trăm triệu đô la trong những vụ đầu tư đó. “Amazon phải tập trung vào mảng kinh doanh chính,” Tinsley nói. “Sai lầm lớn nhất của chúng tôi là nghĩ rằng chúng tôi có khả năng phối hợp kinh doanh với tất cả những công ty trên.”

Bên trong Amazon, các nhân viên sống theo các sắc lệnh tiết kiệm của Bezos trong khi họ kinh ngạc chứng kiến cảnh ông liên tục đẩy ngày càng nhiều chip vào nồi. Gene Pope là một kỹ sư ban đầu của Apple, người đã tái hợp tại Amazon với đồng nghiệp cũ Joel Spiegel. Sau khi quan sát sự mở rộng hoang dã trong vài tháng, Pope nói với Spiegel, “Những gì chúng tôi đang làm ở đây là đóng một con tàu tên lửa khổng lồ, và chúng tôi sẽ đốt cháy cầu chì. Sau đó, nó sẽ đi lên mặt trăng hoặc để lại một miệng núi lửa khổng lồ hun hút trong lòng đất. Dù thế nào thì tôi cũng muốn ở đây khi điều đó xảy ra”.

Khi công ty phát triển hơn, Bezos đưa ra tín hiệu rằng tham vọng của ông lớn hơn bất kỳ ai từng nghĩ tới. Ông bắt đầu tuyển dụng thêm các quản lý của Walmart. Đầu năm 1998, Amazon đã theo đuổi một trong những đồng nghiệp cũ của Rick Dalzell, phó chủ tịch phụ trách phân phối đã nghỉ hưu của Walmart, Jimmy Wright. Wright cho thấy bản thân là người hay tức giận, tuy nhiên, Dalzell biết rằng nếu có người có thể hoàn thành tầm nhìn đầy tham vọng của Bezos về khả năng phân phối nhanh chóng thì người đó chỉ có thể là Jimmy Wright. “Tôi không chắc bất kỳ ai khác tại Mỹ có thể làm được điều này,” Dalzell nói.

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Bezos theo đuổi Wright trong nhiều tháng và mùa hè năm đó đã mời ông tham quan nhà kho tại đường Dawson. Bezos nói rằng ông muốn hệ thống phân phối lớn mạnh gấp 10 lần bây giờ, không chỉ trong nước Mỹ mà cả những thị trường mới của Amazon bao gồm Anh và Đức. Wright hỏi Bezos về sản phẩm mà họ sẽ chuyển. “Bezos nói, ‘Tôi không biết. Hãy thiết kế cái gì đó sẽ phù hợp với bất kỳ thứ gì,’” Wright nhớ lại. “Tôi sẽ làm, nhưng cậu đang đùa tôi phải không? Và Bezos nói, ‘Không, đó là sứ mệnh.’ Tôi phải có giải pháp xử lý tất cả các loại hàng hóa, kể cả sử dụng phương thức vận chuyển hàng không.”

Wright chưa từng kinh qua thách thức nào có tầm cỡ lớn như vậy. Tại Walmart, mỗi ngày một lần, các trung tâm mua sắm chuyển công-ten-nơ sản phẩm theo dự đoán trước đến tất cả cửa hàng ở khu vực lân cận. Còn tại Amazon, sẽ không có dự đoán trước vì doanh số Amazon tăng 300% một năm.

Khi Wright bắt đầu lên kế hoạch, Amazon đang phải đối mặt kỳ nghỉ lễ bận rộn năm 1998. Vào thời điểm lễ Tạ ơn, Joy Covey nhận ra rằng khoảng chênh lệch giữa số lượng đơn đặt hàng trên trang web và số lượng hàng đang được chuyển tới khách hàng đang ngày càng lớn, và bà đã rung một hồi chuông báo động. Amazon thông báo cần hỗ trợ khẩn cấp của tất cả thành viên, và trong chương trình “cứu Santa”, tất cả nhân viên từ trụ sở chính tham gia làm ca đêm tại đường Dawson hoặc tại cơ sở mới tại Delaware. Họ dẫn theo cả bạn bè và gia đình, ăn món burrito và uống cà phê từ xe đẩy thức ăn, thường ngủ trong ô tô trước khi tới văn phòng vào sáng hôm sau. Bezos tổ chức cuộc thi tìm ra ai có thể mang đơn hàng ra khỏi giá đựng nhanh nhất. Sau khi lễ Giáng Sinh kết thúc, ông thề rằng Amazon sẽ không bao giờ thiếu hụt khả năng chuyển hàng so với nhu cầu của khách hàng.

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Wright trình lên Bezos bản kế hoạch xây dựng nhà kho mới tại Fernley, Nevada, cách Reno khoảng 50 km về phía đông. Đôi mắt của nhà sáng lập sáng lên. “Thật tuyệt, Jimmy,” Bezos nói.

Wright hỏi ông cần đưa bản kế hoạch cho ai và những chỉ số lợi nhuận trên vốn đầu tư nào mà ông phải đưa ra để chứng minh.

“Đừng lo lắng về điều đó,” Bezos nói. “Chỉ cần xây dựng nó thôi.”

“Tôi không cần phải nhận phê duyệt để tiến hành sao?” Wright hỏi lại.

“Chỉ cần thực hiện thôi,” Bezos trả lời.

Trong năm tiếp theo, Wright triển khai thực hiện kế hoạch với tổng chi phí khổng lồ, 300 triệu đô la. Ông không chỉ xây dựng nhà kho tại Fernley mà còn mua sắm và trang bị mới cho hệ thống nhà kho hiện có, gồm một kho gần Atlanta, hai kho ở Kentucky và một kho tại Kansas. Ông biến các trung tâm phân phối thành những phiên bản đời thực từ bản vẽ của M. C. Escher, tự động hóa đến tận góc mái kho, sử dụng đèn chớp nháy tại lối đi rẽ nhánh và giá chứa hàng để định hướng công nhân đến đúng vị trí lấy hàng và chuyển ra băng tải chạy vào những cỗ máy Crisplant đồ sộ. Cỗ máy có nhiệm vụ lấy sản phẩm từ băng chuyền, quét và phân loại chúng theo từng đơn đặt hàng của khách hàng để đóng gói và chuyển đi.

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Wright vẫn ở nhà và giữ văn phòng tư vấn riêng tại Bentonville, và trong tháng thứ 15 làm việc tại Amazon, ông đi lại như con thoi tới Seattle. Cùng thời điểm đó, ông còn lãnh trách nhiệm khác. Trong bữa tiệc nướng ở sân sau và tại trung tâm thể dục cộng đồng Bentonville, anh ấy đã hỏi thăm các đồng nghiệp cũ của mình và mời họ tham gia nhà bán lẻ trực tuyến. Kerry Morris, một người mua sản phẩm đã chuyển từ Walmart sang Amazon cho biết: “Walmart thậm chí còn không có Internet trong tòa nhà khi đó. Chúng tôi không trực tuyến. Chúng tôi không gửi thư điện tử. Không ai trong chúng tôi thậm chí còn biết ý của anh ấy về việc bán lẻ trực tuyến”.

Amazon biết Walmart sẽ phản ứng yếu ớt trước việc câu trộm nhân viên tài năng. Morris nói rằng quy trình phỏng vấn của bà được tiến hành vụng trộm. Bà ở nhà một người bạn tại Seattle và phỏng vấn ứng viên tại quán Starbucks, chứ không phải tại văn phòng Amazon. Bà nói rằng Amazon trả chi phí phỏng vấn bằng tiền mặt. Năm đó, vài chục nhân viên của Walmart đã chuyển sang Amazon.

Việc chiêu mộ từ Walmart đã tạo ra nhiều va chạm khó chịu. Các nhân viên của Amazon ở độ tuổi hai mươi và đầu ba mươi và đầy lòng dũng cảm do Bezos lập trình về việc làm mọi thứ theo cách khác. Những người đến từ Bentonville đã lớn tuổi hơn đáng kể, ở độ tuổi bốn mươi và năm mươi, và có rất ít kiên nhẫn đối với những thanh niên hung hãn. Tom Sharpe, một người nổi tiếng từ Walmart, đã đảm nhận vị trí phó chủ tịch kinh doanh và kéo dài hơn một năm. Birtwistle, MBA Harvard, nhớ lại cuộc trò chuyện sơ bộ với Sharpe diễn ra như thế này.

Sharpe: “Nhắc lại, tên anh là gì?”

Birtwistle: “Brian Birtwistle.”

Sharpe: “Chà, nghe này, Buttwistle, những người trưởng thành đang ở đây. Chúng tôi ở đây để làm cho thứ này hoạt động như một doanh nghiệp thực sự.”

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Việc chiêu mộ từ Walmart đã tạo ra một vấn đề khác. Là một phần của quá trình xây dựng Drugstore.com, Bezos và Doerr đã tuyển dụng một kỹ sư của Walmart tên là Kal Raman, và anh ta cũng bắt đầu chọn những đồng nghiệp cũ của mình từ Bentonville. Đó là ống hút cuối cùng. Walmart đã kiện Amazon, Kleiner và Drugstore.com tại tòa án bang Arkansas với cáo buộc rằng họ đang cố ăn cắp bí mật thương mại. John Doerr nói đùa rằng anh ấy không còn có thể đi đến tiểu bang một cách an toàn nữa.

Vụ việc là một phát súng mang tính biểu tượng và cuối cùng đã được giải quyết mà không có thiệt hại nào. Nhưng nó đã khiến căng thẳng sôi sục giữa nhà đương kim vô địch bán lẻ và công ty mới nổi trực tuyến tồi tệ ra mắt. Một số người không hài lòng về điều này. Vợ của Rick Dalzell, Kathryn, đã rất buồn khi cộng đồng mới của cô ấy đang chiến tranh với cộng đồng cũ của cô ấy. Dalzell tình cờ đề cập điều đó với Bezos, và ngay sau đó, Bezos và MacKenzie ghé qua nhà của Dalzell với những bông hoa và bản sao cuốn tự truyện của Sam Walton, Sam Walton: Made in America.

Bezos đã thấm nhuần kỹ lưỡng cuốn sách của Walton và đưa quan điểm của người sáng lập Walmart về sự tiết kiệm và “thiên vị hành động” vào cấu trúc văn hóa của Amazon. Trong bản sao mà anh ta mang đến cho Kathryn Dalzell, anh ta đã gạch dưới một đoạn văn cụ thể trong đó Walton mô tả việc vay mượn những ý tưởng tốt nhất của các đối thủ cạnh tranh của mình. Quan điểm của Bezos là mọi công ty trong lĩnh vực bán lẻ đều đứng trên vai những người khổng lồ đi trước. Cuốn sách rõ ràng đã gây được tiếng vang lớn đối với người sáng lập Amazon. Ở trang cuối cùng, một phần được hoàn thành vài tuần trước khi ông qua đời, Walton viết:

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Liệu câu chuyện kiểu Wal-Mart có còn xảy ra trong thời đại ngày nay? Câu trả lời của tôi là tất nhiên nó có thể xảy ra một lần nữa. Ở đâu đó ngoài kia ngay bây giờ có một người nào đó — có thể là hàng trăm nghìn người — với những ý tưởng đủ tốt để thực hiện mọi nẻo đường. Nó sẽ được thực hiện lặp đi lặp lại, với điều kiện ai đó muốn nó đủ tồi để làm những gì cần thiết để đạt được điều đó. Tất cả là vấn đề về thái độ và năng lực không ngừng nghiên cứu và đặt câu hỏi về việc quản lý doanh nghiệp.

Jeff Bezos không bằng lòng nhìn Amazon đi vào trạng thái ngủ đông, và ông tạo ra dòng ý tưởng không ngừng về cải tiến trải nghiệm trang web, khiến nó trở nên hấp dẫn đối với khách hàng và những cải tiến luôn phải đi trước đối thủ.

Đầu năm 1998, Bezos theo sát phòng Cá nhân hóa và Cộng đồng để đẩy mạnh giúp đỡ khách hàng khám phá sách, âm nhạc và phim ảnh mà họ có thể thấy thú vị. Tháng Năm, ông khảo sát ý tưởng mà sau này trở thành Danh sách 100 sản phẩm bán chạy nhất trên Amazon và có một ý tưởng lóe lên – tại sao không xếp hạng mọi thứ trên trang web, không chỉ 10 hàng hóa bán chạy nhất? “Tôi nghĩ, ‘Tại sao chúng ta dừng lại ở con số 100? Đây là Internet cơ mà! Không phải danh sách bán chạy xuất hiện trên một số tờ báo. Chúng ta có thể lập danh sách thay đổi liên tục,’” ông nói với tờ Washington Post.

Ý kiến này không chỉ tạo ra nguyên tắc phân loại phổ biến mới mà còn đưa tác giả sách, nghệ sĩ biểu diễn và nhà xuất bản những ý tưởng về sản phẩm họ đang làm – và kích thích trí não. “Bezos biết rằng việc xếp hạng theo doanh số bán hàng sẽ giống như liều thuốc cho các tác giả,” Greg Linden, kỹ sư đời đầu của Amazon, nói. “Ông ấy khăng khăng rằng số liệu thống kê danh sách sẽ thay đổi bất cứ khi nào đơn đặt hàng mới được thực hiện.”

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Đó không phải là một thử thách đơn giản. Máy chủ đang hoạt động trong tình trạng quá tải của Amazon đã chạm ngưỡng giới hạn, và phần mềm quản trị cơ sở dữ liệu Oracle không được thiết kế để giải quyết vấn đề tăng dung lượng sinh ra bởi tăng lượng khách truy cập trang web. Đội ngũ kỹ sư cuối cùng chọn giải pháp né tránh nó, chụp nhanh dữ liệu doanh số và đẩy bảng xếp hạng mới lên trang web vài phút một lần. Dịch vụ có tên Amazon Sales Rank (Bảng xếp hạng doanh số trên Amazon) được ra mắt vào tháng Sáu gây sửng sốt cho không chỉ các tác giả sách, những người bắt đầu kiểm tra danh sách xếp hạng từng giờ cả ngày lẫn đêm, mà còn cả bạn đời của họ và nhiều biên tập viên cũng như các nhà xuất bản. “Tôi hiểu việc này gây nghiện ra sao, nhưng họ có thể dành thời gian vào những việc hiệu quả hơn như viết một cuốn sách mới,” biên tập viên kỳ cựu John Sterling nói.

Cùng thời điểm, Amazon đệ đơn xin cấp bằng sáng chế cho quy trình đặt hàng 1-Click (một cú nhấp chuột). Hệ thống bắt nguồn từ bữa ăn trưa mà Bezos đã có với Shel Kaphan và kỹ sư giao diện Peri Hartman vào năm 1997, trong đó ông tuyên bố rằng ông muốn giúp khách hàng mua hàng trên trang web dễ dàng nhất có thể. Hartman, nhà khoa học máy tính tốt nghiệp Đại học Washington, tạo ra hệ thống truy xuất trước vào thông tin thẻ tín dụng và địa chỉ nhận hàng của khách hàng, tạo ra trải nghiệm mua sắm với chỉ một cú nhấp chuột khi khách hàng đặt lệnh mua.

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Bằng cách giảm thiểu tối đa những bất tiện trong việc mua sắm trực tuyến, Amazon có thể kiếm thêm hàng triệu đô la doanh thu, đồng thời xây chiến hào vững chắc bảo vệ việc kinh doanh và gây cho đối thủ những e ngại, do dự trước khi tham gia lĩnh vực trực tuyến. Đơn xin cấp bằng sáng chế dài 19 trang của công ty có tựa đề “Phương pháp và hệ thống dành cho đặt lệnh mua hàng thông qua mạng lưới truyền tin,” được phê chuẩn vào mùa thu năm 1999. Amazon chọn tên thương mại cho dịch vụ là 1-Click (một cú nhấp chuột), và từ đây, nhiều năm tranh cãi xung quanh việc cấp quyền sở hữu bắt đầu diễn ra.

Các nhà phê bình buộc tội rằng ý tưởng đằng sau 1-Click là thô sơ và sự chấp thuận của văn phòng cấp bằng sáng chế Hoa Kỳ là một dấu hiệu của bộ máy quan liêu lười biếng và quy trình cấp bằng sáng chế bị hỏng. Bezos không hoàn toàn không đồng ý — về mặt trí tuệ, ông là người ủng hộ việc cải cách bằng sáng chế — nhưng ông quyết tâm khai thác hiện trạng cho bất kỳ lợi thế nào có thể. Ông kiện Barnes & Noble vi phạm quyền sở hữu trí tuệ vào cuối năm 1999 và giành chiến thắng. Trong phán quyết sơ bộ của toà án, Barnes & Noble bị yêu cầu thêm một bước vào quy trình thanh toán. Năm 2000, Amazon nhượng quyền sở hữu trí tuệ cho Apple với giá trị không được công bố và cũng cố gắng sử dụng, nhưng theo cách không hiệu quả, để giành một số lợi thế trước đối thủ đang lên và đáng lo ngại: eBay – công ty xuất hiện lần đầu trong tầm ngắm của Amazon vào giữa năm 1998.

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Jeff Blackburn, sau này trở thành giám đốc phát triển kinh doanh của Amazon, nhận thấy eBay tiến sát Amazon nhanh hơn đa số những đối thủ khác. Công ty mới ra đời của Thung lũng Silicon, thành lập vào năm 1995 với tên gọi Auction Web tạo ra 5,7 triệu đô la doanh thu vào năm 1997, 47,4 triệu đô la năm 1998, và 224,7 triệu đô la doanh thu năm 1999. Blackburn nhận ra rằng eBay phát triển nhanh chóng, và thậm chí còn đáng lo hơn. Không như Amazon, công ty này vẫn lãi. eBay có mô hình kinh doanh hoàn hảo: Công ty nhận tiền hoa hồng trên mỗi giao dịch nhưng không chịu chi phí lưu kho và gửi bưu kiện. Người bán đăng sản phẩm trên trang web, đấu giá để nhận mức trả cao nhất, và tự chịu chi phí chuyển hàng tới khách hàng. Trang web khởi đầu với những đồ sưu tầm như thú nhồi bông và thẻ bóng chày. Tuy nhiên, eBay bắt nhịp theo hướng phát triển không giới hạn lựa chọn và đang ăn cắp kế hoạch triển khai cửa hàng triệu đồ của Bezos.

Mùa hè năm 1998, Bezos mời người sáng lập eBay, Pierre Omidyar và tổng giám đốc điều hành Meg Whitman, cựu quản lý của Disney tới Seattle. eBay vừa nộp đơn xin trở thành công ty đại chúng khi hai nhóm lãnh đạo, những người có định mệnh gắn chặt lấy nhau trong cả thế kỷ, gặp nhau lần đầu. Bezos dẫn nhóm eBay đi quanh trung tâm phân phối trên đường Dawson. Omidyar nhớ rằng lúc đó ông thực sự ấn tượng với sự tự động hóa trong trung tâm. “Tôi nghĩ tất cả rất tuyệt,” Omidyar nói. Sau đó, Whitman nói với ông rằng: “Pierre, vượt qua nó đi. Điều này thật khủng khiếp. Điều cuối cùng chúng tôi muốn là phải quản lý nhà kho như vậy.”

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Trong suốt cuộc họp, ban quản lý thảo luận những phương thức hợp tác khác nhau. Omidyar và Whitman gợi ý đặt đường dẫn tới trang web eBay trên Amazon, khi một khách hàng tìm kiếm những sản phẩm không bán tại Amazon, như thú nhồi bông, và họ sẽ làm tương tự trên eBay đối với sách của những tác giả nổi tiếng như Tom Wolfe. Bezos gợi ý khả năng Amazon đầu tư vào eBay. Đội ngũ lãnh đạo eBay rời đi với ấn tượng rằng Bezos đề nghị mua eBay với mức giá khoảng 600 triệu đô la, mặc dù sau đó Jeff Blackburn không nhớ rằng có đề nghị chính thức nào được đưa ra. Cuối cùng, đó không phải là vấn đề; đội ngũ lãnh đạo eBay tin rằng họ đang tiên phong trong mô hình kinh doanh thương mại điện tử kiểu mới, trong đó cung và cầu gặp nhau để xác định giá phù hợp cho bất kỳ sản phẩm nào. Họ cũng bị dập tắt bởi tiếng cười kinh ngạc của Bezos. Các nhà đầu tư mạo hiểm ủng hộ eBay đã hỏi xung quanh và nghe nói rằng một người không làm việc với Jeff Bezos; một người đã làm việc cho anh ta.

Bezos không nhìn nhận eBay là mối đe dọa trực tiếp ngay lập tức. Tuy nhiên, khi doanh số và lợi nhuận của eBay tăng lên, ông lo lắng rằng khách hàng có thể coi eBay là điểm đến đầu tiên cho nhu cầu mua sắm trực tuyến. Mặc dù, Bezos vẫn thường tuyên bố Amazon là “công ty tập trung vào khách hàng, không phải tập trung vào đối thủ cạnh tranh,” thì nỗi lo về eBay vẫn tăng lên. Nhân viên Amazon, người đọc những kịch bản kinh tế mới xuất hiện trên báo và tạp chí, cảm thấy lo lắng không chỉ việc eBay có kết quả kinh doanh tốt hơn mà còn về mô hình kinh doanh bán lẻ giá cố định có thể đi vào dĩ vãng.

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Cuối năm, Bezos triển khai dự án đấu giá bí mật EBS trong địa điểm bí mật ở tầng hai của tòa nhà Columbia. Bezos không cho bất kỳ nhân viên hoặc thành viên hội đồng quản trị nào khác biết, đặc biệt kể từ khi Scott Cook, người sáng lập Intuit, vừa ở trong hội đồng quản trị của Amazon, vừa ở trong eBay. Joel Spiegel, người cùng cộng tác với Jeff Blackburn trong dự án này, nhận chỉ thị phải tạo ra bản sao của eBay trong ba tháng.

Bezos tự tin có thể đánh bại eBay, đặc biệt từ khi Amazon có tiềm lực vốn để đưa ra chính sách mức phí đăng ký thấp cho người bán và bảo hiểm gian lận miễn phí. Nhận thấy tính năng đấu giá là con đường tất yếu dành cho người mua và người bán trao đổi tài sản, ông chi 175 triệu đô la để mua Accept.com, công ty thanh toán có sáu tháng tuổi đời và chưa thực sự kinh doanh bất kỳ dịch vụ nào. Thời điểm Bezos xen ngang, Accept.com đang trong giai đoạn hoàn tất hợp tác với eBay.

Bezos đã đi trượt tuyết ở Aspen vào mùa đông năm đó với Cook và Doerr và cuối cùng đã nói cho họ biết điều gì sẽ đến. Cook nói: “Anh ấy nói, ‘Chúng tôi sẽ thắng, vì vậy bạn có thể muốn cân nhắc xem có nên ở lại hội đồng quản trị eBay hay không’. Anh ấy nghĩ đó sẽ là kết quả tự nhiên duy nhất.” Cook cho biết ông muốn chờ xem mọi thứ diễn ra như thế nào.

Dịch vụ Amazon Auctions (Đấu giá Amazon) chính thức ra mắt vào tháng Ba năm 1999. Mặc dù khởi đầu chậm chạp, nhưng Bezos nhanh chóng tăng tốc gấp đôi. Ông mua một công ty phát sóng đấu giá trực tiếp trên web và đã ký thỏa thuận với công ty đấu giá danh tiếng Sotheby’s để tập trung vào sản phẩm cao cấp. Tuy nhiên, nỗ lực không đi tới đâu. Khách hàng chỉ có thể tiếp cận Đấu giá Amazon bằng cách nhấp vào tab riêng trên trang chủ Amazon.com. Đối với khách hàng quen dùng Amazon để mua hàng theo cách truyền thống ở mức giá dự đoán cho mỗi sản phẩm từ trước, thì dịch vụ này giống như chiếc sọt rác đựng đồ thừa không cần thiết.

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Cộng đồng công nghệ cao dần nhận bài học về giá trị của hiệu ứng mạng – sản phẩm và dịch vụ càng có giá trị khi càng nhiều người sử dụng chúng. Trong thị trường kinh doanh trực tuyến, hiệu ứng mạng có sức ảnh hưởng lớn; người bán mong muốn tiếp cận tối đa lượng người mua, và ngược lại. Trong mảng đấu giá, eBay có lợi thế không thể vượt qua. Ban lãnh đạo Amazon vẫn nhớ rõ thất bại đau đớn, nhưng đồng thời thất bại đó cũng tạo ra động lực kỳ lạ thúc đẩy họ. “Những ngày đó thực sự trở thành khoảng thời gian tràn ngập niềm vui và đáng nhớ nhất của tôi trong công ty,” Blackburn nói. “Chúng tôi sở hữu lực lượng nhân sự tài năng nhất, cố gắng tìm hiểu, xác định phương thức tạo ra trang web đấu giá ưu việt nhất. Cuối cùng, hiệu ứng mạng trở thành vấn đề chủ chốt. Bạn có thể nói chúng tôi ngây thơ, nhưng chúng tôi đã tạo ra một sản phẩm vĩ đại.”

Cá nhân Bezos không chấp nhận đó là thất bại. Ông coi sai lầm giống như bước đầu tiên trong chuỗi hành động thử nghiệm đưa bên bán thứ ba vào Amazon. Dịch vụ Đấu giá sau đó được cải tiến và phát triển thành dịch vụ zShops, dành cho người bán tự kinh doanh cửa hàng bán sản phẩm với giá cố định trên Amazon.com. Nhưng bất chấp mọi nỗ lực, kết quả cũng chẳng đi tới đâu. Hiện tại, những người bán tham gia trang web đã chuyển sang gắn bó lâu dài với eBay.

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Có lẽ Bezos chính là người dùng trung thành nhất của dịch vụ Đấu giá Amazon. Ông sưu tầm các vật chứng khoa học và lịch sử quý hiếm. Trong số đó, ông đã mua bộ xương của chú gấu từ thời kỳ băng hà hoàn toàn nguyên vẹn với mức giá 40.000 đô la. Sau khi công ty chuyển trụ sở khỏi tòa nhà Columbia xuống cấp sang tòa nhà Trung tâm Y tế Thái Bình Dương trong suốt mùa hè năm đó, địa điểm mới được trang trí nghệ thuật theo phong cách những năm 1930, nằm trên ngọn đồi nhìn thẳng ra đường cao tốc I-5. Bezos cho trưng bày bộ xương tại hành lang tòa nhà. Bên cạnh bộ xương có biển ghi chú “Vui lòng không cho gấu ăn”.

Thị trường con gấu – thuật ngữ chỉ tình trạng thị trường chứng khoán, những nhà đầu tư bi quan tin rằng giá cổ phiếu chắc chắn đi xuống và sẽ không tham gia vào những diễn biến tiếp theo. Vào ngày 15 tháng Mười hai năm 1998, nhà phân tích Henry Blodge của Oppenheimer đưa ra dự đoán về Amazon, sau này sẽ trở thành một trong những dự đoán nổi tiếng nhất trong thập kỷ. Ông dự đoán cổ phiếu Amazon – hiện tại đang dẫn đầu cơn sóng điên cuồng dot-com ở ngưỡng 200 đô la – sẽ đạt mức đỉnh 400 đô là vào 12 tháng sau. Lời tiên đoán đã trở thành hiện thực và báo hiệu xu hướng ảo tưởng số đông. Ngày hôm sau, cổ phiếu Amazon tăng giá 46 đô la, và đạt đỉnh 400 đô la/cổ phiếu chỉ trong vòng ba tuần (sau hai lần chia tách cổ phiếu tiếp theo, nó đạt đỉnh $ 107). Bị thúc đẩy bởi các báo cáo và lời hùng biện khó thở phát ra từ Phố Wall và báo chí, các nhà đầu tư bắt đầu mất trí.

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Bezos tuyên bố bản thân không ưa sự thổi phồng, nhưng khi làn sóng dot-com tăng cao, ông sử dụng thời điểm có một không hai để đẩy nhanh sự lớn mạnh của Amazon. Ông giải thích, nếu xảy ra cuộc đại khống chế địa hạt Internet, thì Amazon nên nhanh chân chiếm mảnh đất lớn nhất. “Chúng tôi không giới hạn hay bó buộc bản thân ở cửa hàng sách hay cửa hàng âm nhạc. Chúng tôi muốn trở thành địa chỉ ai đó tìm kiếm và khám phá bất kỳ thứ gì họ muốn mua.”

Có hai phương thức để hoàn thành mục tiêu này: hoặc là làm từng bước một, từng phân nhóm một, hoặc là tất cả cùng lúc. Bezos cố gắng triển khai theo cả hai cách trên, và một số ý tưởng của ông quá kỳ quái đến nỗi nhân viên gọi chúng là “những giấc mơ phát sốt”.

Một sáng kiến nội bộ từ thời điểm đó được đặt tên là Dự án Alexandria hay không chính thức là Noah’s Ark. Ý tưởng là thu được hai bản sao của mỗi cuốn sách từng được in và lưu trữ chúng tại trung tâm phân phối mới ở Lexington, Kentucky. Điều đó tốn kém và không hiệu quả; hầu hết các cuốn sách sẽ chỉ thu thập bụi và chiếm không gian, nhưng Bezos muốn khách hàng có thể tìm thấy bất kỳ tên sách nào trên Amazon và lấy nó nhanh chóng. Các nhóm mua sách cuối cùng đã chống lại chỉ thị, chỉ trữ những cuốn sách phổ biến nhất nhưng thương lượng thỏa thuận với một số nhà phân phối và nhà xuất bản chọn lọc để họ giao những tựa sách ít phổ biến hơn trực tiếp cho bất kỳ khách hàng nào đặt hàng.

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“Giấc mơ phát sốt” của Bezos thậm chí còn vô lý hơn khi đưa ra ý tưởng Dự án Fargo, trùng với tên bộ phim của anh em nhà Coen. Bezos muốn có một mẫu hàng của tất cả sản phẩm đã sản xuất trên thế giới và lưu trữ trong trung tâm phân phối. “Nếu thực hiện những mục tiêu trên thành công, Amazon sẽ trở thành địa chỉ đầu tiên mọi người tìm đến để mua bất kỳ thứ gì,” Kim Rachmeler, một quản lý của Amazon trong thời gian dài, nói. “Nếu bạn có tất cả hàng hóa trong kho, còn điều gì bạn không có?”

Rachmeler thận trọng nói rằng Dự án Fargo “không được ủng hộ từ các quản lý và đa số nhân viên. Dự án dần chết yểu và Jeff cố gắng hồi sinh. Tôi nhớ rất rõ một cuộc họp lớn nơi Jeff đang cố gắng thuyết phục mọi người rằng Fargo cần phải hoàn thành. "Đây là dự án quan trọng nhất trong lịch sử của Amazon" khá gần với một trích dẫn trực tiếp. Cuối cùng, dự án kết thúc khi đang triển khai, nhường chỗ cho những ưu tiên cấp bách hơn.

Rõ ràng hơn trong cách vận hành của Amazon hiện nay là Bezos đã trở nên say mê với thách thức giao sản phẩm ngay sau khi khách hàng đặt hàng. John Doerr nói rằng “trong nhiều năm, chúng tôi đã thực hiện một cuộc hành trình để tìm hiểu xem liệu chúng tôi có thể giao hàng trong ngày hay không”. Nhiệm vụ này đã gây ra khoản đầu tư 60 triệu đô la vào Kozmo.com, nơi cung cấp mọi thứ, từ đồ ăn nhẹ đến trò chơi điện tử, đến tận cửa nhà khách hàng của Thành phố New York. (Nó đã bị phá sản vào năm 2001.) Bezos thậm chí còn tự hỏi liệu Amazon có thể thuê sinh viên đại học ở mọi khu nhà ở Manhattan và yêu cầu họ lưu trữ các sản phẩm phổ biến trong căn hộ của họ và giao chúng bằng xe đạp hay không. Các nhân viên đã chết lặng. "Chúng tôi giống như, Chúng tôi đã lo lắng về hành vi trộm cắp từ trung tâm phân phối của chúng tôi ở Atlanta?" Bruce Jones, một kỹ sư làm việc trên phần mềm DC cho biết.

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Những giấc mơ gây sốt có lẽ được thể hiện rõ nhất bằng việc mua lại năm 1998 một công ty ở Thung lũng Silicon có tên là Junglee, được thành lập bởi ba sinh viên tốt nghiệp chương trình Tiến sĩ khoa học máy tính của Stanford. Junglee là trang web so sánh-mua sắm đầu tiên trên Web; nó thu thập dữ liệu từ nhiều nhà bán lẻ trực tuyến và cho phép khách hàng dễ dàng so sánh giá trên các sản phẩm cụ thể. Vài tháng sau khi Amazon IPO, Bezos đã giật công ty khởi nghiệp khỏi tay Yahoo, công ty cũng đang đàm phán để mua lại nó, với giá 170 triệu USD bằng cổ phiếu Amazon. Ý tưởng của ông là kết hợp các danh sách của Junglee vào trang Amazon và đảm bảo rằng khách hàng có thể tìm kiếm và xem thông tin về bất kỳ sản phẩm nào có thể hình dung được, ngay cả khi Amazon không bán sản phẩm đó.

Lo lắng rằng họ sẽ phải bắt đầu thu thuế bán hàng nếu nó có văn phòng ở California, ban quản lý Amazon đã nhấn mạnh rằng các nhân viên của Junglee chuyển đến Seattle, nơi trong vài tháng tới, họ đã biến dịch vụ của mình thành một tính năng trên trang Amazon có tên Shop the Web. Khi khách hàng tìm kiếm một sản phẩm trên Amazon.com, phần mềm Junglee đã tạo ra một danh sách giá cả và các liên kết màu xanh lam. Nhưng khách hàng sẽ phải nhấp vào các liên kết đó và đi đến một trang web khác để thực sự mua các mặt hàng. Nhiều giám đốc điều hành của Amazon ghét việc khách hàng rời trang web của họ để mua hàng ở nơi khác. Kết quả là, Shop the Web tồn tại trên Amazon.com chỉ trong vài tháng và sau đó là một cái chết êm ái. Ram Shriram, giám đốc điều hành của Junglee trước khi trở thành giám đốc điều hành phát triển kinh doanh tại Amazon, gọi đó là “sự từ chối hoàn toàn. Một phần lý do khiến nó không thành công là do nhóm đã không mua nó.”

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Bằng mọi cách, việc mua lại Junglee là một thất bại. Tất cả những người sáng lập của Junglee và hầu hết nhân viên của công ty đã rời Amazon vào cuối năm 1999 để quay lại Bay Area. Tuy nhiên, thỏa thuận đã tạo ra một kết quả phi thường - cho Bezos. Những người sáng lập Junglee không hề hay biết vào thời điểm đó, Ram Shriram đang âm thầm tư vấn cho hai nghiên cứu sinh tiến sĩ tại Stanford — Larry Page và Sergey Brin — những người đang cố gắng tưởng tượng lại việc tìm kiếm thông tin trên Internet. Vào tháng 2 năm 1998, Shriram đã trở thành một trong bốn nhà đầu tư đầu tiên ủng hộ công ty nhỏ đầy hy vọng, Google, với 250.000 đô la mỗi công ty.

Vào mùa hè năm 1998, Bezos và MacKenzie ở khu vực vịnh San Francisco trong chuyến cắm trại cùng bạn bè. Bezos nói với Shriram rằng ông muốn gặp những chàng trai Google. Vào một sáng thứ Bảy, Shriram đón Bezos và vợ tại khách sạn địa phương và lái xe đưa họ đến nhà mình. Page và Brin cũng tham gia bữa sáng và trình bày công cụ tìm kiếm đang phát triển. Nhiều năm sau, Bezos nói với nhà báo Steven Levy rằng ông thực sự ấn tượng với “sự bướng bỉnh, ương ngạnh” của những chàng trai Google khi họ giải thích lý do tại sao họ sẽ không bao giờ đặt quảng cáo trên trang chủ.

Brin và Page rời nhà Shriram sau khi kết thúc bữa sáng. Cuộc gặp gỡ trực tiếp càng khẳng định niềm tin tuyệt đối của ông vào hai nhà khởi nghiệp đầy nhiệt huyết, đam mê khai phá Internet. Bezos ngay lập tức nói với Shriram muốn đầu tư vào Google với tư cách cá nhân.

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Shriram nói rằng giai đoạn huy động vốn đã kết thúc nhiều tháng trước. Nhưng Bezos năn nỉ và nói ông muốn điều kiện như những nhà đầu tư sáng lập khác. Shriram nói sẽ cố gắng hiện thực hóa yêu cầu của Bezos. Sau đó, Shriram quay lại gặp bộ đôi sáng lập Google và lập luận rằng, sự hiểu biết sâu sắc trong ngành và danh tiếng đang nổi của Bezos sẽ hỗ trợ công ty non trẻ, và họ đã đồng ý. Brin và Page bay tới Seattle nói chuyện với Bezos trong văn phòng Amazon khoảng một giờ đồng hồ về vấn đề kỹ thuật, ví dụ như cơ sở hạ tầng máy tính. “Jeff thực sự tỏ thái độ hỗ trợ trong vài cuộc họp trao đổi đầu tiên,” Larry Page nói.

Như vậy, Jeff Bezos trở thành một trong những nhà đầu tư sáng lập của Google, đối thủ tương lai của công ty ông. Bốn năm sau khi gây dựng Amazon, ông đầu tư và sở hữu cơ đồ cá nhân mà hiện nay có thể trị giá trên một tỉ đô la. (Bezos kiên quyết từ chối thảo luận liệu ông sẽ giữ một phần hoặc toàn bộ cổ phần Google sau khi công ty phát hành cổ phiếu lần đầu ra công chúng vào năm 2004.) “Ông ấy quả thực có tài tiên tri. Như thể ông có khả năng nhìn trước tương lai vậy,” Shriram, người đã rời Amazon vào năm 2000 và giữ ghế trong Hội đồng quản trị của Google vẫn lấy làm lạ về giao dịch đó trong nhiều năm sau, nói. “Ông ấy cũng cực kỳ khôn ngoan, sắc sảo, nhận thức bản thân sâu sắc và biết mình có thể kiểm soát một thứ gì đó đến mức nào.”

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Khi “giấc mơ phát sốt” của Bezos dần nguội đi, thay thế cho những quan tâm, lo lắng thực tiễn đang xảy ra bên trong công ty, thì Amazon áp dụng nguyên tắc thứ tự ưu tiên để mở rộng phân nhóm sản phẩm kinh doanh. Việc lấn sân sang lĩnh vực âm nhạc và đĩa DVD năm 1998 đã đem lại thành công. Amazon nhanh chóng vượt qua những công ty dẫn đầu trên từng thị trường, bao gồm công ty mới thành lập CDNow.com trong âm nhạc và Reel.com trong điện ảnh. Ban đầu, Amazon không thể có danh sách tổng hợp tác phẩm âm nhạc và phim ảnh để cung cấp trực tuyến. Tuy nhiên, những nhà cung cấp trung gian như Baker và Taylor trong lĩnh vực sách, đã tạo ra các động lực thúc đẩy hoạt động kinh doanh ban đầu cho Amazon và sau đó cho phép công ty làm việc trực tiếp với các đại gia truyền thông.

Vào đầu năm 1999, Bezos khuyến khích chọn đồ chơi và đồ điện tử là hai trong số các mục tiêu mới chính của công ty. Để dẫn đầu việc giới thiệu đồ chơi, David Risher, Phó chủ tịch cấp cao của bộ phận bán lẻ, đã chọn Harrison Miller, một sinh viên mới tốt nghiệp chương trình MBA của Stanford, người có bằng cấp rõ ràng duy nhất cho công việc đồ chơi đến từ một lần dạy lớp năm tại một trường học ở Thành phố New York. Nói cách khác, Miller không biết gì về bán lẻ đồ chơi, nhưng trong một mô hình sẽ lặp đi lặp lại, Bezos không quan tâm. Anh ấy đang tìm kiếm những nhà quản lý đa năng - anh ấy gọi họ là “vận động viên” - những người có thể tiến nhanh và hoàn thành những việc lớn.

Miller nhận hỗ trợ từ Brian Birtwistle, và chỉ có tám tháng để chuẩn bị và đưa vào kinh doanh đồ chơi trước kỳ nghỉ lễ. Vài ngày sau khi nhận nhiệm vụ, ông và Birtwistle bay tới hội chợ đồ chơi thường niên tại New York. Trong khoang máy bay, hai người chuyển qua chuyển lại báo cáo phân tích kinh doanh trò chơi giữa hai hàng ghế. Họ bước vào sảnh hội nghị, giới thiệu bản thân trước các công ty trò chơi đang băn khoăn liệu Amazon và thương mại điện tử nói chung đưa ra cơ hội hay một sự đe dọa. Lãnh đạo của những công ty trò chơi yêu cầu thông tin về số lượng trò chơi mà hai người muốn mua. Hai nhà quản lý trẻ Amazon không đưa ra bất cứ con số nào.

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Về cơ bản đồ chơi khác biệt với sách, âm nhạc, hay phim ảnh. Thời điểm đó, không có bất kỳ bên phân phối thứ ba nào cung cấp đồ chơi và nhận lại hàng không bán được trên thị trường. Những nhà sản xuất đồ chơi lớn cẩn thận xác định số lượng sản phẩm sẽ phân bổ cho từng nhà bán lẻ. Và trước đó gần một năm, những nhà bán lẻ phải dự đoán sản phẩm nào bán chạy nhất cho mùa nghỉ lễ tiếp theo. Doanh số bán hàng chỉ tập trung trong vòng sáu tuần điên cuồng của năm, do sự nuông chiều của cha mẹ dành cho con cái. Nếu nhà bán lẻ dự đoán sai, họ sẽ gặp rắc rối lớn bởi vì sau nghỉ lễ, đồ chơi không bán được sẽ không thể trả lại và trở thành hàng bỏ đi. “Đồ chơi là thứ mốt nhất thời, nó giống như cá cược ai là người giành giải Oscar khi chỉ xem đoạn phim quảng cáo giới thiệu ngắn,” Miller nói.

Lần đầu tiên, Amazon phải hạ mình trước nhà cung cấp để nhận quyền bán sản phẩm. Mong muốn sở hữu những nhân vật trong bộ phim hành động Chiến tranh giữa các vì sao và những món đồ chơi khác từ bộ ba tác phẩm cổ điển, Miller, Bezos và John Doerr đi ăn tối cùng Alan Hassenfeld, tổng giám đốc điều hành Hasbro tại khách sạn Fairmont, San Francisco. Sau đó, tất cả cùng tới trụ sở của hãng phim Lucas tại hạt Marin, bắc San Francisco. “Đó là nỗ lực nghiêm túc đầu tiên của chúng tôi để khẩn cầu và nài nỉ kiếm hàng dự trữ từ nhà cung cấp,” Miller nói. “Việc nhận được cái gật đầu của nhà cung cấp bỗng nhiên trở thành ngọn núi cao phải vượt qua.”

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Mùa hè năm đó, Harrison Miller và Bezos tranh cãi gay gắt trước mặt hội đồng quản trị về quy mô số tiền đầu tư vào lĩnh vực đồ chơi. Bezos muốn Miller chi 120 triệu đô la để mua dự trữ toàn bộ đồ chơi có thể, từ búp bê Barbie, xe lửa làm từ gỗ quý hiếm xuất xứ từ Đức, đến xô nhựa chơi cát rẻ tiền trên bãi biển. Ông muốn những đứa trẻ và cha mẹ chúng không bao giờ phải thất vọng khi tìm kiếm đồ chơi trên Amazon. Tuy nhiên, Miller với tài tiên tri của ông đã cảm nhận thảm họa phía trước nên muốn mức tiền mua hàng dự trữ thấp hơn.

“Không! Không! 120 triệu đô la!” Bezos thét lên. “Tôi muốn tất cả chúng. Nếu phải bỏ chúng đi, tôi sẽ tự mình đẩy chúng đến bãi rác!”

“Jeff, bạn lái chiếc Honda Accord,” Joy Covey chỉ. “Đó sẽ là rất nhiều chuyến đi.”

Bezos thắng thế. Và công ty sẽ đóng góp đáng kể cho quỹ từ thiện Toys for Tots sau kỳ nghỉ lễ năm đó. “Kỳ nghỉ lễ năm đó đem đến dư vị vừa tuyệt vời nhất, vừa tồi tệ nhất,” Miller nói. “Cửa hàng đầy khách và chúng tôi đạt mục tiêu doanh thu, một con số lớn. Nhưng không chỉ có vậy, mọi thứ đi sai hướng. Cuối cùng, chúng tôi còn tồn kho số đồ chơi trị giá 50 triệu đô la. Tôi phải cử nhân viên đi cầu thang sau bán những chú ‘Vin-nie’ tại New York và Digimon hạ giá ở Mexico chỉ với 20 xu. Bạn phải nhanh chóng bỏ chúng khỏi nhà kho”.

Phân nhóm đồ điện tử gia dụng thậm chí phải đối mặt với thách thức lớn hơn. Để mở rộng kinh doanh sang phân nhóm mới này, David Risher liên hệ với Chris Payne, đồng môn tại Đại học Dartmouth, người đã từng làm việc tại cửa hàng DVD của Amazon. Giống như Miller, Payne phải làm hài lòng nhà cung cấp – trong trường hợp này là những công ty đồ điện tử gia dụng châu Á như Sony, Toshiba và Samsung.

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Ông nhanh chóng vấp phải tảng đá lớn. Những đại gia đồ điện tử Nhật Bản coi những công ty bán hàng qua Internet là những người kinh doanh hàng giá rẻ, không có định hướng lâu dài. Họ cũng có những cửa hàng lớn khác như Best Buy và Circuit City đến đề nghị hợp tác và yêu cầu họ bỏ qua Amazon. Trong ngành cũng có những nhà phân phối trung gian, như Ingram Electronics, nhưng họ chỉ cung cấp sản phẩm giới hạn. Bezos cử Doerr nói chuyện với Howard Stringer của Sony tại chi nhánh ở Mỹ, nhưng kết quả không đi đến đâu.

Do vậy, Payne phải tìm đến những nhà phân phối cấp hai – những nhà kinh doanh thầu lại. Họ hoạt động trong thị trường xám không được thừa nhận, mặc dù không phải bất hợp pháp. Randy Miller, giám đốc tài chính bán lẻ gia nhập Amazon từ công ty Eddie Bauer, so sánh như thể họ đang mua hàng hóa từ va-li trong chiếc ô tô của ai đó trong ngõ tối. “Đó không phải là mô hình mua hàng bền vững, nhưng nếu bạn đang tuyệt vọng vì không thể có được sản phẩm nào đó trên trang web hoặc trong kho hàng, bạn sẽ làm những gì cần phải làm,” ông nói.

Mua hàng hóa từ những nhà phân phối trung gian mập mờ giúp Payne và nhóm điện tử non trẻ tiến thêm một bước trong việc dự trữ hàng hóa cho Amazon. Tuy nhiên, Bezos không ấn tượng với những sản phẩm được chọn bán. Amazon sẽ mất nhiều năm để tạo ra doanh thu đủ lớn và gây chú ý cho những thương hiệu châu Á. Giờ đây, phân nhóm điện tử vẫn cung cấp chủng loại, mẫu mã hàng hóa nghèo nàn. Bezos yêu cầu nhìn thấy 100 triệu đô la doanh thu từ nhóm hàng điện tử vào mùa nghỉ lễ năm 1999; Payne và cộng sự đạt được khoảng 2/3 con số yêu cầu.

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Amazon chính thức thông báo lấn sân sang phân nhóm trò chơi và đồ điện tử vào mùa hè năm đó. Tháng Chín, công ty tổ chức họp báo tại khách sạn Sheraton, ở trung tâm thành phố Manhattan để quảng bá cho những phân nhóm sản phẩm mới. Nhân viên nào đó trong công ty đưa ra ý tưởng xếp thêm các chồng sản phẩm, đại diện cho tất cả phân nhóm mới trên bàn trong phòng họp báo tại khách sạn Sheraton với mục đích củng cố vững chắc thêm thông tin lấn sân sang sản phẩm mới. Bezos thích ý tưởng này và cho thực hiện. Tuy nhiên, khi bước vào phòng họp báo đêm trước khi sự kiện diễn ra, ông đã nổi cơn tam bành. Ông cho rằng những chồng sản phẩm không đủ lớn để gây ấn tượng. “Anh muốn chuyển công việc kinh doanh này cho đối thủ của chúng ta à?” ông hét vào di động khi gọi điện cho nhân viên dưới quyền. “Thật là thảm hại!”

Harrison Miller, Chris Payne và đồng sự đã tản ra khắp các cửa hàng ở Manhattan trong đêm. Họ mua sắm tràn lan những sản phẩm ngẫu nhiên và nhồi nhét vào trong taxi. Miller tiêu 1.000 đô la chỉ riêng cho đồ chơi hiệu Toys “R” Us tại cửa hàng nằm ở ngã tư Herald Square. Payne nâng hạn mức chi tối đa trong thẻ tín dụng cá nhân và phải gọi cho vợ ở Seattle, yêu cầu cô không sử dụng thẻ trong vài ngày. Những chồng sản phẩm cuối cùng đã đủ lớn để khiến Bezos hài lòng, nhưng câu chuyện mới chỉ đang trong giai đoạn đầu. Để khiến khách hàng hài lòng và đáp ứng yêu cầu sản phẩm đa dạng của ông chủ trong kỳ nghỉ tiếp theo, đội ngũ quản lý của Amazon sẽ phải thay thế kỹ nghệ giật gấu vá vai khôn lỏi bằng sự chuẩn bị chu đáo có tính toán kỹ lưỡng.

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Giữa lúc Amazon đang tăng trưởng chóng mặt và vào mùa bán hàng cao điểm trong kỳ nghỉ lễ, Bezos vẫn quan tâm đến văn hóa cốt lõi mà ông dày công gây dựng cho công ty non trẻ nhưng phát triển nhanh chóng.

Sử dụng những chiếc bàn làm việc rẻ tiền và hỗ trợ tối thiểu chỗ đỗ xe cho nhân viên, ông đang ngày càng củng cố giá trị về sự tiết kiệm. Chiếc máy bán cà phê nằm ở tầng trệt tòa nhà Pac Med nhận thẻ khách hàng trung thành và mỗi khách hàng sẽ nhận suất uống miễn phí sau lần mua hàng thứ 10. Dù giờ đây Bezos đã là triệu phú, nhưng ông vẫn thường cố tình để mọi người nhìn thấy hình ảnh ông nhét thẻ thành viên trung thành hoặc chuyển suất uống miễn phí cho đồng nghiệp đang xếp hàng bên cạnh. Thời điểm đó, ông cũng bắt đầu di chuyển bằng máy bay riêng được thuê lại của một doanh nhân địa phương. Tuy nhiên, bất kỳ khi nào bay cùng cộng sự, ông luôn luôn tuyên bố: “Công ty không chi trả cho những chi phí này, mà chính là tôi.”

Việc Amazon mua Telebuch, công ty của Đức, và BookPages, công ty của Anh năm 1998 đã tạo cơ hội tuyệt vời cho Bezos kết nối những nguyên tắc cốt lõi cho công ty. Bezos và nhân viên đã thống nhất năm giá trị cốt lõi và viết chúng trên bảng trắng trong phòng họp: khách hàng đứng đầu, tiết kiệm, hành động nhanh chóng, sở hữu và tiêu chuẩn tuyển dụng cao. Sau này, Amazon thêm giá trị thứ sáu, sự cải tiến.

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Bezos bắt đầu nghĩ về cách thức khiến nhân viên công ty thấm nhuần những giá trị này, không chỉ dừng lại ở việc treo danh sách giá trị cốt lõi trên tường văn phòng và các trung tâm phân phối. Để củng cố quan điểm yêu cầu tuyển dụng cao, ông lấy cảm hứng hành động từ công ty hàng xóm Microsoft. Một phần trong quy trình tuyển dụng nổi tiếng của Microsoft là chỉ định nhân viên chuyên trách của công ty trở thành người phỏng vấn cao cấp, đảm nhiệm trọng trách trao đổi trực tiếp với những ứng viên trong vòng cuối cùng và đưa ra quyết định tuyển dụng. Phân công những quản lý kinh nghiệm vào vai trò này giúp Microsoft đảm bảo duy trì tiêu chuẩn tuyển dụng trước sau như một. Bezos nghe đến chương trình tuyển dụng của Microsoft từ Joel Spiegel và David Risher, sau đó tạo ra phiên bản dành riêng cho Amazon mà ông gọi là chương trình tuyển dụng nhân sự chất lượng cao.

Chương trình tuyển dụng nhân sự chất lượng cao tại Amazon – vẫn duy trì cho đến bây giờ – chỉ định những nhân viên chứng tỏ trực giác bản thân có khả năng tuyển dụng nhân viên tài năng. Dalzell và Bezos tự mình chọn những người đứng đầu chương trình. Jeff Holden, một trong số cựu nhân viên của Shaw nằm trong danh sách. Ít nhất, một “chương trình tuyển dụng nhân sự chất lượng cao” sẽ tham gia vào tất cả các bước trong quy trình tuyển dụng và có quyền loại ứng viên không đạt tiêu chuẩn tuyển dụng chung của công ty. Thậm chí, giám đốc nhân sự không thể gạt bỏ quyết định phủ quyết của chương trình này. “Nhiều công ty khi phát triển đến quy mô nào đó bắt đầu thỏa hiệp tiêu chuẩn của mình để đáp ứng nhu cầu số lượng nhân lực,” Dalzell nói. “Chúng tôi muốn chắc chắn rằng điều này không xảy ra tại Amazon.”

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Nhằm củng cố quan điểm của Walton về hành động có thành kiến, Bezos lập ra phần thưởng “Just Do It” – sự công nhận dành cho nhân viên có sáng kiến, thực hiện một việc đáng chú ý nào đó nằm ngoài những gì được mô tả trách nhiệm công việc. Thậm chí, nếu hành động đó hóa ra lại là sai lầm nghiêm trọng, nhân viên đó vẫn giành giải miễn là họ chấp nhận rủi ro và thể hiện tài xoay xở trong khi thực hiện. Bezos giải thích rằng phần thưởng sẽ không mang giá trị tiền bạc cao vì nhấn mạnh đến sự tiết kiệm. Do vậy, ông mua đôi giày Nike cỡ 21 từ cựu vận động viên bóng rổ Dan Kreft của Đại học Northwestern, hiện đang làm kỹ sư tại Amazon làm giải thưởng.

Nhân viên công ty thấm nhuần những giá trị mới của Amazon, tuy nhiên vẫn còn nhiều người chống lại. Khi Amazon ngày càng lớn mạnh, Bezos thậm chí còn ép nhân viên khủng khiếp hơn. Ông cho tổ chức họp cả vào cuối tuần, thành lập câu lạc bộ sách hoạt động tập trung vào sáng thứ Bảy hàng tuần, và thường nhắc đi nhắc lại về làm việc thông minh, chăm chỉ trong nhiều giờ. Và kết quả tất yếu, môi trường làm việc của công ty không thân thiện với cuộc sống gia đình và một vài quản lý rời đi khi họ muốn có con. “Jeff không tin vào sự cân bằng giữa công việc và cuộc sống,” Kim Rachmeler nói. “Ông ấy tin vào sự hài hòa giữa công việc và cuộc sống. Tôi đoán ý tưởng ẩn sau của ông ấy là bạn có thể làm đồng thời mọi việc cùng lúc.”

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Mục hỏi và đáp trong những cuộc họp các bên của công ty trở thành thời điểm minh chứng rõ rệt nhất cho xung đột. Đây là cuộc họp được tổ chức trong nhiều năm tại rạp hát Moore Theater cổ nhất Seattle. Nhân viên đứng lên và đưa ra câu hỏi trực tiếp cho đội ngũ lãnh đạo, và thường họ nêu vấn đề liên quan đến nhịp độ làm việc quay cuồng và khối lượng công việc khổng lồ. Trong một cuộc họp đáng nhớ, nữ nhân viên hỏi thẳng Bezos khi nào Amazon định xây dựng môi trường làm việc cân bằng giữa công việc và cuộc sống. Bezos đã không đưa ra câu trả lời khôn ngoan cho lắm. “Lý do chúng ta ở đây để hoàn thành công việc, đó là ưu tiên cao nhất,” ông trả lời thẳng thừng. “Đó là đặc trưng riêng của Amazon. Nếu bạn không thể xuất sắc và đặt toàn bộ tâm trí sức lực vào công ty, có thể đây không phải nơi dành cho bạn.”

Trong nhóm kế toán của Amazon, những nhân viên kế toán tài chính đang làm việc ngày đêm, và trở nên lo lắng. Họ cố gắng đưa ra giải thích hợp lý và dự đoán tương lai, nhưng đều không cho họ thấy được điều gì ngoài sự thua lỗ lớn. Họ không thoải mái với kế hoạch mở bảy trung tâm phân phối tốn kém và thậm chí đầu tư quá nhiều vào trung tâm phân phối đầu tiên. Bezos kiên quyết rằng công ty cần phải làm chủ bất cứ thứ gì để mang lại cho khách hàng những trải nghiệm thiêng liêng. Ông từ chối bất kỳ kế hoạch nào nhằm sinh lợi nhuận. “Nếu bạn định lập kế hoạch trước 20 phút trong môi trường kinh doanh này, bạn đang lãng phí thời gian,” ông nói trong những cuộc họp.

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Trong hai năm, phố Wall đã lượng thứ cho việc chi tiêu quá độ của Amazon. Trong buổi họp trực tuyến sau khi công bố báo cáo lợi nhuận hàng quý, những nhà phân tích thường quá lạc quan và vui mừng đến nỗi ban lãnh đạo Amazon phải tự ngăn mình khỏi reo hò lớn. Ở phía trên của bản chính báo cáo lợi nhuận, họ viết dòng chữ to Khiêm tốn, khiêm tốn, khiêm tốn. Vài lần, họ thêm dòng chữ Hãy nhớ, Meg đang lắng nghe, câu nói liên tưởng đến CEO của eBay và nhắc nhở phải thận trọng với thông tin của công ty.

Mùa xuân năm 1999, trạng thái phấn khích của phố Wall dường như đi xuống. Tạp chí tài chính hàng tuần Barron’s xuất bản bài báo chuyên đề “Amazon.bomb”. Bài viết đưa ra thông điệp rõ ràng: “Các nhà đầu tư đang dần nhận ra cổ phiếu của nhà sách này có vấn đề.” Ngoài ra, bài viết còn đi xa hơn khi đưa ra gợi ý rằng Walmart và Barners & Noble sẽ đánh bại công ty non trẻ mới nổi này. Tuy nhiên, bài viết góp phần tạm thời giảm bớt sự thăng hoa quá mức của thị trường. Tháng sau, Amazon công bố báo cáo lợi nhuận hàng quý, với con số doanh thu tăng mạnh và lỗ lớn. Lần này, phản ứng của các bên trầm lắng hơn và cổ phiếu Amazon thật ra đã giảm đôi chút. Như điềm báo trước, Amazon không hề nhận được những lời chúc mừng lấy lòng của những nhà phân tích trong cuộc họp trực tuyến như thường lệ.

Kelyn Brannon, kế toán trưởng của Amazon vào thời điểm đó, nói rằng cô ấy và Joy Covey kéo Bezos khỏi cuộc họp để chỉ cho ông ấy bảng phân tích tài chính về kết quả hoạt động kinh doanh theo mẫu số chung; theo đó mỗi thông số trên bảng cân đối được thể hiện theo phần trăm của doanh số. Kết quả chỉ ra rằng ở tình trạng hiện thời, Amazon sẽ không sinh lãi trong nhiều thập kỷ. “Khoảnh khắc đó thật dễ chịu,” Brannon nói. Và Bezos đã đồng ý chuyển hướng trọng tâm kinh doanh từ mở rộng sang sinh lợi nhuận.

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Tuy nhiên, việc chi tiêu quá mạnh tay và con số lỗ càng ngày càng tăng đã gây nên nỗi sợ hãi trong ban quản trị của Amazon – nỗi sợ rằng Bezos, vị CEO vẫn còn trẻ và ở tuổi 35, hay thay đổi quan điểm, cần người giúp đỡ. Sau khi nghe những lời càu nhàu dai dẳng từ đội ngũ quản lý về việc Bezos không lắng nghe ý kiến của nhân viên dưới quyền, hội đồng quản trị Amazon đưa ra một trong ba quyết định rủi ro nhất của lịch sử công ty trong thập kỷ đầu tiên hoạt động. Hội đồng quản trị yêu cầu Bezos tìm kiếm giám đốc điều hành.

Sau khi dành thời gian suy nghĩ thấu đáo, Bezos hoan nghênh ý tưởng. Ông tin rằng công ty nên có nhiều giám đốc có kinh nghiệm nhất có thể, và ông bắt đầu dành thời gian cho những niềm đam mê cá nhân khác. Amazon phỏng vấn một số nhà quản lý cao cấp, bao gồm nhà quản lý kỳ cựu của phố Wall, Jamie Dimon, người vừa bị chủ tịch Sandy Weill sa thải khỏi Citibank. Tuy nhiên, họ đã chọn Joe Galli Jr., một người bán hàng tham vọng và có vẻ hơi khoa trương từ công ty Black và Decker. Công ty đã phát triển dòng sản phẩm dụng cụ cầm tay sử dụng điện DeWalt nổi tiếng. Bezos, Covey và John Doerr theo đuổi Galli quyết liệt và thỏa thuận cuối cùng diễn ra vào tháng Sáu. Amazon đã giật Galli khỏi tay PepsiCo chỉ sớm hơn một ngày, mặc dù ban đầu ông ấy đã đồng ý sơ bộ về đảm nhiệm vị trí điều hành phân mảng Frito-Lay.

Theo lời của John Doerr, chính Bezos soạn thảo quy trình báo cáo mới không chính thức. Tất cả đội ngũ quản lý bây giờ báo cáo cho Galli, sau đó Galli chịu trách nhiệm báo cáo lại cho Bezos. Galli cũng tham gia hội đồng quản trị của Amazon. Nhóm J Team được đổi tên thành S Team (chữ cái S viết tắt cho từ “Senior” – Cấp cao). Bezos có thời gian tập trung tâm trí vào sản phẩm mới, quan hệ công chúng, những sở thích cá nhân và gia đình. MacKenzie đang mang thai đứa con đầu lòng, và đầu năm đó, cặp đôi đã chuyển khỏi căn hộ tại Seattle đến biệt thự cao cấp trị giá 10 triệu đô la tại Medina, nằm trên bờ đông của hồ Washington. “Jeff thực sự nghĩ rằng ông ấy sẽ tập trung vào hoạt động từ thiện và những sở thích khác. Đồng thời, ông sẽ biến đổi Amazon mạnh mẽ hơn nữa,” Galli nói. “Điều đó thực sự kích thích tôi.”

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Galli – con trai của một người Mỹ gốc Ý làm chủ công ty xử lý ô tô cũ đến từ Pittsburgh, là người có thiên hướng cắt giảm chi phí và một nghệ sĩ xoay chuyển tình thế. Ông rất háo hức gây ảnh hưởng đến công ty mà sau này trở thành một trong những đế chế có quy mô kinh doanh lớn nhất trên thế giới. Ông bước vào sảnh đầy tự tin, cao ngạo, khoác trên mình bộ comple hiệu Brioni đắt tiền và mang theo chiếc gậy bóng chày. Điều này thực sự gây ấn tượng mạnh. Ban đầu, Bezos thích điều này. “Tôi thuê Joe vào vị trí lãnh đạo cấp cao,” Bezos phát biểu trước toàn thể nhân viên khi ông giới thiệu Galli trong công ty. “Tuy nhiên tất cả những điều tôi yêu cầu Joe làm chỉ là tiếp thêm xăng vào lửa đang cháy thôi.”

Galli gia nhập Amazon giống như chú bò đực tức giận xổng dây trói chạy tự do trên đường phố Pamplona. Ông nhìn xung quanh và thấy nhân viên Amazon làm việc không theo quy định kỷ luật mà ông từng chứng kiến trong 19 năm làm việc tại Black & Decker. “Những đứa trẻ tài năng tốt nghiệp Đại học Stanford và Harvard chạy như con thoi, lên xuống tòa nhà,” Galli nói. “Tuy nhiên, thiếu sự chặt chẽ và kiểm soát vận hành. Giống như miền Tây hoang dã vậy. “Một trong những thay đổi đầu tiên ông đưa ra là giảm chế độ đãi ngộ cho nhân viên văn phòng vốn dĩ đã ít ỏi. Ông cho dừng việc cung cấp miễn phí thuốc đau đầu Advil vì cho rằng công ty không cần chi tiền vào những chi phí không cần thiết như vậy. Quyết định này suýt nữa phát động “cuộc khởi nghĩa” đòi quyền lợi của nhân viên.

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Galli không có nền tảng kiến thức hay kỹ thuật chuyên môn và điều này trở thành hạn chế đáng kể trong môi trường mà nhân viên nhìn nhận nơi làm việc của họ là trong công ty phát triển phần mềm, chứ không phải nhà bán lẻ. Ông đọc thư điện tử sau khi thư ký in ra và ông muốn sử dụng điện thoại liên lạc thay cho văn hóa dùng thư điện tử đang có tại Amazon. Do thường xuyên bay ra nước ngoài để mở rộng hoạt động kinh doanh của Amazon, nên trong công ty xuất hiện những tin đồn thất thiệt xuyên tạc, ám chỉ ông sử dụng chuyên cơ công ty vào công việc cá nhân, hay nói cách khác ông đang dính vào bẫy quyền lực. Tin đồn ông đỗ chiếc Porsche nhiều lần vào chỗ đỗ xe dành cho khách hàng quan trọng và lực lượng an ninh tòa nhà cuối cùng phải kéo nó đi lan rộng khắp công ty. Galli nhớ rằng ông chỉ đỗ nhầm một lần thôi.

Tháng Mười năm 1999, Galli chỉ đạo việc mua Tool Crib of the North, chuỗi kinh doanh phần cứng quy mô nhỏ ở phía bắc Dakota, và bắt đầu chuẩn bị mở phân nhóm đồ dụng cụ trên trang web. Ông bay tới Cleveland và gặp đội ngũ lãnh đạo từ Sherwin-Williams để điều tra khả năng thêm phân nhóm sơn. Mặc dù, sơn không phải là mặt hàng dễ giao và vấn đề màu sắc trở thành trở ngại, ví dụ như màu cà phê Thụy Sĩ không thể hiển thị tốt trên web. Áp dụng theo một trong những phương thức quảng bá thành công trong quá khứ khi ở công ty Black và Decker, ông lập ra một đội và cấp cho họ những chiếc SUV màu đen có hình logo của Amazon. Nhân viên sẽ lái chúng vòng quanh đất nước, đưa ra hướng dẫn về phương thức sử dụng Amazon.com và web nói chung. Nỗ lực bị dừng giữa chừng nhường chỗ cho những ưu tiên cấp thiết, và những chiếc xe này nằm bất động thừa thãi trong khu đỗ xe Pac Med một vài tháng. Điều này ngược lại với nỗ lực cắt giảm chi phí trong thời điểm đó. “Đa số các công ty đưa ra danh sách ưu tiên gồm 45 ý tưởng tốt nhất và lựa chọn thứ tự ưu tiên thực hiện thật dễ dàng,” Galli nói. “Tại Amazon, có 150 ý tưởng tốt đồng thời và Jeff có năng lực tạo ra mỗi ngày một ý tưởng.”

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Sự hợp tác giữa Bezos và Galli gặp trục trặc ngay từ đầu. Mặc dù, Bezos tự mình đưa ra cấu trúc và quy trình báo cáo mới, ông vẫn điều khiển Amazon trực tiếp thông qua Galli. Ông đưa ra ý kiến chi tiết cho tất cả vấn đề từ việc mua sắm, sáp nhập công ty tới thay đổi nội dung văn bản xuất hiện trên trang chủ. Galli nghĩ rằng ông tham gia Amazon ở vị trí điều hành công ty, và cuối cùng ông bắt đầu suy nghĩ tính toán để có nhiều quyền lực hơn. Bezos dành thời gian nghỉ ngơi sau khi con trai đầu lòng Preston ra đời. Sau đó, ông trở lại và nhận ra những ồn ào xung quanh phong cách quản lý nghiêm khắc của Galli. Amazon và hội đồng quản trị giờ đây đang tồn tại vấn đề khủng hoảng lãnh đạo.

Tuy nhiên, Galli cũng có một số đóng góp quan trọng cho công ty. Ông đã chuyển những quản lý phân nhóm sản phẩm như Harrison Miller và Chris Payne thành giám đốc phụ trách chung, những người từng kiểm soát báo cáo kết quả hoạt động kinh doanh, cũng như chi phí và tỉ suất lợi nhuận. Ông có kinh nghiệm điều tiết đưa đẩy những mối quan hệ với các cửa hàng lớn nên có thể hợp tác với họ trên nhiều mặt.

Covey kiệt sức sau ba năm làm việc không nghỉ, và Galli đã giúp Amazon thuê giám đốc tài chính mới có tên Warren Jenson từ Delta. Và cuối cùng, Galli cũng sắp xếp ổn thỏa khi Jimmy Wright thường xuyên vắng mặt. Jimmy đi lại giữa Bentonville và văn phòng, nhưng ông bất ngờ từ chức do áp lực ngay trước kỳ nghỉ lễ năm 1999. Galli đã nhanh chóng tìm được người đứng đầu thay thế.

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Khách hàng đổ xô truy cập trang web trong những ngày nghỉ lễ năm 1999. Sau cả năm ròng rã nghe quảng cáo liên tục về dot-com, người tiêu dùng đã sẵn sàng vượt qua những rào cản và bước vào dòng nước quyến rũ của web. Còn nhân viên Amazon vẫn giữ nhịp hoạt động ổn định.

Cho đến bây giờ, Amazon có năm trung tâm phân phối trải rộng trên toàn nước Mỹ và hai trung tâm ở châu Âu. Jimmy Wright và những đồng nghiệp từ Walmart đã rời đi, và hệ thống phần mềm vốn được thiết kế dành cho vận chuyển sách giờ phải dành cho mọi thứ từ ti vi đến hộp đựng cát, đồ chơi cho trẻ em. Chaos, đối thủ cũ của Amazon, giờ đây dường như đang sống dậy.

Ngay sau lễ Tạ ơn, nhận thấy hiển nhiên Amazon không thể dự trữ đủ đồ chơi nổi tiếng, Kerry Morris, người phụ trách mua hàng gia nhập Amazon từ Walmart nói rằng bà đã phân công nhân viên Amazon đến các cửa hàng đồ chơi Costco và Toys “R” Us trên khắp đất nước để đặt mua những đồ chơi đang bán chạy như Pokemon và chú chó Mattel’s Walk ’N Wag. Tận dụng triệt để khuyến mại miễn phí giao hàng của đối thủ cạnh tranh, bà đặt mua toàn bộ đồ chơi Pokemon trên trang web mới ToysRUs.com và địa chỉ giao hàng đều ở Fernley. “Vào thời điểm đó, họ vẫn còn ít kinh nghiệm trong lĩnh vực thương mại điện tử, nên họ thực sự không có công cụ để cảnh báo về hành động thu gom hàng của chúng tôi cho đến khi mọi việc trở nên quá muộn,” Morris nói.

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Sự tăng trưởng nhanh chóng một lần nữa đòi hỏi công ty khởi động chương trình Save Santa. Nhân viên nói lời chào tạm biệt với gia đình và lên đường bắt đầu thời gian làm việc liên tục trong hai tuần. Họ có thể trực đường dây điện thoại dịch vụ khách hàng hoặc làm việc trong những trung tâm phân phối trên toàn quốc. Amazon ghép hai nhân viên vào một phòng khách sạn để tiết kiệm tối đa chi phí. Đối với một số người, đó là trải nghiệm tuyệt vời nhất mà họ từng có tại công ty. Nhưng những người khác ghét điều này và phàn nàn. “Tôi không nói rằng họ là những người kiêu căng khó tính, nhưng họ không quen, họ không mong đợi điều này và nhiều người không thể xoay sở được,” Bert Wegner, giám đốc phụ trách chung của trung tâm phân phối Fernley, nói.

Ở trung tâm phân phối Fernley, sau khi kết thúc ca làm việc đêm, một số nhân viên nghỉ tại Golden Nugget ở Reno, uống vài ly bia tại quán bar, chơi bài vào lúc sáu giờ sáng. Vài nhân viên thì thề rằng đã làm việc cùng những tù nhân từ nhà tù bên cạnh, mặc dù điều này khó có thể chứng minh. Nhân viên Amazon thế hệ đầu tiên, Tom Schonhoff, nằm trong nhóm có nhiệm vụ đến Delaware. Trung tâm này đang có vấn đề về chất lượng lao động thời vụ. “Có nhiều công nhân thời vụ như thể trung tâm cải tạo đẩy họ ra ngoài bằng cửa sau vậy,” ông nói. Ông thấy một công nhân bị sa thải vì say xỉn và sau đó tự làm ướt mình bằng rượu khi cố gắng phản đối quyết định.

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Schonhoff và cộng sự làm việc trong một tuần để giải quyết sạch hàng tồn tại kho Delaware và tổ chức sắp xếp nhân viên. “Chúng tôi làm việc một cách trung thực và tận tụy. Liệu tôi có thể nói điều đó mà không kêu như một chú lừa ư?” ông nói. “Mục tiêu là phải đẩy không khí lễ Giáng Sinh tràn ngập khắp nơi và duy trì lời hứa của thương hiệu. Chúng tôi tin vào điều này.”

Một đội dẫn dắt bởi Kim Rachmeler và Joel Spiegel đến trung tâm phân phối mới có diện tích khoảng 74.300 m2 tại Mc Donough, bang Georgia. Trung tâm chưa hoàn thành, nên nhân viên phải đội mũ bảo hộ lao động. Nhóm của họ tập trung vào vấn đề mang tên FUD: Nhu cầu có thể và không thể lấp đầy (fillable, unfilled demand). Đây là trường hợp khi sản phẩm đã được bán trên trang web nhưng chưa được giao hàng, do họ không tìm thấy chúng trong trung tâm phân phối rộng lớn. Thậm chí, vấn đề này còn nghiêm trọng hơn sự cố 100 khách hàng không nhận được hàng trong dịp Giáng Sinh (vốn dĩ đã đủ tồi tệ). Trong suốt kỳ nghỉ lễ, khi những chiếc máy phân loại hoạt động hết công suất, thì bất kỳ đơn hàng nào không được giao thành công, mắc kẹt trên băng chuyền và ảnh hưởng đến đơn đặt hàng của khách hàng khác, thì cũng sẽ khiến cho công ty không thể giao hàng đúng giờ được. Do vậy, vấn đề FUD ngày càng tích tụ lại, và bắt đầu chiếm diện tích đáng kể trong trung tâm phân phối. Đội của Rachmeler bắt tay vào xử lý hết số hàng tồn. Cuối cùng họ phát hiện nguyên nhân khiến trung tâm phân phối rối loạn nằm ở một vật đặc biệt – kiện hàng đồ chơi Pokemon Jigglypuffs mất tích.

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Cơ sở dữ liệu lưu trữ của Amazon khẳng định rằng Jigglypuffs đã được chuyển đến trung tâm, tuy nhiên nếu vậy, chúng hoặc đã bị để nhầm chỗ hoặc bị trộm mất. Mặc dù Rachmeler đã tập hợp nhóm tìm kiếm, nhưng nhiệm vụ dường như bất khả thi. Nhóm phải tìm kiếm một chiếc hộp trong trung tâm có diện tích 74.300 m2. Bà đã tới cửa hàng Walmart gần kề để mua vài chiếc ống nhòm và đưa cho thành viên trong nhóm. Như vậy, họ có thể nhìn những tầng trên của giá đựng hàng kim loại.

Sau ba ngày tìm kiếm cật lực, vào hai giờ sáng, Rachmeler đang ngồi ở văn phòng riêng trong tâm trạng chán nản. Bỗng nhiên, cửa phòng bật mở. Một đồng nghiệp nhảy múa tiến vào và Rachmeler nghi ngờ không biết có phải mình đang mơ. Sau đó, bà để ý thấy một hàng công nhân đang xếp nối đuôi nhau thành hình uốn khúc, đứng đầu là người phụ nữ đó và họ đang cầm trên đầu chiếc hộp mất tích Jigglypuffs.

Khi mùa nghỉ lễ năm 1999 kết thúc, nhân viên và đội ngũ quản lý của Amazon cuối cùng cũng có thể nghỉ ngơi đôi chút. Doanh thu tăng 95% so với năm trước, và công ty đã thu hút ba triệu khách hàng mới, con số đăng ký tài khoản vượt qua 20 triệu. Jeff Bezos nằm trong danh sách cá nhân nổi bật của năm do thời báo Times bình chọn và trở thành một trong những người nhận giải trẻ tuổi nhất và được ví von như “ông vua thương mại điện tử”. Đây là sự công nhận tuyệt vời đối với Amazon và sứ mệnh của công ty.

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Amazon cũng mắc phải những sai lầm và phải xóa sổ 39 triệu đô la tiền đồ chơi không bán được. Tuy nhiên, nhờ có nỗ lực phi thường nên công ty không tạo ra bất kỳ thảm họa hoặc thất vọng nào quá rõ cho khách hàng. Trong khi đó, trang web của đối thủ như Toys “R” Us và Macy chỉ tồn tại sau mùa bán hàng kỳ nghỉ lễ chính đầu tiên và tràn ngập những lời phàn nàn của khách hàng, dẫn đến ấn tượng xấu từ giới truyền thông, và thậm chí bị Ủy ban Thương mại Liên bang điều tra do không thực hiện đầy đủ cam kết đối với người mua hàng.

Vào tháng Một, sau khi toàn thể nhân viên công ty đã hồi sức và nhiều người nhận được những kỳ nghỉ xứng đáng, Amazon đã tổ chức tiệc hóa trang thường niên. Warren Jenson, giám đốc tài chính mới, mua vài chục con búp bê Barbie và khâu chúng vào chiếc áo len. Trò đùa với ý rằng ông đang mặc như tình trạng hàng tồn kho vậy. Harrison Miller nghĩ đó chỉ là câu nói đùa.

Amazon đã trải qua thời kỳ hỗn loạn khó khăn, đã sống sót và chuẩn bị tham gia trận chiến khác. Tuy nhiên, giờ đây công ty phải đương đầu với thách thức khó khăn hơn bất kỳ điều gì trước đó. Thông tin kế toán nội bộ đang lộn xộn; tăng trưởng nhanh dẫn tới hàng cất trong kho bị để nhầm chỗ và mất cắp. Điều này khiến công ty không thể chốt sổ sách vào quý IV. Kế toán viên Jason Child, đang làm việc cho phân nhánh thị trường Đức của Amazon tại thời điểm đó, được yêu cầu trở về Seattle để đảm nhiệm vị trí trưởng ban tài chính và giải quyết vấn đề rắc rối trên. “Đó là quý điên rồ nhất trong lịch sử Amazon,” ông nói. Công ty tìm kiếm sự giúp đỡ từ bên ngoài và thuê tư vấn viên của Ernst và Young. Ông ta đến công ty, nhìn tình trạng hỗn loạn một cách lạc quan trong vài tuần và sau đó bỏ việc. Child và cộng sự vừa kịp đóng sổ sách trước khi quý đó kết thúc vào cuối tháng Một.

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Bây giờ, ban quản trị Amazon phải đối phó với tình trạng khủng hoảng đội ngũ lãnh đạo. Những lời phàn nàn về Galli, người luôn nhắm đến vị trí CEO, và Bezos, người mà nhiều nhân viên cảm thấy ông không dành thời gian để đào tạo, lắng nghe vấn đề hoặc đầu tư vào phát triển con đường sự nghiệp cá nhân cho họ. John Doerr đã bí mật gọi điện cho nhiều thành viên trong ban lãnh đạo cao cấp của công ty và lắng nghe quan điểm cá nhân về tình hình căng thẳng trong đội ngũ lãnh đạo. Để giải quyết vấn đề, ông tìm đến huyền thoại Bill Campbell của Thung lũng Silicon, cựu huấn luyện viên bóng đá tại Đại học Columbia.

Từng đảm trách vị trí quản lý Apple và tổng giám đốc điều hành của Intuit trong những năm 1990, Campbell được biết đến là người biết lắng nghe sâu sắc, có thể chen ngang vào những tình huống khó khăn của các công ty và đưa cho ban lãnh đạo những giải pháp đương đầu với những vấn đề thực tế. Steve Jobs coi ông là người bạn tâm giao và để ông tham gia hội đồng quản trị Apple khi Jobs quay trở lại lãnh đạo công ty vào năm 1997. Tại Amazon, mục tiêu đưa ra của Campbell là phải giúp Galli xử sự tốt với những người khác. Ông đi lại giữa Thung lũng Silicon và Seattle trong vài tuần, ngồi yên lặng trong các cuộc họp ban lãnh đạo và trao đổi riêng với từng giám đốc Amazon về vấn đề trong đội ngũ quản lý.

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Một vài quản lý của Amazon trong thời điểm đó tin rằng Campbell cũng nhận nhiệm vụ khác, bí mật hơn, do hội đồng quản trị chỉ thị: Xem liệu Bezos có nên nhường đường cho Galli lên vị trí tổng giám đốc điều hành không. Điều này hoàn toàn hợp lý với quan điểm phổ biến trong Thung lũng Silicon vào thời điểm đó. Theo đó, các công ty thường mời “chuyên viên giám sát” để xem xét kế hoạch của người sáng lập tầm nhìn công ty. Meg Whitman đảm nhiệm công việc điều hành cấp cao tại eBay; quản lý của Motorola, Tim Koogle, đã thay thế Jerry Yang, người sáng lập Yahoo. Hội đồng quản trị Amazon thấy rằng công ty đang chi tiêu quá mạnh tay và lỗ ngày càng tăng. Trong khi, họ cũng nghe từ những nhà quản lý khác rằng Bezos là người nóng tính và kiểm soát độc đoán. Họ lo lắng rằng con ngỗng đẻ trứng vàng có thể sẽ bẻ đôi quả trứng.

Thành viên trong hội đồng quản trị, bao gồm cả Cook, Doerr và Alberg, phủ nhận từng xem xét nghiêm túc yêu cầu Bezos đứng sang một bên và trong bất kỳ trường hợp nào, điều này là vô ích nếu Bezos phản kháng, bởi ông kiểm soát phần lớn công ty. Tuy nhiên, Campbell tự nhận trong buổi phỏng vấn với Tạp chí Forbes năm 2011 rằng: “Jeff Bezos tại Amazon – Tôi gặp mặt họ sớm để xem liệu họ có cần một CEO và tôi sẵn sàng, ‘Tại sao cần thay thế ông ấy ư?’ Ông ấy không thể kiểm soát và quá tự hào về những việc bản thân ông đã làm.”

Bất chấp tất cả, Campbell kết luận Galli đang tập trung bất thường vào những vấn đề như lương thưởng và chế độ dành riêng cho ban lãnh đạo, như sử dụng máy bay riêng, và ông thấy rằng nhân viên thì trung thành với Bezos. Ông đưa ra gợi ý khôn ngoan cho hội đồng quản trị rằng họ nên gắn kết với người sáng lập.

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Galli nói rằng quyết định rời khỏi Amazon hoàn toàn xuất phát từ bản thân, không chịu bất kỳ sức ép bên ngoài nào. Trước khi gia nhập, ông đã đọc cuốn sách Odyssey: Từ Pepsi đến Apple, của tác giả John Sculley, người tham gia Apple với vị trí CEO vào giữa những năm 1980 và sau đó hất cẳng Steve Jobs trong buổi họp hội đồng quản trị táo bạo. “Trước khi rời khỏi Amazon, tôi hứa với bản thân và gia đình rằng sẽ không bao giờ đối xử với Jeff giống như những gì mà Sculley đã làm với Steve Jobs,” Galli nói. “Tôi chỉ cảm thấy như thể Jeff đang ngày càng đắm chìm trong tầm nhìn và sứ mệnh cá nhân mà ông ấy muốn công ty trở thành. Tôi có thể dự đoán rằng điều đó không thành công. Ông ấy muốn có thêm trợ thủ đắc lực theo sau hỗ trợ. Tôi chỉ không phải là người thứ hai tuyệt vời đó. Nó không nằm trong DNA của tôi.”

Vào tháng 7 năm 2000, Galli rời Amazon để có công việc hàng đầu tại một công ty khởi nghiệp có tên VerticalNet, công ty này đã bị phá sản ngay sau đó trong vụ phá sản dot-com. Trong vòng vài tháng, ông chuyển sang Newell Rubbermaid, một công ty hàng tiêu dùng đang gặp khó khăn, nơi ông quản lý bốn năm hỗn loạn với việc sa thải và giá cổ phiếu sụt giảm. Sau đó, ông trở thành Giám đốc điều hành của nhà sản xuất châu Á Techtronic Industries, công ty sản xuất máy hút bụi Dirt Devil và Hoover. Kể từ đó, ông đã chủ trì hơn sáu năm phát triển.

Sau khi Gallie rời Amazon, hội đồng quản trị cố gắng ghép Bezos với một giám đốc điều hành khác. Peter Neupert, cựu quản lý của Microsoft, người từng điều hành trang Drugstore.com, tham gia những cuộc họp của S Team trong vài tháng. Tuy nhiên, Neupert và Bezos không thể thống nhất quan điểm hợp tác lâu bền. Bezos dần nhận ra bản thân ông thích đồng nghiệp cần đến mình và hướng tới chi tiết và ông muốn trở thành một tổng giám đốc điều hành năng động. “Ông quyết định dành nhiều năm tiếp theo trong cuộc đời để xây dựng công ty, đi ngược lại ý định nghỉ ngơi để dành thời gian theo đuổi đam mê và sở thích cá nhân khác,” Tom Alberg nói.

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Trải nghiệm cùng Galli và tất cả những sai lầm xảy ra trong năm đó đã tạo ra vết hằn sợ hãi lâu dài cho Amazon. Khi tôi đang viết cuốn sách này, công ty không bổ nhiệm bất kỳ nhà quản lý nào vào chức danh chủ tịch hoặc giám đốc điều hành. Amazon không tiến hành bất kỳ cuộc mua bán sáp nhập đáng chú ý trong nhiều năm. Trước khi tham gia bất kỳ thương vụ sáp nhập mua bán nào, Bezos cân nhắc cẩn thận những bài học vung tay quá trán táo bạo trong quá khứ.

Khi thiên niên kỷ mới đến gần, Amazon đang trong tình trạng khó khăn. Công ty có khả năng lỗ hơn một tỉ đô la năm 2000, rơi vào đúng thời điểm sự lạc quan tươi sáng về nền kinh tế dot-com đã chuyển sang bi quan đen tối. Như những gì đã làm trong ngày đầu thành lập công ty, Bezos sẽ phải thuyết phục mọi người rằng Amazon có thể tồn tại, vượt qua vòng xoáy nợ nần thua lỗ mà công ty tự tạo ra cho chính mình trong suốt thời kỳ phát triển bất thường.

—ooOoo—

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MILLIRAVI

Sự xáo trộn trong ban lãnh đạo Amazon trong suốt những năm công ty mở rộng chỉ là khởi đầu cho thử nghiệm về lòng tin. Năm 2000 và 2001, Amazon trở thành con nợ được nhiều người biết đến sau vụ vỡ bong bóng dot-com. Nhiều nhà đầu tư, công chúng nói chung và nhiều nhân viên cảm thấy không còn yêu mến Bezos. Đa số các nhà quan sát không chỉ gạt bỏ triển vọng phát triển mà còn bắt đầu nghi ngờ cơ hội sống sót của công ty. Cổ phiếu Amazon từ khi tiến hành chào bán lần đầu ra công chúng chứng kiến xu hướng tăng giá, chạm mốc 107 đô la, nhưng giờ đây đang hạ dần trong vòng 21 tháng tiếp theo. Một cú rớt choáng váng từ đỉnh cao huy hoàng.

Có một vài lý do dễ thấy khiến thị trường chứng khoán đảo ngược xu hướng. Số lượng dư thừa những công ty dot-com trong thời kỳ bùng nổ tăng trưởng bắt đầu mài mòn dần niềm lạc quan háo hức của các nhà đầu tư. Những công ty không có mô hình kinh doanh thực tiễn đang huy động hàng trăm triệu đô la vốn, đổ xô phát hành cổ phiếu ra công chúng. Và cộng đồng chứng kiến giá cổ phiếu bay lên tầng bình lưu mặc dù không có nền tảng tài chính bền vững. Tháng Ba năm 2000, một bài báo xuất hiện trên tạp chí Barron’s, chỉ trích các công ty web như Amazon đang hủy hoại bản thân khi đốt tiền vào các vụ đầu tư mạo hiểm. Sự bùng nổ mạnh mẽ công ty dot-com phần lớn dựa trên niềm tin về triển vọng phát triển mà thị trường dành cho những công ty non trẻ, không tạo ra lợi nhuận. Câu chuyện xuất hiện trên Barron’s càng làm gia tăng nỗi sợ hãi về một ngày đen tối dần đến. Chỉ số NASDAQ đạt đỉnh vào ngày 10 tháng Ba, rồi dao động quanh ngưỡng đó và bắt đầu giảm dần đều.

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Những thông tin bất lợi về các công ty Internet lan truyền, kết hợp với những sự kiện khác xảy ra trong suốt hai năm tiếp theo, như vụ sụp đổ của Enron và vụ tấn công khủng bố 11/9 trở thành những cú huých ngáng đường. Tuy nhiên, nguyên nhân thật sự nằm ở việc nhiều nhà đầu tư bắt đầu gỡ bỏ chiếc kính màu hồng và có cái nhìn thực tế hơn vào những công ty Internet, trong đó bao gồm cả Amazon.

Trong khi những công ty dot-com khác sáp nhập hoặc phá sản, thì Amazon sống sót được là nhờ kết hợp ba yếu tố: thuyết phục, ứng biến và may mắn. Đầu năm 2000, Amazon có giám đốc tài chính mới, Warren Jenson đến từ Delta và từng làm việc tại chi nhánh NBC của General Electric. Là người theo lập trường quản lý tài chính thận trọng, nên ông quyết định công ty cần có sẵn lượng tiền mặt bảo đảm thanh toán trong trường hợp những nhà cung cấp có thể yêu cầu Amazon chi trả sớm cho hàng hóa đặt mua. Ruth Porat, đồng giám đốc phụ trách phân nhánh công nghệ toàn cầu của Morgan Stanley, khuyên ông tìm đến thị trường châu Âu. Vào tháng Hai, Amazon đã bán ra 672 triệu đô la trái phiếu chuyển đổi cho nhà đầu tư nước ngoài. Lần này, thị trường chứng khoán diễn biến khó đoán và kinh tế toàn cầu đang trong giai đoạn khủng hoảng đỉnh điểm, nên quá trình thực hiện không dễ dàng như những lần huy động vốn trước. Amazon bị ép phải đưa ra điều kiện hào phóng hơn, mức lãi suất 6,9% và điều kiện chuyển đổi linh hoạt – dấu hiệu cho thấy thời thế thay đổi. Vụ chào bán hoàn tất một tháng trước khi xảy ra cuộc khủng hoảng của thị trường chứng khoán. Sau thời điểm này, việc huy động vốn của bất kỳ công ty nào cũng trở nên cực kỳ khó khăn. Nếu không có số vốn huy động trên, Amazon gần như chắc chắn đối mặt với viễn cảnh phá sản trong vài năm sau đó.

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Sự hoài nghi của nhà đầu tư tăng cao, cộng với đề nghị của đội ngũ quản lý cao cấp đang trong tình trạng lo lắng cuối cùng cũng đã thuyết phục được Bezos chuyển hướng điều hành. Thay vì Trở nên lớn mạnh nhanh chóng, công ty thực hiện hướng điều hành mới: Sắp xếp ngôi nhà của chúng ta theo trật tự. Khẩu lệnh hành động bao gồm: kỷ luật, hiệu quả và triệt tiêu lãng phí. Công ty phát triển nhanh chóng từ 1.500 nhân viên năm 1998 đến 7.600 vào đầu năm 2000, và giờ đây, Bezos đồng ý rằng công ty cần hoạt động chậm và chắc hơn. Việc ra mắt phân nhóm sản phẩm mới chậm lại, và Amazon chuyển cơ sở hạ tầng công nghệ sang dựa vào hệ điều hành miễn phí Linux. Công ty bắt đầu điều hành hiệu quả hoạt động của các trung tâm phân phối khắp đất nước. “Công ty đưa ra nhiều cải tiến sáng tạo bởi vì điều kiện bắt buộc phải làm vậy,” Warren Jenson nói.

Tuy nhiên, vụ vỡ bong bóng dot-com gây ảnh hưởng lớn đến nội bộ công ty. Nhân viên chấp nhận làm việc không ngừng và hi sinh kỳ nghỉ cùng gia đình để đổi lại cơ hội giàu có trong tương lai. Giá cổ phiếu sụt giảm chia đôi công ty. Nhân viên gia nhập từ thời kỳ đầu vẫn giàu có (mặc dù họ cũng kiệt sức). Còn nhiều nhân viên gia nhập sau đó giữ quyền chọn mua cổ phiếu mà vào thời điểm đó không có giá trị gì.

Thậm chí, các nhà quản lý cấp cao cũng dần vỡ mộng. Trong năm đó, ba quản lý cấp cao cùng nhau họp bí mật để lập ra danh sách tất cả những thành công và thất bại của Bezos. Trong cột thất bại bao gồm: Dịch vụ Đấu giá, zShops, đầu tư mạo hiểm vào các công ty dot-com khác và danh sách hầu hết các vụ mua bán sáp nhập của Amazon. Danh sách thất bại dài hơn nhiều so với thành công, mà tại thời điểm đó dường như chỉ dừng lại ở sách, âm nhạc và đĩa DVD. Tương lai của những phân nhóm mới như đồ chơi, dụng cụ và đồ điện tử vẫn còn là dấu chấm hỏi.

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Tuy nhiên, Bezos không bao giờ tỏ vẻ lo lắng hoặc lo sợ trước những xao động của công chúng. “Tất cả chúng tôi đều đang suy nghĩ trong tâm trạng nóng như lửa đốt,Chúng ta sẽ làm gì tiếp theo?” Mark Britto, phó chủ tịch cao cấp nói. Nhưng Jeff thì không. “Tôi chưa từng thấy bất kỳ ai có thể bình tĩnh như vậy khi đang đứng giữa mắt bão. Có lẽ nước đóng băng chảy trong mạch máu của ông ấy”. Britto nói thêm.

Trong hai năm hỗn loạn tiếp theo, Bezos thực hiện tái định hướng phát triển Amazon trong giai đoạn điều kiện thị trường thay đổi nhanh chóng. Trong thời gian này, ông đã gặp gỡ hai nhà bán lẻ huyền thoại, những người tập trung nỗ lực thực hiện chiến lược cạnh tranh duy trì giá thấp tại mọi thời điểm trong năm. Ông bắt đầu nghĩ khác về quảng cáo truyền thống và tìm cách giảm chi phí cũng như sự bất tiện của việc chuyển hàng qua đường bưu điện. Những thuộc tính và đặc điểm riêng của Amazon mà chúng ta biết đến ngày nay, theo cách nào đó, là kết quả của những khó khăn mà Bezos và Amazon phải trải qua trong suốt thời kỳ vỡ bong bóng dot-com và là sự đáp trả cho sự thiếu niềm tin vào công ty cũng như ban lãnh đạo.

Trong quá trình thực hiện cải cách, Bezos vắt kiệt sức của nhiều quản lý cấp cao và chứng kiến sự ra đi hàng loạt của họ. Tuy nhiên, Amazon đã thoát khỏi cuộc suy thoái dẫn tới phá sản của hàng trăm công ty dot-com có mô hình sử dụng vốn tương tự. Ông chứng minh rằng nhiều người đã sai.

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“Trước đó, tôi chỉ nhìn thấy Jeff luôn giữ vững vận tốc, mở rộng tăng trưởng bất chấp mọi giá. Tôi chưa từng nhìn thấy ông ấy hướng tới lợi nhuận và hiệu quả,” Scott Cook, người sáng lập Intuit và thành viên hội đồng quản trị trong thời điểm đó, nói. “Đa số quản lý cấp cao, đặc biệt những CEO đời đầu, những người giỏi về một mảng nào đó, chỉ có thể khiêu vũ theo những điệu mà họ biết thôi”.

“Thành thật mà nói, tôi đã không nghĩ rằng ông ấy có thể làm được việc đó.”

Tháng Sáu năm 2000, khi giá cổ phiếu Amazon lao dốc cùng với những cổ phiếu trong nhóm NASDAQ, lần đầu tiên Bezos nghe đến cái tên Ravi Suria. Là người gốc Ấn Độ đến từ bang Madras và con trai của một giáo viên, Suria đến Mỹ học tại Đại học Toledo và nhận bằng MBA từ trường kinh doanh của Đại học Tulane. Đầu năm 2000, ông vẫn chỉ là một nhà phân tích trái phiếu chuyển đổi 28 tuổi, mới bước vào ngành, chưa chút tiếng tăm. Ông làm việc trong văn phòng nhỏ trên tầng 14 của ngân hàng đầu tư Lehman Brothers tại trung tâm thương mại thế giới. Nhưng đến cuối năm, ông trở thành một trong những nhà phân tích được nhắc tới nhiều nhất ở phố Wall và thần báo ứng của Bezos và Amazon.

Trong 5 năm đầu sự nghiệp, tại Paine Webber và sau đó là Lehman, Suria viết về những chủ đề chuyên sâu như dư thừa vốn của những công ty viễn thông và công nghệ sinh học. Sau khi huy động vốn vay nợ lần ba gây nhiều chú ý và để mất Joe Galli, Amazon nhận được sự chú ý của Suria. Dựa trên những thông tin công bố về doanh thu theo quý gần nhất, Suria phân tích tình trạng lỗ nặng trong mùa bán hàng vào kỳ nghỉ lễ trước và đưa ra kết luận rằng công ty đang gặp khó khăn. Bản báo cáo phân tích, trong đó ông dự đoán một sự sụp đổ nhanh chóng được truyền đi rộng rãi.

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“Nhìn vào tình hình nợ vay, chúng ta thấy rằng tình hình tín dụng cực kỳ yếu và đang xấu dần đi,” ông viết trong báo cáo đầu tiên trong chuỗi báo cáo có nội dung gay gắt về Amazon trong vòng tám tháng. Suria nói rằng nhà đầu tư nên tránh các khoản nợ Amazon bằng mọi giá và rằng công ty đang “cực kỳ lạc lõng” trong nhiều lĩnh vực như phân phối. Và tiếp theo là cú đánh choáng váng: “Chúng tôi tin rằng công ty sẽ hết tiền mặt trong bốn quý tới, trừ khi Amazon có thể xoay sở ra chú thỏ huy động vốn từ chiếc mũ thần kỳ.”

Dự đoán của Suria tạo ra loạt tin gây náo loạn trên toàn thế giới. Sẵn có suy nghĩ bi quan do sự suy giảm của thị trường, nhà đầu tư rời bỏ Amazon và giá cổ phiếu giảm thêm 20%.

Báo cáo của Suria đánh trúng tâm lý lo lắng trong nội bộ Amazon. Bill Curry, người đứng đầu phụ trách mảng truyền thông của Amazon vào thời điểm đó, gọi bản báo cáo là “chuyện tào lao”. Bezos còn nhận xét mạnh mẽ hơn khi trao đổi với tờ Washington Post, rằng đó là “chuyện hoàn toàn tào lao không nghĩa lý gì”.

Những phân tích của Suria dựa theo hiểu biết nhỏ hẹp và theo đuổi những lợi ích đằng sau là không chính xác. Được tiếp thêm vốn từ vụ huy động trái phiếu tại châu Âu, Amazon có trong tay gần một tỉ đô la tiền mặt và chứng khoán, đủ để bảo đảm tất cả nghĩa vụ thanh toán với các nhà cung cấp. Hơn thế nữa, mô hình vốn luân chuyển âm của công ty sẽ tiếp tục tạo ra tiền mặt từ việc bán hàng để đáp ứng chi phí vận hành. Do vậy Amazon vẫn hoạt động tốt trong quá trình cắt giảm chi phí.

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Nguy cơ thực sự của Amazon chỉ đến từ báo cáo của Lehman. Báo cáo có thể trở thành “lời tiên tri tự nó hình thành”. Nếu dự báo của Suria khiến nhà cung cấp lo sợ như việc nhà băng tháo chạy, thì họ sẽ yêu cầu Amazon thanh toán ngay lập tức cho sản phẩm, và khi đó chi phí của công ty có thể tăng. Nếu Suria khiến khách hàng sợ hãi, họ sẽ rời bỏ Amazon vì họ tin những thông tin xuất hiện khắp nơi rằng Internet chỉ là mốt nhất thời thì tăng trưởng doanh thu sẽ giảm. Và khi những điều này xảy ra, Amazon có thể gặp rắc rối thực sự. Nói cách khác, hiểm họa cho Amazon nằm trong những quyết định sai lầm của nhà cung cấp và khách hàng. Suria và những tay đầu cơ giá của phố Wall có thể chứng tỏ họ đúng.

Đó là lý do tại sao hành động phản ứng kiểm soát tổn thất của Amazon được chú trọng hơn thường lệ. Vào đầu mùa hè, Jenson và Grandinetti đi xuyên nước Mỹ và châu Âu để gặp gỡ nhà cung cấp lớn và thuyết trình về năng lực tài chính của công ty. Grandinetti nói: “Ngay cả sự thật cũng có tội cho đến khi được chứng minh là vô tội trong một thời gian ngắn.”

Một trong những chuyến đi đó, Grandinetti và Jenson bay tới Nashville để làm yên lòng hội đồng quản trị của Ingram về năng lực tài chính ổn định và vững chắc của Amazon. “Nhìn xem, chúng tôi tin cậu, chàng trai à. Chúng tôi thích những gì cậu đang làm,” John Ingram, tổng giám đốc điều hành công ty, nói với hai nhà quản lý Amazon. “Nhưng nếu các anh đi xuống, chúng tôi cũng xuống theo. Nếu chúng tôi nhận định sai về các anh, đó sẽ không chỉ đơn thuần là ‘mất trắng’. Những khoản phải thu từ Amazon đối với công ty chúng tôi lớn đến mức chúng tôi cũng sẽ gặp rắc rối theo.”

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Khi danh tiếng và thương hiệu Amazon bị bóp méo bởi giới truyền thông, Bezos bắt đầu thấy bị xúc phạm nặng nề. Bỗng nhiên, ông xuất hiện khắp nơi – trên kênh CNBC, những cuộc phỏng vấn với báo giấy, nói chuyện với các nhà đầu tư – khẳng định rằng những gì Suria đưa ra không đúng sự thật và nền tảng phát triển của Amazon hoàn toàn ổn định vững chắc. Đang làm phóng viên chuyên viết mảng Thung lũng Silicon cho tạp chí Newsweek, tôi nói chuyện với cả Bezos và Jenson vào mùa hè năm đó. “Thông điệp phản bác chính được đưa ra là dự đoán dòng tiền của Suria là sai. Nó hoàn toàn sai,” Bezos nói với tôi tại buổi gặp gỡ đầu tiên trong hàng chục buổi trao đổi suốt thập kỷ tiếp theo.

Trong bản ghi của cuộc phỏng vấn đó, Bezos, thậm chí một thập kỷ sau, dường như tràn đầy tự tin và niềm tin, và ông đã là một người tái chế ổn định những Jeffisms ngăn nắp. Ông tái khẳng định cam kết xây dựng một công ty lâu dài, học hỏi từ những sai lầm của mình và phát triển một thương hiệu không gắn liền với sách hay phương tiện truyền thông mà với “khái niệm trừu tượng là bắt đầu với khách hàng và làm việc lùi lại”.

Tuy nhiên, khi nói về dự đoán của Suria, lý luận phản bác của Bezos dường như ở thế phòng thủ. “Đầu tiên, đối với bất kỳ ai dõi theo Amazon.com trong thời gian dài, thì tất cả chúng ta đều từng thấy cảnh này tương tự trước đây,” ông nói, và xen vào giữa câu trả lời là tiếng cười kỳ quặc. “Tôi biết chúng ta đang sống trong thời kỳ khi mà lâu dài có nghĩa là 10 phút [cười] nhưng nếu bạn nhìn theo quan điểm lịch sử, bạn nghĩ giá cổ phiếu của chúng tôi tăng bao nhiêu trong suốt ba năm qua? Cổ phiếu tăng 20 lần! Do vậy, điều này là bình thường. Tôi luôn nói rằng Amazon.com không tìm kiếm tranh cãi, nhưng chúng tôi chắc chắn tranh cãi nếu cần thiết [cười lớn]”.

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Trên thực tế, giai đoạn đó không hề yên bình. Thách thức đến từ Suria và sự sụp đổ của bong bóng dot-com đã thay đổi môi trường tài chính, và Bezos biết điều đó. Vài tuần sau, Jenson và Bezos ngồi lại với nhau để nghiên cứu, phân tích bảng cân đối kế toán của Amazon. Họ cũng đưa ra kết luận rằng, thậm chí nếu công ty cho thấy mức tăng trưởng hợp lý thì chi phí cố định – của trung tâm phân phối và lương nhân viên – là quá lớn. Họ sẽ phải cắt giảm thêm nữa. Bezos thông báo đến nhân viên trong bản thông báo nội bộ rằng Amazon đang “bắt đầu những bước đi lớn” và sẽ tạo ra lợi nhuận trước quý IV năm 2001. Jenson nói rằng công ty “cố gắng xác định mức doanh thu sát thực tế và tất cả thành viên đều nhận phân bổ định mức chi phí.”

Tuy nhiên, những chuyển biến của công ty không thu hút được sự quan tâm, chú ý từ giới truyền thông. Một năm sau, khi Amazon thông báo mục tiêu này ra công chúng, công ty bị chỉ trích vì tính mức lợi nhuận dựa trên chuẩn mực kế toán chiếu lệ – trong đó loại bỏ nhiều chi phí, như chi phí phát hành quyền chọn mua cổ phiếu – thay vì dựa trên phương pháp kế toán chuẩn mực hơn.

Trong tám tháng tiếp theo, Ravi Suria tiếp tục tấn công dồn dập Amazon với những bản báo cáo tiêu cực. Nghiên cứu, phân tích của ông trở thành phép thử quan trọng cho quan điểm nhìn nhận của mọi người về kỷ nguyên Internet đang mới ló rạng. Những ai tin vào triển vọng phát triển đầy hứa hẹn của web và đánh cược cả cuộc đời vào nó dường như hoài nghi những đánh giá tiêu cực của Suria. Tuy nhiên, những ai cảm thấy rằng làn sóng thay đổi đang đến đe dọa công việc kinh doanh, bản năng tự nhiên trỗi dậy, họ dường như đồng cảm với ý kiến của Suria và những nhà phân tích khác có cùng suy nghĩ. Họ tin rằng Amazon.com không khác gì một giấc mơ điên rồ, được xây dựng mong manh dựa trên thị trường chứng khoán đầy rẫy bất hợp lý.

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Có lẽ đó là lý do tại sao một Bezos cực kỳ lý trí bắt đầu ám ảnh về nhà phân tích New York đeo kính có cách cư xử điềm đạm. Đối với Bezos, Suria là người suy nghĩ không logic, gieo rắc vào công chúng ý niệm rằng cuộc cách mạng Internet và tất cả những sáng tạo kèm theo sẽ biến mất. Theo lời những đồng nghiệp của Bezos, trong thời gian đó, ông thường dẫn chứng những phân tích của Suria trong các buổi họp. Một quản lý trong nhóm tài chính sử dụng tên Suria để tạo ra một thuật ngữ chỉ những sai sót toán học nghiêm trọng giá trị một triệu đô la hoặc hơn; Bezos rất thích điều này và bắt đầu sử dụng nó.

Và milliravi ra đời từ đó.

Các công ty công nghệ đều có tham vọng trở nên đáng giá hơn tổng hợp từng bộ phận cấu thành. Amazon tìm cách đưa ra hàng loạt phương thức giúp những công ty khác có thể tiếp cận khách hàng. Theo cách nói trong ngành, công ty muốn trở thành, một cổng giao dịch.

Tại thời điểm đó, Microsoft là hình mẫu trong việc sử dụng chiến lược trên. Những nhà phát triển tạo ra các phần mềm chạy trên hệ điều hành Window phổ biến. Sau đó, hệ điều hành iOS dành cho điện thoại và máy tính bảng của Apple trở thành nền tảng cho những nhà lập trình điện thoại tiếp cận người dùng. Qua nhiều năm, những công ty như Intel, Cisco, IBM và thậm chí cả AT&T xây dựng những cổng giao dịch và sau đó nhận được phần thưởng xứng đáng từ lợi thế tạo ra.

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Do vậy, đầu năm 1997, ban lãnh đạo của Amazon nghĩ đến kế hoạch trở thành một cổng giao dịch và kích thích những nhà bán lẻ khác sử dụng thương mại điện tử. Đấu giá Amazon (Amazon Auctions) là nỗ lực đầu tiên, tiếp theo là zShops, dịch vụ cho phép những nhà bán lẻ nhỏ tạo cửa hàng riêng trên trang Amazon.com. Cả hai cố gắng trên đều thất bại trong cuộc chiến với eBay, chướng ngại vật không thể vượt qua trong lĩnh vực kinh doanh theo kiểu gia đình. Tuy nhiên, trước năm 2000, theo như một bản ghi nhớ nội bộ, Bezos nói với đồng nghiệp rằng trước khi Amazon đạt 200 tỉ đô la doanh thu một năm, ông muốn doanh thu được chia thành hai loại: thứ nhất, doanh thu từ sản phẩm công ty tự bán và thứ hai, doanh thu tiền hoa hồng thu được từ những người bán khác sử dụng trang Amazon.com.

Trớ trêu thay, do quy mô của thị trường bị thổi phồng quá mức trong năm 1999 nên cuối cùng Amazon bị đẩy xuống theo hướng trở thành cổng giao dịch. Toys “R” Us được đầu tư 60 triệu đô la từ SoftBank và công ty đầu tư vốn Mobious Equity Partners để lập công ty Internet con ToysRUs.com. Họ vẫn trượt dài thậm tệ trong suốt mùa nghỉ lễ năm 1999. Nhà bán lẻ trực tiếp hứng chịu dư luận tiêu cực do trang web thường xuyên không thể truy cập được và khách hàng nhận hàng muộn, thậm chí không nhận được trong lễ Giáng Sinh. Công ty phải trả 350.000 đô la tiền phạt cho Ủy ban Thương mại Liên bang vì không thể giữ đúng cam kết với khách hàng. Trong khi đó, Amazon phải xóa sổ 39 triệu đô la hàng đồ chơi trong kho không bán được mà Bezos thề rằng ông sẽ tự mình chở đến bãi rác địa phương.

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Một buổi tối sau kỳ nghỉ, giám đốc tài chính của ToysRUs.com, Jon Foster bất ngờ gọi điện cho Bezos. Foster gợi ý về liên minh hợp tác; trong đó nhà bán lẻ trực tuyến cung cấp cơ sở hạ tầng cần thiết, và trực tiếp đóng góp kinh nghiệm hiểu biết sản phẩm và các mối quan hệ với nhà cung cấp như Hasbro. Bezos gợi ý lãnh đạo của Toys “R” Us gặp Harrison Miller, giám đốc phân nhóm đồ chơi. Các công ty tổ chức cuộc họp trù bị tại Seattle, tuy nhiên lúc đó Amazon không nhận thấy có nhiều lý do để hợp tác với đối thủ cạnh tranh chính.

Mùa xuân năm sau, Miller và nhóm điều hành Amazon nghiên cứu vấn đề dự trữ và vận chuyển đồ chơi, sau đó kết luận rằng để tạo ra lợi nhuận trong phân nhóm này đòi hỏi doanh thu phải đạt ít nhất một tỉ đô la. Thách thức lớn nhất đến từ việc lựa chọn và chuẩn bị chính xác loại đồ chơi – những điều mà Toys “R” Us làm rất tốt.

Một vài tuần sau, Miller và Mark Britto, điều hành nhóm phát triển kinh doanh của Amazon, gặp ban lãnh đạo của ToysRUs.com trong một phòng hội nghị nhỏ tại sân bay quốc tế O’Hare của Chicago và chính thức đàm phán về điều kiện hợp tác bán đồ chơi. Miller nói: “Chúng tôi đã cho chúng tôi thấy rằng việc chọn Barbies và Digimons là tàn bạo như thế nào, và chúng tôi thấy rằng việc xây dựng một cơ sở hạ tầng thương mại điện tử đẳng cấp thế giới sẽ tốn kém như thế nào.”

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Dường như đây là sự kết hợp hoàn hảo. Toys “R” Us là tay lão luyện kinh doanh trong ngành, sẽ chọn sản phẩm đồ chơi phù hợp cho từng mùa, có các mối quan hệ cần thiết với nhà sản xuất để có mức giá tốt nhất và đủ hàng cung cấp của những đồ chơi phổ biến nhất. Tất nhiên, Amazon có kinh nghiệm vận hành kinh doanh bán lẻ trực tuyến và chuyển hàng tới khách hàng đúng hạn. Việc đàm phán, khi Bezos dính vào, thường kéo dài và theo như Jon Foster thì “hết sức khắt khe”. Bezos tập trung xây dựng quy trình chọn lựa sản phẩm toàn diện và muốn Toys “R” Us cam kết đưa tất cả sản phẩm hiện có lên trên trang web. Toys “R” Us lập luận rằng điều này không thực tế và tốn kém. Trong khi đó, công ty muốn trở thành người bán đồ chơi độc quyền trên Amazon.com. Bezos cảm thấy điều này quá chặt chẽ và gò bó.

Hai công ty đàm phán trong nhiều tháng. Cả hai bên đồng ý nhượng bộ lẫn nhau để cùng đi đến thỏa thuận hợp tác. Toys “R” Us đồng ý bán vài trăm đồ chơi phổ biến nhất, và Amazon có quyền bổ sung thêm những đồ chơi ít phổ biến hơn. Không công ty nào đạt được những gì mình muốn, nhưng tại thời điểm đó, ai cũng thở phào nhẹ nhõm. Tháng Tám, hai công ty thông báo việc hợp tác trong 10 năm. Đối với Amazon, công ty sẽ nhận thêm nguồn tiền mặt quan trọng và điều này sẽ hỗ trợ giải quyết vấn đề trong bảng cân đối kế toán. Cả hai bên đồng ý rằng hàng hóa của Toys “R” Us sẽ được giữ trong các trung tâm phân phối của Amazon – bước đầu tiên tiến đến công việc kinh doanh phức tạp và tốn kém nhất của Amazon, cổng giao dịch cho phép các công ty khác có thể kinh doanh.

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Thỏa thuận với Toys “R” Us trở thành hình mẫu hợp tác cho Amazon sau này. Với việc thuê ngoài phân nhóm đồ chơi cho Toys “R” Us, Harrison Miller đảm nhiệm vai trò mới, giám đốc dịch vụ cổng giao dịch. Với Neil Roseman, phó chủ tịch kỹ thuật, ông bắt đầu đi khắp đất nước, bắt tay với những nhà bán lẻ lớn khác để tìm kiếm cơ hội hợp tác như với Toys “R” Us.

Amazon cũng gần như hoàn tất thỏa thuận với gã khổng lồ bán đồ điện tử Best Buy. Tuy nhiên, người sáng lập chuỗi cửa hàng Richard Schulze khăng khăng trong buổi đàm phán qua điện thoại vào sáng thứ Bảy rằng, Amazon phải cho Best Buy độc quyền hoàn toàn trong mảng sản phẩm điện tử. Bezos không đồng ý. Bed, Bath, Beyond và Barnes & Noble cũng không đồng ý hợp tác cùng Amazon.

Sony Electronics nhận ra khả năng sử dụng Amazon để đưa chuỗi Sony Style sang kinh doanh trực tuyến. Là một phần trong hoạt động đàm phán, Howard Stringer, đại diện của tập đoàn Sony tại Mỹ tham quan toàn bộ trung tâm phân phối hàng của Amazon tại Fernley. Và trong khoảnh khắc đáng nhớ, ông đã nhìn thấy trên sàn kho một đống sản phẩm Sony. Đây là những sản phẩm không được bán do vấn đề kỹ thuật. Stringer và đồng nghiệp bắt đầu kiểm tra nhãn mác và ghi lại số mã sản phẩm để xác định những hàng hóa này đến từ đâu. Thỏa thuận hợp tác giữa hai bên đã không xảy ra.

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Tuy nhiên, đầu năm 2001, nỗ lực mở rộng hợp tác dần được chú ý. Amazon ký thỏa thuận với chuỗi cửa hàng sách Borders. Công ty đang mắc sai lầm khi xây dựng trung tâm phân phối dành cho các đơn đặt hàng trực tuyến lớn hơn mức cần thiết ở ngoại ô Nashville, trước khi kịp nhận ra cần những nhà kho nhỏ hơn và phân bố trên vùng địa lý rộng để giao hàng nhanh chóng và bớt tốn kém. Vài tháng sau, Amazon đồng ý chạy kênh mua sắm AOL để đổi lấy khoản đầu tư cần thiết trị giá 100 triệu đô la. Amazon cũng ký thỏa thuận nhận hàng trong kho của nhà bán lẻ Circuit City. Thỏa thuận này giúp công ty bổ sung thêm sản phẩm cho khách hàng lựa chọn trong phân nhóm đồ điện tử vốn nghèo nàn, ít ỏi của Amazon.

Tất cả những thỏa thuận trên giúp cải thiện bảng cân đối kế toán của Amazon trong ngắn hạn, tuy nhiên trong dài hạn, chúng ẩn chứa nguy hiểm cho tất cả các bên. Với việc dựa vào Amazon, những nhà bán lẻ đã gây trở ngại cho việc có kinh nghiệm cần thiết trong lĩnh vực mới và nhượng lại những khách hàng trung thành cho công ty mới nổi, xông xáo. Đó là một trong nhiều vấn đề với cả Borders và Circuit City. Cả hai phá sản khi cuộc khủng hoảng tài chính bắt đầu vào năm 2008.

Bezos chưa bao giờ hoàn toàn hài lòng với những thỏa thuận trên, hay với ý tưởng thuê ngoài để đạt mơ ước về lựa chọn không giới hạn của ông. Thỏa thuận với Toys “R” Us vô cùng có lợi, nhưng Bezos nản lòng khi thực tế cho thấy cực kỳ khó khăn để bảo đảm việc Amazon có thể đưa ra lựa chọn không giới hạn cho đồ chơi. Điều này cuối cùng tác động chính lên kết quả mối quan hệ hợp tác vài năm sau đó – kiện tụng giữa hai bên tại tòa án liên bang.

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Vào mùa hè năm 2000, khi Ravi Suria tiếp tục công bố báo cáo, giá cổ phiếu Amazon càng trượt dốc. Trong ba tuần tháng Sáu, giá đã giảm từ 57 đô la xuống 33 đô la, giảm gần nửa giá trị. Nhân viên công ty bắt đầu lo lắng. Bezos viết nguệch ngoạch dòng chữ Tôi không phải là giá cổ phiếu của tôi trên bảng trắng trong văn phòng và hướng dẫn mọi người lờ đi cảm giác bi quan đang đeo bám. “Bạn không cảm thấy thông minh thêm 30% khi giá cổ phiếu tăng thêm 30%, do vậy khi cổ phiếu xuống bạn không nên cảm thấy ngu đi 30%,” ông phát biểu trong một cuộc họp giữa các bên. Ông dẫn chứng lời của Benjamin Graham, nhà đầu tư người Anh đem lại cảm hứng cho Warren Buffett: “Trong ngắn hạn, thị trường chứng khoán là cỗ máy bỏ phiếu. Trong dài hạn, nó là một chiếc cân” đo lường giá trị thực của một công ty. Nếu Amazon duy trì tập trung vào khách hàng, Bezos tuyên bố, công ty sẽ ổn.

Như để chứng minh sự tập trung cao độ hướng tới trải nghiệm khách hàng, Bezos đã đặt cược lớn khi tạm thời ngưng tác phẩm chiếc chổi Quidditch của Amazon để tập trung cho seri truyện giả tưởng đang nổi Harry Potter. Vào tháng Bảy, tác giả J. K. Rowling xuất bản quyển thứ tư trong seri mang tựa đề Harry Potter và Chiếc cốc lửa. Amazon đưa ra mức giảm giá 40% và chính sách giao hàng hỏa tốc. Khách hàng sẽ nhận sách vào thứ Bảy, ngày 8 tháng Bảy – ngày cuốn sách được chính thức phát hành – với chi phí vận chuyển như bình thường. Amazon mất vài đô la trên mỗi đơn hàng, trong khoảng 255.000 đơn đặt hàng. Lúc đầu, việc không sinh lời tạo ra phản ứng khó chịu cho phố Wall. Tuy nhiên, Bezos chỉ nhìn nhận quyết định trên giống như cách thức xây dựng lòng trung thành của khách hàng. “Đó là lựa chọn được cái này mất cái kia, nếu bạn làm điều gì tốt cho khách hàng, chắc hẳn nó sẽ là điều tồi tệ với cổ đông,” ông nói trong buổi phỏng vấn với tôi vào mùa hè.

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Khuyến mại cuốn sách Harry Potter gây tâm lý xáo trộn trong cả đội ngũ quản lý phụ trách. “Tôi nghĩ, quái quỷ, đây là một số tiền lớn,” Lyn Blake, nhà quản lý phụ trách mảng sách của Amazon vào thời điểm đó, nói. Sau này, bà thú nhận rằng Bezos đã đúng. “Chúng tôi có thể đánh giá toàn bộ ảnh hưởng tích cực xuất hiện trên các phương tiện truyền thông và nghe được tất cả câu chuyện này đều từ những người đã gặp nhân viên đưa hàng trước cửa nhà. Và chúng tôi nhận được lời chứng thực từ lái xe rằng đó là ngày tuyệt vời nhất trong cuộc đời họ.” Amazon được nhắc đến trong khoảng 700 câu chuyện về cuốn tiểu thuyết mới Harry Potter chỉ trong tháng Sáu và tháng Bảy năm đó.

Bezos luôn hướng tới trải nghiệm của khách hàng và để ý đến bất kỳ ai không có chung chí hướng hoặc những ai mà ông cảm thấy không có khả năng chịu được tính khí của ông. Một người trở thành mục tiêu thường xuyên của ông trong thời kỳ này là phó chủ tịch phụ trách dịch vụ khách hàng, Bill Price.

Từng là nhân viên của nhà cung cấp dịch vụ điện thoại đường dài MCI, Price gia nhập Amazon năm 1999. Ông sớm mắc sai lầm khi gợi ý trong một cuộc họp rằng, những nhà quản lý của Amazon di chuyển thường xuyên nên được phép sử dụng vé hạng thương gia. Bezos thường nói muốn đồng nghiệp nói lên suy nghĩ của họ, tuy nhiên đôi khi ông không đánh giá khi bản thân bị thách thức. “Bạn có thể nghĩ rằng tôi đang cố gắng bắt trái đất ngừng quay quanh trục,” Price nói trong khi nhớ lại khoảnh khắc sợ hãi trong nhiều năm sau đó. “Jeff đập mạnh tay xuống bàn và nói, ‘Đó không phải là cách một người chủ suy nghĩ! Đó là ý tưởng ngớ ngẩn nhất mà tôi từng nghe.’”

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“Tất nhiên những người khác trong phòng đều đang nghĩ [quản lý nên được đặc ân sử dụng vé thương gia], tuy nhiên tôi là người nói ra vấn đề gai góc đó,” Price nói.

Kỳ nghỉ lễ năm 2000 trở thành cuộc chiến thảm hại của Price. Bộ phận dịch vụ khách hàng theo dõi hai thông số quan trọng: thời gian nói chuyện trung bình (thời gian nhân viên mất trên mỗi cuộc gọi của khách hàng) và số lần liên hệ trên mỗi đơn hàng (số lần cuộc gọi hoặc thư điện tử của khách hàng trên một giao dịch mua hàng). Bezos yêu cầu Price giảm cả hai chỉ số trên, tuy nhiên điều này cơ bản là không thực tế. Nếu một nhân viên chăm sóc khách hàng trên điện thoại dành thời gian đủ dài để giải đáp vấn đề khách hàng thắc mắc trọn vẹn, thì số lần liên hệ trên mỗi giao dịch mua bán sẽ giảm, nhưng thời gian nói chuyện trung bình sẽ tăng. Nếu nhân viên chăm sóc khách hàng cố gắng dừng cuộc gọi nhanh chóng, thời gian nói chuyện trung bình sẽ giảm nhưng khách hàng dường như sẽ gọi lại.

Bezos không quan tâm về phép tính đơn giản đó. Ông ghét việc khách hàng lúc nào cũng gọi đến, và thấy hệ thống không trả lời ngay. Bezos tin rằng khách hàng có thể giải quyết thắc mắc với sự trợ giúp của công cụ trả lời tự động. Khi họ gọi đến, Bezos muốn những thắc mắc được trả lời nhanh chóng và vấn đề giải quyết triệt để. Sẽ không có bất kỳ lý do biện hộ nào. Giải pháp duy nhất của Price là phải thúc đẩy nhóm nhân viên của mình mạnh hơn nữa. Tuy nhiên, do không được tuyển thêm nhân viên mới nên cấp dưới của ông kiệt sức.

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Đoạn kết cuộc chiến xuất hiện trong cuộc họp của nhóm S Team diễn ra hàng ngày trong suốt kỳ nghỉ lễ, nhằm rà soát lại vấn đề quan trọng của công ty và khách hàng. Khoảng 30 quản lý cấp cao của công ty tham gia họp trên tầng thượng tòa nhà Pac Med, có tầm nhìn rộng ra vịnh Puget Sound. Doanh thu trong mùa Giáng Sinh tăng cao và thời gian nói chuyện trên đường dây hỗ trợ khách hàng của Amazon lâu hơn. Bezos bắt đầu cuộc họp bằng việc hỏi Price về việc thời gian khách hàng chờ đợi. Price phạm phải quy tắc chủ yếu tại Amazon: Ông quả quyết với Bezos rằng họ đang làm tốt, thời gian đều dưới một phút nhưng không cung cấp được bằng chứng.

“Thật không?” Bezos hỏi. “Hãy thử xem.” Ông gọi tới số 800, số điện thoại chăm sóc khách hàng của Amazon bằng chiếc điện thoại đặt giữa bàn họp. Nhạc chờ vang lên trong phòng. Bezos tháo đồng hồ ra và theo dõi thời gian. Phút đầu trôi qua, rồi sang phút thứ hai. Những quản lý cao cấp khác bồn chồn không thoải mái, trong khi Price lén lút mở điện thoại và gọi cho nhân viên. Khuôn mặt của Bezos dần trở thành màu đỏ; hằn mạch máu trên trán, cảnh báo một cơn bão sắp xuất hiện trong phòng. Khoảng bốn phút rưỡi trôi qua, tuy nhiên theo một số người tham dự, sự chờ đợi dường như vô tận.

Cuối cùng, một giọng nói hào hứng cất lên, “Xin chào, Amazon.com xin nghe!” Bezos nói: “Tôi chỉ gọi để kiểm tra,” và đặt mạnh chiếc điện thoại xuống. Sau đó, Bezos hướng về phía Price, buộc tội ông không có năng lực và dối trá.

Khoảng 10 tháng sau đó, Price bị sa thải.

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Trong khi đội ngũ quản lý Amazon đang tiếp cận những chuỗi bán lẻ lớn, thì một đối thủ khác cũng đang tiếp cận họ. Tổng giám đốc điều hành của eBay, Meg Whitman và một trong những trợ thủ đắc lực của bà, Jeff Jordan, đến thăm Amazon vào mùa thu năm đó mang theo một đề nghị hấp dẫn: Họ muốn nhận quản lý một trong những thất bại của Amazon: dịch vụ kinh doanh Đấu giá.

Whitman đưa ra điều kiện hợp tác cho thương vụ đầy thuyết phục. Bà nhấn mạnh vào việc eBay tập trung vào cộng đồng người bán nhỏ lẻ và thuyết phục rằng lĩnh vực kinh doanh bán lẻ chính của Amazon đang mâu thuẫn tranh chấp với chính nỗ lực cung cấp dịch vụ cầu nối trung gian cho bên bán hàng thứ ba. Cả Amazon và những nhà bán hàng này đều cạnh tranh để bán cùng một hạng mục sản phẩm. Tuy nhiên, eBay không gặp phải xung đột lợi ích như vậy, bởi vì công ty không tự mình bán bất kỳ mặt hàng nào. Whitman tiếp tục rằng thỏa thuận có thể giải quyết vấn đề cho Amazon, đồng thời cũng gia tăng sức mạnh của eBay trong lĩnh vực kinh doanh công ty tập trung chính, đấu giá. Đó là kịch bản hợp tác đôi bên cùng có lợi.

Tuy nhiên, Bezos từ chối đề nghị với cùng lý do: Ông giữ cộng đồng người mua bán ít ỏi của Đấu giá và zShops tồn tại trên trang web Amazon. Ông không sẵn sàng từ bỏ hoặc buông tay hi vọng trở thành cổng giao dịch cho nhà bán lẻ cỡ nhỏ và trung bình của Amazon. Trên thực tế, việc bán hàng của bên thứ ba trên Amazon không hoạt động hiệu quả đối với Bezos, chỉ do dịch vụ không hiệu quả ở thời điểm đặc thù nào đó thôi, không phải vĩnh viễn.

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Vấn đề chính nằm ở chỗ khác. Đấu giá và zShops đang cản trở hoạt động của trang web Amazon và nhận được sự quan tâm ít ỏi từ khách hàng. Bezos nhắc đến chúng như những con đường cụt trên trang Amazon.com. Công ty cũng nhận được lợi ích từ lượng truy cập thông qua tính năng Đường dẫn chéo. Đường dẫn tới thông tin đấu giá của bên thứ ba xuất hiện trên những trang bán lẻ liên quan. Ví dụ, một người bán săn tìm khách hàng cho sản phẩm cần câu truyền thống, có thể chọn đăng đấu giá của mình thông qua Đường dẫn chéo trên trang về sách hoặc phim ảnh, về cách câu cá dùng ruồi nhân tạo.

Amazon có kinh nghiệm thực tiễn sử dụng các thuật toán để phân tích những cụm từ cụ thể trên trang sản phẩm và đấu giá, rồi tự động ghép sản phẩm tương tự. Công nghệ này cũng tạo ra những lỗi đáng nhớ. Chẳng hạn, trang hiển thị sản phẩm tìm kiếm cho cuốn tiểu thuyết Kỳ ảo đao (The Subtle Knife), cuốn thứ hai tiếp sau cuốn Kim la bàn (The Golden Compass) dành cho tuổi vị thành niên, có đường dẫn tới hàng loạt người bán sản phẩm tự vệ cá nhân trong phân mục đấu giá đang tìm khách hàng mua dao bấm và bộ vũ khí chiến đấu. “Cũng có những kết quả tìm kiếm không hài lòng cho lắm,” Joel Spiegel nói. “Một người luôn đặt sứ mệnh cuộc đời phải bán sách cho trẻ em sẽ nổi giận lôi đình và hét lớn trong văn phòng của tôi. Tại sao những vật lưu niệm về phát xít lại xuất hiện trên trang web của tôi?”

Một buổi cuối tuần mùa thu năm 2000, Bezos tập trung những thành viên trong nhóm S Team và những quản lý tham gia cuộc họp kéo dài bên trong tầng trệt của biệt thự cao cấp quay mặt về phía hồ ở Medina của ông. Cuộc họp xác định lý do tại sao việc kinh doanh cho bên thứ ba đang thất bại. Mặc dù có vấn đề, nhưng nhóm thừa nhận rằng Đường dẫn chéo trên trang sản phẩm đang là nguồn dẫn chính tới những người bán thứ ba của Amazon.

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Đó là một kết quả phân tích quan trọng. Lưu lượng truy cập Amazon được định hướng từ nội dung trang giới thiệu sản phẩm đáng tin cậy của Amazon. Trên eBay, một khách hàng tìm kiếm tiểu thuyết Mặt trời vẫn mọc (The Sun Also Rises) của Hemingway sẽ nhận được vô số đấu giá của những bản in gốc và mới. Nếu khách hàng tìm kiếm cuốn sách trên Amazon, kết quả hiện thị chỉ một trang duy nhất, với phần mô tả về cuốn tiểu thuyết và đó là điều mà đa số khách hàng quan tâm.

Vào thời điểm đó, ban lãnh đạo lập luận rằng Amazon đang sở hữu danh mục sản phẩm phong phú, đa dạng và họ nên khai thác thế mạnh này. Và đây chính là tài sản cốt lõi, không chỉ biến Amazon trở thành cổng giao dịch cho những người bán hàng trực tuyến nhỏ, mà còn tạo ra sức mạnh thành công huy hoàng của công ty ngày nay. Nếu Amazon muốn những người bán hàng khác kinh doanh trên trang web, công ty sẽ phải hiển thị những mặt hàng của người bán thứ ba cùng với sản phẩm của Amazon trên những trang khách hàng truy cập. “Đó là buổi họp tuyệt vời,” Jeff Blackburn nói. “Trước khi ngày hôm đó kết thúc, chúng tôi đều chắc 100% rằng đó là tương lai.”

Đến mùa thu, Amazon thông báo dự án mới Marketplace. Dự án bắt đầu với mặt hàng sách đã qua sử dụng. Những bên bán sách khác được mời quảng cáo sản phẩm trực tiếp trên trang sách của Amazon. Khách hàng sẽ lựa chọn liệu mua sản phẩm từ Amazon hoặc từ bên thứ ba. Nếu họ chọn bên thứ ba, hoặc do người bán đưa ra mức giá thấp hơn, hoặc do Amazon đang hết sản phẩm này, công ty sẽ mất doanh số nhưng nhận được một ít phí hoa hồng. “Jeff cực kỳ rõ ràng,” Neil Roseman nói. “Nếu một ai khác có thể bán sản phẩm rẻ hơn, chúng tôi nên để họ làm vậy và xác định xem làm cách nào họ có thể làm điều đó.”

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Marketplace chính thức hoạt động vào tháng Mười một năm 2000, bắt đầu với phân nhóm sách và ngay lập tức tạo ra làn sóng phản đối. Hai tổ chức thương mại là Hiệp hội nhà xuất bản Mỹ và Hội tác giả, mỗi bên đăng một bức thư lên trang web chính thức của hội. Cả hai bức thư đều chỉ trích Amazon đang tạo ra ảnh hưởng tiêu cực tới doanh thu kinh doanh sách mới khi ủng hộ sách cũ và đang lấy mất tiền bản quyền khỏi túi của tác giả. Trong thư có đoạn: “Nếu khuyến mại lớn đối với sách đã qua sử dụng trở nên phổ biến dành cho khách hàng Amazon, thì dịch vụ này sẽ giảm doanh thu sách mới, trực tiếp ảnh hưởng tới tác giả và nhà xuất bản.”

Sự phản đối này chẳng thấm vào đâu so với sự kinh ngạc về Marketplace trong nội bộ Amazon. Các giám đốc phân nhóm nhận ra giờ đây họ có thể để mất doanh thu về tay đối thủ trên chính trang web Amazon. Thậm chí, vấn đề còn tồi tệ hơn khi khách hàng có thể có trải nghiệm tồi tệ với người bán hàng thứ ba và cuối cùng đưa ra những nhận xét tiêu cực. Và những nhân viên mua hàng giờ đây phải đấu tranh với các nhà xuất bản và nhà sản xuất giận dữ, những người muốn biết tại sao sản phẩm đã qua sử dụng mà những người kinh doanh nhỏ lẻ, thường không ủy quyền lại có thể cạnh tranh trực tiếp với sản phẩm mới. Cuộc tranh cãi dần biến mất trong vài năm tới khi Amazon thêm cả sản phẩm mới và cũ của người bán là bên thứ ba vào từng phân nhóm sản phẩm. Marketplace khiến những giám đốc phụ trách phân nhóm sản phẩm của Amazon gặp khó khăn trong việc hoàn thành mục tiêu doanh số cao ngất do Bezos đề ra.

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Chris Payne nói: “Hãy tưởng tượng bạn là người đang kiếm được hàng tồn kho trị giá hàng triệu đô la”, nhớ lại phản ứng ban đầu của mình với Marketplace. “Và kẻ mất trí khác này đến việc đưa những thứ tào lao giá rẻ lên trang của bạn. Bạn có thể đặt cược rằng điều đó dẫn đến một số cuộc cãi vã.”

Chiến lược kinh doanh dịch vụ mới tạo sự căng thẳng giữa những phòng ban khác nhau trong nội bộ công ty, giữa Amazon và nhà cung cấp, giữa hiệp hội thương mại ngành và công ty trong nhiều năm. Bezos không quan tâm đến những điều này, miễn là dịch vụ cung cấp thêm lựa chọn cho khách hàng và đồng thời đem đến cho Amazon nhiều lựa chọn sản phẩm hơn. Với một chiến lược không mang tính trực giác và khôn ngoan, ông đã khiến đa số mọi người khó chịu, thậm chí với chính đồng nghiệp. “Như thường lệ,” Mark Britto nói, “Jeff đang chống lại cả thế giới.”

Một buổi sáng thứ Bảy đầu tháng Mười hai năm 2000, Britto và Doug Boake, giám đốc phát triển kinh doanh, những người gia nhập Amazon trong vụ sáp nhập Accept.com, đang ngập trong đống hộp quà tặng tại Fernley thì Britto nhận cuộc gọi từ Bezos. Ông yêu cầu tối hôm đó họ gặp nhau ở Bentonville, Arkansas. Họ sẽ cùng nhau tới thăm Walmart.

Mặc dù, có vẻ không hợp lý khi mà hiện tại họ đang là đối thủ cạnh tranh trực tiếp chính, Amazon đang tấn công Walmart trên mặt trận kinh doanh trực tuyến. Walmart là gã khổng lồ trong lĩnh vực bán lẻ, mỗi năm mở hàng trăm cửa hàng mới trên toàn thế giới và ít bị ảnh hưởng vì sự đi xuống của thị trường chứng khoán. Lee Scott, giám đốc điều hành đời thứ ba trong toàn bộ lịch sử Walmart, đã mời Bezos với tư cách cá nhân tới nhà riêng. Britto và Boake vui vẻ đặt hộp quà xuống và tiến thẳng tới sân bay Reno.

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Buổi tối hôm đó, đội ngũ lãnh đạo Amazon gặp nhau tại Bentonville, nơi họ được thưởng thức sự thanh đạm của thương hiệu Walmart. Walmart đặt phòng cho họ tại một Days Inn địa phương. Đêm đó, Bezos, Britto và Boake ăn tối tại một cửa hàng Chili’s gần đó và đi dạo quanh quảng trường lịch sử của thị trấn.

Sáng hôm sau, ba chiếc Chevy Suburban màu đen đã đến đón những nhà quản lý Amazon. Họ được đưa vào chiếc xe ở giữa và thực sự ngạc nhiên về sự bảo vệ nghiêm ngặt. Các giám đốc điều hành của Amazon đã được dẫn vào toa giữa và ngạc nhiên trước sự phong phú của bảo mật. Dù không biết nhưng Bezos đang nhìn thấy tương lai của chính mình.

Những chiếc xe tiến đến ngôi nhà lớn gần một sân gôn, và ba nhà quản lý Amazon xuống xe, bước lên và gõ cửa trước. Linda Scott, vợ của tổng giám đốc điều hành, mở cửa và ngay lập tức khiến họ cảm thấy thoải mái. Bà nói với Bezos bà là người rất hâm mộ ông và đã xem ông xuất hiện trên chương trình Squawk Box của đài CNBC vài tuần trước đó.

Ba nhà quản lý Amazon gặp Lee Scott và giám đốc tài chính, Tom Schoewe trong phòng ăn có những cửa sổ lớn. Trong hai tiếng, họ vừa nói chuyện thẳng thắn với nhau, vừa nhâm nhi bánh ngọt và cà phê. Họ nói về văn hóa chia sẻ trong công ty và những nguyên tắc Bezos có được từ cuốn tự truyện của Sam Walton. Bezos nói chung chung về những nỗ lực của Amazon trong việc cá nhân hóa trải nghiệm người dùng và công nghệ đằng sau mang tên “lọc cộng tác” – thuật toán xác định thiên hướng mua sắm tiếp theo của những ai mua một loại sản phẩm đặc thù.

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Scott nói rằng Walmart cũng có kỹ thuật tương tự. Công cụ có thể xác định liệu một mặt hàng cụ thể, như quả địa cầu cho trẻ em, có thể đẩy doanh số của một sản phẩm khác, như một cuốn sách tô màu, nếu chúng được đặt cạnh nhau khi trưng bày trong cùng cửa hàng. Hai công ty đều quan tâm sâu sắc tới việc thử nghiệm kết hợp những kỹ thuật này.

Scott cũng nói về cách Walmart coi quảng cáo và định giá là hai đầu trên cùng một phạm vi. “Chúng tôi chỉ dành bốn mươi điểm cơ bản cho tiếp thị. Hãy nhìn vào tuyên bố cổ đông của chúng tôi,” ông nói. “Hầu hết trong số đó được đưa lên báo để thông báo cho mọi người về những gì có trong các cửa hàng của chúng tôi. Phần còn lại của số tiền tiếp thị chúng tôi đổ vào việc giảm giá. Chiến lược tiếp thị của chúng tôi là chiến lược định giá, đó là định giá thấp từng ngày. ”

Trước cuộc họp, Rick Dalzell đã cảnh báo Bezos nên cảnh giác với người đứng đầu Walmart xảo quyệt và sắc sảo. Nhưng Bezos đã làm hỏng mọi thứ mà người đàn ông lớn tuổi nói. Amazon luôn coi mình là một công ty thương mại điện tử, không phải là một nhà bán lẻ. Bây giờ Bezos cần phải học một số quy tắc cơ bản trong một môn thể thao chuyên nghiệp mà cho đến thời điểm đó, anh ấy chỉ chơi nghiệp dư.

Sang giờ tiếp theo, những nhà quản lý bắt đầu nói về việc hợp tác kinh doanh. Scott muốn biết Amazon có dự định gì. Những nhà quản lý Amazon giải thích về thỏa thuận hợp tác cùng Toys “R” Us, nỗ lực vận hành trang web và giải quyết việc phân phối cho các nhà bán lẻ khác. Scott nói lấp lửng rằng vấn đề đó chưa cần nói đến. Kết thúc buổi họp, ông nghiêng người về phía trước và nói: “Vậy, có điều gì hấp dẫn và mang tính chiến lược hơn mà chúng ta nên xem xét không?”

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Bezos đáp lại ông sẽ nghĩ cách khiến cho đề nghị hợp tác với Walmart hấp dẫn hơn và họ ra về. Trên đường ra sân bay, Britto và Boake đồng ý rằng Lee Scott có thể đang gợi ý đề nghị thâu tóm. “Thật không, đó là những gì ông ấy ám chỉ sao?” Bezos hỏi.

Tất nhiên, Bezos không hứng thú với việc bán công ty cho Walmart, và cuối cùng Scott từ chối ý tưởng thuê ngoài một phần quan trọng trong mảng kinh doanh trực tuyến của Walmart dành cho Amazon. Cuộc trò chuyện giữa hai nhà bán lẻ không bao giờ tiến triển thêm và cuộc họp vẫn chỉ là một góc lượn của lịch sử, một đề nghị thử cho điều có thể xảy ra. Hai công ty tiếp tục bước trên con đường riêng, mà nhiều năm sau này sẽ gặp nhau và tạo ra cuộc cạnh tranh khốc liệt.

Tháng Hai năm 2001, Ravi Suria tiếp tục ngẩng cao đầu một lần nữa. Ông công bố bản cáo khác, trong đó đưa ra thắc mắc về vốn dự trữ của Amazon. Khi mà Amazon đang phải đối mặt với chi phí lãi suất trên những khoản nợ hàng năm ở mức 130 triệu đô la và khả năng tiếp tục thua lỗ, Suria dự đoán rằng công ty sẽ phải đối mặt với sự thiếu hụt lượng tiền mặt trước cuối năm đó.

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Và đến lúc này, Amazon biến vấn đề với Suria thành chuyện cá nhân. Phát ngôn viên Bill Curry đáp trả gay gắt trong một cuộc phỏng vấn và gọi bản báo cáo của Suria là “ngớ ngẩn”. Warren Jenson tự chi trả cho chuyến thăm cá nhân vị phó chủ tịch Lehman, là Howard Clark, và John Doerr đã gọi cho Dick Fuld, vị tổng giám đốc điều hành ngân hàng đầu tư và khẩn thiết đề nghị ông xem xét nghiêm túc phân tích của Suria.

Nhiều năm sau, trong một quán bar, Suria vừa dùng cocktail vừa than phiền rằng Amazon dùng ảnh hưởng của mình để gây sức ép mạnh mẽ lên ông trong suốt thời gian đó. “Họ muốn bắn tôi. Mọi người tại Lehman ghét dũng khí và khí phách của tôi trong những năm tháng đó,” ông nói. “Mỗi lần tôi nhấc điện thoại, có ai đó lại đang hét lên.”

Hiện nay, Suria đang quản lý quỹ đầu tư dự phòng và nhìn nhận khá gay gắt về quãng thời gian với nhà bán lẻ trực tuyến. “Amazon giống như đứa học sinh phổ thông bắt nạt đứa trẻ học tiểu học. Lúc đó, tôi mới 29 tuổi. Đó là thời điểm định hình danh tiếng [với họ], và đến khi tôi lo lắng, thì họ thất bại thảm hại. Nó đã phá hủy cuộc đời tôi trong hai năm.” Suria tin rằng Bezos là người bị “loạn trí” và tự hào nhấn mạnh rằng ông không mua bất kỳ thứ gì trên Amazon từ khi gây chiến với công ty.

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Tuy nhiên, có thể chắc chắn rằng các nhà đầu tư là nhân tố chính trong phân tích của Suria. Bản báo cáo tháng Hai, phân tích cuối cùng của ông tại Lehman Brothers trước khi chuyển đến quỹ đầu tư phòng rủi ro mang tên Quản lý vốn Duquesne, đẩy cổ phiếu Amazon tiến tới mức giá một con số. Đồng thời, nó cũng gây ra những hậu quả khác. Trong những văn bản do luật sư của Bezos nộp lên cơ quản quản lý, ông tiết lộ ý định bán một phần nhỏ cổ phiếu, khoảng 12 triệu đô la. Do thời điểm Lehman cho phép Amazon xem bản sao báo cáo của Suria là trước khi nó được công bố và trước thời điểm Bezos thông báo bán cổ phiếu cho Ủy ban chứng khoán và giao dịch, như vậy ông chủ định bán phá giá cổ phiếu Amazon trước khi thông tin xấu lan truyền.

Nhìn lại những gì đã qua, có thể thấy rằng đó là hành động rời khỏi niềm tin duy nhất của Bezos; ông vẫn hoàn toàn tin vào thành công cuối cùng của quyết định đầu tư mạo hiểm. Tuy nhiên, Ủy ban chứng khoán và giao dịch Mỹ – đang bị chỉ trích vì kích thích bong bóng dot-com – thông báo điều tra về khả năng giao dịch nội gián. Cuộc điều tra không đi đến đâu cả, tuy nhiên tờ New York Times đưa tin tràn lan trên mục tin tức kinh doanh. “Tôi không quan tâm bạn là ai hoặc độ trơ tráo của bạn ở mức nào,” Warren Jenson nói. “Không vui vẻ gì khi cầm tờ Times và nhìn thấy hình bạn xuất hiện ở vị trí trang trọng trên trang đầu, với những cáo buộc giao dịch nội gián. Chúng ta là thành quả tổng hợp của những gì chúng ta trải qua. Đây là một trong những sự việc khiến Jeff trở lại là chính mình. Vết sẹo đó không dễ dàng hàn gắn được.”

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Giờ đây, Amazon một lần nữa phải trải qua tác động thực tế của giá cổ phiếu sụt giảm và việc mở rộng quá nhanh chóng. Tháng đó, Amazon định giá lại quyền chọn mua cổ phiếu của nhân viên. Họ có thể đổi quyền mua ba cổ phiếu ở mức giá cũ lấy quyền mua một cổ phiếu ở mức giá mới – một động thái thúc đẩy lòng trung thành của nhân viên sở hữu quyền chọn mua cổ phiếu đang trở thành vô giá trị do giá cổ phiếu trượt dốc. Amazon thông báo kế hoạch cắt giảm 1300 nhân viên, hoặc khoảng 15% lực lượng lao động. Công ty có thông lệ tuyển thêm người, chứ không phải giảm bớt, và việc sa thải hàng loạt này cực kỳ tàn bạo. Những nhân viên nào mới được tuyển dụng sẽ trở thành đối tượng sa thải chính. Sự nghiệp và cuộc sống cá nhân tan tành. Mitch Berman, một giám đốc kinh doanh của nhóm DVD, trước đây đã làm việc tại Coca-Cola ở Atlanta và đã chuyển đến Seattle để làm công việc này. Anh ấy đã làm việc cho Amazon trong bốn tháng và không bao giờ hiểu tại sao công việc không thành công. Anh nói: “Tôi đã thực sự chọn cả cuộc đời mình và di chuyển khắp đất nước. Rõ ràng là tôi cảm thấy bị bỏng. Tôi đã phải xắn tay áo và bắt đầu lại từ đầu”. Anh ấy hiện là một huấn luyện viên cuộc sống sống ở Barcelona, Tây Ban Nha.

Diego Piacentini, quản lý mới đến từ Apple, được đẩy trực tiếp vào mớ bòng bong này. Vào đầu năm 2000, Bezos thuê Piacentini, một người khéo léo và sinh ra tại Italia, đảm trách điều hành phân nhánh vận hành kinh doanh quốc tế của Amazon. Ông chủ cũ của Piacentini, Steve Jobs, tỏ ra hoài nghi về quyết định rời đi. Trong suốt bữa ăn trưa tại căng tin của Apple ở Cupertino, Jobs hỏi Piacentini lý do vì sao muốn đến nhà bán lẻ chán ngắt, trong khi Apple đang trong hành trình phát triển đổi mới lĩnh vực máy tính. Gần như ngay tức khắc, Jobs đã gợi ý rằng thay đổi con đường sự nghiệp cho thấy Piacentini quá ngu ngốc khi nghĩ rằng rời bỏ Apple là điều tốt.

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Lúc đầu, bản thân Piacentini tự hỏi tại sao anh ấy lại di chuyển. Anh ấy đã gia nhập Amazon ngay giữa cuộc xung đột của Bezos với Joe Galli. Sau vài tuần đầu tiên của mình, Piacentini đã gọi vợ trở lại Milan và nói với cô ấy là chưa thu dọn đồ đạc để đến Seattle. Nhưng sau khi Galli rời đi, anh ấy trở nên thoải mái hơn ở Amazon. Một năm sau, trong suốt thời kỳ sa thải hàng loạt, ông nhận nhiệm vụ đóng cửa trung tâm cuộc gọi đa ngôn ngữ mới của Amazon tại thành phố The Hague. Trung tâm mới chỉ hoạt động trong vài tháng khi Piacentini đến đóng cửa. The Hague là một trung tâm tài chính và ngoại giao, và trung tâm cuộc gọi nằm ở vị trí bất hợp pháp trong một tòa nhà lát đá cẩm thạch từng bị một ngân hàng chiếm giữ. Piacentini nói: “Mọi người ở nhiều cấp khác nhau đang đưa ra các quyết định phi tập trung để tiến hành nhanh chóng và quy trình này không mạnh mẽ”.

Trung tâm chỉ mới mở được vài tháng khi Piacentini đến để đóng cửa. Cùng một vài đồng nghiệp từ Seattle, ông tập hợp khoảng 250 nhân viên tại sảnh lát đá cẩm thạch lớn và phát biểu ngắn gọn bằng tiếng Anh thông báo đến mọi người tin buồn. Theo lời kể của nhân viên Amazon chứng kiến, mọi người bắt đầu hò hét và la ó. Một phụ nữ bắt đầu khóc thổn thức và lăn lộn trên sàn.

Bên trong văn phòng của Amazon ở Seattle, những bức tường có vẻ đang xích lại gần nhau – đôi khi theo đúng nghĩa đen. Vào buổi sáng thứ Tư, ngày 28 tháng Hai, Neil Roseman, Rick Dalzell, và một quản lý khác có tên Tom Killalea gặp Bezos trong phòng họp riêng và trình bày ngắn gọn với ông về nguy cơ lỗ hổng bảo mật nghiêm trọng của Exchange.com, chợ mua bán sách đã qua sử dụng của Amazon. Vài phút sau khi trao đổi, căn phòng bắt đầu rung chuyển.

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Bắt đầu từ từ, âm thanh ầm ầm vang lên trượt trên sàn và va chạm vào tường và rồi càng to lên. Bốn người đàn ông bối rối nhìn nhau và rồi nhanh chóng lao xuống dưới gầm bàn ở giữa phòng. Trái đất bỗng nhiên rung lắc, và trận động đất Nisqually có cường độ 6,9 độ richter bắt đầu.

Bên ngoài, đống gạch vữa đang rơi khỏi tòa nhà 68 tuổi Pacific Medical xuống mặt đất. Bên trong, những chiếc bình nước phun ra và nhân viên cuộn tròn dưới chiếc bàn vuông. Phòng hội thảo nhỏ của Bezos đầy ắp những chiếc xe tchotchkes như tượng nhỏ Star Trek và súng nước, nhiều trong số đó có tiếng ồn ào rơi xuống sàn. Ngoài ra trong phòng còn có một quả bóng nặng 22 pound làm bằng vonfram kim loại dày đặc, một vật lưu niệm của Stewart Brand và những người tổ chức Đồng hồ Thời đại. Trận động đất diễn ra được nửa chặng đường, những người điều hành trong phòng nghe thấy âm thanh đáng sợ của quả bóng lăn khỏi giá đỡ. Neil Roseman nói: “Tôi là người thấp trên cột totem, vì vậy hai chân của tôi bị lộ ra một nửa. May mắn thay, quả bóng ném xuống sàn một cách vô hại.

Khi trận động đất diễn ra, Killalea thò đầu ra ngoài, tìm thấy chiếc máy tính xách tay, và kiểm tra xem liệu trang web Amazon có đang hoạt động. (Ông sẽ giành giải thưởng Just Do It (Hãy làm đi) và nhận phần thưởng đôi giày mềm cũ cho hành động dũng cảm đó).

45 giây sau, hiện tượng rung lắc dừng lại, và nhân viên rời khỏi tòa nhà. Trong động thái mang tính thể hiện uy quyền, Bezos đội chiếc mũ cứng giống như của cao bồi trong bộ sưu tập những vật kỳ dị của ông, bò trên nóc xe ô tô trong khu vực đậu xe, và phân công từng cặp đôi nhân viên trở lại tòa nhà lấy những đồ có giá trị. Chủ tòa nhà sau đó đóng cửa tầng 10 và 12 để sửa chữa, và trong nhiều tháng, bạt nhựa được dùng để che phủ miếng vá nơi gạch rơi ra.

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Khi tôi tới thăm Amazon để viết một câu chuyện khác trên Newsweek vào tháng Ba năm đó, giá cổ phiếu đang quanh quẩn ở mức 10 đô la. Tình hình không khả quan, chứng tỏ điềm báo không thể tránh khỏi về sự đi xuống nhanh chóng của công ty. Khách tham quan được dẫn vào tầng hầm từ cửa sau tòa nhà, đi qua một biển báo lớn cảnh báo gạch rơi.

Đầu năm 2001, vị thế và triển vọng tương lai của Amazon vẫn mơ hồ. Vấn đề không chỉ xuất phát từ sự suy giảm giá trị vốn hóa thị trường hay việc mở rộng và tuyển dụng ồ ạt. Tăng trưởng, đặc biệt trong phân nhóm lâu đời nhất, sách – vẫn chiếm hơn một nửa doanh số kinh doanh vào thời điểm đó – dường như đang chậm lại sau nhiều năm tăng trưởng hai con số. Trong nội bộ công ty, ban lãnh đạo sợ rằng tăng trưởng chậm báo trước sự suy giảm toàn bộ lĩnh vực mua sắm trực tuyến. “Chúng tôi lo sợ rằng công ty sẽ phá sản,” Erich Ringewald, phó chủ tịch phụ trách Marketplace phát biểu. “Phân nhóm sách đang chững lại, và mọi người nghĩ rằng Walmart.com sẽ bắt đầu bán sách ở giá lỗ để ngăn chúng tôi không phát triển được.”

Sau đó, Amazon thực hiện quyết định cực kỳ hiếm trong lịch sử phát triển của công ty. Warren Jenson, trong nỗ lực thúc đẩy lợi nhuận biên để đạt mức sinh lời do công ty đề ra, thuyết phục Bezos lặng lẽ tăng giá phân nhóm truyền thống. Amazon giảm mức chiết khấu dành cho sách bán chạy nhất và bắt đầu thu phí cao hơn đối với khách hàng nước ngoài, những người mua hàng từ trang web địa phương. Bezos định dừng hướng tăng trưởng mở rộng, tuy nhiên một cuộc họp quan trọng khác nhanh chóng khiến ông thay đổi ý định.

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Một buổi sáng thứ Bảy, tại quán Starbucks bên trong cửa hàng sách Barnes & Noble tại Bellevue, nơi ông thường tổ chức họp cùng đồng nghiệp tại Amazon trong những ngày đầu, Bezos gặp Jim Sinegal, người sáng lập Costco. Sinegal là người bình dị, nói giọng đặc trưng vùng Pittsburg, có bộ râu rậm rạp màu trắng và vẻ mặt tử tế, ẩn giấu bên trong tính cách kiên quyết của một doanh nhân. Ở độ tuổi nghỉ hưu, ông không hề có dấu hiệu muốn ngừng lại. Cả hai có nhiều điểm chung. Trong nhiều năm, Sinegal cũng như Bezos đã chiến đấu nảy lửa với những nhà phân tích phố Wall, những người muốn ông tăng giá quần áo, thiết bị và thực phẩm đóng hộp. Giống như Bezos, Sinegal từ chối nhiều đề nghị mua bán sáp nhập, trong đó có cả từ Sam Walton, và ông thích nói bản thân không đi theo chiến lược rút lui – ông đang xây dựng công ty với tầm nhìn dài hạn.

Bezos đã sắp xếp cuộc gặp mặt với mục đích đề nghị Sinegal sử dụng Costco là nhà cung cấp sỉ cho những sản phẩm mà các nhà sản xuất chưa chịu bán cho Amazon. Ý định đó không đi đến đâu, tuy nhiên sau khoảng một tiếng, Bezos lắng nghe Sinegal cẩn thận và một lần nữa đúc rút ra những bài học quý báu từ một nhà kinh doanh bán lẻ dày dặn kinh nghiệm.

Sinegal giải thích mô hình kinh doanh của Costco cho Bezos: Công ty dựa trên sự trung thành của khách hàng. Trung bình có khoảng 4.000 chủng loại sản phẩm trong nhà kho của Costco. Những hàng hóa thời vụ hoặc theo xu hướng, bị giới hạn số lượng dự trữ. Mặc dù khách hàng chỉ có chọn lựa giới hạn trong mỗi phân mục, nhưng số lượng cho từng sản phẩm thì vô cùng nhiều – và tất cả đều cực kỳ rẻ. Costco mua theo số lượng lớn và chỉ cộng thêm tỉ lệ phần trăm lãi thông thường ở mức 14%, thậm chí khi công ty có thể đưa ra mức giá cao hơn. Công ty không quảng cáo, và kiếm phần lớn lợi nhuận gộp từ phí thành viên thường niên.

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“Phí thành viên là chi phí một lần, tuy nhiên thúc đẩy khách hàng đến cửa hàng và xem chiếc ti vi 47 inch có giá thấp hơn thị trường 200 đô la,” Sinegal nói. “Nó củng cố quan điểm giá trị. Khách hàng biết họ sẽ tìm được thứ gì đó thực sự rẻ tại Costco.”

Chính sách giá thấp của Costco tạo ra doanh số khổng lồ và công ty tận dụng quy mô lớn để đưa ra thỏa thuận lợi nhất có thể với nhà cung cấp và như vậy tăng lợi nhuận gộp trên từng đơn vị sản phẩm. Nhà cung cấp không hài lòng nhưng cuối cùng họ vẫn phải chấp nhận. “Bạn có thể lấp đầy Safeco Field với những người không muốn bán cho chúng tôi,” Sinegal nói. “Nhưng trong một khoảng thời gian, chúng tôi tạo ra đủ công việc kinh doanh và chứng minh chúng tôi là một khách hàng tốt, đồng thời thanh toán các hóa đơn và giữ lời hứa của mình.” Sau đó họ nói, “Tại sao tôi không làm ăn với những người này. Tôi thật ngu ngốc. Chúng là một hình thức phân phối tuyệt vời.”

“Phương pháp kinh doanh của tôi luôn đặt giá trị lên hàng đầu,” Sinegal nói tiếp. “Lý do mọi người đến mua sắm tại những cửa hàng xa lạ của chúng tôi chỉ có thể là chúng tôi có giá trị. Chúng tôi liên tục phân phối giá trị. Sẽ không có bất kỳ khoản thu theo thời gian cố định nào trong mô hình kinh doanh này.”

Một thập kỷ sau, cuối cùng khi đang chuẩn bị nghỉ hưu, Sinegal vẫn nhớ rõ ràng buổi gặp gỡ hôm đó. “Tôi nghĩ Jeff đã nhìn vào đó và nghĩ rằng cậu ấy có thể áp dụng điều gì đấy trong công việc kinh doanh,” ông nói. Sinegal không hề hối tiếc vì đã đào tạo một doanh nhân, mà sau này người đó lớn mạnh thành đối thủ cạnh tranh đáng gờm. “Tôi luôn tâm niệm bất kỳ ai trong chúng ta đều đánh cắp ý tưởng tốt một cách trơ tráo,” ông nói.

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Năm 2008, Sinegal mua một chiếc máy đọc sách điện tử Kindle, nhưng không may bị lỗi. Sau đó, ông viết thư khen ngợi Bezos sau khi dịch vụ khách hàng đổi mới miễn phí. Bezos hồi đáp lại: “Tôi muốn ông để ý giúp xem dịch vụ chăm sóc khách hàng cá nhân của công ty đối với khách hàng Kindle ra sao.”

Có lẽ người sáng lập Amazon nhận ra rằng, ông nợ Sinegal lời cảm ơn. Ông đã nhận được những bài học quý giá trong buổi cà phê vào năm 2001 và áp dụng chúng để tấn công lại người thầy đào tạo.

Vào thứ Hai, sau cuộc gặp với Sinegal, Bezos tổ chức cuộc họp nhóm S Team, bàn về một số quyết định thay đổi chiến lược. Ông nói về chiến lược giá của công ty, theo một số quản lý có mặt hôm đó, không rõ ràng mạch lạc. Amazon luôn tuyên truyền áp dụng chính sách giá thấp, nhưng trong vài trường hợp giá vẫn cao hơn đối thủ cạnh tranh. Như trong trường hợp Walmart và Costco, Bezos nói, Amazon nên có “giá thấp mọi ngày”. Công ty nên nhìn vào những nhà bán lẻ lớn khác và áp dụng theo mức giá thấp nhất của họ ở mọi thời điểm. Nếu Amazon có thể cạnh tranh về giá, công ty có thể giành chiến thắng khi cung cấp sự lựa chọn không giới hạn và sự tiện lợi cho khách hàng, những người không phải bước vào ô tô, lái xe tới cửa hàng và xếp hàng dài chờ mua hàng.

Tháng Bảy năm đó, vì cuộc gặp với Sinegal, nên Amazon thông báo công ty giảm giá sách, âm nhạc và video từ 20% đến 30%. “Sẽ có hai loại hình nhà bán lẻ: những công ty luôn nghĩ cách tăng giá, và những công ty luôn nghĩ cách giảm giá. Chúng tôi thuộc nhóm thứ hai, chấm hết,” ông phát biểu trong cuộc họp qua điện thoại với những nhà phân tích hàng quý diễn ra trong tháng đó. Những câu nói này cấu thành tư tưởng Jeff mới và sẽ được nhắc đi nhắc lại trong nhiều năm đến phát ngán.

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Bezos có vẻ quyết định sẽ không chiều theo các nhà đầu tư của thị trường tài chính trong kế hoạch thoát khỏi chiếc hố lớn mà Amazon đã tự đào cho mình, và không chỉ là việc vay mượn kế hoạch kinh doanh của Sinegal. Trong cuộc họp của ban giám đốc và hội đồng quản trị diễn ra hai ngày bên ngoài công ty trong năm đó, Amazon đã mời Jim Collins, nhà tư duy kinh doanh, thuyết trình kết quả nghiên cứu từ cuốn sách mới xuất bản của ông mang tựa đề Good to Great (Từ tốt đến vĩ đại). Collins đã nghiên cứu nhiều công ty và đưa ra hàng loạt thảo luận chuyên sâu tại cuộc họp. “Bạn phải quyết định điều gì khiến bạn vĩ đại nhất,” ông nói với các nhà quản lý Amazon.

Đúc rút triết lý “bánh xe lấy đà” của Collins, Bezos và đồng nghiệp phác thảo chiếc vòng giới hạn, mà họ tin rằng sẽ tạo ra sức mạnh cho việc kinh doanh. Kịch bản sẽ diễn ra như sau: Giá thấp khiến khách hàng tới nhiều hơn. Nhiều khách hàng tăng doanh số và thu hút nhiều nhà bán lẻ bên thứ ba chấp nhận trả phí hoa hồng tham gia vào trang web. Điều đó cho phép Amazon nhận được doanh thu nhiều hơn những chi phí cố định để mua hàng chứa trong kho và máy chủ chạy trang web. Mô hình kinhdoanh giá thấp hiệu quả giúp công ty có thể giảm giá thấp hơn nữa. Họ lý giải rằng việc nuôi dưỡng, chăm sóc bất kỳ bộ phận nào của “bánh xe lấy đà” sẽ đẩy chiếc vòng quay tiến lên. Theo một vài thành viên của nhóm S Team, vào thời điểm đó, ban lãnh đạo Amazon tràn đầy hứng khởi khi cuối cùng họ cũng hiểu công việc kinh doanh của công ty sau 5 năm. Tuy nhiên, khi Warren Jenson hỏi Bezos xem liệu có nên đưa câu chuyện “bánh xe lấy đà” vào buổi thuyết trình với các nhà phân tích không, Bezos đã trả lời không nên. Cho đến tận bây giờ, ông vẫn coi đó là bí mật kinh doanh.

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Tháng Chín năm 2001, Bezos, Mark Britto, Harrison Miller và hai nhân viên quảng cáo bay tới Minneapolis để thông báo thỏa thuận dài hạn với Target. Vào ngày diễn ra sự kiện, họ chỉ kịp đến trụ sở chính của nhà bán lẻ lúc gần 8 giờ sáng và đi thang máy lên trường quay ghi hình ở tầng 32 của tòa nhà cao nhất thành phố, Target Plaza South. Khi đang ở trong thang máy, phụ trách PR của Amazon, Bill Curry nhận cuộc gọi từ một đồng nghiệp ở Seattle. Một chiếc máy bay đã đâm thẳng vào Trung tâm thương mại thế giới. Khi lên tới nơi, họ yêu cầu đồng sự bên Target bật ti vi.

Các nhà lãnh đạo của Amazon và Target cùng nhau xem hình ảnh chiếc máy bay thứ hai đâm vào Trung tâm thương mại thế giới trong sự kinh hoàng. Không ai có thể hiểu chuyện gì đang diễn ra. Curry, cựu nhân viên truyền thông cho Boeing, quan sát thấy chiếc máy bay giống chiếc 767. Kế hoạch truyền thông cho dự án hợp tác giữa hai bên thông qua hàng loạt buổi phỏng vấn truyền hình bị hủy bỏ. Buổi sáng đau thương mở ra trước mắt họ, cũng như với bất kỳ ai trên thế giới. Tòa nhà Target đã được sơ tán ngay và hoạt động trở lại sau đó. Những nhà quản lý Amazon và Target cùng nhau ngồi theo dõi ti vi trong suốt ngày hôm đó.

Buổi chiều, Bezos dạo quanh văn phòng Target, chụp ảnh ghi lại một ngày lịch sử đau thương với chiếc máy ảnh kỹ thuật số Elph. Ai đó đã phàn nàn với Dale Nitschke, giám đốc phụ trách hợp tác với Amazon, và ông đã nhỏ nhẹ yêu cầu Bezos không chụp ảnh nữa.

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Những chuyến bay thương mại không được phép hoạt động trong vòng 72 giờ tiếp theo, nên cả nhóm Amazon không thể bay về Seattle. Buổi sáng ngày 12 tháng Chín, họ mua thêm đồ dùng và thuê một chiếc xe lái về Seattle. Tất cả đều bối rối, sốc, nghe nhạc và chìm sâu trong suy nghĩ riêng của mỗi người. “Lái xe qua những trang trại và suy nghĩ về những điều xảy ra tiếp theo thực sự kỳ lạ và đầy cảm xúc,” Miller nói.

Trong khi Britto lái xe, Bezos gọi điện và hỗ trợ tổ chức quyên góp bảy triệu đô la cho hội Chữ thập đỏ trong vòng hai tuần trên trang chủ Amazon. Họ dừng chân để nghỉ ngơi ở Badlands và nghỉ qua đêm tại một khách sạn Mount Rushmore mà Bezos nhớ đã từng đến thăm gia đình khi còn nhỏ. Các lá cờ treo ở nửa cột tại đài tưởng niệm Mount Rushmore, và các du khách thì ủ rũ. Một số khách du lịch đã nhận ra Bezos — không phải với tư cách là người sáng lập Amazon.com, mà là Giám đốc điều hành, người vừa xuất hiện trong một quảng cáo ngốc nghếch cho Taco Bell nhằm quyên góp tiền cho Thế vận hội đặc biệt. Sau đó, các giám đốc điều hành đã mua những chiếc áo gió Mount Rushmore màu xanh nước biển phù hợp và dùng bữa tại quán cà phê của công viên.

Cả nhóm tiếp tục lái xe về phía tây. Sau sự kiện đau thương, những chuyến bay tư nhân được mở lại và máy bay của Bezos đón họ ở một bãi đáp nhỏ. Bezos không đưa ra bất kỳ tuyên bố theo thường lệ nào về việc công ty sẽ không trả chi phí cho chuyến bay; họ bay thẳng tới Seattle, và cuộc phiêu lưu xuyên đất nước kết thúc.

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Bezos có thể nổi tiếng với một số người vì quảng cáo ngốc nghếch cho Taco Bell, tuy nhiên trên thực tế, Amazon cũng có một vài quảng cáo truyền hình đáng nhớ trong kỷ nguyên dot-com. Chẳng hạn, trong một quảng cáo dàn dựng bởi chi nhánh San Francisco của công ty quảng cáo FCB toàn cầu, một người đàn ông ăn mặc như quý ông Rogers tán dương Amazon là nơi cung cấp sản phẩm không giới hạn. Dáng vẻ tinh nghịch và cổ điển thể hiện cảm xúc ngô nghê, ngốc ngếch của vị tổng giám đốc điều hành Amazon. Tuy nhiên, sau một năm không hiệu quả, Bezos muốn liều lĩnh ngừng quảng cáo.

Như thường lệ, Bezos tranh cãi nảy lửa với những quản lý phụ trách marketing. Họ lập luận rằng Amazon phải xuất hiện trên sóng phát thanh truyền hình để tiếp cận khách hàng mới. Khi thua lỗ của Amazon tăng lên, Bezos phản đối mạnh mẽ hơn nữa. Ông yêu cầu phòng marketing tổ chức thử nghiệm, chạy thử chương trình tại Minneapolis và Portland sau đó xem xét mức độ hiệu quả từ việc đặt hàng mua sản phẩm của những khách hàng ở hai thành phố. Họ thực hiện – tuy nhiên, Bezos kết luận rằng doanh số thu được không đáng để đánh giá quyết định đầu tư. “Rõ ràng quảng cáo trên ti vi không thực sự đem lại hiệu quả,” Mark Stabingas, phó chủ tịch phụ trách tài chính, người đã gia nhập công ty từ Pepsi nói.

Kết quả thử nghiệm không chỉ hủy toàn bộ chiến dịch quảng cáo trên truyền hình của Amazon mà còn thanh trừ mạnh mẽ phòng marketing. Alan Brown, giám đốc marketing đến từ MasterCard, rời khỏi Amazon chỉ sau một năm tại nhiệm. Chiến lược marketing tập trung tại Amazon bị hủy bỏ. Họ chuyển sang thúc đẩy email marketing và nhóm nghiên cứu toàn cầu nằm dưới sự lãnh đạo của Andy Jassy và Jeff Holden. Amazon không quảng cáo trên ti vi trong suốt bảy năm tiếp theo, cho đến tận khi ra mắt sản phẩm Kindle. Diane Lye, một quản lý cấp cao người Anh, người đã lãnh đạo bộ phận khai thác dữ liệu của Amazon và đã giúp chạy các thử nghiệm quảng cáo cho biết: “Chỉ có thể có một người đứng đầu bộ phận tiếp thị tại Amazon và tên anh ta là Jeff.”

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Bezos thấy rằng quảng cáo truyền miệng sẽ đưa khách hàng đến với Amazon. Ông muốn chi tiêu vào marketing tiết kiệm để nâng cao trải nghiệm của khách hàng và đẩy nhanh chiếc “bánh xe lấy đà”. Và tôn chỉ đó thực sự xảy ra vào thời điểm Amazon tiến hành thử nghiệm dịch vụ giao hàng miễn phí.

Trong suốt kỳ nghỉ lễ năm 2000 và 2001, Amazon đã bắt đầu cung cấp dịch vụ giao hàng miễn phí đến khách hàng có đặt đơn hàng trị giá từ 100 đô la trở lên. Chương trình kích cầu này tốn kém nhưng tăng doanh số rõ rệt. Khảo sát khách hàng chỉ ra rằng, chi phí vận chuyển là một trong những lý do cản trở họ mua sắm trực tuyến. Amazon đã không thể nghĩ ra kế sách phù hợp để thuyết phục khách hàng mua sắm nhiều phân nhóm sản phẩm cùng lúc – ví dụ như mua sách, đồ dùng trong bếp và phần mềm cùng lúc. Chính sách giao hàng miễn phí với đơn hàng trị giá từ 100 đô la đã khuyến khích người mua chất đầy giỏ hàng với nhiều sản phẩm ở những danh mục khác nhau.

Vào một buổi tối thứ Hai muộn đầu năm 2002, Bezos triệu tập đồng nghiệp tại phòng họp của Warren Jenson để cùng thảo luận về cách đưa dịch vụ giao hàng miễn phí trong mùa nghỉ lễ trở thành dịch vụ lâu dài. Như vậy, ông có thể phân bổ lại ngân sách marketing. Jenson phản đối quyết liệt ý kiến này. Vị giám đốc tài chính lo rằng việc giao hàng miễn phí sẽ trở nên tốn kém và lãng phí, bởi vì Amazon đang giảm giá sản phẩm cho tất cả khách hàng, bao gồm cả những ai đang có xu hướng đặt đơn hàng giá trị lớn.

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Sau đó, một trong những cấp phó của ông, phó chủ tịch phụ trách tài chính Greg Greeley đề cập về cách các hãng hàng không phân chia khách hàng thành hai nhóm – nhóm khách hàng doanh nhân và người du lịch – bằng việc giảm giá vé cho những khách hàng sẵn sàng ở lại điểm dừng trong đêm thứ Bảy. Greeley đưa ra gợi ý thực hiện điều tương tự tại Amazon. Họ sẽ cung cấp dịch vụ giao hàng miễn phí vĩnh viễn, nhưng chỉ dành cho khách hàng sẵn sàng đợi thêm vài ngày để nhận hàng. Giống như phương thức của các hãng hàng không, Amazon cũng chia khách hàng của mình thành hai nhóm: Những người đặt thời gian là quan trọng nhất, và nhóm còn lại. Công ty có thể giảm chi phí giao hàng miễn phí bởi vì công nhân trong các trung tâm phân phối có thể đóng gói đơn hàng miễn phí vận chuyển vào những xe tải. Amazon sẽ chuyển chúng đến công ty chuyển hàng hỏa tốc và bưu điện khi xe đã đầy khoang. Bezos thích điều đó. “Đó chính xác là những gì chúng ta sẽ làm,” ông nói.

Amazon chính thức giới thiệu dịch vụ giao hàng siêu tiết kiệm miễn phí cho những đơn hàng trên 99 đô la vào tháng Một năm 2002. Trong một vài tháng, con số hạ xuống còn 49 đô la và tiếp theo là 25 đô la. Dịch vụ giao hàng siêu tiết kiệm khởi động cho nhiều đổi mới trong những năm tiếp theo, bao gồm đăng ký làm thành viên câu lạc bộ Amazon Prime.

Không phải ai cũng hào hứng với cải cách đổi mới trên. Sau cuộc họp hôm đó, Warren Jenson kéo Greeley ra nói chuyện riêng và trách móc. Vào thời điểm đó ông nhìn nhận dịch vụ giao hàng miễn phí không khác gì một nhân tố tiềm ẩn phá hoại bảng cân đối kế toán.

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Năm sau, những quản lý của Amazon rời đi hàng loạt. Họ rời đi bởi vì cổ phiếu đã được chuyển giao hoặc do không còn tin vào sứ mệnh hoặc bởi vì mức lương thấp so với các công ty khác và giá cổ phiếu đáng thất vọng đến nỗi họ sẽ không thể giàu lên nhanh được. Một vài người mệt mỏi, chán nản và chỉ muốn thay đổi. Những người khác thì cảm thấy Bezos không lắng nghe ý kiến của họ và không có ý định thay đổi. Đa số mọi người xác định những ngày tươi đẹp nhất của Amazon đã lùi xa. Sự rệu rã của công ty chạm ngưỡng tột đỉnh vào những năm 2002 và 2003. “Số nhân viên ngoài Jeff vào thời điểm đó nghĩ rằng, ông có thể biến công ty thành tài sản trị giá 80 tỉ đô la – cực kỳ ít,” Doug Boake, người bỏ đến công ty mới thành lập OpenTable của Thung lũng Silicon, nói. “Ông ấy không bao giờ ngừng tin tưởng. Ông chưa từng chớp mắt nghi ngờ một lần.”

Tất cả đều có lý do của họ. David Risher chuyển sang giảng dạy tại trường kinh doanh của Đại học Washington. Joel Spiegel muốn dành nhiều thời gian hơn cho ba đứa con tuổi teen của mình trước khi chúng rời khỏi nhà. Mark Britto muốn trở lại Bay Area. Harrison Miller đã kiệt sức và cần một sự thay đổi. Chris Payne rời Microsoft, nơi anh sẽ giúp khởi chạy công cụ tìm kiếm Bing, sau đó anh sẽ trở thành giám đốc điều hành hàng đầu tại eBay. Và tiếp tục.

Họ rời đi, hít một hơi thật sâu và cảm thấy mất phương hướng, giống như họ vừa thoát khỏi một giáo phái. Mặc dù không chia sẻ điều này rộng rãi, nhưng nhiều người không thể tiếp tục chịu đựng để làm việc với Bezos nữa. Ông yêu cầu nhiều hơn những gì họ có thể làm và cực kỳ tiết kiệm lời khen. Trong khi đó, nhiều người cực kỳ trung thành với Bezos và luôn tự hỏi đã cống hiến được bao nhiêu cho Amazon. Kim Rachmeler chia sẻ một câu nói yêu thích mà bà nghe được từ một đồng nghiệp vào thời điểm đó. “Nếu bạn làm không tốt, Jeff sẽ nhai ngấu nghiến bạn rồi nhổ văng ra. Và nếu bạn làm tốt, ông sẽ nhảy lên lưng bạn và vắt kiệt sức của bạn.”

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Bezos không bao giờ tuyệt vọng trước cuộc di cư ồ ạt. Các đồng nghiệp của ông cho biết một trong những món quà của ông là có thể thúc đẩy và động viên nhân viên của mình mà không quá gắn bó với họ. Nhưng anh ấy thường dành thời gian trong lịch của mình cho một cuộc họp riêng với các giám đốc điều hành sắp xuất cảnh. Harrison Miller nói với Bezos trong bữa trưa chia tay của họ rằng thành tựu tại Amazon mà ông tự hào nhất là hoạt động kinh doanh dịch vụ nền tảng với các nhà bán lẻ lớn, công ty chịu trách nhiệm về một phần ba dòng tiền của Amazon vào năm 2002. “Vâng, nhưng đừng quên, bạn đã xây dựng cửa hàng đồ chơi đầu tiên của chúng tôi và điều đó thật tuyệt vời,” Bezos nói, một dấu hiệu khác cho thấy ông vẫn tập trung hơn vào mục tiêu dài hạn là lựa chọn không giới hạn hơn là vào các mối quan hệ đối tác thúc đẩy doanh thu ngắn hạn, tuy nhiên vẫn sinh lợi.

Trong buổi họp chia tay, Brian Birtwistle viết danh sách những khoảnh khắc yêu thích của ông tại Amazon trên chiếc khăn ăn. Bezos và Birtwistle chụp ảnh cùng chiếc khăn ăn và nhớ lại chuyến đi từ trường kinh doanh Đại học Harvard tới sân bay Boston. “Toàn bộ hành trình bắt đầu trên chiếc ô tô và trở thành chuyến đi dài bên nhau,” Bezos nói.

Bezos không phải lúc nào cũng đa cảm như vậy. Christopher Zyda, Giám đốc tài chính của Amazon, đã đào tẩu sang eBay và, trong bối cảnh quay lại vụ kiện của Walmart về việc săn trộm, Amazon đã kiện Zyda lên tòa án liên bang, cáo buộc rằng anh ta vi phạm điều khoản không cạnh tranh trong hợp đồng lao động của mình. Vụ kiện, giống như vụ săn trộm của Walmart chống lại Amazon, đã được giải quyết mà không có thiệt hại do hậu quả. Nhưng nếu chiến lược pháp lý của anh ấy là bất kỳ hướng dẫn nào, thì Bezos rõ ràng đang lo lắng về eBay đang bay cao, vốn hóa thị trường hiện đã vượt quá Amazon một tỷ lệ đáng kể.

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Cuộc chiến cạnh tranh giữa eBay và Amazon đã đặt ít nhất một người vào tình trạng khó xử: Scott Cook, người sáng lập Intuit, vẫn đang là thành viên hội đồng quản trị của cả hai công ty. Bây giờ, rõ ràng ông sẽ cần phải từ bỏ một trong hai. Ông chọn rời bỏ Amazon và gắn bó với eBay. “Jeff đã tức giận, nhưng không phải với tôi,” Cook nói. “Ông ấy bực tức với bản thân vì không ngăn cản tôi khi tôi nói rằng tôi muốn gia nhập eBay lúc trước. Ông ấy không thích sự mất mát.”

Warren Jenson cũng rời đi. Giám đốc tài chính Amazon giải thích rằng ông muốn trở lại bên vợ và các con, những người vẫn đang sống ở Atlanta, và thời điểm đó là hoàn toàn phù hợp vì Amazon cuối cùng đã thoát khỏi những thách thức tài chính nghiêm trọng nhất. Nhưng toàn bộ câu chuyện không hoàn toàn như vậy.

Jenson và Bezos bất hòa. Jenson cố gắng xoa dịu những nhà đầu tư tức giận bằng cách làm cho công ty sinh lợi nhuận. Ông huy động vốn lần cuối từ thị trường trái phiếu châu Âu vào thời điểm cực kỳ quan trọng và ép Bezos đưa ra quyết định cứng rắn khi những nhân viên rời bỏ công ty. Tuy nhiên, ông cũng ép tăng giá và đấu tranh chống lại dịch vụ giao hàng miễn phí. “Tôi sẽ không bao giờ nói mình hoàn hảo,” ông nói. “Tôi luôn cố gắng làm những gì tốt cho công ty.”

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Những gì Jenson để lại Amazon đã tạo ra những tranh cãi gay gắt, thậm chí cho tới cả thập kỷ sau. Một số người nghĩ rằng ông quá cứng nhắc. Những người khác thì nói rằng ông giúp đỡ định hướng công ty khỏi con đường tăng trưởng liều lĩnh, thiếu thận trọng và tạo dựng đội phụ trách tài chính mà sau này tiếp tục đóng góp to lớn cho Amazon và rộng hơn là thế giới công nghệ. Bằng chứng thành tích của Jenson là khó gạt bỏ. “Warren là sự lựa chọn chính xác, đúng thời điểm cho vị trí giám đốc tài chính,” Dave Stephenson, quản lý tài chính làm việc dưới quyền, nói. “Ông thực thi những quyết định khó khăn và nhiều tranh cãi. Ông luôn ủng hộ Jeff trực diện hơn bất kỳ ai khác.”

Thay thế Jenson, Bezos tuyển giám đốc tài chính khác từ General Electric, Tom Szkutak. Ông viết bức thư dài hai trang đầy cảm xúc gửi Szkutak và vợ ông, với nội dung nói về những ảnh hưởng họ có thể tạo ra ở thời điểm lịch sử của Internet. Szkutak cũng là sự lựa chọn chính xác cho vị trí giám đốc tài chính của Amazon. Ông hỗ trợ hơn là thách thức những tham vọng mở rộng lĩnh vực kinh doanh của Bezos trong những năm tiếp theo.

Có lẽ những lần ra đi tồi tệ nhất trong công ty trong thời gian này bắt nguồn từ cuộc chiến nội bộ giữa hai bộ phận: nhóm biên tập của Amazon và nhóm cá nhân hóa của nó. Bộ phận biên tập, có từ những ngày đầu tiên của Amazon, bao gồm các nhà văn và biên tập viên, những người đã thêm liên lạc của con người vào trang chủ Amazon và vào các trang sản phẩm riêng lẻ. Ban đầu Bezos thành lập nhóm để nuôi dưỡng hào quang văn học của một hiệu sách độc lập và giới thiệu những cuốn sách mà họ có thể chưa tìm thấy.

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Nhưng trong những năm qua, nhóm cá nhân hóa bắt đầu xâm phạm lĩnh vực của nhóm biên tập. P13N, vì nó được viết tắt một cách khéo léo (có mười ba chữ cái giữa chữ p và chữ n cuối cùng trong cá nhân hóa), đã sử dụng phân tích và thuật toán để tạo ra các đề xuất nhằm thu hút khách hàng cá nhân dựa trên các giao dịch mua trước đó của họ. Trong những năm qua, P13N tiếp tục tốt hơn. Năm 2001, Amazon bắt đầu đưa ra các đề xuất dựa trên những mặt hàng mà khách hàng đã xem, không chỉ là những sản phẩm họ đã mua.

Sự cạnh tranh giữa hai cách tiếp cận là rõ ràng. Editorial là sản phẩm bán chạy với cách viết thông minh và quyết định trực quan về những gì cần quảng cáo. (“Chúng tôi không phải là sư tử: Goliath Backpack Pal là một cách tuyệt vời để xua đuổi những người bồn chồn trong ngày đầu tiên đến trường,” đọc trang chủ năm 1999, quảng cáo một chiếc ba lô hình sư tử cho trẻ em.) bỏ qua các cách chơi chữ và xây dựng một cửa hàng cho mọi khách hàng bằng cách sử dụng dữ liệu lạnh, cứng để cung cấp các mặt hàng mà khách hàng có khả năng mua nhiều nhất trên kệ.

Bezos không rõ ràng ủng hộ nhóm này hơn nhóm kia, nhưng ông đã xem xét kết quả của các bài kiểm tra. Theo thời gian, rõ ràng là con người không thể cạnh tranh. NHỮNG NGƯỜI QUÊN RẰNG JOHN HENRY ĐÃ CHẾT, đọc một tấm biển trên tường của văn phòng P13N, liên quan đến câu chuyện dân gian về người lái thép chạy đua đào hố thi đấu với máy khoan chạy bằng hơi nước; anh ta thắng cuộc thi nhưng chết ngay sau đó.

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Hầu hết các biên tập viên và nhà văn đã được bổ nhiệm lại hoặc bị sa thải. Susan Benson - chủ sở hữu của Rufus - đã nghỉ phép ở Amazon. Khi cô quay trở lại, Jason Kilar, lúc đó là phó chủ tịch phụ trách truyền thông, đã mời cô đến một cuộc họp mà anh ta mô tả một cách đáng ngại trong e-mail là "người thay đổi trò chơi biên tập". Cô biết mình đang gặp rắc rối. Benson nói: “Nó liên quan rất nhiều đến cách loại bỏ biên tập và biến nó thành một phần của vũ trụ tự động. “Tôi nghĩ, Vâng, thời gian của tôi ở đây đã xong.”

Một thuật toán có tên là Amabot đã dẫn đến sự sụp đổ của việc biên tập. Amabot đã thay thế các phần thủ công, cá tính của trang web bằng các đề xuất được tạo tự động theo bố cục tiêu chuẩn hóa. Hệ thống này đã thắng một loạt các bài kiểm tra một cách thủ công và chứng minh rằng nó có thể bán được nhiều sản phẩm như do con người biên tập. Ngay sau đó, một nhân viên giấu tên của Amazon đã đặt một mẩu quảng cáo có ba dòng trong ấn bản Ngày lễ tình nhân năm 2002 của Stranger, một tờ báo độc lập của Seattle. Nó đọc:

KÍNH GỬI LẠI AMABOT

Nếu bạn chỉ có một trái tim để tiếp nhận sự thù hận của chúng tôi… Cảm ơn vì không có gì, bạn là cái thùng rỉ sét được tuyên án. Sự hỗn độn tuyệt đẹp của máu thịt sẽ chiếm ưu thế!

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Tháng Giêng năm 2002, Amazon công bố báo cáo kết quả kinh doanh quý có lãi đầu tiên trong lịch sử công ty, trong đó lợi nhuận ròng là 5 triệu đô la, một con số ít ỏi và lãi trên cổ phiếu ở đơn vị xu. Chi phí marketing giảm, doanh thu thị trường quốc tế từ Anh và Đức tăng, doanh số từ bên bán hàng thứ ba trên cổng giao dịch Amazon chiếm 15% đơn đặt hàng của công ty. Công ty vẫn hứng chịu chỉ trích do lợi nhuận được tính dựa trên cả chuẩn mức kế toán chiếu lệ gây tranh cãi và phương pháp truyền thống.

Cuối cùng, Amazon chứng tỏ với thế giới rằng, công ty không chỉ là một thành quả yểu mệnh của bong bóng dot-com. Giá cổ phiếu ngay lập tức tăng 25% chỉ trong thời gian giao dịch thêm, đẩy xa khỏi mức một con số. Kathy Savitt, nhân viên quan hệ công chúng mới, nói với Bezos rằng bà muốn đóng khung vài bài viết có nội dung tích cực và treo chúng trên tường. Bezos trả lời ông thích treo những câu chuyện có nội dung tiêu cực, như bài viết Amazon.bomb trên trang bìa Barron’s. Khi ai đó viết hoặc nói tích cực về Amazon, ông muốn nhân viên nhớ về những bài báo của Barron’s và sợ hãi.

Bảng cân đối kế toán của Amazon không hoàn toàn minh bạch nhưng công ty đang đi đúng đường. Trong quý đầu tiên của năm tiếp theo, lần đầu tiên Amazon đạt doanh thu một tỉ đô la trong thời điểm không có kỳ nghỉ lễ, đặt nền móng cho năm đầu tiên sinh lợi nhuận. Trong sự lạc quan, Amazon tuyên bố rằng công ty sẽ đáo hạn trước trái phiếu phát hành đầu tiên vào năm 1998, thanh toán đầy đủ giá trị trái phiếu có kỳ hạn 5 năm cho chủ sở hữu trái phiếu trước kỳ hạn.

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Khi công ty chuẩn bị thông báo, có thành viên trong nhóm tài chính băn khoăn về kẻ thù cũ Ravi Suria đang nghĩ gì. Nhờ đó những ký ức về thuật ngữ “milliravi”, sai sót toán học trầm trọng sống lại. Mark Peek, kế toán trưởng của công ty vào thời điểm đó nói đùa rằng, họ nên tìm ra cách sử dụng thuật ngữ trên trong bản thông cáo báo chí. Mọi người đều thích ý tưởng đó, Bezos cũng vậy, và họ bắt đầu trao đổi ý tưởng qua email. Cuối cùng, người phụ trách quan hệ đầu tư, Tim Stone hỏi ý kiến Bezos liệu ông có thực sự nghiêm túc về điều này không và Bezos trả lời quả quyết rằng có.

Và kết quả, vào ngày 24 tháng Tư năm 2003, trong thông cáo báo chí về lợi nhuận quý, các cổ đông, nhà phân tích và phóng viên được tiếp đãi bằng tiêu đề khó hiểu: NHỮNG ĐỔI MỚI Ý NGHĨA DẪN DẮT, KHƠI NGUỒN, TRUYỀN CẢM HỨNG CẢI TIẾN KHÔNG NGỪNG CHO KHÁCH HÀNG CỦA AMAZON. (MEANINGFUL INNOVATION LEADS, LANCHES, INSPIRES RELENTLESS AMAZON VISITOR IMPROVEMENTS.)

Lấy chữ cái đầu của mỗi từ và đặt chúng cùng nhau sẽ ghép thành từ milliravi. Vài nhà phân tích và phóng viên theo sát hành động của công ty cũng phải vò đầu trước câu văn mộc mạc. Không ai ở ngoài Amazon hiểu được ý nghĩa sâu xa. Tuy nhiên, đối với Bezos và những nhân viên theo sát người lãnh đạo kiên định trải qua trận chiến sống còn đầu tiên đó, thông điệp đưa ra thật rõ ràng.

Họ đã chiến thắng.

—ooOoo—

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CẬU BÉ TÊN LỬA

Jeff Bezos làm được nhiều hơn là chỉ bắt bẻ lại Ravi Suria và những người hoài nghi khác trong suốt thời kỳ bong bóng dot-com vỡ. Ông đánh bại họ một cách quang minh chính đại và sau đó bí mật mã hóa chiến thắng cho thế hệ sau trong bản thông cáo báo chí. Tương tự, ông cũng làm được nhiều điều hơn là chỉ khôn ngoan hơn Barnes & Noble trên thương trường – ông thích kể câu chuyện về cách tổ chức buổi họp đầu tiên trong cửa hàng cà phê.

Khi những người bạn và đồng nghiệp lâu năm của Bezos cố gắng giải thích tính cách cạnh tranh mạnh mẽ và nhu cầu chiến thắng đối thủ lạ lùng của ông, họ thường nhắc đến quá khứ – khoảng 50 năm về trước – về tuổi thơ của Bezos. Ông lớn lên trong một gia đình đầm ấm, có cha mẹ chăm sóc, là Jackie và Mike, cùng hai em Christina và Mark. Dường như không có điều gì khác thường.

Tuy nhiên, có khoảng thời gian ngắn trong những năm tháng đầu đời, trước tuổi thơ êm đềm của ông, Bezos sống cùng mẹ và ông bà ngoại. Và trước đó, ông sống với mẹ và cha ruột, người đàn ông tên Ted Jorgensen. Bezos từng trả lời tạp chí Wired rằng, ông nhớ khoảnh khắc khi Jackie và Mike, cha mẹ nuôi của ông, giải thích sự thật với ông khi ông lên 10 tuổi. “Điều đó thực sự khiến tôi bật khóc,” ông nói. Nhiều năm sau, khi đã là sinh viên, ông chất vấn mẹ mình và hỏi bà hàng loạt câu hỏi về sự ra đời của ông. Cả hai đều từ chối kể chi tiết về cuộc đối thoại đó, nhưng cuối cùng Bezos ôm bà và nói: “Mẹ đã làm một việc tuyệt vời, mẹ ạ”.

Bezos nói rằng thời điểm duy nhất ông nghĩ về Ted Jorgensen là khi ông điền vào mẫu khám sức khỏe yêu cầu khai thông tin về gia đình. Ông từng nói trên tạp chí Wirednăm 1999 rằng ông chưa từng gặp người đàn ông đó. Thực ra đây không phải sự thật; Bezos gặp cha đẻ lần gần nhất khi lên ba tuổi.

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Dĩ nhiên, vẫn không thể biết liệu yếu tố gia đình không bình thường có giúp tạo ra năng lực khởi nghiệp, bao gồm sự thông minh, tham vọng và nhu cầu chứng tỏ bản thân không ngừng không. Hai biểu tượng công nghệ khác, Steve Jobs và Larry Ellison, cũng được nhận nuôi và một vài người tin rằng hoàn cảnh gia đình đem đến động lực thành công. Trong trường hợp của Bezos, không thể phủ nhận sự thật rằng, ngay từ những năm tháng đầu đời, cha mẹ và giáo viên đã nhận ra điều khác biệt của cậu bé – không thông minh bẩm sinh nhưng luôn có động lực thúc đẩy mạnh mẽ. Tuổi thơ chính là bệ phóng hoàn hảo cho Bezos bay tới cuộc đời của nhà khởi nghiệp.

Theodore John Jorgensen là diễn viên xiếc và trong những năm 1960 ông trở thành một trong những diễn viên đạp xe một bánh giỏi nhất của Albuquerque. Các kho lưu trữ của các tờ báo địa phương chứa đựng một hồ sơ đầy màu sắc về trình độ thời trẻ của ông. Một bức ảnh trên tạp chí Albuquerque Journal chụp năm 1961, khi ông mười sáu tuổi, cho thấy ông đang đứng trên bàn đạp của chiếc xe đạp một bánh quay mặt về phía sau, một tay đặt lên ghế, tay kia đặt sân khấu sang một bên, nét mặt căng thẳng vì tập trung. Chú thích nói rằng anh ấy đã được trao giải "người lái xe linh hoạt nhất" trong câu lạc bộ xe đạp một bánh địa phương.

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Năm đó, Jorgensen và nửa tá tay đua khác đã đi chơi xe đạp một bánh rộng rãi trong một đội do Lloyd Smith, chủ một cửa hàng xe đạp địa phương quản lý. Đội của Jorgensen đã chiến thắng ở những nơi như Newport Beach, California và Boulder, Colorado. Tờ báo có một tài khoản về sự kiện Boulder. Bốn trăm người đã xuất hiện trong thời tiết lạnh giá đến một bãi đậu xe ở trung tâm mua sắm để xem các đội xoay quanh bốn inch tuyết bằng những chiếc vồ nhựa dài 36 inch để theo đuổi một quả bóng cao su nhỏ, đường kính sáu inch. Đội của Jorgensen đã vượt qua cuộc thi, một người đánh đôi, ba đến hai và sáu đến năm.

Năm 1963, đoàn kịch của Jorgensen xuất hiện trở lại trên các mặt báo với tên gọi Unicycle Wranglers, lưu diễn các hội chợ quận, sự kiện thể thao và rạp xiếc. Họ nhảy vuông, nhảy jitterbug và xoắn, nhảy dây, và thực hiện các thủ thuật như cưỡi trên dây cao. Cả nhóm luyện tập liên tục, tập luyện ba lần một tuần tại cửa hàng Lloyd Smith’s và tham gia các lớp học khiêu vũ hai lần một tuần. Một thành viên nói với Albuquerque Tribune: “Nó giống như giữ thăng bằng trên tia sét bôi trơn và nhảy cùng một lúc. Khi Ringling Brothers và Barnum & Bailey Circus đến thị trấn, các Wranglers biểu diễn dưới đỉnh lớn, và vào mùa xuân năm 1965, họ biểu diễn trong tám buổi biểu diễn địa phương của Rude Brothers Circus. Họ cũng đến Hollywood để thử (nhưng đã không thành công) biểu diễn cho Ed Sullivan Show.

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Ted Jorgensen sinh ra ở Chicago trong một gia đình theo đạo Báp-tít. Cha anh chuyển cả gia đình đến Albuquerque khi Jorgensen và em trai anh, Gordon, đang học tiểu học. Cha của Ted đã nhận công việc như một đại lý mua hàng tại Sandia, khi đó là cơ sở lắp đặt vũ khí hạt nhân lớn nhất cả nước, đảm nhiệm việc mua sắm các vật tư tại căn cứ. Ông nội của Jorgensen, một người nhập cư từ Đan Mạch, là một trong những cựu chiến binh cuối cùng còn sống sót trong Chiến tranh Tây Ban Nha Mỹ.

Bước vào cấp ba, Jorgensen bắt đầu hẹn hò với Jacklyn Gise, cô gái năm hai của trường có bố cũng làm việc tại Sandia. Cha của họ quen nhau. Cha cô, Lawrence Preston Gise, được bạn bè gọi là Preston và gia đình gọi là Pop, điều hành văn phòng địa phương của Ủy ban Năng lượng Nguyên tử Hoa Kỳ, cơ quan liên bang quản lý chương trình vũ khí hạt nhân sau khi Truman đưa nó khỏi quân đội sau Thế chiến II.

Khi Jorgensen chỉ vừa bước vào tuổi 18 và đang học năm cuối trung học thì Gise mang thai. Cô chỉ 16 tuổi và là học sinh năm hai. Họ yêu nhau và quyết định cưới. Cha mẹ cô gái cho tiền để họ bay tới Juarez, Mexico tổ chức lễ cưới. Vài tháng sau, vào ngày 19 tháng Bảy năm 1963, họ tổ chức lễ cưới tại gia đình Gise. Vì Gise chưa đủ tuổi nên cả mẹ cô và gia đình Jorgensen đều ký vào đơn xin cấp giấy chứng nhận kết hôn. Đứa trẻ sinh ra vào ngày 12 tháng Một năm 1964 và mang tên Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen.

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Đôi vợ chồng trẻ thuê một căn hộ ở vùng lân cận thành phố Southeast Heights và Jackie tốt nghiệp. Hàng ngày, mẹ cô, Mattie, chăm sóc đứa trẻ. Điều kiện sống của họ khá khó khăn. Xe của Jorgensen đã bị hỏng vĩnh viễn, và họ chỉ có một chiếc xe duy nhất, chiếc Chevy '55 màu kem của anh ấy. Làm cho một đoàn xe đạp không trả nhiều tiền. Các Wranglers chia phí của họ cho tất cả các thành viên, với Lloyd Smith đã chia phần một cách hào phóng. Cuối cùng thì Jorgensen cũng có được một công việc trị giá 1,25 đô la một giờ tại Cửa hàng bách hóa Globe, đây là một phần trong bước đột phá ngắn ngủi của Walgreen vào thị trường bán lẻ giảm giá đầy hứa hẹn đang được Kmart và Walmart tiên phong vào thời điểm đó. Thỉnh thoảng Jackie đưa em bé đến cửa hàng để tham quan.

Hai người vẫn còn quá trẻ và chưa trưởng thành. Hôn nhân của họ ngay từ đầu gần như chắc chắn đổ vỡ. Tuy nhiên, Jorgensen có thói quen uống rượu quá nhiều và tụ tập ăn uống với bạn bè tới khuya. Ông không phải là người cha và người chồng chu đáo. Preston Gise đã cố gắng giúp đỡ; ông trả tiền học phí Đại học New Mexico cho con rể nhưng Jorgensen bỏ học sau vài kỳ học. Sau đó, Gise cố gắng kiếm việc cho Jorgensen ở Cảnh sát bang New Mexico, nhưng Jorgensen không nắm lấy cơ hội này.

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Cuối cùng, Jackie bế đứa trẻ trở về sống cùng gia đình tại Sandia Base. Vào tháng Sáu năm 1965, khi đứa bé được 17 tháng tuổi, cô đệ đơn ly hôn. Tòa án yêu cầu Jorgensen chu cấp cho đứa trẻ 40 đô la một tháng. Theo như ghi nhận của tòa, thu nhập của người cha vào thời điểm ly hôn là 180 đô la một tháng. Trong vài năm sau đó, Jorgensen thi thoảng đến thăm con trai nhưng không trả nhiều đợt tiền chu cấp. Ông là một người không thể dựa dẫm được và không có tiền.

Sau đó, Jackie hẹn hò với người khác. Trong vài dịp khi Jorgensen đến thăm con trai, người đàn ông này xuất hiện và họ tránh mặt nhau. Tuy nhiên, Jorgensen hỏi thăm tin tức và biết rằng đó là một người tốt.

Vào năm 1968, Jackie gọi điện cho Ted Jorgensen và thông báo với ông rằng bà sẽ tái hôn và chuyển đến Houston. Ông có thể ngừng chu cấp cho con, nhưng bà muốn đổi họ của Jeffrey theo tên người chồng mới và ông ấy sẽ nhận nuôi cậu bé. Bà yêu cầu Jorgensen không can thiệp vào cuộc sống của họ. Vào thời điểm đó, cha của Jackie dồn Jorgensen vào thế bí và yêu cầu ông hứa phải tránh xa gia đình họ. Tuy nhiên, sự đồng ý của Ted là điều cần thiết để họ tiến hành nhận nuôi. Sau khi suy nghĩ kỹ và cho rằng đứa trẻ sẽ có cuộc sống tốt đẹp hơn khi là con trai của Jackie và người chồng mới, Jorgensen đã đồng ý. Sau một vài năm, ông không còn biết gì về thông tin của gia đình Bezos và cũng quên mất tên họ của họ. Trong nhiều thập kỷ, ông không biết đứa trẻ đã khôn lớn, trưởng thành ra sao, và sự lựa chọn từ bỏ đáng tiếc trong quá khứ luôn ám ảnh ông.

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Cuộc cách mạng Cuba năm 1959 đã thổi bay một phần cuộc sống thoải mái của Miguel Angel Bezos Perez. Người cha nuôi trong tương lai của Jeff Bezos đang học tại trường tư danh giá mang tên Colegio de Dolores tại Santiago, Cuba trên bờ nam của hòn đảo khi chính quyền Batista bị lật đổ. Miguel và bạn bè trải qua những ngày tháng lang thang trên đường và “làm những việc mà chúng tôi đã không nên làm, như viết khẩu hiệu chống Castro,” ông nói. Khi cha mẹ ông biết về những hành động ngớ ngẩn này, họ lo lắng ông có thể gặp rắc rối và giống như nhiều gia đình Cuba có con trong độ tuổi thanh thiếu niên, họ bắt đầu chuẩn bị gửi ông tới Mỹ.

Họ đã đợi một năm trước khi nhận được hộ chiếu của anh ta dưới sự bảo trợ của Nhà thờ Công giáo. Mẹ của Miguel lo lắng về việc anh chuyển đến sống ở vùng khí hậu lạnh giá của el norte, vì vậy bà và chị gái của anh đã đan cho anh một chiếc áo len từ vải vụn cũ. Miguel mặc nó ra sân bay. (Chiếc áo len hiện đã được đóng khung và treo trên tường nhà anh ấy ở Aspen.) Mẹ anh ấy phải thả anh ấy ở lề đường và sau đó đậu ở một bãi đất gần đó để xem máy bay cất cánh. Nhưng gia đình cho rằng điều này chỉ là tạm thời và sẽ chỉ kéo dài cho đến khi tình hình chính trị ổn định và mọi thứ trở lại bình thường.

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Miguel Bezos đến Miami năm 1962, 16 tuổi và đơn độc. Ông chỉ biết một từ tiếng Anh duy nhất: Hamburger. Ông là một trong những thành viên lớn tuổi nhất của Chiến dịch Pedro Pan, một chương trình giải cứu do Nhà thờ Công giáo điều hành và được chính phủ Hoa Kỳ tài trợ rất nhiều, nhằm loại bỏ hàng nghìn thanh thiếu niên khỏi sự kìm kẹp của Castro vào đầu những năm 1960. Cục Phúc lợi Công giáo đã đưa Bezos đến một trại ở Nam Florida, có tên là Matecumbe, nơi anh ta cùng với bốn trăm trẻ em bị lưu đày khác. Bởi một sự may mắn, ngày hôm sau, người em họ Angel của anh ta cũng đến cơ sở tương tự. Miguel nói: “Ngay lập tức cả hai chúng tôi đều ăn ý với nhau. Một vài tuần sau, họ được triệu tập đến văn phòng của trại và được đưa cho va li và áo khoác nặng - thật sự. Họ đã được chuyển đến một ngôi nhà tập thể ở Wilmington, Delaware. Miguel nhớ lại:" Chúng tôi nhìn nhau và nói, "Cậu bé, chúng tôi đang gặp rắc rối".

Miguel và anh họ của mình cùng với khoảng hai chục chiếc Pedro Pans khác trong một cơ sở có tên là Casa de Sales dưới sự chăm sóc của Cha James Byrnes, một linh mục trẻ nói thông thạo tiếng Tây Ban Nha và thỉnh thoảng thích uống rượu vodka bổ. Sau đó, họ sẽ biết anh ta mới từ trường dòng, nhưng đối với những cáo buộc thời trẻ của anh ta, Byrnes là một nhân vật quyền lực cao ngất ngưởng. Anh dạy họ tiếng Anh, buộc họ phải tập trung vào việc học và cho họ mỗi người năm mươi xu mỗi tuần sau khi làm xong việc nhà để họ có thể tham gia một buổi khiêu vũ vào tối thứ Bảy. Carlos Rubio Albet, bạn cùng phòng của Miguel và Angel Bezos tại cơ sở nói: “Những gì anh ấy đã làm cho chúng tôi, chúng tôi không bao giờ có thể đền đáp được.” Anh ta đã bắt một số thiếu niên bị đày ải không nói được tiếng Anh và biến nó thành một gia đình thực sự. Giáng sinh đầu tiên tôi ở đó, vào năm 62, anh ấy đảm bảo rằng mọi người đều có thứ gì đó dưới gốc cây đó.” Sau mười ba ngày đầy căng thẳng của cuộc khủng hoảng tên lửa Cuba vào tháng 10 năm đó, cư dân của La Casa, như cách gọi của họ, biết rằng họ sẽ không về nhà sớm.

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Trong khi bầu không khí tại Casa de Sales nghiêm ngặt, các thanh thiếu niên thích thú với bản thân, và sau đó khi tụ tập để đoàn tụ với Cha Byrnes, họ nhớ lại những ngày ở đó như là một trong những ngày hạnh phúc nhất trong đời. Chàng trai trẻ Miguel Bezos có niềm yêu thích đặc biệt với một trò đùa thực tế. Khi ai đó mới đến nhà tập thể, anh ta sẽ giả vờ như một người câm điếc, ra hiệu và càu nhàu tìm các món trong bàn ăn. Vài ngày thành thói quen, anh ta sẽ khiến mục tiêu của trò đùa giật mình, thường là bằng cách đứng lên và hét lên khi một cô gái hấp dẫn đi qua, "Anh bạn, đó là một phụ nữ đẹp!" Bạn bè của anh ấy đều sẽ hát, "Đó là một phép màu!" trước khi mọi người gục xuống khi cười đau bụng.

Miguel Bezos rời Casa de Sales sau một năm và đăng ký học đại học tại Đại học Albuquerque, trường Đại học Thiên chúa, (đến nay không còn), cấp học bổng toàn phần cho những cư dân Cuba rời đất nước. Để kiếm thêm tiền, ông làm thư ký ca đêm tại ngân hàng New Mexico – cùng lúc đó cô gái trẻ vừa ly hôn Jacklyn Gise Jorgensen bắt đầu làm ở phòng kế toán của ngân hàng. Ca làm của họ trùng nhau trong một giờ. Bằng chất giọng tiếng Anh đặc Cuba và từ vựng căn bản, Bezos mời cô đi chơi vài lần; cô liên tục từ chối lịch sự. Cuối cùng, cô cũng đồng ý. Vào buổi hẹn hò đầu tiên, họ đã xem bộ phim The Sound of Music.

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Miguel tốt nghiệp Đại học New Mexico và cưới Jackie vào tháng Tư năm 1968, Miguel làm kỹ sư dầu khí tại Exxon và họ chuyển đến Houston. Điểm dừng chân đầu tiên trong sự nghiệp của ông đem họ đến ba châu lục khác nhau. Cậu bé bốn tuổi Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen đổi tên thành Jeffrey Preston Bezos và bắt đầu gọi Miguel Bezos là cha. Một năm sau, họ sinh thêm bé gái Christina và sau đó một năm là bé trai Mark.

Jeff và các em lớn lên cùng với cường độ công việc không ngừng nghỉ của người cha và sự bộc lộ tình yêu dành cho nước Mỹ, những cơ hội và sự tự do mà ông có. Miguel Bezos, sau này dùng tên Mike, thừa nhận rằng ông cũng phản đối chính phủ xâm phạm đời sống cá nhân và công việc kinh doanh của công dân. “Chắc hẳn điều đó thấm vào cuộc sống gia đình chúng tôi,” ông nói. Ông nhấn mạnh rằng những buổi trò chuyện gia đình trong bữa tối không nhắc đến nội dung chính trị và chỉ xoay quanh câu chuyện về lũ trẻ. “Tôi không thể chịu được bất kỳ hình thức chuyên chế nhà nước nào, từ mức độ cao hoặc thấp hay không rõ ràng và có thể điều đó tạo ảnh hưởng nào đó.”

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Trong thời thơ ấu của người con đầu tiên có vài thời điểm đáng lưu tâm, khi Jackie Bezos hồi tưởng quá khứ. Ví dụ như lần cậu bé ba tuổi Jeff sử dụng chiếc tua vít tháo rời chiếc nôi vì cậu nhất định muốn ngủ trên giường. Hoặc thời điểm bà bế cậu đi bơi thuyền trong công viên và nhận thấy trong khi những đứa trẻ khác đang vẫy tay với mẹ thì Jeff nhìn vào hoạt động cơ khí của dây cáp và ròng rọc. Giáo viên nhà trẻ Montessori báo với cha mẹ cậu rằng, cậu bé quá mải mê với việc đang làm đến nỗi họ phải nhấc cậu và chiếc ghế ngồi để chuyển sang tham gia hoạt động khác. Tuy nhiên, Jeff là đứa con đầu của Jackie nên bà nghĩ rằng tất cả những đứa trẻ đều như vậy cả. “Cụm từ tài năng thiên bẩm vẫn còn xa lạ trong từ vựng giáo dục và rõ ràng với cả tôi khi đang ở tuổi 26,” Jackie Bezos nói. “Tôi biết thằng bé khôn sớm hơn những đứa trẻ khác, kiên định và cực kỳ tập trung, và bạn sẽ thấy điều này không đổi cho tới tận bây giờ.”

Khi lên tám, Bezos đạt điểm cao trong bài kiểm tra chuẩn cho học sinh, và cha mẹ cho cậu tham gia chương trình Vanguard tại trường tiểu học River Oaks, cách nửa tiếng lái xe từ nhà. Bezos là học viên xuất sắc và thầy hiệu trưởng chọn cậu để nói chuyện với những vị khách như Julie Ray, người tiến hành nghiên cứu cho cuốn sách Bật sáng tài năng (Turning On Bright Minds). Một công ty địa phương đã tặng trường máy tính lớn do thừa công suất sản xuất và cậu bé Bezos dẫn đầu nhóm bạn kết nối chiếc máy thông qua máy điện báo nằm trong hành lang trường. Chúng tự dạy nhau cách lập trình, rồi khám phá trò chơi Star Trek trên chiếc máy tính và dành nhiều giờ chơi với nó.

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Khi đó, cha mẹ Bezos lo lắng con trai của họ có thể trở thành một đứa trẻ trí thức mà xa rời thực tiễn. Để chắc chắn rằng cậu phát triển đầy đủ và giúp cậu “kết bạn với những điểm yếu của mình”, họ đăng ký cho cậu tham gia nhiều môn thể thao dành cho thanh thiếu niên. Bezos là một vận động viên ném bóng chày, nhưng mục tiêu của anh ta tỏ ra khó đoán đến mức mẹ anh ta buộc một tấm nệm vào hàng rào và yêu cầu anh ta tự tập luyện. Anh ấy cũng miễn cưỡng chơi bóng đá, hầu như không vượt qua giới hạn trọng lượng của giải đấu nhưng được huấn luyện viên đội tuyển chọn làm đội trưởng phòng ngự vì anh ấy có thể ghi nhớ các lượt chơi và nhớ vị trí mọi người trên sân phải đứng. Anh ấy nói: “Tôi đã rất khó để chơi bóng đá. “Tôi không có hứng thú chơi một trò chơi mà mọi người sẽ đè tôi xuống đất.” Tuy nhiên, trong lĩnh vực thể thao, Bezos bộc lộ một bản lĩnh thi đấu khốc liệt, và khi đội bóng của ông, Jets, mất chức vô địch giải đấu, ông đã rơi nước mắt.

Chơi thể thao không khiến cậu bé Jeff Bezos giảm đam mê khoa học. Star Trek là bộ phim luôn xuất hiện trong ngôi nhà của Bezos tại Houston và họ xem chiếu lại vào buổi chiều sau khi tan học. “Tất cả chúng tôi đều là những tay nghiện bộ phim. Tôi biết khi nào Jeff sẽ trích dẫn lời thoại, cậu bé quá say mê,” Jackie Bezos nói. Chương trình củng cố đam mê khám phá vũ trụ khởi nguồn khi cậu năm tuổi và xem tàu Appolo 11 hạ cánh xuống mặt trăng bằng chiếc ti vi đen trắng cũ của gia đình. Ông ngoại cậu hai thập kỷ trước làm việc cho cơ quan dự án nghiên cứu tiên tiến, viết tắt là ARPA (hiện giờ là DARPA) của quân đội, chuyên nghiên cứu và phát triển bay, cũng góp phần nuôi dưỡng niềm say mê trong cậu bé khi kể những câu chuyện về tên lửa và viễn cảnh du hành vũ trụ tuyệt vời.

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Năm 1968, ở tuổi 53, Pop Gise từ chức Ủy ban Năng lượng Nguyên tử Hoa Kỳ vì một cuộc tranh cãi quan liêu với các ông chủ của mình ở Washington. Anh và Mattie nghỉ hưu tại trang trại của gia đình vợ anh ở Cotulla, Texas. Trong độ tuổi từ bốn đến mười sáu tuổi, Jeff Bezos dành mỗi mùa hè với ông bà nội, và ông nội của ông gia nhập giúp đỡ của ông trong việc thực hiện công việc khó khăn của trang trại, nơi mà cách một trăm dặm từ các cửa hàng gần nhất hoặc bệnh viện.

Gise, người từng là trung úy chỉ huy của Hải quân Hoa Kỳ trong Thế chiến II, về nhiều mặt là người cố vấn của Bezos. Ông truyền cho Bezos những giá trị tự lực và khả năng xoay sở, cũng như tự căm ghét sự không hiệu quả. “Có rất ít việc mà ông không thể tự mình làm,” Jackie Bezos nói về cha bà. “Ông nghĩ mọi thứ đều có thể xử lý trong gara.” Bezos và Pop Gise sửa chữa cối xay gió và thiến những chú bò đực; họ cố gắng sửa chữa, tu bổ những đoạn đường bẩn và lắp đặt những thiết bị kỳ quặc như thiết bị tự động mở cổng và cần trục để di chuyển bộ phận nặng của chiếc xe ủi D6 Caterpillar bị hỏng.

Pop Gise thường xuyên thực hành phương châm tự mình làm mọi thứ. Một tình huống như vậy xảy ra khi chú chó chim trung thành Spike của anh bị thương ở đầu đuôi trên cửa xe hơi. Các bác sĩ thú y gần đó đều chuyên về gia súc và các động vật lớn khác, và Gise lý luận rằng anh có thể tự mình thực hiện các ca cắt cụt cần thiết trong nhà để xe của mình. "Tôi chưa bao giờ biết đuôi của một con chó có thể chảy nhiều máu đến vậy", anh ấy kể lại sau đó.

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Nhưng tất cả điều đó không phải là các cuộc phẫu thuật nghiệp dư và lao động chân tay; Pop Gise cũng khơi dậy trong cháu niềm đam mê theo đuổi trí tuệ. Ông mang cậu bé tới thư viện Cotulla địa phương. Bezos trải qua nhiều mùa hè liên tiếp với vô số sách khoa học giả tưởng do người dân địa phương quyên góp. Cậu bé đọc những công trình nghiên cứu của Jules Verne, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein và cực kỳ yêu thích việc du hành giữa các vì sao, và quyết định muốn trở thành nhà du hành vũ trụ khi lớn lên. Pop Gise dạy Bezos chơi cờ và đánh bại cậu liên tiếp, bỏ qua sự nài nỉ của Jackie để cậu thắng một ván. “Nó sẽ đánh bại cha khi nào sẵn sàng,” cha Jackie nói.

Ông bà ngoại Bezos dạy ông bài học về lòng trắc ẩn mà nhiều thập kỷ sau ông đã kể lại trong một bài phát biểu ở lễ phát bằng tại Đại học Princeton năm 2010. Hàng năm, Pop và Mattie Gise móc chiếc xe kéo Airstream vào ô tô và lái khắp đất nước với những người sở hữu Airstream khác đôi khi mang cả Bezos theo. Một trong những chuyến đi đó là khi Bezos 10 tuổi và đang ngồi trên ghế sau của ô tô, nghe thông tin thống kê tử vong trong thông báo của dịch vụ cộng đồng chống hút thuốc và tính ra thói quen hút thuốc lá của bà ngoại sẽ lấy đi chín năm tuổi thọ của bà. Khi cậu thò đầu lên ghế trước để thông báo điều này, bà đã bật khóc và Pop Gise tấp xe vào lề đường và dừng xe.

Thực ra, Mattie Gise được phát hiện mắc ung thư từ nhiều năm trước và cuối cùng cũng không chống lại được căn bệnh. Bezos kể lại những gì xảy ra tiếp theo trong bài nói chuyện tại Princeton.

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“Ông xuống xe, đi một vòng, mở cửa xe và đợi tôi bước theo. Liệu tôi có đang gặp rắc rối? Ông ngoại là người cực kỳ thông minh và trầm tính. Ông chưa bao giờ nặng lời với tôi, và có thể lần này sẽ là lần đầu tiên? Hoặc có thể ông sẽ yêu cầu tôi trở về ô tô và xin lỗi bà ngoại. Tôi chưa từng trải qua cảm giác này với ông bà ngoại và không có cách nào đánh giá hậu quả sẽ xảy ra sau đó. Chúng tôi dừng lại bên chiếc xe kéo. Ông ngoại nhìn thẳng vào tôi và sau một lúc im lặng, ông nhẹ nhàng và bình tĩnh nói: “Jeff ạ, một ngày nào đó cháu sẽ hiểu rằng, trở thành người tốt bụng và tử tế khó hơn nhiều so với người thông minh.”

Khi Jeff 13 tuổi, do yêu cầu công việc của Mike Bezos tại Exxon nên cả gia đình đã đến Pensacola, Florida. Jackie Bezos kiên quyết tin rằng cậu bé sẽ cần sử dụng những kiến thức và kỹ năng trong chương trình đào tạo tài năng bậc hai nên đã thuyết phục ban giám hiệu trường mới để cậu tham gia chương trình, mặc dù quy định yêu cầu phải chờ thêm một năm. Ban giám hiệu không đồng ý nên bà đề nghị họ kiểm tra năng lực cậu bé và rồi họ đã hoàn toàn thay đổi ý kiến. “Bạn muốn tìm hiểu nguyên nhân thành công của Bezos, hãy nhìn vào Jackie,” người bạn thời thơ ấu của Bezos nói. “Bà ấy là người phụ nữ nghiêm khắc nhất mà bạn từng gặp và cũng là người ngọt ngào và chung thủy nhất.”

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Jackie Gise mới chỉ 30 tuổi khi cậu con trai cả bước vào tuổi thiếu niên, nhưng bà hiểu và nuôi dưỡng niềm đam mê của cậu. Bezos mơ ước trở thành nhà sáng chế như Thomas Edison, nên mẹ cậu kiên nhẫn đưa cậu từ nhà đến cửa hàng Radio Shack địa phương để mua những bộ phận cho hàng loạt máy tự chế cải tiến: những chú rô bốt, tàu đệm hơi, nồi điện sử dụng năng lượng mặt trời và thiết bị khiến hai đứa em tránh xa phòng cậu. “Tôi bị mắc bẫy trong chính ngôi nhà của mình, với vô số các loại chuông báo động và một vài trong số chúng không chỉ phát ra âm thanh lớn mà còn thực sự là một chiếc bẫy cơ học,” Bezos nói. “Thỉnh thoảng tôi cũng lo lắng rằng, một ngày khi cha mẹ mở cửa bước vào và nhận lấy khoảng 13 kg đinh vào đầu hoặc một thứ gì khác.”

Đôi khi Bezos trông em gái và em trai trong những năm này, nhưng điệu cười chói tai đôi lúc cũng gây ra rắc rối. “Chúng tôi tin tưởng giao cho Jeff dẫn em đi xem phim,” Jackie Bezos nói, “nhưng hai đứa em trở về trong sợ hãi và nói rằng, ‘Jeff cười quá to.’ Nếu là bộ phim Disney thì cậu cười lấn át mọi thứ xung quanh.”

Sau hai năm dừng chân tại Pensacola, gia đình chuyển nhà một lần nữa. Lần này, Mike Bezos nhận nhiệm vụ tại Miami – thành phố Mike đến lần đầu cách đó 15 năm, trước khi còn là một người nhập cư nghèo khổ. Giờ đây, ông đã trở thành nhà quản lý của Exxon, và mua được ngôi nhà bốn phòng ngủ với bể bơi ở sân sau trong khu vực Palmetto giàu có tại quận Dade.

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Jeff học phổ thông trung học tại Miami Palmetto, tham gia lớp khoa học và câu lạc bộ cờ vua, lái chiếc xe chở hàng Ford Falcon màu xanh, không điều hòa và gây ấn tượng mạnh với bạn bè trong lớp về phương pháp làm việc khó chịu. “Cậu ấy tập trung hết sức tỉ mỉ,” Weinstein, người hàng xóm và trở thành một trong những người bạn tốt nhất của Bezos (cả hai hiện tại vẫn rất thân thiết) nói. “Không giống sự tập trung của nhà khoa học điên khùng, cậu ấy có khả năng tập trung cao độ vào những vấn đề nhất định. Cậu ấy cực kỳ có kỷ luật, điều đó giải thích tại sao cậu ấy có thể làm mọi việc.”

Ngôi nhà của Bezos trở thành nơi tụ tập của Jeff và bạn bè. Họ xây dựng câu lạc bộ khoa học trong ga ra khi tan học và tập trung tại đây sau những bữa tiệc cuối năm. Jackie Bezos, bà mẹ trẻ nhất trong số các bà mẹ của bọn trẻ trong nhóm, nhận được sự tôn trọng của lũ trẻ và trở thành một phần trong cuộc sống của chúng. Cùng với mẹ của Weinstein, bà tổ chức thăm thú hàng xóm và những cuộc họp mặt khu phố tại ngôi nhà của bà. Bà là người khá nghiêm khắc. Khi một cảnh sát bang phạt Bezos trên đường cao tốc Dixie, bà gọi điện cho từng người bạn ngồi cùng trên xe và xin lỗi họ.

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Cậu thiếu niên Bezos không chỉ xung đột với mẹ. Khi cậu học cấp ba, Jackie Bezos nhớ lại, Jeff đã tranh cãi nảy lửa với cha về vấn đề tư tưởng mà bây giờ bà không nhớ cụ thể là gì. Hai cha con bắt đầu tranh cãi vào khoảng 10 giờ tối và mỗi bên đều không có ý nhường nhịn đối phương. Bất đồng quan điểm bùng nổ thành cuộc tranh cãi lớn nhưng cuối cùng cũng kết thúc; Mike nhượng bộ bước vào phòng ngủ và Jeff đi về phòng tắm ở tầng trệt. Jackie để cả hai bình tĩnh lại trong một giờ và sau đó đến quan sát từng người. “Mike vẫn ở trong phòng ngủ, nhìn như thể vừa mất đi người bạn tốt nhất,” bà nói. Bà đi xuống tầng và gõ cửa phòng tắm, nhưng không nghe thấy câu trả lời. Cửa vẫn khóa. Bà đi vòng ra sân sau, mở cửa ngoài – và phòng tắm trống trơn. Xe ô tô của gia đình vẫn ở đó. “Tôi cực kỳ lo lắng,” Jackie nói. “Lúc đó đang là giữa đêm và thằng bé đi bộ ra khỏi nhà. Tôi nghĩ, điều này không tốt chút nào cả.”

Trong lúc bà đang tính xem nên làm gì tiếp theo thì điện thoại đổ chuông. Đó là Jeff, cậu sử dụng dịch vụ điện thoại trả tiền từ nơi gần nhất, an toàn nhất – bệnh viện gọi về nhà. Cậu nói cậu không muốn bà lo lắng, nhưng cậu vẫn chưa sẵn sàng về nhà. Cuối cùng bà thuyết phục để bà đến đón và họ lái xe đến một quán ăn rẻ tiền mở vào ban đêm ở gần đó và nói chuyện hàng giờ. Cuối cùng cậu đồng ý về nhà, dù lúc đó đã hơn ba giờ sáng và cậu phải tới trường vào hôm đó, nhưng rõ ràng Jeff không hề ngủ. Sáng hôm đó, khi Mike Bezos đi làm, ông thấy một bức thư viết tay của cậu con trai trong cặp. Ông vẫn còn giữ bức thư đó cho đến tận bây giờ.

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Bezos làm nhiều công việc lặt vặt khác nhau trong suốt quãng thời gian học cấp ba. Trong một mùa hè, cậu là tay làm món rán nổi tiếng tại cửa hàng McDonald’s địa phương và học được cách đập trứng một tay. Một công việc khác ít được biết đến hơn là giúp đỡ một người phụ nữ hàng xóm lập dị có ý nghĩ ngày nào đó sẽ nuôi và bán chuột Hamster. Bezos lau dọn chuồng và cho những con vật gặm nhấm ăn, nhưng cậu sớm nhận ra đang dành nhiều thời gian lắng nghe rắc rối của người phụ nữ đó hơn là chăm sóc những con chuột. Cậu rõ ràng là người bạn tâm giao tốt vì bà từng gọi cho cậu tại trường và kéo cậu ra khỏi lớp học để thảo luận về một vài khủng hoảng cá nhân mới xuất hiện. Khi Jackie Bezos biết điều này, bà đặt dấu chấm hết cho mối quan hệ.

Bạn bè cấp ba của Bezos nói rằng cậu có tính cách cực kỳ cạnh tranh. Cậu là chủ nhân của giải thưởng dành cho học sinh khoa học giỏi nhất tại trường cấp ba trong ba năm liền, học sinh có điểm toán cao nhất trong hai năm, và giành giải thưởng trong hội chợ khoa học toàn bang với công trình về ảnh hưởng của môi trường không trọng lực đối với ruồi nhà. Đôi khi cậu thông báo với bạn bè trong lớp về kế hoạch trở thành người đại diện cho 680 học sinh toàn khóa đọc diễn văn tốt nghiệp. Và cậu nhồi nhét thời gian biểu với những khóa học vinh danh để đẩy cao thứ hạng. “Cuộc đua [đối với những học sinh còn lại] sau đó trở thành cuộc cạnh tranh để trở thành người có vị trí số hai,” Josh Weinstein nói. “Jeff quyết định cậu muốn điều đó và phấn đấu nỗ lực hơn bất kỳ ai.”

Ursula Werner, bạn gái thời phổ thông của Jeff, nói rằng cậu là mẫu người cực kỳ sáng tạo và lãng mạn. Trong sinh nhật lần thứ 18 của cô, cậu dành nhiều ngày liền xây dựng trò chơi tìm kiếm, dẫn cô đi vòng quanh Miami với những yêu cầu kỳ lạ và gây bối rối, như vào ngân hàng yêu cầu thu ngân một triệu xu và đi vòng quanh Home Depot để tìm kiếm manh mối được giấu dưới nắp bình nước toilet.

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Sau mùa hè đầy dầu mỡ ở McDonald’s, Bezos không muốn làm công việc lương thấp tương tự nên cậu cùng với Werner mở học viện DREAM (GIẤC MƠ), cung cấp khóa học 10 ngày trong mùa hè cho trẻ em ở độ tuổi lên 10 về những chủ đề đa dạng như Gulliver du ký, hố đen, ngăn cản nguyên tử, và chiếc máy tính Apple II của gia đình Bezos. Lớp học “tập trung sử dụng tư duy mới vào những chủ đề cũ,” theo như tờ rơi của những giáo viên trẻ phát cho cha mẹ. Werner nói rằng cha mẹ cô không tin vào tính khả thi của dự án và băn khoăn liệu ai sẽ đăng ký. Tuy nhiên, cha mẹ Bezos ủng hộ nỗ lực này và ngay lập tức đăng ký cho Mark và Christina. “Tôi có cảm giác rằng Jackie và Mike là bậc cha mẹ tốt bụng, những người luôn khuyến khích Jeff và nuôi dưỡng tính sáng tạo của cậu ấy,” Werner nói.

Bezos vào thẳng Đại học Princeton và không chỉ trở thành người đọc diễn văn tốt nghiệp tại trường phổ thông mà cậu còn giành được danh hiệu Hiệp sĩ Bạc, danh hiệu danh giá toàn bang được tài trợ bởi tờ Miami Herald. Theo Weinstein, người đã ở đó, khi Jeff đi vào ngân hàng gửi số tiền thưởng, thu ngân nhìn vào tấm séc và nói: “Ồ, cậu làm gì cho Miami Herald vậy?” và Bezos tự mãn trả lời: “Tôi giành danh hiệu Hiệp sĩ Bạc.”

Bezos tự tay viết bài diễn văn tốt nghiệp. Mẹ cậu đánh máy, dừng lại khá lâu để hiểu và nhận ra rằng Jeff đã có những tham vọng lạ lùng, điên cuồng khi chỉ là học sinh phổ thông cuối cấp. Bà vẫn giữ bản sao, trong đó phần mở đầu bài phát biểu liên quan đến Star Trek, “Vũ trụ, biên giới cuối cùng,” và thảo luận về giấc mơ cứu nhân loại bằng việc tạo ra những vùng đất vĩnh cửu cho con người trong trạm không gian quay theo quỹ đạo và biến trái đất thành nơi bảo tồn tự nhiên khổng lồ.

Đó không phải là những ý tưởng viển vông, chúng đơn thuần là mục tiêu cá nhân. “Bất kỳ hình ảnh nào mà cậu ấy tưởng tượng về tương lai của mình cũng liên quan đến việc trở nên giàu có,” Ursula Werner nói. “Không có cách nào để đạt được những gì cậu ấy mong muốn nếu không có tiền.” Vậy chính xác cậu ấy muốn gì? “Lý do cậu ấy kiếm nhiều tiền,” Werner trao đổi với nhà báo liên hệ với bà trong những năm 1990 để hiểu về con người quyền lực trong lĩnh vực Internet, “là phải đến được không gian rộng hơn nữa.”

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Năm 2000, khi Amazon đang cố gắng khôi phục đơn hàng và chiến đấu với những người nghi ngờ tương lai dot-com, Bezos chứng kiến cơ nghiệp của mình sụt giảm mạnh, từ 6,1 xuống còn 2 tỉ đô la. Đó là một con số lớn và khiến ông trở thành một trong những người giàu nhất thế giới. Ông đã chứng kiến tận mắt công nghệ, sự kiên nhẫn và tư duy dài hạn có thể được đền đáp. Và vào thời kỳ đỉnh điểm của chủ nghĩa hoài nghi trên toàn thế giới về triển vọng tương lai của Amazon, Bezos bí mật thành lập công ty mới hoàn toàn, hoạt động trong lĩnh vực khám phá vũ trụ và đăng ký kinh doanh tại bang Washington.

Bezos định giữ bí mật về phòng nghiên cứu vũ trụ mới. Tuy nhiên, nhiều đồng nghiệp trong Amazon biết về tham vọng của ông. Ông nói với Kay Dangaard, người phụ trách quan hệ công chúng của Amazon vào những năm 1990. Bà cố gắng làm hài lòng Jeff bằng cách bí mật biến công ty con thành thương hiệu của Amazon. Trên thực tế, bà còn xây dựng thỏa thuận về việc đưa bảng xếp hạng sản phẩm của Amazon lên mặt trăng trong bộ phim Những cuộc phiêu lưu của Pluto Nash của Eddie Murphy, nhưng hủy thỏa thuận sau khi đọc kịch bản tồi tệ. Năm 1999, bà cố gắng đề nghị NASA chấp thuận cho phi hành gia của tàu vũ trụ Discovery đặt hàng quà Giáng Sinh trên Amazon từ quỹ đạo trái đất. Sau khi nhận được sự quan tâm ban đầu, cơ quan NASA dè chừng ý tưởng vì coi nó là quá thương mại.

Bezos cũng tiết lộ giấc mơ của mình cho Nick Hanauer, nhà đầu tư vào Amazon từ thời kỳ đầu và thành viên hội đồng quản trị không chính thức của công ty trong suốt 5 năm đầu. “ Ông ấy hoàn toàn nghĩ rằng sẽ vào vũ trụ,” Hauauer nói. “Đó luôn là một trong những mục tiêu của ông. Đó là lý do tại sao ông bắt đầu làm việc mỗi sáng. Ông cực kỳ nghiêm khắc với mục tiêu của bản thân.”

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Nhìn lại, dường như Bezos đang trêu ngươi giới truyền thông khi giữ kín những kế hoạch nghiên cứu vũ trụ. Rõ ràng, ông không thể không ám chỉ đến vấn đề đó. Trao đổi về hiện trạng môi trường sống trên trái đất với tạp chí Wired năm 1999, ông nói: “Tôi không ngại giúp đỡ theo cách này hay cách khác. Tôi nghĩ rằng chúng ta đều có trứng trong một chiếc rổ.” Ông trao đổi với công ty Fast vào năm 2001 và kết luận sẽ thật tuyệt nếu nội dung của cuốn tiểu thuyết Dune đề cập đến việc nhân loại sinh sống trên những hành tinh khác không còn là “điều giả tưởng”.

Trong một cuộc phỏng vấn tôi thực hiện với Bezos vào năm 2000, tôi hỏi anh ấy đang đọc gì. Anh ấy đã nói về các cuốn sách của Robert Zubrin Đi vào không gian: Tạo ra một nền văn minh đi ngoài không gian và Trường hợp cho sao Hỏa. Vào cuối cuộc trò chuyện, tôi tự hỏi khi nào thì một doanh nhân dũng cảm ở Thung lũng Silicon sẽ thành lập một công ty vũ trụ tư nhân (đây là hai năm trước khi người đồng sáng lập PayPal Elon Musk thành lập công ty tên lửa SpaceX). Câu trả lời của Bezos dường như đặc biệt phức tạp. “Đó là một vấn đề kỹ thuật rất khó và tôi nghĩ rất khó để biết bạn sẽ tạo ra lợi tức như thế nào trong một khoảng thời gian hợp lý cho khoản đầu tư đó,” ông nói. “Vì vậy, câu trả lời cho câu hỏi của bạn có thể là có, có thể là có ai đó đang làm việc đó, nhưng không phải vậy… khi bạn tham gia các hội nghị đầu tư mạo hiểm, nó không bao giờ xuất hiện. Để nói rằng đó là một chủ đề tuyệt vời và sẽ là phóng đại nó như thế nào.”

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Năm 2002, Bezos đã tạo một Danh sách điều ước công khai của riêng mình trên Amazon, có sẵn cho bất kỳ ai xem, chỉ rõ một số sở thích đọc của ông. Trong số các tựa sách có Lịch sử của Phương tiện Không gian, của Tim Furniss, và Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe, của Peter Douglas Ward và Donald Brownlee. Sau đó, vào tháng 2 năm 2003, tôi tham dự một hội nghị TED, một cuộc tụ họp thường niên dành cho công nghệ và thiết kế được tổ chức hồi đó ở Monterey, California, và tôi tình cờ nghe ai đó nói về một công ty vũ trụ ở Seattle tên là Blue. Một tháng sau, Bezos và luật sư của ông bị thương nhẹ trong vụ tai nạn máy bay trực thăng gần Alpine ở tây Texas. “Khi đang cất cánh, đuôi máy bay chạm vào cây, chiếc máy bay lộn nhào mất thăng bằng, hạ xuống trên một nhánh sông nhỏ và một phần máy bay chìm trong nước.” Theo bản tin chính thức về vụ tai nạn của Cục Quản lý Hàng không Liên bang. “Ba hành khách trên máy bay bị thương và được đưa tới bệnh viện địa phương. Mức độ thương tổn không đáng lo ngại.”

Sau đó, Bezos trả lời phỏng vấn trên tạp chí Time rằng, khoảnh khắc tai nạn xảy ra, suy nghĩ bao trùm ông là cái chết ngớ ngẩn. Về sau lộ ra thông tin ông đang tìm mua đất xây nông trại ở Texas. Bezos muốn xây dựng trải nghiệm cho những đứa trẻ, giống như những gì ông đã trải qua cùng ông bà ngoại ở nông trại tại Cotulla.

Ông cũng luôn tìm kiếm nơi phù hợp để xây dựng bệ phóng tàu vũ trụ.

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Khi vụ tai nạn xảy ra, thế giới vẫn không hề biết bất kỳ thông tin gì về công ty nghiên cứu khám phá vũ trụ của Jeff Bezos. Tuy nhiên, tất cả những sự việc xảy ra dường như đang chuẩn bị cho một điều gì đó. Sau vụ tai nạn, tôi lục tung cơ sở dữ liệu doanh nghiệp bang Washington để tìm cái tên Blue và tìm thấy hồ sơ cho Blue Operations LLC được đăng ký tại địa chỉ số 1200 phía nam đại lộ thứ 12 ở Seattle – trụ sở của Amazon. Công ty có website đăng tải nội dung mơ hồ về cơ hội việc làm cho kỹ sư hàng không vũ trụ, có kinh nghiệm trong lĩnh vực như lực đẩy và điện tử hàng không. Vào thời điểm đó, tôi đang là nhà báo ở tạp chí Newsweek và chủ đề về một tỉ phú nổi tiếng Internet đang bí mật xây dựng tàu vũ trụ là quá hấp dẫn.

Trong chuyến đi tới Seattle vào tháng Ba năm 2003, tôi thuê một chiếc ô tô và đợi đến lúc tối muộn mà lái xe tới một địa chỉ khác mà tôi tìm thấy trong hồ sơ doanh nghiệp bang Washington của công ty Blue, nằm trong khu công nghiệp nam Seattle dọc khu công nghiệp Duwamish Waterway. Trên mảnh đất có nhà kho rộng khoảng 4900 m2 có mái hiên xanh và trên cửa chính nổi bật dòng chữ Blue Origin màu trắng.

Mặc dù hôm đó là ngày cuối tuần và trời đã tối muộn, nhưng đèn vẫn sáng và một vài chiếc ô tô, xe máy vẫn đỗ trước cửa. Tôi không thể nhìn thấy bất kỳ thứ gì xuyên qua ô cửa sổ và chẳng có ai bên ngoài. Không khí nặng mùi nước sông và gỗ xẻ. Ngồi trong xe, tôi băn khoăn, thích thú khi phát hiện ra tàu vũ trụ bí mật và mục tiêu chinh phục Sao Hỏa được tài trợ bởi nhà tỉ phú. Tuy nhiên, tôi không thể tiếp tục tiến sâu vào bên trong và điều này khiến tôi cực kỳ thất vọng.

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Một vài tuần sau, tôi viết câu chuyện đầu tiên về Blue Origin mang tựa đề “Bezos trong vũ trụ” đăng trên tạp chí Newsweek. Dựa trên những bằng chứng quý giá thu thập trong đêm đó – một loạt bản dự thảo về sứ mệnh công ty Blue Origin có dính vết cà phê – tôi đã viết rằng, sứ mệnh trong dài hạn của công ty là tạo ra nơi sinh sống lâu dài cho nhân loại trong vũ trụ. Công ty đang xây dựng tàu vũ trụ New Shepard, đặt theo tên của Alan Shepard, nhà du hành Sao Thủy tiên phong. Con tàu mang sứ mệnh đem du khách lên tầng khí quyển. Thiết kế độc đáo của con tàu cho phép cất cánh thẳng đứng và những tên lửa hỗ trợ kiểm soát hạ cánh dọc để chiếc tàu có thể tái sử dụng. Công ty cũng đầu tư vào những nghiên cứu mang tầm nhìn dài hạn về hệ thống đẩy mới, như động cơ sóng và năng lượng cung cấp từ tia laser nằm ở mặt đất.

Vài ngày sau khi đến nhà kho của Blue Origin, tôi viết email gửi cho Bezos về những chi tiết mình biết và tiết lộ trước nội dung sẽ viết trong bài báo và cố gắng thử phản ứng. Tôi không còn lưu lại bức thư, nhưng tôi chắc hẳn đã ám chỉ rằng ông dần mất kiên nhẫn với những gì mà NASA đang tiến hành về du hành vũ trụ. Tôi vẫn giữ bức thư trả lời:

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Cậu bé tên lửa

Brad thân mến, tôi đang đi du lịch và trả lời thư trên chiếc Blackberry – có thể anh sẽ nhận được bức thư này.

Blue sẽ thật hấp tấp và vội vã nếu đưa ra bất kỳ phát ngôn hoặc nhận xét về bất kỳ vấn đề nào, bởi vì chúng tôi chưa làm được bất kỳ điều gì đáng kể. Nếu anh còn quan tâm đến chủ đề này trong những năm tiếp theo, chúng tôi sẽ ghi nhớ khi có gì đó đáng nhắc tới. Một số điều anh biết là đúng và một số là sai. Tôi sẽ chỉ nhận xét một vấn đề bởi vì anh động chạm đến cảm xúc, và tôi nghĩ rằng điều này gây ra tổn thương cho những người đang làm việc tại NASA. Cần có sự đối trọng ở đây.

NASA là kho báu quốc gia và hoàn toàn ngớ ngẩn nếu ai đó thất vọng về NASA. Lý do duy nhất tôi quan tâm đến lĩnh vực vũ trụ là bởi vì họ đã khơi gợi đam mê trong tôi từ khi còn là đứa trẻ năm tuổi. Anh nghĩ có bao nhiêu cơ quan chính phủ có khả năng khơi gợi đam mê cho đứa trẻ năm tuổi? Công việc mà NASA đang làm yêu cầu yếu tố kỹ thuật cao đầy tính nguy hiểm, và họ tiếp tục thực hiện những công việc tuyệt vời. Lý do DUY NHẤT mà các công ty vũ trụ nhỏ có thể làm BẤT KỲ VIỆC GÌ là bởi vì họ dựa trên vai những thành quả nghiên cứu của NASA.

Nếu anh cần ví dụ cụ thể: Hãy xem xét tất cả những công ty sử dụng chương trình máy tính phức tạp nhất để phân tích những vấn đề như: cấu trúc, dòng nhiệt và khí động học, do NASA nghiên cứu lập trình (trong nhiều năm và kiểm tra ngặt nghèo trên thực tiễn!).

JEFF

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Giới truyền thông biết đôi chút thông tin sau khi Newsweek đăng bài viết. Tuy nhiên, Blue Origin vẫn nằm trong bức màn bí ẩn. Sử dụng những công ty nặc danh đặt theo tên những nhà thám hiểm nổi tiếng trong lịch sử (như James Cook LP và Coronado Ventures), Bezos mua các nông trại tại Texas và đưa ra mức giá hời với chủ đất quanh Van Horn, Texas, không xa nơi chiếc trực thăng gặp tai nạn. Đến năm 2005, ông đã sở hữu 290.000 héc ta – diện tích bằng 1/3 đảo Rhode. Ông công khai ý định xây sân bay vũ trụ khi bước vào văn phòng của tờ báo địa phương Van Horn Advocate, và trả lời phỏng vấn ngoài kịch bản với biên tập viên đang ngơ ngác vì bất ngờ.

Trong bài phát biểu tại Đại học Carnegie Mellon năm 2001, Bezos nói rằng mục tiêu của Blue Origin là phải giảm chi phí và tăng tính an toàn của công nghệ đưa nhân loại vào vũ trụ. Công ty đang “tiến hành nghiên cứu để thực hiện giảm chi phí cho chuyến bay vào vũ trụ để xây dựng tương lai khi nhân loại có thể khám phá trực tiếp hệ mặt trời và hoàn toàn mang tính cá nhân,” ông nói. “Qua thời gian, những tiến bộ trong khoa học và công nghệ chắc chắn sẽ từ từ xóa dần bất kỳ thách thức nào.”

Tiến triển của dự án có thể chậm hơn những gì Bezos và các nhà khoa học tên lửa tham gia ước lượng ban đầu. Năm 2001, con tàu thử nghiệm của Blue Origin mất kiểm soát ở độ cao 13.716 m, tạo ra một quả cầu lửa trên bầu trời. Người dân Van Horn được phen nhớ về thảm họa tai nạn tàu vũ trụ Challenger. “Không ai trong chúng tôi mong muốn kết quả này, tuy nhiên chúng tôi đã lường trước những khó khăn,” Bezos viết trên trang web Blue Origin. Một năm sau, công ty thử nghiệm thành công hệ thống tên lửa đẩy thoát phi thuyền. Công ty nhận hai chứng nhận nhượng quyền trị giá hơn 25 triệu đô la từ NASA để phát triển công nghệ liên quan đến tàu vũ trụ. Ông trùm Internet Elon Musk với SpaceX, và tỉ phú Richard Branson, người sáng lập Virgin Galactic, cũng đang theo đuổi mục tiêu vũ trụ tương tự.

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Bezos không cho phép công chúng hay giới truyền thông tham quan cơ sở vũ trụ của ông. Năm 2006, công ty chuyển trụ sở đến địa điểm lớn hơn ở Kent, Washington, cách Seattle khoảng 32 km về phía nam. Khách tham quan miêu tả nơi đây tràn ngập đồ vật sưu tập vũ trụ của Bezos, như những mô hình từ Star Trek, những bộ phận tên lửa từ nhiều loại tàu vũ trụ khác nhau theo từng thời kỳ lịch sử, và bộ trang phục phi hành gia từ Liên bang Xô viết. Những kỹ sư di chuyển trên những chiếc xe tự cân bằng Segways trong địa điểm có diện tích 26.000 m2. Tại khu vực ra vào của tòa nhà, Bezos cho để mô hình mô phỏng nguyên cỡ con tàu vũ trụ ở thời kỳ nữ hoàng Victoria. Con tàu được dựng dựa theo những mô tả trong cuốn tiểu thuyết của Jules Verne, đầy đủ buồng lái, những nút điều khiển bằng đồng và nội thất của thế kỷ XIX. Khách tham quan cũng có thể thử cảm giác tưởng tượng trở thành nhà thám hiểm dày dạn kinh nghiệm trong thời đại của thuyền trưởng Nemo và Phileas Fogg khi bước vào bên trong, ngồi trên những chiếc ghế bọc nhung. “Đối với một đứa trẻ có trí tưởng tượng phong phú, thì mô hình đó giống như thật vậy,” Danny Hillis, một người bạn của Bezos nói.

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Như nhiều nhà khởi nghiệp vĩ đại khác, bao gồm Walt Disney, Henry Ford và Steve Jobs, Bezos đang dần biến những điều thấy trong tưởng tượng thành hiện thực, những điều kỳ diệu trong tuổi thơ hiện hữu trong thế giới thực. “Vũ trụ dành cho Jeff không phải là năm 2000 hay cơ hội trong năm 2010,” Hillis nói. “Đó là giấc mơ của nhân loại trong nhiều thế kỷ và tiếp tục trong nhiều thế kỷ tiếp theo. Bezos không ngần ngại nhận lấy những trách nhiệm đi kèm khi theo đuổi niềm đam mê về vũ trụ. Ngay cả khi Amazon phải vật lộn để duy trì hoạt động kinh doanh, ông vẫn nhận thêm nghĩa vụ, thuê thêm nhân viên cho công ty Blue Origin và phân chia thời gian phù hợp sao cho hiệu quả nhất. Bezos đặt cho Blue Origin khẩu hiệu bằng ngôn ngữ Latinh, Gradatim Ferociter, có nghĩa là “Từng bước, từng bước, một cách mạnh mẽ”. Cụm từ cũng nắm bắt chính xác triết lý dẫn dắt Amazon. Bước từng bước vững chắc tiến tới những mục tiêu tưởng như bất khả thi sẽ thành công trong một ngày nào đó. Những bước lùi chỉ là tạm thời. Những người phản đối tốt nhất nên bị phớt lờ.

Trong một cuộc phỏng vấn, Bezos được hỏi về nguyên nhân hay động lực để hoàn thành nhiều mục tiêu lớn lao như vậy, trong khi ông đã sở hữu lượng tài sản cực kỳ lớn. “Tôi nhận thức rằng, bản thân tôi được thúc đẩy bởi những người phụ thuộc vào mình,” ông trả lời. “Tôi thích trở thành chỗ dựa cho mọi người.”

—ooOoo—

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THUYẾT HỖN MANG

Jeff Bezos thích trở thành chỗ dựa cho mọi người, tuy nhiên sau khi Amazon đạt lợi nhuận trong thời kỳ đi xuống của đợt vỡ bong bóng dot-com năm 2003, ông khám phá ra rằng bản thân ông cần dựa vào ai đó. Amazon phản ứng im lặng trước hầu hết những chỉ trích gay gắt. Bezos cần sự giúp đỡ để giải quyết tình trạng hỗn loạn đang lớn dần trong nội bộ công ty.

Amazon ngày càng trở thành công ty có quy mô lớn hơn và phức tạp hơn. Công ty có 2.100 nhân viên vào cuối năm 1998, và con số này tăng nhanh chóng thành 9.000 người vào cuối năm 2004. Sau khi vượt qua được giai đoạn khó khăn nhất trong thời kỳ vỡ bong bóng dot-com, công ty tiếp tục mở rộng phân nhóm mới, như đồ dùng thể thao, quần áo, trang sức và những lãnh thổ mới như Nhật Bản và Trung Quốc.

Tăng trưởng nhanh chóng tạo ra những mầm mống của sự hỗn loạn. Tất cả các công ty đều phải trải qua giai đoạn quan trọng này, khi mà cấu trúc bên trong giống như đôi giày cũ của một thiếu niên đang tuổi lớn, bỗng nhiên không còn vừa nữa. Tuy nhiên, Amazon đã trải qua hình thức trầm trọng nhất. Công ty càng lớn và càng tham vọng thì Amazon càng khó khăn trong việc giữ nhân viên, phối hợp và vận hành nhanh chóng, hài hòa. Bezos muốn đồng thời thực hiện vài chiến lược, nhưng do các phòng ban trong công ty được tổ chức chồng chéo, phụ thuộc lẫn nhau nên mất quá nhiều thời gian để phối hợp.

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Tại các trung tâm phân phối, sự hỗn loạn không quá khó để nhìn thấy mà hiện hữu ngay trong các vấn đề như: hệ thống thường xuyên thiếu hàng, có thể dẫn tới đóng cửa trung tâm hàng giờ, và hàng chồng hàng hóa được đặt khắp nơi trên sàn bị nhân viên kho bỏ qua. Trong những năm đầu phát triển nhanh chóng, những phân nhóm sản phẩm mới nhảy vào hệ thống phân phối hàng của Amazon mà có rất ít sự chuẩn bị trước. Nhân viên công ty nhớ rằng khi phân nhóm nội thất và đồ dùng trong bếp được ra mắt vào mùa thu năm 1999, những con dao làm bếp rơi khỏi băng chuyền mà không được bao gói bảo vệ. Phần mềm phân phối nội bộ Amazon được thiết kế mà không tính toán đến những phân nhóm mới, nên máy tính sẽ hỏi công nhân đồ chơi mới nhập vào kho “là cuốn sách có bìa cứng hay mềm”.

Amazon cố gắng kiểm soát hỗn loạn bằng cách kết hợp sự nỗ lực của nhân viên với những khẩu hiệu đoàn kết như lớn mạnh nhanh chóng và giữ cho ngôi nhà của chúng ta ngăn nắp. Điều này giúp mọi người cùng tiến về một hướng, nhưng bây giờ công ty quá lớn để những khẩu hiệu trên phát huy tác dụng.

Trong những năm công ty phát triển mạnh, Bezos không chấp nhận giảm tốc, mà đặt cược gấp đôi, gấp ba vào Internet và tiếp tục sứ mệnh to lớn về cửa hàng bán mọi thứ. Để dẫn dắt công ty vượt qua giai đoạn chuyển giao, ông đã tạo ra cấu trúc tổ chức không truyền thống với cái tên rất khác biệt. Và để dẹp yên sự hỗn loạn ở các trung tâm phân phối, ông bắt đầu dựa vào nhà quản lý trẻ Jeff Wilke, người theo phong cách quản lý không kiên nhẫn. “Họ bổ sung lẫn nhau,” Bruce Jones, phó chủ tịch chuỗi cung ứng, nói. “Bezos muốn làm điều gì đó và Wilke biết cách thực hiện. Rất nhiều niềm vui, theo cách xảo quyệt nhất.”

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Công việc của Jeff Wilke là phải dọn dẹp những sai lầm của người tiền nhiệm. Jimmy Wright và những đồng nghiệp cao bồi từ Walmart đã xây dựng hệ thống cung ứng hàng hóa toàn quốc cho Amazon vào cuối những năm 1990 và đã từng là hệ thống phân phối hàng bán lẻ số lượng lớn tốt nhất trên thế giới. Tuy nhiên, để làm hài lòng nhanh chóng những mục tiêu không có điểm dừng của Bezos đối với việc dự trữ và vận chuyển mọi loại hàng hóa, họ đã phải tạo ra hệ thống tốn kém, không đáng tin cậy và cần tiếp viện nhân lực lớn từ Seattle vào dịp cuối năm. “Đó là một mớ hổ lốn,” Bruce Jones nói. “Hệ thống giống như cách Walmart đã làm, nó sẽ cực kỳ tuyệt vời nếu bạn phải phân phối 5.000 cuộn giấy vệ sinh. Nhưng nó không hoàn toàn phù hợp với đơn hàng nhỏ.”

Wilke đến từ vùng ngoại ô Pittsburgh, con trai của một luật sư; cha mẹ ông ly hôn khi ông 12 tuổi. Ông nhận ra bản thân có năng khiếu toán học vào lớp sáu. Trong kỳ thi toán học khu vực, ông đứng ở vị trí thứ hai trong sự ngạc nhiên của chính bản thân mình. Wilke đạt thành tích tốt trong những năm ở trường trung học, nhưng tư vấn viên khuyên ông không nên đăng ký vào Đại học Princeton bởi vì không ai tốt nghiệp trường trung Keystone Oaks từng được chấp nhận vào ngôi trường danh tiếng này. Ông bỏ ngoài tai lời khuyên, vẫn đăng ký và đã trúng tuyển.

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Wilke tốt nghiệp đạt thành tích cao nhất tại Đại học Princeton vào năm 1989, ba năm sau khi Bezos tốt nghiệp. Ông nhận bằng MBA và MS trong chương trình kép về đào tạo kỹ sư/MBA từ Viện Công nghệ Massachusetts (MIT). Mark Mastandrea, bạn học cùng lớp tại MIT, theo bước ông gia nhập Amazon, nói rằng Wilke “là một trong những người thông minh nhất mà tôi từng gặp. Ông có câu trả lời nhanh hơn bất kỳ ai khác.”

Wilke khởi đầu sự nghiệp từ công ty tư vấn Anderson và tiếp theo là nhà khổng lồ về sản xuất AlliedSignal mà sau này bị Honeywell thâu tóm. Trong trụ sở của AlliedSignal ở Morristown, New Jersey, Wilke đắm chìm trong Sáu Sigma, triết lý quản lý và sản xuất hướng tới tăng sự hiệu quả bằng cách nhận diện và loại bỏ nguyên nhân gây lỗi.

Trở về năm 1999, Scott Pitasky, nhân viên tuyển dụng của Amazon sau này trở thành người đứng đầu bộ phận nhân sự của Microsoft, được giao phụ trách tìm kiếm người thay thế cho Jimmy Wright. Pitasky trước đó từng làm việc với Wilke ở AlliedSignal, nên ông nghĩ ngay về đồng nghiệp cũ sau khi kết luận rằng Amazon cần người đủ thông minh để chiến đấu cùng Jeff Bezos, người luôn đặt câu hỏi về cách thức mọi việc được thực hiện.

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Pitasky đã theo sát Wilke trong một chuyến công tác ở Thụy Sĩ và mời anh ta tiếp quản mạng lưới phân phối quan trọng tại Amazon. Anh ấy nói với Wilke rằng anh ấy sẽ có cơ hội xây dựng một mạng lưới phân phối duy nhất và xác định một ngành công nghiệp non trẻ, một cơ hội đơn giản là không tồn tại ở AlliedSignal. Làm việc nhanh chóng, Pitasky thuyết phục COO Joe Galli khi đó đang đến thăm các con của mình ở Bờ Đông, gặp Wilke tại một nhà hàng khách sạn gần Sân bay Quốc tế Dulles ngay khi Wilke trở về Hoa Kỳ.

Vào thời điểm đó, độ ba mươi hai tuổi, với nụ cười răng khểnh và cặp kính cận hợp thời trang, Wilke không thể hiện ngay hình ảnh một nhà lãnh đạo năng động. “Anh ấy không phải là một người giao tiếp lôi cuốn,” Galli nói. “Anh ấy là một chuyên gia chuỗi cung ứng cực kỳ thông minh và chu đáo, người dựa vào phân tích dựa trên thực tế và muốn hoàn thành và làm điều đúng đắn.” Trong bữa tối hôm đó, và trong một chuyến đi riêng mà Galli đến thăm Wilke và vợ anh, Liesl, tại nhà của họ ở New Jersey, cặp đôi đã gắn bó với nhau. Wilke và Galli đều đến từ Pittsburgh và có nguồn gốc trung lưu tương tự. Từng là nhân viên bán hàng, Galli đã khơi gợi sự quan tâm của Wilke đối với những thách thức hậu cần lớn mà Amazon phải đối mặt. Wilke sau đó đến thăm Seattle để phỏng vấn với Bezos và Joy Covey. Ông gia nhập công ty ngay sau đó với tư cách là phó chủ tịch kiêm tổng giám đốc hoạt động trên toàn thế giới. Sau cuộc trò chuyện cuối cùng của anh ấy với Larry Bossidy, người vừa tuyên bố nghỉ hưu từ AlliedSignal, CEO kỳ cựu đã dành cho anh ấy một cái ôm.

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Ngay sau khi chuyển đến Seattle, Wilke ưu tiên bổ nhiệm các nhà khoa học và kỹ sư vào những vị trí quản lý hơn là sử dụng các cựu binh đến từ nhà phân phối bán lẻ. Ông liệt kê danh sách 10 người thông minh nhất ông từng biết và thuê tất cả họ, bao gồm Russell Allgor, kỹ sư chuỗi cung ứng của Bayer AG. Wilke, học cùng Allgor tại Đại học Princeton. Allgor và các đồng nghiệp trong nhóm thuật toán chuỗi cung ứng của ông trở thành vũ khí bí mật của Amazon. Họ sử dụng toán học để trả lời cho những câu hỏi như ở đâu và khi nào thì dự trữ loại sản phẩm cụ thể trong mạng lưới trung tâm phân phối của Amazon và làm sao để sắp xếp hiệu quả nhất nhiều mặt hàng của cùng một khách hàng trong một chiếc hộp.

Wilke nhận ra rằng Amazon đang phải đối mặt với vấn đề độc nhất vô nhị trong phân phối: Công ty rất khó lên kế hoạch trước cho lần vận chuyển tiếp theo. Công ty không dự trữ và chuyển hàng theo số lượng hay chủng loại có thể dự đoán trước. Một khách hàng có thể yêu cầu một cuốn sách, một chiếc DVD, vài dụng cụ – có thể bao gói quà tặng, có thể không – và việc kết hợp chính xác như trên có thể không bao giờ được lặp lại. Như vậy, sẽ cần đến vô số phép toán hoán vị. “Chúng tôi cần phải sắp xếp và đáp ứng đầy đủ đơn đặt hàng của khách hàng. Các nhà máy nằm gần khu vực sản xuất và lắp ráp hơn là bán lẻ,” Wilke nói. Do vậy, một trong những việc đầu tiên là Wilke đã đổi tên những cơ sở phân phối để thể hiện rõ hơn vai trò và nhiệm vụ chúng đang thực hiện. Chúng không còn được gọi là nhà kho (tên ban đầu) hoặc trung tâm phân phối (theo cách đặt tên của Jimmy Wright); từ lúc đó, chúng mang tên trung tâm đơn hàng, viết tắt là FC.

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Trước khi Wilke gia nhập Amazon, giám đốc phụ trách các trung tâm FC thường triển khai kế hoạch linh hoạt, đàm thoại trên điện thoại vào mỗi buổi sáng và đánh giá trung tâm nào đang vận hành hết công suất hoặc dư thừa năng lực phân phối, rồi sau đó điều chuyển đơn hàng dựa trên những đánh giá trên sao cho phù hợp. Những thuật toán của Wilke khớp với nhu cầu đặt hàng chính xác đến trung tâm FC, định mức hàng dự trữ và những cuộc đàm thoại buổi sáng trở nên không cần thiết. Sau đó, ông áp dụng học thuyết Sáu Sigma từ AlliedSignal vào chuỗi quy trình hoạt động và kết hợp với triết lý sản xuất của Toyota, theo đó yêu cầu công ty hợp lý hóa mọi chi phí theo giá trị mà nó tạo ra cho khách hàng và cho phép nhân viên (bây giờ được gọi là cộng sự) kéo dây đỏ và dừng sản xuất ngay tại chỗ nếu họ phát hiện sai sót (thuật ngữ trong ngành cho hệ thống này là andon).

Trong hai năm đầu tiên của mình, Wilke và nhóm của mình đã nghĩ ra hàng chục số liệu, và ông ra lệnh cho các giám đốc của mình theo dõi chúng cẩn thận, bao gồm số lượng hàng mà mỗi FC nhận được, bao nhiêu đơn hàng đã được vận chuyển và chi phí đóng gói trên mỗi đơn vị vận chuyển từng mặt hàng. Anh ấy đã loại bỏ những cái tên cũ hơn, đôi khi phù phiếm vì những sai lầm — thuật ngữ của Amazon để mô tả việc giao nhầm sản phẩm cho khách hàng bằng cách thay tên gọi — và thay thế bằng những cái tên nghiêm trọng hơn. Và anh ấy đã truyền đạt một số kỷ luật cơ bản trong FCs. Wilke nói: “Khi tôi tham gia, tôi không tìm thấy đồng hồ thời gian. Mọi người đến vào lúc họ thích buổi sáng và sau đó về nhà khi công việc đã hoàn thành và chiếc xe tải cuối cùng đã được xếp hàng. Đó không phải là kiểu nghiêm ngặt mà tôi nghĩ sẽ mở rộng." Wilke đã hứa với Bezos rằng ông sẽ tiết kiệm chi phí một cách đáng tin cậy mỗi năm chỉ bằng cách giảm thiểu các lỗi và tăng năng suất.

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Wilke nâng cao tầm nhìn của các giám đốc điều hành FC trong Amazon. Ông đưa họ đến Seattle bất cứ khi nào có thể và nhấn mạnh tính cấp thiết của những vấn đề kỹ thuật. Trong kỳ nghỉ lễ, trong những gì còn lại ngày nay là chữ ký cá nhân của anh ấy, Wilke mặc một chiếc áo sơ mi flannel hàng ngày như một cử chỉ đoàn kết với các đồng đội cổ áo xanh của anh ấy trong sân. Wilke “nhận ra rằng một tổng giám đốc là một công việc khó khăn và ông ấy khiến bạn cảm thấy mình đang ở trong một câu lạc bộ trọn đời”, Bert Wegner, người điều hành Fernley FC trong những năm đó nói.

Wilke còn sở hữu một vũ khí khác: Giống Bezos, ông cũng là người có tính khí nỏng nảy. Trở lại thời điểm mùa thu năm 2000, hệ thống phần mềm trong các trung tâm FC của Amazon vẫn không đủ khả năng theo dõi chính xác hàng trong kho và hàng chuyển đi. Do vậy kỳ nghỉ năm đó, năm thứ hai Wilke làm việc cho công ty, trong suốt cuộc chạy đua hàng năm đến lễ Giáng Sinh, toàn bộ công ty dường như trong một cuộc chiến lớn. Wilke khởi động hàng loạt cuộc họp qua điện thoại với các giám đốc điều hành trung tâm tại Mỹ và châu Âu. Ông nói với họ trong mỗi cuộc họp rằng, ông muốn biết con số thực tế: bao nhiêu đơn hàng được chuyển, bao nhiêu không được chuyển, liệu có hàng đang chờ chuyển và nếu xảy ra tình trạng này thì nguyên nhân nằm ở đâu. Và khi kỳ nghỉ lễ đạt đỉnh điểm, Wilke còn yêu cầu các giám đốc chuẩn bị câu trả lời cho “những hàng hóa nào đang có” – con số chính xác và số lượng hàng hóa đang chứa trong các xe tải chờ bên ngoài FC để chờ dỡ và số lượng đơn hàng đang chờ gửi tới bưu điện hoặc UPS.

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Trung tâm FC ở McDonough, Georgia, thành phố của tầng lớp công nhân lao động cách Atlanta khoảng 48 km về phía nam lặp đi lặp lại một vấn đề và trở thành tâm điểm chú ý của kỳ nghỉ lễ năm đó. Trong sức nóng của những ngày nghỉ lễ sôi động, McDonough vẫn thường xuyên chậm tiến độ công việc. Giám đốc điều hành trung tâm Bob Duron, trong tương lai sẽ chuyển sang Walmart làm quản lý, đang ở trong tình trạng nguy hiểm khi Wilke xem xét các giám đốc trung tâm trong cuộc họp qua điện thoại và đặt câu hỏi về hàng hóa trong các trung tâm. Khi Wilke hỏi đến trung tâm FC McDonough, Duron không có con số đưa ra và trả lời: “Xin chờ một chút, tôi không thể nhìn thấy chúng bên ngoài cửa sổ.” Sau đó ông ngả lưng vào ghế và bắt đầu đếm to trên điện thoại. “Tôi có một, hai, ba, bốn…”

Wilke nổi điên lên. Ông đang gọi từ văn phòng ở nhà tại đảo Mercer Island và bắt đầu thét lên – một cuộc tấn công âm thanh kết hợp giữa cường độ và sự thô tục khiến chiếc điện thoại phát ra những tiếng rít. Ngay sau cơn bùng nổ là sự im lặng đáng sợ. Wilke dường như biến mất.

Không ai nói gì trong 30 giây. Cuối cùng, Arthur Valdez, giám đốc trung tâm Campbellsville nói nhỏ. “Tôi nghĩ rằng ông ấy đã ăn mất điện thoại rồi.”

Mỗi người có cách giải thích riêng cho những gì thực sự xảy ra. Một vài người cho rằng trong lúc tức giận, Wilke đã vô tình giật mạnh dây điện thoại khỏi tường. Những người khác giả thuyết rằng ông đã ném chiếc máy ra khỏi phòng. Một thập kỷ sau, trong bữa trưa tại quán bia Italia cạnh văn phòng Amazon, Wilke giải thích thực ra lúc đó ông vẫn đang kết nối nhưng đơn giản là vì quá tức giận nên ông không thể nói gì nữa. “Chúng tôi chỉ đang chiến đấu để khiến trung tâm McDonough hoạt động tốt ở nhiều mức độ khác nhau,” ông nói. “Chúng tôi tranh đấu để tuyển dụng đúng nhà quản lý, và tranh đấu để có đủ người làm việc tại đó.”

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Mùa xuân năm đó, Amazon đang chạy đua đến mục tiêu lợi nhuận đặt ra nên Wilke cho đóng cửa McDonough và sa thải 450 nhân viên toàn thời gian. Đóng cửa trung tâm không giải quyết được vấn đề của Amazon; trên thực tế, giảm nhân lực thậm chí còn đẩy sức ép lớn hơn lên những trung tâm FC còn lại của Amazon. Công ty đã hoạt động ở công suất cao trong kỳ nghỉ lễ và doanh số tăng trên 20% một năm. Giờ đây, Amazon không có sự lựa chọn nào khác ngoài việc phải nắm chắc hệ thống phân phối phức tạp của công ty và tạo ra hiệu quả đầu tư cao hơn những gì đã làm được.

Wilke đã đốt đi một chiếc thuyền khi đang ra khơi và hạm đội Amazon không có đường quay đầu. Trong chuyến đi này, ông chứng tỏ phong cách lãnh đạo dựa trên thực tiễn kết hợp với sự nóng nảy – là phần tích cực trong tính cách kiểu Bezos. Có lẽ không phải ngẫu nhiên, Wilke được thăng chức trở thành phó chủ tịch cấp cao chỉ trong vòng một năm sau khi gia nhập Amazon. Jeff Bezos đã tìm thấy đồng minh tin cậy trong cuộc chiến chống lại sự hỗn loạn.

Trong cuộc họp quản lý ngoài văn phòng vào cuối những năm 1990, một nhóm những quản lý trẻ tiềm năng đứng trước những nhân vật quan trọng nhất công ty và thuyết trình về vấn đề tồn tại trong tất cả các tổ chức quy mô lớn: Khó khăn trong việc liên kết những chi nhánh nằm trên vùng địa lý rộng lớn. Những quản lý trẻ đưa ra hàng loạt giải pháp khác nhau để khuyến khích đối thoại nhóm chéo và tỏ vẻ tự hào về sáng kiến của mình. Sau đó, Jeff Bezos với khuôn mặt đỏ bừng và mạch máu đập mạnh trên trán lên tiếng.

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“Tôi hiểu những gì các bạn đang đưa ra, tuy nhiên các bạn hoàn toàn sai,” ông nói. “Giao tiếp là dấu hiệu của rối loạn chức năng. Điều đó có nghĩa là mọi người đang không làm việc gần gũi cùng nhau và theo hệ thống. Chúng ta nên cố gắng tìm ra cách để các nhóm giao tiếp với nhau ít hơn, chứ không phải nhiều hơn.”

Cuộc đối đầu đó đã được nhiều người ghi nhớ. David Risher nói: “Jeff có những khoảnh khắc tuyệt vời này. “Toàn bộ máu trong toàn bộ cơ thể anh ấy đổ dồn lên mặt. Anh ấy vô cùng đam mê. Nếu anh ta là người đập bàn, anh ta sẽ đập bàn ”.

Trong cuộc họp đó và với những phát biểu trước công chúng sau này, Bezos đều đưa ra những phát biểu định hướng điều hành Amazon theo phương thức phân quyền và ra quyết định độc lập. “Một mô hình quản lý dọc không đủ linh động để ứng phó với biến động nhanh chóng,” ông nói. “Tôi luôn cố gắng điều hành mọi người làm theo những gì tôi yêu cầu. Và nếu tôi thành công, có lẽ chúng tôi sẽ không có công ty đúng kiểu.”

Điểm phản trực giác của Bezos là sự phối hợp giữa các nhân viên làm lãng phí thời gian và những người gần gũi nhất với vấn đề thường ở vị trí tốt nhất để giải quyết chúng. Điều đó sẽ đại diện cho một cái gì đó tương tự như sự khôn ngoan thông thường trong ngành công nghệ cao trong thập kỷ tới. Các công ty áp dụng triết lý này, như Google, Amazon, và sau này là Facebook, phần nào rút ra bài học từ các lý thuyết về phát triển phần mềm tinh gọn và nhanh nhẹn. Trong cuốn sách công nghệ cao nổi tiếng The Mythical Man-Month, giáo sư khoa học máy tính và kỳ cựu của IBM, Frederick Brooks lập luận rằng việc bổ sung nhân lực vào các dự án phần mềm phức tạp thực sự đã làm chậm tiến độ. Một lý do là thời gian và tiền bạc dành cho giao tiếp tăng tỷ lệ thuận với số lượng người trong một dự án.

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Bezos và những nhà sáng lập công ty khác đã hành động dựa trên nhiều học rút ra từ những gã khổng lồ về công nghệ trước đây. Microsoft áp dụng mô hình quản lý dọc, sử dụng nhiều cấp quản lý bậc trung, một hệ thống khiến các quyết định được đưa ra lâu hơn và cải tiến diễn ra chậm hơn. Nhìn vào trải nghiệm không mấy dễ chịu của gã khổng lồ trong ngành phần mềm Lake Washington khi áp dụng mô hình quản lý dọc, ban quản lý Amazon đã thấy được những dấu hiệu cảnh báo để tránh những sai lầm tương tự.

Sức ép cắt giảm chi phí cũng khiến Bezos phải loại bỏ phân cấp quản lý bậc trung trong công ty. Sau khi thị trường chứng khoán sụt giảm vào năm 2000, Amazon trải qua hai đợt sa thải hàng loạt. Tuy nhiên, Bezos vẫn không muốn ngừng việc tuyển dụng, ông chỉ muốn tăng cường hiệu quả. Do vậy, ông xây dựng khung tiêu chí đối với những nhân viên mà ông muốn chiêu mộ. Toàn bộ nhân viên tuyển dụng mới phải trực tiếp nâng cao hiệu quả hoạt động của công ty. Ông muốn những nhân viên trực tiếp làm việc như kỹ sư, nhân viên phát triển và có lẽ người mua hàng, chứ không phải là những nhà quản lý. “Chúng tôi không muốn trở thành đội quân đồng nhất toàn những nhà quản lý, một mô hình kiểu Microsoft. Chúng tôi muốn những nhóm độc lập có khả năng đưa ra quyết định riêng rẽ,” Neil Roseman nói. Hoặc, như Roseman từng nói: “Những đơn vị hoạt động riêng rẽ thì tốt. Những thứ để quản lý đơn vị hoạt động thì tồi tệ.”

Tuy nhiên, như thường thấy trong nhiều trường hợp, không ai có thể tiên đoán được mức độ Bezos mạo hiểm theo đuổi những thuyết quản lý tổ chức trong hành trình chắt lọc thành những tư tưởng cốt lõi. Vào đầu năm 2002, là một phần trong lịch trình kế hoạch cá nhân mới, ông dành thời gian sau kỳ nghỉ lễ để suy nghĩ và đọc sách. Trở về công ty sau vài tuần, Bezos đưa ra ý tưởng lớn cho nhóm S Team bên trong tầng trệt ngôi nhà của ông tại Medina, Washington.

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Ông đưa ra ý kiến rằng toàn bộ công ty sẽ tái cấu trúc theo những gì mà ông gọi là “những nhóm hai pizza”. Nhân viên sẽ được tổ chức thành những nhóm độc lập có số thành viên dưới 10 người – quy mô đủ nhỏ để khi làm việc quá giờ, các thành viên trong nhóm có thể được cung cấp hai chiếc bánh pizza. Các nhóm này sẽ giải quyết độc lập những vấn đề lớn nhất xảy ra với Amazon. Họ sẽ phải đấu tranh với các nhóm còn lại để giành lấy nguồn lực và đôi khi nhân đôi nỗ lực làm việc. Một ý tưởng dường như tái tạo thực tiễn tồn tại trong tự nhiên của nhà bác học Darwin.

Trong khái niệm “nhóm hai pizza” của Bezos vẫn tồn tại những khía cạnh chưa thỏa đáng. Mỗi nhóm được yêu cầu đưa ra đề xuất “chức năng phù hợp” của nhóm đó – một phương trình tuyến tính có thể được dùng để đo mức độ ảnh hưởng mà không có bất kỳ sự mơ hồ nào. Ví dụ, “nhóm hai pizza” chịu trách nhiệm gửi thư điện tử quảng cáo tới khách hàng có thể chọn “chức năng phù hợp” là tỉ lệ số lượng thư gửi được mở nhân với số lượng trung bình đơn hàng được sinh ra từ những thư quảng cáo này. Nhóm lập trình phần mềm cho các trung tâm FC có thể chọn mức giảm chi phí chuyển hàng trên mỗi loại sản phẩm và thời gian giảm từ khi khách hàng đặt đơn hàng và hàng rời khỏi FC trên xe tải. Bezos muốn tự mình kiểm chứng mỗi phương trình và theo dõi kết quả theo thời gian. Đó là cách thức Bezos sử dụng để định hướng phát triển cho các nhóm.

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Bezos đang áp dụng một thứ gì đó, dạng như thuyết Hỗn mang để quản lý, theo đó thừa nhận sự phức tạp, rắc rối trong công ty bằng cách xé nhỏ chúng thành những phần cơ bản nhất với hi vọng rằng có thể có những kết quả bất ngờ, nhưng kết quả cuối cùng lại gây thất vọng. Ý tưởng “nhóm hai pizza”được áp dụng đầu tiên trong nhóm kỹ sư, do Rick Dalzell gây dựng ban đầu, và sau vài năm triển khai đã xảy ra hiện tượng áp dụng không đồng nhất trong toàn công ty. Chẳng có lý do gì để tổ chức một số phòng ban như pháp chế và tài chính theo kiểu này.

Ý tưởng “chức năng phù hợp” xung đột rõ nét nhất với một số khía cạnh nền tảng của bản chất con người – không ai thoải mái khi phải xây dựng khung đánh giá chính mình, khi bạn có thể bị đánh giá khắc nghiệt theo kết quả cuối cùng đạt được. Việc yêu cầu các nhóm xác định “chức năng phù hợp”, một phần nào đó giống như việc yêu cầu một người đã bị kết tội quyết định xem anh ta muốn bị phán xét như thế nào. Các nhóm mất quá nhiều thời gian để lo lắng về công thức đưa ra, khiến chúng trở lên phức tạp và khó hiểu hơn. “Là một thành viên trong “nhóm hai pizza” không thoải mái,” Kim Rachmeler nói. “Nó thực sự khó chịu. Nó không giúp bạn hoàn thành công việc và cuối cùng đa số kỹ sư và các nhóm trong công ty đều ghét nó.”

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Một năm sau ngày Jeff Wilke gia nhập Amazon, ông gọi điện cho giảng viên từng giảng dạy ông, giáo sư khoa học quản lý Stephen Graves của MIT và nhờ giúp đỡ. Amazon đã và đang vận hành hệ thống phân phối thương mại điện tử ở quy mô không có đối thủ cạnh tranh, nhưng công ty vẫn phải vật lộn để vận hành nó hiệu quả. Hệ thống gồm bảy trung tâm FC trên toàn thế giới thực sự tốn kém, công suất hoạt động không đồng nhất. Bezos muốn trang web Amazon.com có thể thông báo cho khách hàng chính xác khi nào hàng đặt mua sẽ được chuyển. Ví dụ, một sinh viên đại học đặt hàng cuốn sách quan trọng phục vụ cho kỳ thi hết môn nên được biết rằng, cuốn sách sẽ phải được chuyển đến vào thứ Hai tuần sau. Tuy nhiên, các trung tâm FC không đủ tin cậy để đưa ra kết quả chính xác như vậy.

Wilke hỏi Graves liệu có thể sắp xếp một cuộc gặp mặt với ông và cộng sự trong tháng đó để có cái nhìn chính xác hơn đối với vấn đề của họ không. Bezos và Wilke đang tự hỏi bản thân một câu hỏi căn bản dường như gây bất ngờ hiện nay: Amazon có nên tiếp tục dự trữ hàng trong kho và phân phối sản phẩm không? Giải pháp thay thế là phải chuyển sang mô hình đang được sử dụng bởi các đối thủ cạnh tranh như Buy.com, đó là nhận đặt hàng trực tuyến nhưng yêu cầu sản phẩm chuyển thẳng từ nhà sản xuất và nhà phân phối như Ingram.

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Ngày lễ Thánh Patrick đó, một số bộ não lớn nhất của Amazon đã đến tham dự một phòng họp buồn tẻ tại trung tâm thực hiện Fernley, Nevada. Jeff Bezos và Brewster Kahle, một kỹ sư siêu máy tính và là người sáng lập Alexa Internet, một công ty khai thác dữ liệu mà Amazon đã mua lại, đã thực hiện chuyến bay kéo dài hai giờ từ Seattle trên chiếc máy bay riêng mới mua của Bezos, một chiếc Dassault Falcon 900 EX. Stephen Graves đã bay từ Massachusetts đến Reno và sau đó lái xe ba mươi bốn dặm qua sa mạc đến Fernley. Một vài kỹ sư khác của Amazon cũng có mặt ở đó, cũng như quản lý cấp cao của cơ sở vào thời điểm đó, Bert Wegner. Vào buổi sáng, cả nhóm đã đi tham quan trung tâm thực hiện và nghe bài thuyết trình của một trong những nhà thầu chính của công ty, người đã liệt kê những lợi ích của thiết bị và phần mềm bổ sung mà anh ta có thể bán cho họ, phản ánh suy nghĩ truyền thống về phân phối không hoạt động. ngay từ đầu. Sau đó, đáng ngạc nhiên họ sa thải nhà thầu trong ngày và dành cả buổi chiều để điền vào bảng trắng và giải quyết câu hỏi làm thế nào mọi thứ ở FC có thể được cải thiện. Đến bữa trưa, họ đến McDonald’s mua đồ ăn nhẹ từ các máy bán hàng tự động của tòa nhà.

Với Wegner, những vấn đề đặt ra ngày hôm đó cộng hưởng với suy nghĩ của cá nhân ông. “Chúng tôi phải ra quyết định quan trọng,” ông nói. “Liệu việc phân phối đơn thuần chỉ là một dạng “hàng hóa” hay sẽ trở thành nhân tố cạnh tranh chủ lực? Nếu chỉ là hàng hóa, tại sao phải đầu tư vào nó? Và khi chúng tôi lớn mạnh lên, liệu chúng tôi sẽ tiếp tục tự làm hay thuê ngoài?” Nếu Amazon chọn thuê ngoài, Wegner có thể sẽ không còn cần thiết. “Về cơ bản, tôi nhìn thấy sự nghiệp vụt qua trước mắt,” ông nói.

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Trang thiết bị trong các trung tâm FC của Amazon ban đầu do Jimmy Wright xây dựng và giống như hệ thống trong các trung tâm phân phối của Walmart, được thiết kế bởi những nhà sản xuất để vận hành theo từng đợt – chuyển từ sức chứa tối thiểu đến tối đa và quay về bắt đầu chu kỳ mới. Trong giai đoạn đầu của mỗi đợt, nhóm nhân viên gom hàng tản ra khu vực do mình phụ trách, lấy các sản phẩm được đặt hàng. Vào thời điểm đó, Amazon sử dụng hệ thống lấy hàng theo đèn khá phổ biến. Nhiều loại đèn khác nhau được lắp giữa các lối đi và trên mỗi giá hàng để định hướng cho người gom hàng đến đúng nơi có sản phẩm cần lấy, rồi cho vào giỏ trên xe chứa hàng. Sau đó, họ đặt giỏ hàng lên băng chuyền chạy thẳng vào cỗ máy phân loại, phân chia toàn bộ sản phẩm vào từng đơn hàng rồi đẩy chúng vào dây chuyền khác để đóng gói và vận chuyển đến khách hàng.

Phần mềm yêu cầu người gom hàng phải làm việc độc lập, tuy nhiên trên thực tế một vài người sẽ mất nhiều thời gian hơn những người khác và khi đó tất nhiên nảy sinh vấn đề. Ví dụ, nếu 99 người gom hàng hoàn thành lô hàng trong vòng 45 phút, người thứ 100 mất thêm nửa tiếng nữa, như vậy 99 người còn lại phải ngồi đợi cho đợt gom hàng tiếp theo. Chỉ đến khi chiếc xe chở hàng cuối cùng đổ hàng vào băng chuyền thì hệ thống mới tiếp tục hoạt động và khi âm thanh lớn ngân lên khắp trung tâm phân phối thì điều đó cho biết rằng hệ thống đã sẵn sàng để bắt đầu hoạt động chu kỳ mới.

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Mọi việc diễn ra trong trung tâm FC đều đều theo từng đợt. Đối với một công ty đang cố gắng tối đa năng suất trong thời điểm cao điểm của mùa nghỉ lễ thì điều này trở thành vấn đề lớn. Wilke tán thành với nguyên lý đưa ra trong cuốn sách về ràng buộc nhân tố trong sản xuất có tựa đề Mục tiêu (The Goal) của Eliyahu M. Goldratt xuất bản năm 1984. Cuốn sách, viết dưới dạng một cuốn tiểu thuyết giải trí, hướng dẫn nhà sản xuất tập trung vào tối đa hóa hiệu quả những nút thắt lớn nhất. Đối với Amazon, đó là cỗ máy phân loại Crisplant, nơi sản phẩm được đưa vào phân loại, tuy nhiên sản phẩm được đưa vào theo từng lô giới hạn tốc độ xử lý. Và tất nhiên, cỗ máy hoạt động hết công suất chỉ trong một vài phút vào thời điểm nhiều lô hàng được đưa vào nhất. Nhóm của Wilke đã từng cố gắng chạy chồng đợt, tuy nhiên dẫn tới quá tải Crisplant và theo như cách nói của các giám đốc trung tâm là “nổ tung tòa nhà”. Điều này khiến trung tâm mất nhiều giờ để dọn dẹp đống lộn xộn và trở lại hoạt động bình thường.

Trong cuộc họp tại Fernley vào ngày hôm đó, ban lãnh đạo và các kỹ sư đặt ra các câu hỏi truyền thống phổ biến khi phân phối bán lẻ. Vào cuối buổi chiều, mọi người quay trở lại sàn kho và quan sát các đơn hàng di chuyển chậm chạp. “Tôi không biết Jeff Bezos, nhưng tôi chỉ nhớ rằng mình bị cuốn theo hình ảnh ông ấy ở đó với tay áo xắn cao, bò quanh băng chuyền với tất cả chúng tôi,” Stephen Graves, giáo sư MIT nói. “Chúng tôi đang tập trung suy nghĩ và nảy ra vài ý tưởng điên rồ để cải thiện tình hình.”

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Cuối ngày, Bezos, Wilke và đồng nghiệp đưa ra kết luận: Trang thiết bị và phần mềm từ nhà cung cấp thứ ba đơn giản là không được thiết kế cho thời điểm hiện tại. Để thoát khỏi hệ thống phân phối hàng hóa theo lô, chuyển sang hoạt động liên tục và từng đợt đơn hàng có thể dự đoán trước được đưa ra khỏi trung tâm, Amazon sẽ phải viết lại tất cả phần mềm. Thay vì loại bỏ công việc phân phối, họ sẽ phải tái đầu tư vào chúng để hoạt động hiệu quả hơn.

Trong vài năm tiếp theo, “chúng tôi sẽ lần lượt thoát khỏi các nhà cung cấp và xem họ ngạc nhiên ra sao,” Wegner nói. “Họ không thể tin rằng chúng tôi đang tự mình đưa ra các giải pháp.” Khi Amazon mở những trung tâm nhỏ tại những nơi như Seattle và Las Vegas để xử lý các sản phẩm có thể đóng gói nhanh chóng dễ dàng và các trung tâm FC lớn hơn ở Indianapolis, Phoenix và những nơi khác, công ty còn tiến xa hơn trong cải cách. Công ty không dùng đến hệ thống đèn lấy hàng và cỗ máy phân loại Crisplant, mà thay vào đó là áp dụng quy trình ít tự động hơn, trong đó các thuật toán vô hình được sử dụng. Nhân viên gom hàng sẽ đưa xe chở hàng từ các kệ hàng đến các trạm đóng gói ngay cạnh. Việc di chuyển của họ do phần mềm máy tính điều tiết cẩn thận. Dần dần, Amazon sẽ đánh bại hệ thống lấy hàng theo từng đợt, đẩy năng suất công nhân tăng cao, đồng thời tăng độ chính xác và tin cậy của các trung tâm FC.

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Thành công của Wilke trong việc xây dựng mạng lưới phân phối hiệu quả hơn giúp Amazon có lợi thế cạnh tranh trong những năm tiếp theo. Kiểm soát chặt chẽ hệ thống phân phối cho phép công ty đưa ra những cam kết với khách hàng về thời gian giao hàng cụ thể. Việc vận hành sử dụng công nghệ của riêng Amazon, từ chuỗi cung ứng đến trang web, cho phép Russell Allgor và đội ngũ kỹ sư tạo ra thuật toán mô phỏng vô số kịch bản xảy ra cho mỗi đơn hàng và khi đó hệ thống có thể chọn một phương án sao cho việc giao hàng nhanh nhất với chi phí thấp nhất. Hàng triệu phương án tối ưu như vậy được thực hiện mỗi giờ, giúp Amazon giảm chi phí – và do vậy giảm giá và tăng doanh số. Thử thách ở đây chỉ là làm sao vận hành tốt mô hình này.

“Dù cho việc này có khó khăn thế nào, thì việc gom hàng trong những trung tâm FC cũng bù cho chi phí lưu kho và những chi phí gián tiếp,” Jeff Wilke, người luôn nói rằng ông không bao giờ lo lắng Bezos sẽ từ bỏ mô hình trung tâm phân phối trong cuộc họp ở Fernley. “Nguyên lý và các phép toán học đứng về phía chúng tôi và tôi nhận ra rằng đây là công ty mà bạn có thể thành công khi các nguyên lý và phép toán đứng về phía bạn cũng như bạn là người kiên nhẫn và bền bỉ.”

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Bất cứ khi nào Jeff Bezos dạo quanh một trung tâm FC nào đó hoặc trụ sở Seattle, ông đều tìm ra sai sót – những thiết sót trong hệ thống công ty hoặc ngay cả trong văn hóa công ty. Như một buổi sáng bình thường trong tuần vào năm 2003, Bezos bước vào phòng hội nghị và bất ngờ khi nhìn thấy chiếc ti vi để trình chiếu video cho nhân viên mới được treo trên tường ở góc phòng. Một chiếc ti vi trong phòng hội nghị thì không có gì bất thường, tuy nhiên Bezos không hài lòng.

Việc lắp đặt này Bezos chưa từng biết hoặc cho phép và đối với ông, nó giống như nỗ lực vụng về để kết nối thông tin giữa các phòng ban và lãng phí. “Làm gì có thứ gì tốt lại được truyền đạt theo cách này,” ông phàn nàn.

Bezos quyết định tháo bỏ ngay lập tức tất cả ti vi mới trong các phòng hội nghị của Amazon. Nhưng theo Matt Williams, giám đốc lâu năm tại Amazon, Bezos vẫn giữ lại giá treo kim loại trên tường trong nhiều năm, thậm chí một số giá treo trên tường thấp đến nỗi nhân viên có thể chạm vào chúng. Như một lãnh chúa treo đầu kẻ thù bên ngoài ngôi làng, ông sử dụng giá treo như một biểu tượng cảnh cáo đối với nhân viên.

Câu chuyện chiếc ti vi đặt nền móng cho một giải thưởng chính thức khác tại Amazon. Một giải thưởng sẽ được trao cho nhân viên nếu họ xác định được bất kỳ hoạt động nào đó của công ty có tính quan liêu và lãng phí. Những chiếc ti vi không cần thiết trở thành phần thưởng. Khi nguồn cung giải thưởng ti vi đã hết, đồ trang trí cho chiếc bàn ghép từ gỗ làm cửa của công ty được trao cho nhân viên nêu ra “ý tưởng hoàn hảo giúp chúng ta giảm giá bán cho khách hàng”. Một lần nữa, Bezos nỗ lực tăng cường và củng cố những triết lý của ông về giá trị trong công ty.

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Cùng lúc gỡ những chiếc ti vi khỏi tường, Bezos đưa ra hai quyết định lớn thay đổi văn hóa công ty. Là một phần trong hành trình tìm cách phân bổ thời gian cá nhân tốt hơn, ông quyết định sẽ không họp riêng với từng cộng sự nữa. Những cuộc họp cá nhân thường chỉ để cập nhật thông tin không quan trọng và gây sao nhãng hơn là giải quyết vấn đề và đưa ra ý tưởng mới. Cho đến bây giờ, Bezos vẫn hiếm khi họp cá nhân với từng đồng nghiệp.

Một thay đổi khác cũng đặc biệt và có lẽ độc nhất vô nhị trong lịch sử công ty. Cho đến thời điểm đó, nhân viên Amazon vẫn đang sử dụng Microsoft PowerPoint và Excel để thuyết trình ý tưởng trong các cuộc họp. Bezos tin rằng phương pháp này che đậy tư duy lười biếng. “PowerPoint là phương thức giao tiếp mơ hồ,” Jeff Holden, đồng nghiệp cũ tại D. E. Shaw của Bezos, người đang ở trong nhóm S Team nói. “Cực kỳ dễ dàng giấu giếm giữa những dấu gạch. Bạn không bao giờ bị ép đưa ra suy nghĩ cá nhân.”

Bezos thông báo rằng nhân viên không được sử dụng công cụ hỗ trợ nữa và phải viết bản thuyết trình bằng văn xuôi, mà ông gọi chúng là những bản tường thuật. Nhóm S Team tranh luận với ông về lợi thế khi dùng PowerPoint nhưng Bezos khăng khăng theo ý mình. Ông muốn mọi người tư duy sâu và dành thời gian đưa ra suy nghĩ cá nhân thuyết phục. “Tôi không muốn nơi này trở thành câu lạc bộ đồng quê,” ông thích nói kiểu này khi ép nhân viên làm việc chăm chỉ hơn. “Những gì chúng ta làm là vất vả. Đây không phải nơi mọi người nghỉ ngơi.”

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Khi mới bắt đầu triển khai, nhân viên trong công ty trải qua giai đoạn điều chỉnh thích nghi. Các cuộc họp không còn bắt đầu với việc một ai đó đứng dậy điều khiển như từng thấy ở Amazon hay bất kỳ công ty nào khác. Thay vào đó, bản tường thuật được phân phát cho mọi người đọc trong 15 phút – hoặc lâu hơn. Ban đầu, công ty không đưa ra giới hạn số trang viết, và đó là sự bỏ sót mà Diego Piacentini gọi là “đau thương” và dẫn tới việc trong vài tuần, nhân viên cố gắng viết dài ra đến 60 trang. Ngay lập tức, quyết định bổ sung được ban hành, yêu cầu giới hạn sáu trang viết tường thuật và có thể thêm trang dành cho chú thích.

Không phải ai cũng thích phương pháp mới. Nhiều nhân viên cảm thấy quy định này thiên vị những ai viết tốt, nhưng không cần phải là người điều hành hiệu quả hoặc người có tư duy sáng tạo. Những kỹ sư đặc biệt không vui vẻ gì khi đột nhiên phải học tiếng Anh lớp chín. Lyn Blake, phó chủ tịch phụ trách các mối quan hệ của công ty với các nhà sản xuất cho biết: “Đưa mọi thứ vào một câu chuyện cuối cùng giống như mô tả một bảng tính.” Bản thân Blake nghi ngờ toàn bộ sự việc chỉ là một giai đoạn. (Không phải vậy.)

Bezos còn phát triển phương pháp mới ở mức độ cao hơn. Mỗi khi tính năng hoặc sản phẩm mới được đề xuất, ông quyết định rằng bản tường thuật nên được trình bày như bản thông cáo báo chí. Mục đích là để nhân viên phải chắt lọc những gì tinh túy nhất, bắt đầu từ những điểm khách hàng có thể nhìn thấy, cảm thấy – thông báo trước công chúng – và quay ngược trở lại. Bezos không tin có ai đó có thể đưa ra quyết định đúng đắn về một tính năng hoặc sản phẩm mà không biết chính xác cách truyền đạt – và cách khách hàng sẽ giải mã thông điệp ra sao.

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Steve Jobs nổi tiếng vì những hiểu biết thấu đáo những điều khách hàng muốn, tuy nhiên ông cũng được biết đến về tính khí thất thường với đồng nghiệp. Người sáng lập Apple từng được biết đến khi sa thải nhân viên ngay trong thang máy và quát vào mặt những quản lý không hoàn thành nhiệm vụ. Có lẽ tồn tại một cái gì đó mang tính đặc trưng trong ngành kinh doanh công nghệ vốn dĩ có nhịp độ nhanh khiến sinh ra hành vi này. Tính khí thất thường không hiếm thấy ở những CEO của ngành. Bill Gates thường nổi cơn tam bành. Steve Ballmer, người kế nhiệm ông tại Microsoft, có thiên hướng ném ghế. Andy Grove, CEO nhiều năm tại Intel, được biết đến là người khó tính, cục cằn và đáng sợ đến nỗi một nhân viên dưới quyền đã ngất trong một cuộc họp đánh giá công việc.

Jeff Bezos hoàn toàn mang những nét tính cách điển hình này. Ông có thiên hướng vui buồn thất thường và mang trong mình tính liều lĩnh, không theo đuổi những đặc điểm lãnh đạo truyền thống khác như xây dựng sự đồng tâm nhất trí và cổ súy phép lịch sự. Trước công chúng, ông có thể là người hấp dẫn và có khiếu hài hước, nhưng ở công ty, ông có thể hét vào mặt nhân viên.

Bezos thường nổi cơn tam bành mà một vài nhân viên Amazon ví von bí mật với nhau là “nutter” (người điên). Một đồng nghiệp không đáp ứng chính xác những mục tiêu của Bezos đưa ra, sẽ được dự đoán là hứng chịu cơn thịnh nộ.

Nếu một nhân viên nào đó không đưa ra câu trả lời đúng, hoặc cố tình lừa dối, hoặc lấy thành quả công việc của người khác, hoặc cho thấy đang tham gia hoạt động chính trị nội bộ, hoặc bất kỳ sự bất định không chắc chắn hay bạc nhược khi đang giữa trận chiến, thì mạch máu trên trán Bezos sẽ nổi lên và ông sẽ không thể kiểm soát bản thân. Ông có năng khiếu sản sinh ra những lời nói ngoa ngoắt, tàn nhẫn trong thời điểm này và qua năm tháng, ông đưa ra cơ số những lời khiển trách hủy diệt đối với nhân viên. Trong số những lời nói đó, một nhân viên cũ của Amazon vẫn còn nhớ:

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“Nếu điều đó nằm trong kế hoạch, tôi không thích kế hoạch của chúng ta.”

“Xin lỗi, hôm nay tôi bị ngớ ngẩn hả?”

“Tôi có cần bước xuống và lấy chứng nhận là CEO của công ty để bảo anh ngừng thách thức tôi về điều này không?”

“Anh đang cố gắng nhận công cho những gì mà anh không làm à?”

“Anh lười biếng hay đơn giản là không có năng lực?”

“Tôi tin tưởng trao cho anh quyền điều hành công việc kinh doanh đẳng cấp thế giới và đây là một minh chứng của việc anh đang làm tôi thất vọng.”

“Tôi mà nghe về ý tưởng đó một lần nữa, chắc tôi phải tự tử mất.”

“Anh có ngạc nhiên khi anh không trả lời được câu hỏi đó không?”

“Tại sao anh lại phá hủy cuộc đời tôi vậy?”

[Sau khi một nhân viên trình bày đề xuất.] “Chúng ta cần phải áp dụng một chút trí thông minh con người vào vấn đề này.”

[Sau khi xem xét kế hoạch hàng năm từ phòng cung ứng.] “Tôi đoán rằng phòng cung ứng sẽ chẳng làm được điều gì thú vị vào năm sau.”

[Sau khi đọc xong bản tường thuật.] “Tài liệu này hoàn toàn được viết bởi nhóm B. Có ai có thể đưa tôi tài liệu của nhóm A không? Tôi không muốn lãng phí thời gian với tài liệu của nhóm B nữa.”

Một số nhân viên Amazon hiện nay nghĩ rằng, Bezos giống Steve Jobs, Bill Gates và Larry Ellison, thiếu đồng cảm và điều này dẫn tới việc ông đối xử với nhân viên như nguồn lực của công ty mà không đếm xỉa đến những đóng góp của họ. Điều này giúp ông có cái đầu lạnh khi phân bổ vốn, nhân lực và đưa ra những quyết định kinh doanh cực kỳ lý trí, trong khi một tổng giám đốc điều hành khác có thể để tình cảm và các mối quan hệ cá nhân tác động. Tuy nhiên, họ cũng thừa nhận rằng mục tiêu nhắm đến của ông là phát triển hoạt động của công ty cũng như dịch vụ khách hàng và vấn đề cá nhân chỉ là thứ yếu. “Điều này không có nghĩa là ông hoan hỉ khi xúc phạm ai đó. Ông ấy không phải là tuýp người như vậy,” Kim Rachmeler nói. “Jeff không tha thứ cho sự ngu ngốc, thậm chí đó chỉ là ngu ngốc vô ý.”

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Dù đúng hay sai, thì hành vi của Bezos thường dễ được chấp nhận hơn bởi vì trước sự sửng sốt và tức giận của nhân viên thì ông đa phần đúng trong các phê phán, chỉ trích. Bruce Jones miêu tả lại việc dẫn dắt nhóm kỹ sư năm người tạo ra những thuật toán tối ưu hóa việc di chuyển của các nhân viên gom hàng trong các trung tâm FC, trong khi công ty đang cố gắng giải quyết vấn đề đóng gói hàng phân phối theo đợt. Nhóm đã mất chín tháng nỗ lực giải quyết yêu cầu và trình kết quả công việc lên Bezos và nhóm S Team. “Chúng tôi chuẩn bị những tài liệu đẹp mắt và mọi người đều trong tư thế sẵn sàng,” Jones nói. Bezos đọc báo cáo và nói: “Các anh đều nhầm rồi”. Sau đó, ông đứng dậy và bắt đầu viết lên bảng trắng.

“Ông ấy không có kiến thức nền tảng về lý thuyết kiểm soát và hệ thống vận hành,” Jones nói. “Ông ấy chỉ có chút ít kinh nghiệm trong trung tâm phân phối và chưa từng dành nhiều thời gian tiếp cận vấn đề.” Tuy nhiên, Bezos viết luận điểm trên bảng trắng và “mỗi ý ông đưa ra đều chính xác,” Jones nói. “Sẽ dễ chịu hơn nếu chúng tôi có thể chứng minh rằng ông ấy sai, nhưng chúng tôi không thể. Đó là những trao đổi thường thấy với Jeff. Ông ấy có khả năng hiểu biết phi thường về những điều chưa từng làm và ông cực kỳ thẳng thắn khi trao đổi về chúng.”

Năm 2002, Amazon thay đổi phương pháp hạch toán hàng tồn kho, từ phương pháp nhập sau - xuất trước, sang nhập trước - xuất trước. Thay đổi này cho phép Amazon phân biệt rõ hơn giữa sản phẩm trong trung tâm FC của Amazon và sản phẩm trong trung tâm FC của đối tác như Toys “R” Us và Target.

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Nhóm chuỗi cung ứng của Jones đảm nhiệm công việc phức tạp này. Phần mềm sử dụng dính lỗi lập trình và gây ra khó khăn trong một vài ngày khi mà hệ thống của Amazon không thể ghi nhận bất kỳ doanh thu nào. Vào ngày thứ ba vấn đề xảy ra, khi Jones đang cập nhật tình hình quá trình chuyển đổi cho nhóm S Team thì Bezos chỉ trích ông. “Ông ấy gọi tôi là ‘tên ngốc khốn kiếp’ và nói rằng ông ấy không hiểu tại sao lại thuê một tên ngốc như tôi vào công ty, và nói rằng, ‘Tôi cần anh dọn dẹp nhóm của anh,’” Jones nhớ lại sau nhiều năm. “Thật thô bạo. Tôi gần như muốn từ bỏ. Tôi là nhân tố thất bại. Một tiếng sau, ông ấy trở lại trạng thái bình thường, hoàn toàn khác lúc đó. Tôi chưa từng gặp ai có thể thay đổi nhanh như vậy.”

Khi Jones rời khỏi cuộc họp FIFO, trợ lý hành chính của Jeff Wilke tiến đến gần ông với chiếc điện thoại. Wilke gọi khi vừa nghe tin về cuộc đụng độ dù đang đi nghỉ ở Arizona. “Ông ấy nói ‘Bruce, tôi muốn anh biết rằng tôi ủng hộ anh một trăm phần trăm. Tôi hoàn toàn tự tin vào khả năng của anh. Tôi đang ở trên sân gôn, nếu anh cần gì, tôi sẽ làm bất cứ điều gì có thể để giúp anh .”

Jeff Wilke không phải lúc nào cũng mềm mỏng hơn Bezos. “Cặp đôi” đến thăm các trung tâm FC vào mùa thu hàng năm, họ dành một tuần trên đường, một ngày ở mỗi trung tâm FC và dùng sự hiện diện lãnh đạo của mình để tập trung loại bỏ sai sót, cải thiện chu trình hoạt động. Giám đốc điều hành trung tâm, với lòng bàn tay ướt đẫm mồ hôi và tim đập mạnh, sẽ trình bày với cặp đôi về những kịch bản tình huống khẩn cấp và cách họ từng quản lý hàng nghìn công nhân thời vụ trong các mùa nghỉ lễ. Wilke và Bezos đi sâu vào các chi tiết, đưa ra những câu hỏi tiên đoán tàn khốc. Điều đó thực sự vừa đầy cảm hứng vừa đáng sợ. “Cặp đôi này có thể rất thô lỗ,” Mark Mastandrea nói. “Bạn phải nói thoải mái cụm: ‘Tôi không biết, tôi sẽ trở lại trong vài tiếng nữa,’ và tìm ra câu trả lời. Bạn đừng đưa ra những câu nói nhảm nhí. Như vậy là chấm hết đó.”

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T. E. Mullane làm việc trong mạng lưới hậu cần của Amazon trong nhiều năm, giúp thành lập và quản lý những trung tâm FC mới. Ông cho mở một trung tâm FC mới tại Chambersburg, Pennsylvania và tiếp Wilke trong chuyến thăm đầu tiên tới trung tâm. Theo như lời Mullane kể lại, Wilke bắt đầu chuyến viếng thăm bằng việc bước lặng lẽ vòng quanh trung tâm. Trong một góc của trung tâm cạnh kho nhận hàng, ông bắt gặp một đống sản phẩm bừa bộn không thể chuyên chở – quá nặng để di chuyển trên băng chuyền. Vì lý do này hay lý do khác, công nhân đã không thể ghép những sản phẩm này vào các đơn hàng và do vậy chúng bị xếp lại thành đống.

Sau khi đi thị sát, Wilke nhìn vào Mullane và bắt đầu câu chuyện. “T.E., anh có biết tại sao tôi lại đi một vòng quanh trung tâm không? Cho tôi biết đi.”

“Để tìm sai sót,” Mullane trả lời.

“Vậy tại sao công nhân để lại những đống sản phẩm như vậy?”

“Bởi vì hiện tại chu trình hoạt động không đúng. Nó không chính xác và không thể lường trước được.”

“Đúng rồi. Vậy anh sẽ xử lý vấn đề này chứ?”

“Vâng.”

Những chuyến thị sát như vậy thường diễn ra vào khoảng giữa quý IV hàng năm, ngay tại thời điểm nhu cầu cho mùa nghỉ lễ bắt đầu tăng lên, nhưng trước những ngày mua sắm lớn trong năm như Black Friday (Thứ Sáu Đen) và Cyber Monday (Thứ Hai Điện tử). Trong suốt đợt nghỉ lễ, Wilke sẽ trở về Seattle nhưng giữ liên lạc với cộng sự cấp dưới thông qua những cuộc họp điện đàm diễn ra hàng ngày.

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Áp lực trong những mùa nghỉ lễ có thể quá căng thẳng đến nỗi Wilke đưa ra phương pháp giải tỏa căng thẳng mới mang tên tiếng cười nguyên thủy. Khi một quản lý hậu cần hoặc nhóm của anh ta hoàn thành nhiệm vụ đáng kể, Wilke sẽ cho phép anh ta hoặc thậm chí toàn bộ nhóm ngả lưng, nhắm mắt và hét lớn hết cỡ vào điện thoại. “Hiển nhiên, đó là cách giải tỏa căng thẳng tuyệt vời nhưng lần đầu tiên tiến hành, loa điện thoại của tôi như bị thổi bay vậy,” Wilke nói.

Khi những ngày lễ căng thẳng nhất qua đi và chiếc hộp đóng gói sản phẩm cuối cùng được chuyển đi, thông thường là sẽ vào ngày 23 tháng Mười hai. “Bạn sẽ tận hưởng ngày lễ Giáng Sinh hạnh phúc hơn bất kỳ ai trên thế giới, bởi vì bạn đã phải làm việc cực kỳ vất vả trước ngày lễ,” Bert Wegner nói. Và sau đó, kế hoạch làm việc mới sẽ lại bắt đầu.

Năm 2002, Jeff Wilke đã dẫn đầu nỗ lực đáng kể đầu tiên để sử dụng quy mô hiện nay của Amazon để nhượng bộ từ một đối tác kinh doanh lớn: United Parcel Service. Năm đó, hợp đồng của Amazon với UPS sắp được gia hạn và gã khổng lồ vận chuyển gói hàng, vướng vào một mối quan hệ riêng với Teamsters Union, dường như không có tâm trạng để đưa ra các điều khoản có lợi hơn cho công ty trực tuyến mới khởi nghiệp. Vào thời điểm đó, Amazon không sử dụng Federal Express theo bất kỳ cách quan trọng nào và giải pháp thay thế chính cho UPS, Dịch vụ Bưu điện Hoa Kỳ do liên bang quản lý, không được phép thương lượng giá cước của nó. Có vẻ như Amazon không có đòn bẩy.

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Nhưng vào đầu năm đó, nhận thấy có cơ hội, Wilke đã tiếp cận Bruce Jones ở bộ phận Hoạt động và đề nghị anh bắt đầu phát triển FedEx. Trong suốt sáu tháng, Jones và một nhóm đã thường xuyên đến trụ sở của FedEx ở Memphis, tích hợp hệ thống của họ và âm thầm thu thập khối lượng gói hàng. Amazon cũng tăng cường vận chuyển lô hàng của mình với Dịch vụ Bưu điện Hoa Kỳ: nhân viên của công ty lái xe tải của Amazon đến bưu điện và đưa các gói hàng trực tiếp vào luồng thư liên bang.

Wilke bắt đầu đàm phán với UPS vào mùa hè năm đó tại Louisville, trước thời hạn hợp đồng ngày 1 tháng 9. Khi UPS được dự đoán bướng bỉnh về sai lệch từ thẻ tỷ lệ tiêu chuẩn của nó, Wilke đe dọa sẽ bỏ đi. Các quan chức của UPS cho rằng anh ta đã lừa dối. Wilke gọi cho Jones ở Seattle và nói, "Bruce, tắt chúng đi."

Jones, người đã bay đến Fernley để xem bụi phóng xạ trong vòng mười hai giờ, cho biết: “Trong mười hai giờ, họ đã chuyển từ hàng triệu mảnh [từ Amazon] đến một vài mảnh mỗi ngày. Cuộc đình trệ kéo dài bảy mươi hai giờ và không được khách hàng và những người bên ngoài khác chú ý. Tại Fernley, đại diện của UPS nói với Jones rằng họ biết Amazon không thể theo kịp và dự đoán rằng FedEx sẽ bị quá tải. Họ đã có thể đúng. Nhưng trước khi nó xảy ra, các giám đốc điều hành của UPS đã lưu ý và đưa ra mức chiết khấu cho Amazon.

Wilke nói: “Đúng vậy, chúng tôi có thể hoạt động chủ yếu mà không có chúng. Nhưng nó sẽ rất khó khăn, rất đau đớn. Họ biết điều đó. Tôi không muốn rời bỏ họ, tôi chỉ muốn một mức giá hợp lý.” Cuối cùng, anh ấy đã nhận được một chiếc, mang về nhà một trong những đợt giảm giá hàng loạt đầu tiên của Amazon và dạy cho công ty một bài học lâu dài về sức mạnh của quy mô và thực tế về sự tồn tại của Darwin trong thế giới kinh doanh lớn.

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Năm 2003, Jeff Bezos nảy ra cách khác để xây dựng khung hệ thống quan điểm kinh doanh của Amazon. Lần này, ý tưởng dành cho nhóm khách hàng dẫn đầu phí sử dụng dịch vụ Amazon trong những phân nhóm quan trọng mới, nhóm sản phẩm bao gồm: phần cứng, đồ dùng thể thao và hàng điện tử.

Bezos đã chọn trang sức làm cơ hội kinh doanh lớn tiếp theo cho công ty. Phân mục này đầy hấp dẫn: sản phẩm có kích thước nhỏ, giá cao và chi phí vận chuyển tương đối rẻ. Ông nhờ cậy hai giám đốc bán lẻ Eric Broussard và Randy Miller triển khai kế hoạch. Như thường lệ, Bezos chọn giám đốc không có kinh nghiệm bán hàng cho phân nhóm sản phẩm.

Mặc dù có vẻ hấp dẫn, nhưng kinh doanh trang sức đặt ra một số thách thức cần vượt qua. Đồ trang sức đắt tiền thì giá trị và sự hấp dẫn khó có thể hiển thị rõ ràng và đầy đủ, chi tiết trên trang web; ngoài ra, sản phẩm cũng giá trị và hấp dẫn đối với những công nhân ăn cắp vặt trong các trung tâm FC của công ty. Một vấn đề khác nảy sinh về giá cả: Ngành trang sức có mô hình định giá đơn giản với mức lợi nhuận cao. Việc giá bán lẻ tăng cao là điển hình; các cửa hàng bán lẻ sẽ tăng gấp đôi giá bán buôn hoặc thậm chí gấp ba lần. Những nhà sản xuất và bán lẻ đồ trang sức trung thành với nguyên tắc trên. Và điều này không hợp với tôn chỉ cứng rắn của Bezos về việc cung cấp giá thấp nhất.

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Những nhà quản lý phân nhóm đồ trang sức quyết định áp dụng phương pháp tương tự với những gì công ty thực hiện gần đây. Họ sẽ để những nhà bán lẻ khác có nhiều kinh nghiệm hơn bán mọi đồ trên Amazon’s Marketplace và Amazon sẽ hưởng hoa hồng. Trong khi đó, công ty có thể quan sát và học hỏi từ họ. “Đó là điều chúng tôi làm rất tốt,” Randy Miller nói. “Nếu bạn không biết bất kỳ điều gì về lĩnh vực kinh doanh đó thì hãy đưa chúng vào Marketplace, thu hút nhà bán lẻ tham gia, quan sát điều họ làm và sản phẩm họ bán, hiểu chúng và sẵn sàng tự mình nhập cuộc.”

Bezos dường như theo sát dự án, ít ra là trong giai đoạn mới triển khai. Và rồi một ngày, trong cuộc họp với nhóm S Team và nhóm sản phẩm quan trọng, có điều gì đó đã khiến ông tức giận. Họ đang thảo luận về lợi nhuận biên trong lĩnh vực đồ trang sức và một trong những đồng nghiệp của Randy Miller đưa ra ý kiến rằng ngành trang sức vẫn hoạt động theo “cách xưa nay vẫn thế”. “Anh suy nghĩ không đúng rồi,” Bezos nói, và buộc ông phải về lấy một thứ từ văn phòng của mình. Vài phút sau quay lại, ông ấy mang theo đống tài liệu phô tô và đưa mỗi người trong cuộc họp một bản. Trong đó chỉ có một đoạn văn bản dài khoảng 10 câu bắt đầu với cụm từ Chúng ta “không phải là cửa hàng bán lẻ”.

Theo Miller và những quản lý khác tham gia họp nhớ thì tài liệu đó đưa ra cách Bezos nhìn nhận công ty – và giải thích tại sao, thậm chí nhiều năm sau, nhiều công ty rối loạn khi Amazon xâm nhập vào thị trường của họ.

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Trở thành “không phải là cửa hàng bán lẻ”, theo như góc nhìn của Bezos, tức là Amazon không bị giới hạn theo quy luật truyền thống trước đó của lĩnh vực bán lẻ. Công ty có vô số kho dự trữ và đã cá nhân hóa bản thân công ty theo từng khách hàng. Công ty cho phép hiển thị trên trang web những nhận xét tiêu cực cùng với tích cực và đặt sản phẩm đã qua sử dụng trực tiếp ngay cạnh sản phẩm mới để khách hàng có thể đưa ra sự lựa chọn sau khi xem thông tin sản phẩm. Trong con mắt của Bezos, Amazon đã cam kết cung cấp giá thấp hàng ngày và dịch vụ khách hàng tuyệt vời. Công ty sẽ là sự kết hợp hoàn hảo của Walmart và Nordstrom’s.

Trở thành “không phải là cửa hàng bán lẻ” cũng có nghĩa là Amazon chỉ cần quan tâm duy nhất đến vấn đề điều gì là tốt nhất cho khách hàng. Trong ngành trang sức, mức lợi nhuận truyền thống vào khoảng 100% hoặc 200%, nhưng điều này không áp dụng cho Amazon.

Trong cuộc họp hôm đó, Bezos đã quyết định rằng Amazon không nằm trong ngành bán lẻ và do đó không phải theo nhà bán lẻ khác. Ông gợi ý rằng Amazon có thể lờ đi truyền thống định giá trong ngành kinh doanh trang sức và hướng khách hàng mua vòng tay trên trang web với giá 1.200 đô la và sau đó nhận những lời khen ngợi và phát hiện ra cửa hàng trang sức địa phương đang bán món đồ với giá 2.000 đô la. “Tôi biết bạn là nhà bán lẻ và tôi đã thuê bạn vì bạn là nhà bán lẻ,” Bezos nói. "Nhưng tôi muốn bạn hiểu rằng kể từ ngày này trở đi, bạn không bị ràng buộc bởi các quy tắc cũ."

Amazon bắt đầu bán đồ trang sức vào mùa xuân năm 2004; 2/3 sản phẩm được lấy trên Marketplace và 1/3 còn lại là trực tiếp từ Amazon. Trong nhiều tháng, Bezos bị cuốn hút vào thiết kế của chiếc hộp trang sức bằng gỗ tao nhã mà Amazon sẽ sử dụng sau này. “Chiếc hộp là tất cả mọi thứ với ông,” Randy Miller nói. “Ông muốn chiếc hộp trở thành biểu tượng giống như trường hợp của Tiffany.”

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Amazon đã ký hợp đồng với người mẫu, diễn viên nổi tiếng Paris Hilton để bán trang sức do cô thiết kế độc quyền trên trang web và công ty đầu tư mạnh tay để tạo ra công cụ cho phép khách hàng tự thiết kế nhẫn trên trang web. Những thợ kim hoàn của Amazon sẽ chế tác những chiếc nhẫn trong trung tâm FC Lexington, Kentucky. Ngoài ra, Amazon cũng giới thiệu tính năng mang tên Tìm kiếm kim cương, cho phép khách hàng tìm kiếm những hòn đá theo trọng lượng, hình dáng và màu sắc. Bezos đã chỉ thị cho nhân viên truyền thông phải điều chỉnh thời gian công bố phân nhóm đồ trang sức trước công chúng trùng với thời điểm ra báo cáo hàng quý của đối thủ cạnh tranh Blue Nile, có trụ sở tại Seattle, công ty đứng đầu trong lĩnh vực kinh doanh đồ trang sức trực tuyến.

Theo những nhân viên làm việc tại phân nhóm đồ trang sức, công việc kinh doanh đem lại lợi nhuận vừa phải cho Amazon, nhưng rõ ràng hạt mầm đã không phát triển thành cây như Bezos hình dung. Mặc dù, việc giám sát kinh doanh của Amazon mạnh hơn, nhưng khách hàng vẫn muốn đến cửa hàng trên phố để chọn nhẫn đính hôn. Sau một thời gian, công cụ thiết kế nhẫn và Tìm kiếm kim cương biến mất khỏi trang web. Amazon tập trung vào những mặt trận mới, như giày dép và quần áo. Sau này, những nhân viên từng tham gia dự án đồ trang sức mô tả quãng thời gian mệt mỏi với việc liên tục thay đổi mục tiêu, luân chuyển quản lý và việc tranh cãi không ngừng với các nhà cung cấp không thích mức giá của Amazon. Trở thành cửa hàng “không phải bán lẻ” rõ ràng không dễ như những gì Bezos đã nghĩ. Những nhà quản lý Amazon làm việc trong nhóm sản phẩm quan trọng trong suốt những năm này thường có câu nói đùa: “Tại sao bạn nghĩ họ tự gọi mình là quan trọng?”.

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Khi các nhóm giữ quan điểm hướng Amazon vào những nhóm hàng mới có mức độ thành công khác nhau, Jeff Wilke và đội của mình gần như đã hoàn thiện chu trình phân phối tại các trung tâm FC của Amazon, từ một hệ thống xây dựng trên nền tảng may rủi thành hệ phương trình đa thức chặt chẽ. Khách hàng có thể đặt hàng hàng tá sản phẩm, và phần mềm công ty sẽ nhanh chóng kiểm tra các nhân tố như: địa chỉ khách hàng, vị trí hàng trong trung tâm FC và số lần chuyển hàng tại các trung tâm trên toàn quốc. Sau đó, chương trình sẽ đưa tất cả những biến trên để giải quyết bài toán phương án chuyển hàng nhanh nhất và ít tốn kém nhất.

Phần mềm viết lại cho hệ thống phân phối tạo ra hiệu ứng đáng mơ ước. Chi phí trên từng đơn vị hàng hóa (tổng chi phí để đáp ứng đơn hàng của một hàng hóa cụ thể) giảm xuống, trong khi thời gian chuyển hàng (thời gian tính từ khi hàng hóa được đặt hàng trên web đến khi được chuyển vào xe tải) ngắn hơn. Một năm sau cuộc họp Fernley, thời gian từ lúc đặt hàng đến chuyển hàng cho hầu hết hàng hóa tại các trung tâm FC của công ty được giảm xuống chỉ còn bốn giờ, giảm từ ba ngày lúc Wilke bắt đầu gia nhập công ty. Tiêu chuẩn trung bình trong ngành thương mại điện tử vào thời điểm đó là 12 giờ.

Khả năng vận chuyển hàng hóa hiệu quả của Amazon và việc đưa ra thời gian nhận hàng chính xác cho khách hàng đã tạo ra lợi thế cho công ty cạnh tranh với đối thủ, đặc biệt là eBay – công ty tránh không trực tiếp vận chuyển hàng. Các trung tâm FC chính là đòn bẩy mà Bezo đầu tư xây dựng phát triển và ông đã dùng nó để dẫn dắt chiến lược cạnh tranh trong ngành.

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Năm 2002, công ty vẫn cung cấp cho khách hàng lựa chọn chuyển hàng có tính thêm phí như: qua đêm, hai ngày hoặc ba ngày. Đội của Wilke gọi đó là những đơn hàng ưu tiên hoặc đơn hàng nhanh và xây dựng một quy trình riêng cho chúng. Trên sàn của các trung tâm FC, những hàng hóa thuộc đơn hàng này được nhanh chóng chuyển tới máy phân loại Crisplant. Chúng sẽ được chuyển đến đầu tiên cho nhân viên đóng gói và ra xe tải đã sẵn sàng. Công ty dần cải tiến quy trình và đẩy thời gian chuẩn bị cho đơn hàng của ngày tiếp theo xuống còn 45 phút (trước khi những chiếc xe tải cuối cùng rời các trung tâm FC). Việc giao hàng nhanh có thể ngốn của khách hàng và Amazon một số tiền lớn, nhưng bù lại công ty có khả năng chi trả lượng tiền cổ tức chiến lược lớn.

Năm 2004, kỹ sư Charlie Ward đưa ra sáng kiến dựa trên những ý kiến đóng góp của nhân viên Amazon tham gia chương trình Công cụ ý tưởng. Dịch vụ giao hàng siêu tiết kiệm đáp ứng nhu cầu của những khách hàng quan tâm tới giá cả nhưng không quá để ý tới thời gian – cũng giống như những hành khách đi máy bay trả giá vé thấp hơn vì họ ở lại địa điểm qua đêm thứ Bảy. Những đơn hàng chuyển vào xe tải bất cứ khi nào xe còn chỗ trống nhằm giảm tổng chi phí vận chuyển. Tại sao không tạo ra dịch vụ đối với đối tượng khách hàng có nhu cầu ngược lại, Ward gợi ý, vận chuyển nhanh cho khách hàng quan tâm thời gian và không chú ý đến giá cả? Ông gợi ý rằng dịch vụ này sẽ hoạt động như một câu lạc bộ âm nhạc với mức phí trả hàng tháng.

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Mùa thu năm đó, nhân viên trong công ty tỏ ra ủng hộ với đề xuất của Ward nên dần gây được chú ý của Bezos. Bezos thích thú đề xuất ngay tức thì và yêu cầu một nhóm bao gồm Vijay Ravindran, giám đốc phụ trách hệ thống đơn hàng của Amazon, đến gặp vào thứ Bảy trong căn nhà thuyền phía sau ngôi nhà tại Medina. Bezos khẩn trương bắt đầu cuộc họp và nói rằng vận chuyển bây giờ được ưu tiên hàng đầu. “Đây là ý tưởng rất ý nghĩa,” ông nói với những kỹ sư tham gia họp. Ông yêu cầu Ravindran và Jeff Holden xây dựng đội SWAT gồm hàng chục cá nhân xuất sắc nhất, và nói rằng ông muốn chương trình sẵn sàng trước thời điểm công bố lợi nhuận kế tiếp, vào tháng Hai – thời gian chỉ còn tính theo tuần.

Bezos họp hàng tuần với nhóm trong vòng hai tháng sau đó, bao gồm Charlie Ward và Dorothy Nicholls, sau này trở thành người quản lý lâu năm của Kindle. Họ đưa ra dịch vụ giao hàng hai ngày, khai thác khả năng của nhóm Wilke để đẩy nhanh việc xử lý hàng đơn lẻ trong các trung tâm FC. Nhóm đề xuất vài cái tên cho dịch vụ mới, trong đó có Siêu tiết kiệm bạch kim, nhưng Bezos từ chối vì ông không muốn mọi người nhìn nhận dịch vụ như chương trình tiết kiệm tiền. Bing Gordon, thành viên ban quản trị Amazon và đối tác tại Kleiner Perkins, nảy ra ý tưởng Prime (Hàng đầu). Một số thành viên trong nhóm tin rằng Prime được chọn vì những giá để hàng chuyển nhanh đóng vai trò quan trọng hàng đầu trong các trung tâm FC. Nhóm khách hàng thử nghiệm trọng tâm được yêu cầu đến các văn phòng của Amazon và kiểm tra quy trình đăng ký Prime. Những tình nguyện viên chỉ ra rằng quy trình quá rắc rối nên Holden đề xuất sử dụng nút màu vàng lớn với cụm từ Tạo tài khoản Prime trên trang web.

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Định mức phí cho dịch vụ thực sự đem đến nhiều thách thức; không hề có bất kỳ mô hình tài chính rõ ràng nào, bởi không ai biết có bao nhiêu khách hàng sẽ tham gia, hay việc sử dụng dịch vụ sẽ ảnh hưởng ra sao đến hành vi mua sắm của khách hàng. Nhóm xem xét vài mức giá đưa ra, trong đó có 49 và 99 đô la. Cuối cùng Bezos quyết định 79 đô la một năm, và giải thích rằng mức phí cần đủ lớn để khách hàng phải cân nhắc nhưng đủ thấp để họ hào hứng thử dịch vụ mới. “Không bao giờ chỉ là 79 đô la. Nó thực sẽ thay đổi suy nghĩ của mọi người để họ không mua sắm ở bất kỳ nơi nào khác,” Ravindran, người sau này trở thành phụ trách bản điện tử của tờ Washington Post nói.

Bezos cương quyết yêu cầu dịch vụ ra mắt trong tháng Hai. Khi nhóm Prime báo cáo họ cần thêm thời gian, Bezos hoãn thời điểm công bố lợi nhuận công ty một tuần. Thành viên nhóm hoàn tất việc mô tả chi tiết cho dịch vụ vào ba giờ sáng của ngày cuối cùng. Nhiệm vụ đầy phức tạp, gian nan đã được hoàn thành do nhiều yếu tố của dịch vụ đã sẵn có. Wilke tạo ra một hệ thống cho phép lấy hàng, gói hàng và vận chuyển nhanh hàng ưu tiên trong các trung tâm FC. Chi nhánh châu Âu của công ty đã phát triển công cụ đăng ký thành viên cho công việc kinh doanh đĩa DVD giao hàng qua bưu điện, cung cấp tại Đức và Anh. Mặc dù dịch vụ vẫn đang trong giai đoạn phôi thai, nhưng đã nhanh chóng được cải tiến và đưa vào kinh doanh tại Mỹ để hỗ trợ Prime. Holden nói: “Nó gần như là Prime đã ở đó và chúng tôi đang hoàn thiện nó”.

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Nói chung, sự ra đời của Amazon Prime là quyết định hành động dựa trên niềm tin. Công ty hầu như không có nhiều cơ sở về việc dịch vụ sẽ ảnh hưởng ra sao đến đơn hàng hay xác suất khách hàng sẽ mua sắm các phân nhóm khác ngoài phân nhóm truyền thông giải trí. Nếu mỗi đơn hàng chuyển nhanh mất 8 đô la, và nếu thành viên đăng ký tham gia dịch vụ đặt 20 đơn hàng một năm, công ty sẽ mất 160 đô la giao hàng, cao hơn mức phí 79 đô la rất nhiều. Việc triển khai dịch vụ này quá tốn kém và không có điểm hòa vốn rõ ràng. Diago Piacentini nói: “Chúng tôi vẫn quyết định triển khai, mặc dù mọi phân tích tài chính đều cho ra kết luận chúng tôi hoàn toàn điên rồ khi đưa ra dịch vụ giao hàng trong hai ngày miễn phí”.

Tuy nhiên, Bezos vẫn tiếp tục kiên định và đầy kinh nghiệm. Ông biết rằng dịch vụ giao hàng siêu tiết kiệm sẽ thay đổi hành vi của khách hàng, khuyến khích họ đặt đơn hàng trị giá hơn và mua sắm trong những phân nhóm hàng hóa mới. Từ dịch vụ đặt hàng với một cú nhấp chuột, ông nhận thấy rằng khi những phiền hà trong mua sắm trực tuyến được loại bỏ, khách hàng sẽ mạnh tay mua sắm nhiều hơn. Và điều này sẽ đẩy nhanh vòng quay lấy đà phát triển của công ty. Khi khách hàng chi tiêu nhiều hơn, doanh số của Amazon sẽ tăng theo, và tất nhiên chi phí vận chuyển hàng giảm xuống và tăng sức mạnh đàm phán với những nhà cung cấp. Điều đó sẽ giúp công ty tiết kiệm tiền và dùng khoản đó chi trả cho Amazon Prime, tiếp tục cho ra mức giá thấp hơn.

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Cuối cùng, Prime cũng chứng tỏ sự tồn tại đúng đắn của mình. Dịch vụ biến những khách hàng thông thường thành những người nghiện Amazon, những người cảm thấy hài lòng vì mua sắm hàng hóa và đảm bảo nhận sản phẩm sau hai ngày đặt hàng. Jason Kilar phát biểu vào thời điểm đó, đăng ký Amazon Prime, “giống như chuyển từ kết nối Internet quay số sang băng thông rộng vậy.” Tham gia dịch vụ Amazon Prime cũng kích hoạt hành vi mua sắm tối đa để tận dụng triệt để lợi ích của tư cách thành viên. Chỉ với chi phí giao hàng cố định, ban đầu Amazon phải chi thêm tiền cho dịch vụ Prime. Tuy nhiên, sau đó, cách tổ chức phân phối của Wilke dần dần hoàn thiện khi có thể kết hợp nhiều hàng hóa sản phẩm trong một đơn hàng của khách hàng vào một thùng đóng gói và như vậy tiết kiệm chi phí và đóng góp một phần vào việc giảm chi phí vận chuyển của Amazon đến hơn 10% mỗi năm.”

Prime sẽ không thể hiện mình với thế giới như một thành công lớn trong vài năm nữa và ban đầu nó không được ưa chuộng trong Amazon. Một giám đốc điều hành công nghệ đã nói với Vijay Ravindran rằng anh ta sợ Bezos bây giờ sẽ tin rằng anh ta có thể chỉ huy các kỹ sư và thực hiện các dự án yêu thích của mình thông qua hệ thống. Các giám đốc điều hành khác đã cảnh giác vì tổn thất ước tính của Prime. Gần như đơn độc, Bezos tin tưởng nhiệt thành vào Prime, theo dõi chặt chẽ lượt đăng ký mỗi ngày và can thiệp mỗi khi tập đoàn bán lẻ bỏ khuyến mãi cho câu lạc bộ vận chuyển khỏi trang chủ.

Nhưng ngay cả vào tháng 2 năm 2005, Bezos vẫn nghi ngờ rằng mình đã có người chiến thắng. Tại cuộc họp chung tay của Amazon vào tháng đó tại địa điểm thường lệ, Nhà hát Moore cổ điển trên Đại lộ Số 2, Vijay Ravindran đã giới thiệu Prime cho công ty và sau đó Bezos đã dẫn đầu mọi người trong một tràng pháo tay.

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Prime đã mở ra những cánh cửa mới và trong năm tiếp theo, Amazon giới thiệu dịch vụ mang tên Fulfillment by Amazon hay FBA, dịch vụ cho phép những nhà bán hàng khác lưu trữ và vận chuyển hàng hóa tại các trung tâm FC của Amazon. Điều này giúp hàng hóa của họ đáp ứng yêu cầu giao hàng trong vòng hai ngày cho các khách hàng thành viên Prime và giúp người bán tiếp cận tới nhóm khách hàng mua sắm nhiều nhất của Amazon. Còn với nhóm phân phối của Wilke, đây là thời điểm đầy tự hào. “Đó chính là khi điều đó chạm tới đích,” Bert Wegner nói. “Chúng tôi đã xây dựng dịch vụ tốt mà mọi người đều sẵn lòng trả tiền sử dụng.”

Do vậy, khi Bezos kéo Wilke ra khỏi việc giám sát đánh giá vận hành vào cuối năm 2006, Wilke không hi vọng rằng kỳ nghỉ lễ năm đó sẽ trở thành thời điểm cuối cùng ông làm việc trong lĩnh vực phân phối. Bezos muốn Wilke đảm nhiệm ở chi nhánh bán lẻ toàn Bắc Mỹ và Wilke sẽ phụ trách tuyển dụng người kế nhiệm ông. Wilke nghĩ rằng chu trình hoạt động trong các trung tâm FC của Amazon đã đi vào ổn định nên thay vì đề cử các quản lý trong bộ phận phân phối của Amazon, vì cũng như ông, tất cả họ đều dập khuôn theo mô hình Sáu Sigma, Wilke tìm kiếm ứng viên có cách tiếp cận mới mẻ và kinh nghiệm quản lý quốc tế.

Cuộc tìm kiếm kết thúc ở cái tên Marc Onetto, cựu quản lý của General Electric có giọng nói đậm chất Pháp và khiếu kể chuyện sinh động. Dưới sự lãnh đạo của Onetto, các kỹ sư đã lập trình lại những nhân tố của phần mềm phân phối và sáng chế ra hệ thống tính toán mang tên Mechanical Sensei, xây dựng mô hình giả định tính toán tất cả lệnh đơn hàng xuyên suốt toàn hệ thống các trung tâm FC của Amazon và dự đoán địa điểm phù hợp nhất để mở các trung tâm FC mới. Onetto cũng chuyển trọng tâm quản lý phân phối của Amazon sang triết lý sản xuất tinh gọn, bắt nguồn từ Toyota và nhắm vào mục đích giảm lãng phí tiến hành khắc phục ngay tại chỗ.

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Mặc dù Amazon tập trung trọng tâm vào phát triển phần mềm và hệ thống tự động, nhưng hệ thống phân phối vẫn còn nhân tố trọng yếu khác – những công nhân lương thấp, những người làm việc trực tiếp trong hệ thống. Trong thập kỷ phát triển của Amazon, công ty đã thuê hàng chục nghìn lao động mỗi mùa nghỉ lễ và giữ lại khoảng 10 đến 15% trong số đó làm lâu dài. Những công nhân ít kỹ năng phải lao động nặng nhọc để nhận 10 đến 12 đô la một giờ, và họ nhận ra rằng Amazon hơi tàn nhẫn. Trộm cắp trở thành vấn đề thường xuyên, vì các trung tâm FC đều chứa những hàng hóa dễ giấu như đĩa DVD và trang sức. Do vậy, tất cả các trung tâm đều được trang bị máy phát hiện kim loại và camera an ninh, cuối cùng ký hợp đồng với công ty an ninh bên ngoài để giám sát. “Họ hoàn toàn cho rằng công nhân có thể ăn cắp,” Randall Krause, nhân viên kho hàng làm việc trong trung tâm FC Fernley năm 2010 nói. “Tôi thực sự không ăn cắp một mình bởi vì có rất nhiều người khác đang ăn cắp.”

Amazon sử dụng hệ thống theo dõi công nhân làm việc để cố gắng kiểm soát hành vi vi phạm của họ. Đến muộn mất nửa điểm; không có mặt mất ba điểm. Thậm chí, gọi điện xin nghỉ ốm mất một điểm. Một công nhân bị sáu điểm lỗi trên sẽ phải ra đi. “Họ đưa ra các yêu cầu và nếu bạn không đáp ứng, thì họ có nhiều người khác xếp hàng để nhận công việc của bạn,” Krause nói. “Họ sẽ không cho bạn cơ hội thứ hai đâu.”

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Qua nhiều năm, các tổ chức liên đoàn người lao động như Teamsters, United Food và Commercial Worker cố gắng tổ chức hoạt động công đoàn trong các trung tâm FC của Amazon tại Mỹ. Họ phát tờ rơi tại bãi đỗ xe và trong một số trường hợp, họ gõ cửa nhà các công nhân. Quản lý chuỗi phân phối của Amazon nhanh chóng nắm bắt chiến dịch. Ông gần gũi công nhân và lắng nghe những lời phàn nàn, trong khi đó cương quyết đưa ra ý kiến rằng những nỗ lực tổ chức công đoàn sẽ không được chấp nhận. Với số lượng công nhân lớn và tỉ lệ luân chuyển công nhân mới trong các trung tâm FC khiến cho việc tổ chức trở nên cực kỳ khó khăn. Gần đây nhất, vào năm 2013, công nhân tại hai trung tâm FC của Amazon ở Đức đình công trong bốn ngày, yêu cầu tăng lương và chế độ tốt hơn. Công ty đã từ chối đàm phán với công đoàn.

Công đoàn nói rằng trong cuộc đấu tranh này tồn tại sức cản khác – công nhân sợ bị trả thù. Vào tháng Một năm 2001, công ty đóng cửa trung tâm dịch vụ khách hàng tại Seattle, đó là một phần trong biện pháp tổng thể nhằm cắt giảm chi phí. Amazon thông báo rằng việc đóng cửa trung tâm không liên quan gì đến những hoạt động công đoàn tại đây, nhưng tổ chức công đoàn liên quan không dám chắc về điều này. “Sức mạnh ngăn cản quá trình hoạt động công đoàn tại Amazon thật đáng sợ,” Rennie Sawade, phát ngôn viên của Liên minh công nhân công nghệ Washington nói. Công nhân “sợ rằng họ sẽ sa thải bạn – thậm chí điều này không được phép theo luật pháp. Bạn là người phải chiến đấu để quay lại với công việc nếu họ làm vậy.”

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Amazon thường xuyên phải đối phó với nhân tố còn hơn cả trộm cắp, công đoàn, hay trốn việc tại các trung tâm FC, đó chính là điều kiện thời tiết. Ban lãnh đạo công ty nhanh chóng nhận ra rằng họ không có con đường nào khác là phải lắp đặt hệ thống điều hòa trong các trung tâm FC tại Phoenix, nơi có mùa hè thiêu đốt. Nhưng họ lại cho rằng đây là chi phí không cần thiết ở những nơi có thời tiết mát mẻ hơn. Thay vào đó, giám đốc các trung tâm đưa ra giải pháp khác để đối phó với cái nóng. Nếu nhiệt độ vượt quá 38oC, mức nhiệt độ phổ biến vào mùa hè tại khu vực Trung Tây, thì công nhân sẽ được nghỉ thêm năm phút vào buổi sáng và chiều. Ngoài ra, công ty cho lắp đặt quạt và phát miễn phí nước tăng lực Gatorade.

Những giải pháp trên dường như vẫn chưa đủ. Năm 2011, Morning Call, tờ báo của thành phố Allentown, đăng bài viết về điều kiện làm việc tồi tệ ở hai trung tâm FC của Amazon tại thung lũng Lehigh trong thời tiết nóng khủng khiếp của mùa hè. 15 công nhân gặp các vấn đề về sức khỏe do liên quan đến nắng nóng và được chuyển đến bệnh viện địa phương. Bác sĩ trực cấp cứu đã gọi cho cơ quan quản lý liên bang và báo cáo về môi trường làm việc không an toàn. Tờ báo tiết lộ một chi tiết gây kinh ngạc cho nhiều độc giả và khách hàng của Amazon, công ty đã trả tiền cho công ty cấp cứu tư nhân để cung cấp trạm cấp cứu tạm thời bên ngoài trung tâm FC trong mùa hè nắng nóng. Các trạm y tế có nhiệm vụ sẵn sàng cấp cứu cho những công nhân bị ngất trong lúc đang làm việc.

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Jeff Wilke giải thích rằng làm việc trong nhà kho của Amazon an toàn hơn so với cửa hàng tạp hóa. Ông dẫn chứng con số các vụ tai nạn thấp trong các báo cáo gửi Cơ quan quản lý sức khỏe và an toàn lao động (OSHA). (Số lượng lời phàn nàn liên quan tới các trung tâm của Amazon ghi nhận tại OSHA trở thành bằng chứng cho luận điệu này.) Dư luận không phải vấn đề lớn. Nhưng báo cáo được gửi đi đã gây ra làn sóng trong giới truyền thông và năm sau, Amazon thông báo công ty chi khoản tiền 52 triệu đô la để lắp đặt hệ thống điều hòa tại nhiều trung tâm FC hơn.

Bezos và Wilke có thể giải quyết các vụ lộn xộn nhưng họ không bao giờ có thể triệt tận gốc nguyên nhân ẩn sâu bên trong. Hành vi thất thường và không dự đoán được trong bản chất con người luôn trỗi dậy theo cách khó đoán nhất. Như trường hợp tháng Mười hai năm 2010, một nhân viên châm lửa đốt phòng cung ứng tại Fernley. Theo lời hai nhân viên làm việc vào thời điểm đó, những nhân viên khác được sơ tán và đứng run rẩy dưới trời lạnh trong hai giờ trước khi được đưa về nhà. Cũng trong năm đó tại Fernley, một công nhân đang chuẩn bị thả mình vào băng chuyền vận chuyển hàng hóa để đi vòng quanh trung tâm đã ngay lập tức bị tống ra khỏi trung tâm.

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Có lẽ câu chuyện hay nhất xảy ra vào mùa nghỉ lễ bận rộn năm 2006. Một nhân viên thời vụ tại trung tâm FC Coffeyville, Kansas xuất hiện vào đầu ca làm và rời đi khi kết thúc, nhưng thật kỳ lạ là anh ta không làm bất kỳ việc gì trong giờ làm việc. Đồng hồ của Amazon không liên kết với hệ thống giám sát năng suất nên sự việc bất thường này không được chú ý trong ít nhất một tuần.

Cuối cùng, có người đã khám phá ra sự thật. Người công nhân đã bí mật tạo một chiếc hầm bên trong đống ván gỗ cao khoảng 2,5 m nằm ở góc xa của trung tâm. Đứng bên ngoài sẽ không nhìn thấy gì bên trong. Anh chàng tạo dựng căn phòng riêng biệt thoải mái và trang bị những đồ vật ăn trộm từ vô số các giá đựng hàng hóa của Amazon. Trong căn phòng có thức ăn, chiếc giường ngủ thoải mái, những bức ảnh xé ra từ những cuốn sách báo treo trên tường – và vài cuốn lịch khiêu dâm. Brian Calvin, giám đốc trung tâm Coffeyville đã bắt được người công nhân trong căn phòng bí mật và tống anh ta ra khỏi trung tâm. Anh ta rời đi không tranh cãi và bước thẳng tới trạm xe buýt gần đó; ngượng ngùng, ai đó có thể tưởng tượng như vậy, nhưng có lẽ cũng có một chút hân hoan.

—ooOoo—

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CÔNG TY CÔNG NGHỆ, KHÔNG PHẢI NHÀ BÁN LẺ

Ngày 30 tháng Bảy năm 2005, Amazon kỷ niệm 10 năm thành lập với chương trình gala tại nhà hát Benaroya. Trong buổi lễ kỷ niệm đó, Phó chủ tịch phụ trách marketing Kathy Savitt thuyết phục Bezos kể về khoảnh khắc mang tính lịch sử của công ty. Chương trình được dàn dựng, sắp xếp theo hướng đem lại lợi ích cho khách hàng: Buổi biểu diễn được truyền trực tiếp trên trang Amazon.com và được một triệu người theo dõi.

Cho dù Amazon.com đi xa được đến đâu, nó vẫn thường được nghĩ đến là một công ty trung gian. Lúc đó, Google đến từ Thung lũng Silicon đang là ngôi sao sáng cung cấp công cụ tìm kiếm. Người sáng lập Google, Larry Page và Sergey Brin đang viết lại lịch sử của Internet. Công ty nhanh chóng thu hút công chúng, trong đó phải kể đến vụ IPO năm 2004, và vẫn được toàn thế giới dõi theo. Bỗng một ngày, những mô hình kinh doanh trực tuyến linh hoạt và những CEO đầy kinh nghiệm từ các công ty truyền thống trở thành lỗi thời tại Thung lũng Silicon và được thay thế bởi các nhà quản lý có kiến thức công nghệ cao.

Điều này dường như sẽ trở thành thời kỳ hoàng kim cho các tiến sĩ khoa học máy tính Stanford, không dành cho các MBA của Harvard hay các nhà đầu cơ của phố Wall và thế giới bên ngoài đã không tin Amazon sẽ cân bằng được trong sự chuyển dịch này.

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Một năm trước khi lễ kỷ niệm 10 năm diễn ra, giá cổ phiếu giảm 12% khi phố Wall tập trung vào mức lợi nhuận thấp của công ty và mô hình kinh doanh siêu việt của những công ty Internet khác. 18 trong số 23 nhà phân tích tài chính theo dõi công ty vào thời điểm diễn ra lễ kỷ niệm cho thấy góc nhìn ảm đạm khi đưa ra ý kiến giữ hoặc bán cổ phiếu Amazon. Tổng số vốn hóa thị trường của eBay gấp ba lần của Amazon và giá trị của Google gấp hơn bốn lần Amazon trong khi Google mới chỉ lên sàn chưa đến một năm. Bán lẻ trực tuyến theo giá cố định đơn giản chỉ là xu thế đã qua.

Từ cuối những năm 1990, Bezos đã tuyên bố rằng Amazon là công ty công nghệ tiên phong trong lĩnh vực thương mại điện tử, không phải là nhà bán lẻ. Tuy nhiên, điều này giống với điều mơ ước hơn. Phần lớn doanh thu của Amazon vẫn là từ việc bán hàng cho khách hàng. Mặc cho Bezos phản đối, Amazon vẫn có mọi biểu hiện của nhà bán lẻ – và không phải công ty đem lại lợi nhuận cao.

Một tuần sau lễ kỷ niệm 10 năm thành lập, tờ New York Times xuất bản bài viết dài trên trang nhất của mục kinh doanh Chủ nhật. Bài báo ám chỉ Bezos không còn là nhà lãnh đạo phù hợp trong thời điểm đó. “Đã đến lúc Ngài Bezos cần phải làm như nhiều người sáng lập của những công ty công nghệ khác đã thực hiện trước ông: Tìm kiếm một tổng giám đốc điều hành được đào tạo chuyên nghiệp, có kiến thức sâu rộng về điều hành để quản lý công ty,” trích dẫn phát ngôn của một nhà phân tích trong bài báo.

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Sự nổi lên mạnh mẽ của Google không chỉ đơn thuần chuyển hướng tập trung của phố Wall và giới truyền thông, mà nó còn đem lại hàng loạt các thách thức cho Amazon. Người tiêu dùng bây giờ không chỉ truy cập Amazon.com và tìm kiếm sản phẩm, họ còn tìm kiếm qua Google. Điều này vô hình chung tạo ra rào cản trung gian không mong đợi giữa Jeff Bezos và khách hàng của công ty. Google có những tham vọng kinh doanh thương mại điện tử riêng và sớm cho ra mắt công cụ mua sắm cạnh tranh mang tên Froogle. Thậm chí còn tồi tệ hơn khi cả Amazon và eBay phải cạnh tranh với nhau để quảng cáo trong kết quả tìm kiếm của Google dành cho những từ khóa tìm kiếm phổ biến như ti vi màn hình phẳng và Apple iPod. Họ cũng phải trích một khoản doanh thu cho Google từ đơn đặt hàng thông qua công cụ tìm kiếm này. Với mục đích biến loại hình quảng cáo mới này trở nên hiệu quả hơn, Amazon phát triển hệ thống mua quảng cáo tìm kiếm tự động trên web đầu tiên, mang tên Urubamba theo tên của dòng sông ở Peru, một nhánh của sông Amazon. Tuy nhiên, Bezos cũng thận trọng khi giúp Google phát triển những công cụ có thể sau này sẽ chuyển thành đối thủ cạnh tranh của Amazon. “Hãy đối xử với Google giống như với ngọn núi. Bạn có thể trèo lên núi, nhưng bạn không thể di chuyển nó,” ông nói với Blake Scholl, nhà lập trình trẻ phụ trách Urubamba. “Hãy sử dụng họ, nhưng đừng khiến họ thông minh hơn.”

Google cạnh tranh với Amazon về cả khách hàng và nhân sự là những kỹ sư tài năng. Sau vụ IPO, gã khổng lồ trong lĩnh vực tìm kiếm mở văn phòng tại Kirkland, cách 20 phút lái xe từ trung tâm Seattle. Google đưa ra chế độ thù lao hậu hĩnh, như miễn phí đồ ăn, tập gym tại văn phòng và dịch vụ trông trẻ em vào ban ngày, không kể đến quyền chọn mua cổ phiếu giá trị. Trong khi đó, Amazon đưa ra chính sách giá cổ phiếu tệ hại, văn hóa công ty hiếu chiến và nhân viên vẫn phải trả phí đỗ xe và đồ ăn. Không mấy ngạc nhiên, Google bắt đầu đánh cắp ồ ạt những kỹ sư tài năng khỏi tay Amazon.

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Trong thời gian này, Bezos luôn ủng hộ chủ trương mạo hiểm đầu tư vào lĩnh vực ngoài thế mạnh của Amazon. Trong giai đoạn từ năm 2003 đến 2005, Amazon phát triển công cụ tìm kiếm riêng, cho phép khách hàng tìm kiếm những cụm từ trong nội dung của sách trên trang web. Bezos cũng đỡ đầu phát triển mô hình hiện đại với dịch vụ mang tên Mechanical Turk và đặt nền tảng cho dịch vụ web Amazon – khởi đầu của kỷ nguyên điện toán đám mây.

Bezos đã chiến đấu với một phản ứng mà ông gọi là không thể chế, theo đó ông muốn nói đến bất kỳ và tất cả các dấu hiệu phản kháng nội bộ đối với những động thái không chính thống này. Ông nói, ngay cả những công ty mạnh cũng có xu hướng đẩy lùi các động thái theo hướng bất thường theo phản xạ. Tại các cuộc họp hội đồng quản trị hàng quý, ông yêu cầu mỗi giám đốc chia sẻ một ví dụ về thể chế không từ quá khứ của chính họ. Bezos đang chuẩn bị cho những người giám sát của mình để phê duyệt những gì sẽ là một loạt các thứ không chắc chắn, tốn kém và rủi ro. Anh ấy chỉ đơn giản là từ chối chấp nhận số phận của Amazon là một nhà bán lẻ trực tuyến kém thú vị và có lợi nhuận thấp. “Chỉ có một cách thoát khỏi tình trạng khó khăn này,” ông nói nhiều lần với các nhân viên trong thời gian này, “và đó là tìm ra lối thoát cho chúng tôi”.

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Bezos chắc chắn rằng Amazon cần xác định bản thân là công ty công nghệ thay vì nhà bán lẻ, do vậy ông bắt đầu tuyển dụng những nhà công nghệ và đặt tên cho các vị trí công việc đầy khó hiểu. Năm 2001, ông dụ dỗ cựu binh của Apple, chuyên gia giao diện người dùng Larry Tesler đến Amazon và đưa ông vào vị trí phó chủ tịch phụ trách trải nghiệm mua hàng. Năm sau, ông thuê giáo sư về nghiên cứu máy móc của trường Stanford, Andreas Weigend và đặt ông vào vị trí nhà khoa học chính. Không ai trong số họ đạt những thành công nhất định dưới sự giám sát của Bezos và cả hai nhanh chóng chán Seattle. Weigend chỉ ở Amazon 16 tháng, Tesler nán lại lâu hơn, trong ba năm. Sau đó, Bezos phát hiện một nhà công nghệ có suy nghĩ tích cực giống ông trong phương thức mở rộng nhánh phát triển cho Amazon.

Udi Manber sinh ra ở Kiryat Haim, một thị trấn nhỏ ở miền bắc Israel, và anh lấy bằng tiến sĩ khoa học máy tính tại Đại học Washington. Năm 1989, trên cương vị giáo sư khoa học máy tính tại Đại học Arizona, ông viết cuốn sách về những thắc mắc, giải quyết các công thức toán học hóc búa mang tên Nhập môn thuật toán: Cách tiếp cận sáng tạo gây chú ý cho những tay sành sỏi của Thung lũng Silicon. Manber làm việc cho Yahoo và rời đi vào năm 2002 sau khi cựu CEO, Terry Semel của Warner Brothers đảm nhiệm vị trí CEO và định hướng phát triển Yahoo từ một cổng web để trở thành công ty truyền thông.

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Rick Dalzell đã từng nghe về cuốn sách của Manber và bắt đầu tiếp cận ông khi Manber chuẩn bị rời khỏi Yahoo. Dalzell giới thiệu Manber với Bezos và tất cả nguồn tin đều khẳng định giữa hai người bắt đầu mối quan hệ thân thiết từ đây. Một trong những câu hỏi đầu tiên Bezos hỏi Manber là. “Tại sao anh không bắt đầu mô tả một thuật toán mới mà anh vừa nghĩ ra?” Manber trả lời và ngạc nhiên trước sự lĩnh hội của Bezos. “Ông ấy không chỉ hiểu nó sâu sắc, mà quá trình này diễn ra nhanh hơn hầu hết những người khác. Tôi không hi vọng điều này từ một CEO. Tôi phải mất một tháng để giải thích nó cho hầu hết các quản lý cấp cao của Yahoo,” ông nói.

Manber khẳng định chắc chắn sẽ chuyển đến Seattle và ông gia nhập Amazon vào mùa thu năm đó. Như mọi khi, Bezos đặt một cái tên khó hiểu cho vị trí công việc của ông: Quản lý phụ trách thuật toán. Một vài tháng sau, ông tham gia nhóm S Team.

Sứ mệnh dành cho Manber thực sự rất lớn: Áp dụng công nghệ để cải tiến hoạt động của Amazon và sáng tạo ra những tính năng mới. Ông sẽ gặp Bezos mỗi tuần một lần – một ngoại lệ đối với quan điểm không ưa gì những cuộc họp cá nhân của vị CEO – để báo cáo tiến độ những dự án đang thực hiện và đưa ra những ý tưởng mới. Manber luôn nhận được ưu tiên cao nhất của Bezos, thậm chí có lúc họ gặp nhau vài giờ trước lễ công bố lợi nhuận hàng quý của Amazon.

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Một trong những dự án đầu tiên của Manber tại Amazon nhận được sự chú ý của cả giới truyền thông và giới xuất bản New York. Trước khi Manber tham gia công ty, Amazon đã giới thiệu công cụ mang tên Khám phá nội dung cuốn sách, với nỗ lực tạo cho khách hàng có được trải nghiệm giống như đọc sách tại các cửa hàng trên phố. Khách hàng có thể truy vấn vào vài trang đầu của bất kỳ cuốn sách nào. Manber đẩy ý tưởng đó lên tầm cao hơn. Ông đề xuất dịch vụ mang tên Tìm kiếm bên trong cuốn sách, theo đó cho phép khách hàng tìm kiếm theo từ hoặc cụm từ cụ thể trong bất kỳ cuốn sách nào mà họ mua. Bezos thích ý tưởng và chú ý đặc biệt đến nó: Ông muốn khách hàng có thể tìm kiếm bất kỳ cuốn sách nào trên trang web, và ông đặt ra mục tiêu cho Manber là: Có một trăm nghìn cuốn sách trong danh sách những cuốn sách kỹ thuật số.

Tuy nhiên, các nhà xuất bản lo sợ rằng Tìm kiếm bên trong cuốn sách có thể tạo cơ hội vi phạm bản quyền trực tuyến tràn lan. Tuy nhiên, đa số đồng ý thử dịch vụ và giao những bản cứng của sách cho Amazon. Sau đó, những cuốn sách sẽ được gửi đến đối tác tại Philippin để quét kỹ thuật số. Để giảm nguy cơ khách hàng có thể đọc sách miễn phí, công cụ tìm kiếm của Amazon sẽ chỉ hiển thị một vài đoạn nội dung tương ứng với từ khóa tìm kiếm – một hoặc hai trang trước và trang sau sau cụm từ tìm kiếm và chỉ dành cho khách hàng có điểm tín dụng. Công cụ sẽ cài tập tin vào máy tính khách hàng để bảo đảm rằng khách hàng đó sẽ không liên tục truy cập trang để đọc thêm sách mà không phải trả tiền.

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Điều đó thực sự đòi hỏi quy trình chuyên sâu sử dụng máy điện toán và Amazon không cấp nhiều nguồn lực máy tính cho Manber và nhóm cộng sự. Manber phải chạy phần mềm trên máy tính của nhân viên vào buổi tối và cuối tuần. Nhưng vào một ngày, một nhân viên của ông tìm thấy hàng loạt PC không dùng, chỉ mua về để đề phòng trường hợp khẩn cấp. Ông được cho phép sử dụng những chiếc máy tính này, mặc dù vẫn biết rằng chúng sẽ bị lấy lại bất kỳ lúc nào.

Amazon ra mắt tính năng Tìm kiếm bên trong cuốn sách vào tháng Mười năm 2003 – và lần đầu tiên trong ba năm rưỡi, tính năng này đã xuất hiện trên tạp chí Wired vì những bước tiến lớn. Bài báo làm sống dậy sứ mệnh của Bezos trong dự án Alexandria, “giấc mơ phát sốt” trong những năm 1990 về việc sẽ lưu kho tất cả các cuốn sách từng được viết ra. Có lẽ thư viện toàn cầu như vậy chỉ có thể đưa vào không gian kỹ thuật số và hoàn toàn thực tiễn hơn? Bezos phát biểu thận trọng trên Wired rằng Tìm kiếm bên trong cuốn sách có thể thực sự chỉ là sự khởi đầu. “Bạn phải khởi hành tại đâu đó,” ông nói. “Bạn trèo lên đỉnh của ngọn đồi thấp đầu tiên và từ đó bạn nhìn thấy ngọn đồi tiếp theo.”

Khi Amazon bổ sung các danh mục sản phẩm trong suốt những năm 1990, các giám đốc điều hành của nó đã đi đến một kết luận không thể tránh khỏi: công ty phải trở nên giỏi trong việc tìm kiếm sản phẩm. Đầu lịch sử của mình, Amazon đã cấp phép cho một công cụ tìm kiếm hiện đã không còn tồn tại có tên là Alta Vista, một sản phẩm phụ của nhà sản xuất máy tính Digital Equipment Corp., nhưng nó nhanh chóng tỏ ra không đủ.

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Vào cuối những năm 1990, các kỹ sư của Amazon là Dwayne Bowman và Ruben Ortega đã lãnh đạo sự phát triển của một công cụ tìm kiếm sản phẩm nội bộ có tên là Botega (kết hợp giữa họ của họ) tận dụng kho dữ liệu khách hàng khổng lồ của Amazon, thông tin mà trang web đã thu thập từ thời điểm nó chính thức mở cửa kinh doanh. Hệ thống xác định các sản phẩm hàng đầu mà khách hàng đã nhấp vào cho một cụm từ tìm kiếm nhất định và sau đó định vị các sản phẩm đó cao hơn trong các tìm kiếm tiếp theo. Điều đó đã hiệu quả trong một thời gian Nhưng khi danh mục của Amazon ngày càng phức tạp hơn và Google trở nên cực kỳ giỏi trong việc lập chỉ mục và tổ chức trang Web, Amazon phải đối mặt với sự thật khó xử rằng một trong những đối thủ chính của họ có thể tìm kiếm trang web của Amazon tốt hơn công cụ tìm kiếm của chính họ.

Vào thời điểm đó, một số yếu tố đã đưa Amazon trực tiếp tham gia vào lĩnh vực tìm kiếm trên Web rộng lớn hơn — và bước vào cuộc đối đầu trực tiếp đầu tiên với Google. Amazon đang gặp khó khăn trong việc thu hút nhân tài kỹ thuật đến Seattle và các bộ phận của nó thường cạnh tranh nhau để có được những kỹ sư giống nhau. Vì vậy, vào cuối năm 2003, Jeff Holden, Udi Manber và một số đồng nghiệp đã đến Palo Alto để phỏng vấn những nhân viên tiềm năng. Chuyến đi rất thành công và thị trường lao động Seattle phát triển đầy thách thức đến mức công ty quyết định mở văn phòng Bắc Mỹ đầu tiên bên ngoài Seattle.

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Bezos và Dalzell đến gọi các địa điểm vệ tinh này là trung tâm phát triển từ xa. Ý tưởng là đặt văn phòng ở những khu vực có nhiều tài năng kỹ thuật và thiết lập các nhóm làm việc trong các dự án cụ thể, riêng biệt, khai thác năng lượng và sự nhanh nhẹn của một công ty khởi nghiệp trong khi giảm thiểu nhu cầu giao tiếp với tàu mẹ ở Seattle. Các luật sư của Amazon, lo ngại rằng điều này có thể yêu cầu công ty thu thuế bán hàng của nhà nước, đã ký vào chiến lược nhưng chỉ khi các văn phòng được thành lập như các công ty con độc lập và tránh xa các giao dịch với khách hàng.

Sau một năm ở Seattle, Manber đã cảm thấy mệt mỏi với công việc đi làm của mình, và anh ấy được yêu cầu về văn phòng Palo Alto mới. Vào tháng 10 năm 2003, trung tâm phát triển đầu tiên của Amazon đã được mở trên đường Waverly và Hamilton ở trung tâm thành phố Palo Alto. Giữ đúng sở thích của mình với các chữ viết tắt toán học, Bezos gọi nó là A9 - viết tắt của các thuật toán. Bất chấp việc di chuyển của mình, Manber vẫn tiếp tục các cuộc họp hàng tuần với Bezos thông qua các cuộc gọi hội nghị và các chuyến đi thường xuyên đến trụ sở chính.

Họ vẫn đang nghĩ lớn. A9 không chỉ làm việc trong việc cải tiến tìm kiếm sản phẩm trên Amazon.com mà còn trong một cuộc tấn công trực tiếp vào sân cỏ của Google, đã phát triển một công cụ tìm kiếm Web chung. Công ty đã cấp phép cho chỉ mục tìm kiếm của Google nhưng được xây dựng dựa trên nó — đồng thời hợp tác và thách thức Google. “Tìm kiếm không phải là một vấn đề đã được giải quyết”, Manber cho biết vào tháng 4 năm 2004 khi Amazon công bố công cụ tìm kiếm Web tại A9.com. “Có rất nhiều điều có thể làm được. Điều này chỉ là khởi đầu."

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A9 sẽ cung cấp cho Bezos và Manber một diễn đàn để thử một số ý tưởng tham vọng hơn của họ, hầu hết đều không liên quan đến hoạt động kinh doanh cốt lõi của Amazon. Trong một phiên động não, họ đã quyết định rằng Web mang đến một cơ hội tự nhiên để phát minh lại Trang vàng và xây dựng một dự án có tên là Block View khớp với các bức ảnh cấp phố về các cửa hàng và nhà hàng với danh sách của họ trong kết quả tìm kiếm của A9. Đây là hai năm trước khi Google công bố một sáng kiến tương tự (thành công hơn và cuối cùng gây tranh cãi) được gọi là Chế độ xem phố.

Google sẽ bao phủ đất nước bằng một đội xe tải thuộc sở hữu của công ty được trang bị máy ảnh chuyên dụng, đắt tiền để có được quang cảnh đường phố, nhưng Amazon đã tiếp cận vấn đề bằng cách nhấn mạnh thông thường vào sự tiết kiệm. Ngân sách của Manber cho dự án ít hơn một trăm nghìn đô la. A9 đã đưa các nhiếp ảnh gia và thiết bị di động đến hai mươi thành phố lớn và thuê phương tiện.

Vào cuối năm 2005, khi Google trở nên phổ biến và vốn hóa thị trường, tìm kiếm trên Web nói chung tại A9.com bắt đầu giống như một thử nghiệm cao quý nhưng thất bại. Rõ ràng là tìm kiếm trên web không phải là thứ có thể được thực hiện với giá rẻ hoặc bằng cách dựa vào chỉ mục tìm kiếm của đối thủ. Manber có hàng chục kỹ sư làm việc về tìm kiếm trên Web, trong khi Google có vài trăm. Tuy nhiên, trung tâm phát triển A9 đã cho thấy nhiều hứa hẹn. Nó đã thực hiện những cải tiến khiêm tốn đối với tìm kiếm sản phẩm trên Amazon.com và bắt đầu hoạt động trên một dịch vụ quảng cáo có tên là Clickriver, dịch vụ này sẽ cho phép các nhà quảng cáo (ví dụ: trình cài đặt truyền hình) mua các liên kết trong kết quả tìm kiếm trên Amazon.com (tìm kiếm HDTV, cho ví dụ).

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Clickriver chứa đựng những hạt giống của một công việc kinh doanh quảng cáo mới, những hạt giống sau này sẽ nảy mầm thành một nguồn doanh thu lành mạnh cho công ty. Thời gian của Manber tại Amazon cũng hoạt động hiệu quả theo những cách khác: sau ba năm, anh ấy đã có hơn 20 đơn đăng ký bằng sáng chế, một số trong số đó mang tên Bezos.

Tuy nhiên sau đó, hàng loạt xung đột bùng phát làm rung chuyển nhóm S Team, phá vỡ mối quan hệ thân thiết giữa Bezos và Manber, đồng thời đẩy Amazon quay lại với nỗ lực không ngừng để chứng tỏ với cả thế giới rằng Amazon không phải là nhà bán lẻ nhàm chán hay một công ty công nghệ kém nổi bật nhất trong kỷ nguyên mới.

Vào thời điểm Amazon 10 tuổi, công ty không phải là nơi thoải mái và dễ chịu cho nhân viên làm việc. Giá cổ phiếu đi ngang, tăng lương hàng năm bị giới hạn và môi trường làm việc khốc liệt. Nhân viên cảm thấy bị trả lương dưới mức cống hiến và đang làm việc quá tải. Khi các trung tâm phát triển mới được mở ở Palo Alto và các thành phố khác, trong Amazon thường có những câu đùa rằng đó là bước đi cần thiết, bởi vì bất kỳ ai ở Seattle cũng đều thấy những nhân viên hiện tại đang thất vọng về công ty ra sao.

Trong bộ phận kỹ thuật, các nhân viên không ngừng cố gắng sửa chữa một cơ sở hạ tầng kỹ thuật giờ đã trở nên cũ kỹ, ngổn ngang. Công ty đã phát triển nhanh hơn khuôn khổ ban đầu do Shel Kaphan nghĩ ra vào những năm 1990, cơ sở mã nguyên khối có tên là Obidos mà trong nhiều năm được kết hợp với nhau bởi cái mà giám đốc điều hành Amazon Werner Vogels sau này gọi là “băng keo và kỹ thuật WD40”. Và khi Amazon sao chép cơ sở mã phức tạp của mình để chạy các trang web Target and Borders, những giao dịch đó rất hấp dẫn nhưng chúng lại làm tăng thêm vấn đề cơ sở hạ tầng của công ty. Thay vì chiến đấu với ngọn lửa phát ra từ một tòa nhà, các kỹ sư thường phải đối phó với một địa ngục xung quanh khu vực lân cận.

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Như nhiều công ty công nghệ khác vào thời điểm đó, Amazon nhận được bài học kinh nghiệm là phải chuyển sang hệ thống cơ sở hạ tầng đơn giản và linh hoạt hơn, mang tên kết cấu hướng dịch vụ. Cấu trúc này phân chia mọi tính năng và dịch vụ thành những mảng độc lập, dễ dàng nâng cấp và thay thế mà không phá vỡ toàn bộ kết cấu hệ thống.

Được dẫn dắt bởi giám đốc công nghệ của Amazon vào thời điểm đó, một phi công cuồng nhiệt tên là Al Vermeulen, người mà các đồng nghiệp gọi là Al V., công ty đã xây dựng lại cơ sở hạ tầng công nghệ của mình như một chuỗi các bộ phận độc lập nhưng được kết nối với nhau. Kế hoạch chuyển đổi mở rộng sang tập hợp mã nguồn cơ sở mới ẩn chứa nhiều nguy cơ. Gurupa (đặt theo tên của một khúc sông Amazon, nơi nhiều nhánh sông hội tụ) là một nhân tố quan trọng trong kế hoạch đó, khiến Amazon mất hơn ba năm và khiến cho những kỹ sư hệ thống của công ty, những nhân viên trong dự án bị ép phải mang máy nhận tin nhắn để có thể phản ứng tức thì với hàng loạt vấn đề phát sinh.

Kết quả là, hàng chục kỹ thuật viên tài năng này đã rời đi, nhiều người trong số họ chuyển sang Google. Steve Yegge là một trong những kỹ sư đã thực hiện động thái vào khoảng thời gian này. Anh ấy sẽ công bố ý kiến của mình về người chủ cũ của mình nhiều năm sau đó bằng cách viết một bản thảo trên mạng xã hội Google+ và vô tình công khai cho toàn bộ Internet đọc. Yegge viết: “Thách thức của tôi với Amazon là tìm ra cách để mô tả nó mà không làm tôi buồn nôn. “Nhưng cuối cùng thì tôi cũng sẽ tìm ra điều gì đó. Theo nhiều cách, họ là một hoạt động đẳng cấp thế giới — chủ yếu theo những cách quan trọng đối với khách hàng của họ; nhân viên, không quá nhiều. Nhưng tôi đoán cuối cùng thì khách hàng mới là vấn đề quan trọng.”

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Cuối năm 2004, một sự kiện khác đánh vào tâm trạng và hoạt động nội bộ của Amazon. Toys “R” Us kiện Amazon ra tòa án liên bang với lý do Amazon vi phạm thỏa thuận cho phép chuỗi cửa hàng trở thành người bán hàng độc quyền của hầu hết những trò chơi phổ biến trên trang web Amazon. Những vấn đề trong vụ kiện xoay quanh ngôn ngữ pháp lý trong bản hợp đồng gốc. Và hai bên gặp nhau tại tòa án để giải quyết tranh chấp về mục tiêu và sự nhìn nhận của công chúng. Toys “R” Us cho rằng công ty trả phí hậu hĩnh hàng năm cho Amazon và phần trăm doanh thu để được độc quyền bán hầu hết các trò chơi phổ biến trên Amazon. Tuy nhiên, Amazon và vị CEO đã không thể ngăn cản động lực muốn cung cấp cho khách hàng lựa chọn hoàn hảo và Amazon dần khiến đối tác tức giận khi âm thầm tìm các cách thức, mánh khóe mới cho phép những người bán đồ chơi khác kinh doanh trên trang web.

Phiên xử diễn ra vào tháng Chín năm 2005 trong phòng xử án ngột ngạt tại Paterson, New Jersey. Bezos tham gia làm chứng trong hai ngày và từ những biên bản ghi chép tại tòa, dường như ông không hài lòng về bản thân. Thẩm phán Margaret Mary McVeigh chất vấn ông về việc không thể nhớ lại những quyết định quan trọng và cuối cùng đưa ra phán quyết có lợi cho Toys “R” Us, cho phép bên bán hàng phá vỡ hợp đồng với Amazon và phát triển trang web riêng của công ty. Trong bản án, thẩm phán miêu tả nhân viên Amazon như những người coi thường đối tác tôn sùng, cũng như sợ hãi vị CEO và những yêu cầu của ông. “Tôi chắc chắn rằng không chuyện gì lớn diễn ra tại Amazon mà thiếu sự chấp thuận của Bezos,” bà viết trong phán quyết, trích dẫn từ lời làm chứng của một quản lý Toys “R” Us.

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Amazon kháng cáo nhưng thất bại và bị yêu cầu trả 51 triệu đô la cho đối tác cũ. Tranh chấp với Toys “R” Us sẽ trở thành bằng chứng loại A phản ánh sự thật rằng, Amazon luôn hướng tới việc chăm sóc khách hàng và thường chống lại những đối tác lớn. (Cùng thời điểm Toys “R” Us kiện Amazon, một đối tác khác có trang web du lịch Expedia, cũng kiện công ty. Và vấn đề được dàn xếp, giải quyết ngoài tòa.)

Phân nhóm đồ chơi bước sang giai đoạn chuyển đổi. Sau việc hủy bỏ thỏa thuận hợp tác với Toys “R” Us, phân nhóm hàng hóa quan trọng càng xáo trộn. Một phần vấn đề xuất phát từ thực tế rằng, tình hình tài chính của công ty đang bị ảnh hưởng từ những nhóm hàng như đồ điện tử và trang sức. Chúng chưa tạo ra lợi nhuận, mặc dù tăng trưởng nhanh hơn những nhóm về nghe nhìn giải trí truyền thống. Bezos thấy rằng ông cần đặc biệt tập trung giải quyết vấn đề này. Cuối năm 2004, ông thuê Kal Raman, cựu quản lý của Drugstore.com, người từng đóng vai trò hỗ trợ đắc lực trong vụ lôi kéo nhân viên và dẫn tới vụ kiện của Walmart vào năm 1998. Trong thời gian ngắn, ông quyết định tách làm đôi mảng đang phụ trách của Diego Piacentini. Sau đó, Diego trở thành phó chủ tịch phụ trách mảng bán lẻ toàn cầu và chuyển giao mảng hàng hóa quan trọng cho Raman. Bezos thông báo quyết định vào thứ Ba trong email nội bộ gửi toàn công ty. Hầu hết nhân viên công ty vào thời điểm đó đều cho rằng thông báo gây bất ngờ không chỉ với họ mà cả Piacentini (mặc dù Piacentini khẳng định rằng ông đã biết về quyết định trước khi email được gửi đi).

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Raman sinh ra trong ngôi làng nhỏ ở phía nam Ấn Độ. Cha ông mất khi ông mới 15 tuổi và gia đình rơi vào cảnh nghèo khó. Ông đã nỗ lực học tập để lấy bằng về kỹ thuật điện tử và tìm được công việc tại Công ty tư vấn kỹ thuật Tata ở Mumbai, rồi gia nhập Walmart ở Texas, nơi ông làm việc trong phòng IT và gặp Rick Dalzell. Raman thông minh, làm việc không ngừng nghỉ và tạo dựng hình ảnh cá nhân là nhà quản lý luôn đòi hỏi khắt khe.

Áp dụng kinh nghiệm làm việc ở Walmart, Raman thúc đẩy xây dựng các hệ thống để cuối cùng hiểu rõ tầm nhìn của Bezos về một Amazon có nền tảng trọng tâm là lấy dữ liệu làm trung tâm. Nhóm của ông phát triển hàng loạt công cụ tự động cho phép người mua (là chủ cửa hàng lớn) đặt hàng dựa trên hàng chục biến số như xu hướng theo mùa, lịch sử mua sắm và thống kê về số lượng khách hàng đang tìm kiếm một sản phẩm cụ thể vào thời điểm nhất định. Nhóm của Raman cũng cải tiến phần mềm hiển thị giá bán. Chương trình tự động tìm kiếm trên web, theo dõi giá của đối thủ và sau đó điều chỉnh giá của Amazon, bảo đảm yêu cầu của Bezos về mức giá thấp nhất so với những cửa hàng trên phố hay cửa hàng trực tuyến khác.

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Những người mua (là chủ cửa hàng lớn) được yêu cầu chịu trách nhiệm hoàn toàn cho việc giữ hàng hóa luôn có trong kho và mức giá cạnh tranh. Nếu họ chậm trễ giao hàng trong trường hợp nào đó – nếu kho hàng bỗng nhiên hết hoặc nếu giá của Amazon cao hơn đối thủ – thì “Kal chắc chắn sẽ tự mình lùng sục và giết bạn,” Diane Lye, nhân viên làm việc dưới quyền của Raman trong 18 tháng, nói. “Quá nhiều cơn lốc tức giận. Công nghệ bị lỗi liên tục nên dẫn đến dữ liệu thường bị sai. Chúng tôi sẽ báo cáo với Jeff Bezos nhưng tất cả giải thích chỉ là lý sự cùn và ông ấy sẽ gào lên và hét vào mặt chúng tôi. Ôi trời, thật là khủng khiếp.”

Raman nói nhanh và đặc âm bản địa. Tật dùng từ sai nghĩa của ông trở thành huyền thoại. Nhân viên gọi đó là “chủ nghĩa Kal”. “Các anh đang say thuốc hết cả rồi!”, ông gào lên. Hoặc “Tôi có thể uống thứ anh đang uống để cảm thấy tốt về công việc anh làm?” Ông làm việc cho Amazon chưa tới hai năm nhưng mọi người trong công ty vẫn nói về ông.

“Kal là người hung dữ,” Jason Goldberger, giám đốc bán lẻ làm việc cho Raman nói. “Ông ấy giống như nhân vật bước ra từ màn ảnh. Sau khi thảm họa bão Katrina xảy ra một năm, tôi đảm nhận nhóm ngành cải tạo nhà cửa và ông ấy không thể hiểu tại sao kinh doanh máy phát điện lại đang đi xuống [so với mức tăng lúc cơn bão đến]. Ông ấy là người cầu tiến.”

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Sự hỗn loạn gây ra bởi những thay đổi trên khiến Amazon càng loạn hơn vào thời điểm đó. Nhóm S Team bị bủa vây trong hàng loạt cuộc chiến thương tàn nội bộ, có lẽ đây là nét đặc trưng trong một công ty lớn. Raman và Piacentini không được thoải mái trong việc tách quyền quản lý về bán lẻ. Raman cũng xung đột với Jeff Wilke. Có lúc, Wilke nghe nói rằng Raman nói xấu về nhóm phân phối và ông thách thức trực tiếp với Raman trong cuộc họp lớn. “Tôi nghe nói anh có điều muốn nói với tôi,” Wilke nói. “Anh có muốn nói ngay tại đây, trước mặt những người tham dự họp không?” Mọi người đã nghĩ họ có thể lao vào đánh nhau.

Bezos đã không giải quyết ổn thỏa vấn đề này; ông nghĩ những vấn đề đó mang tính cá nhân và đang xảy ra ở nơi ông không thể hoặc không muốn tiếp cận. Và điều gì phải đến cũng đến, nhóm S Team, theo như thông tin của vài thành viên, đã trở thành nơi cực kỳ dễ kích động, mọi người cảm thấy cần được nói thẳng với nhau, cần nịnh nọt sếp và tranh chấp chính trị được phép phát triển.

Một trong những tranh chấp lớn nhất xảy ra là giữa Udi Manber và Jeff Holden, một quản lý kỹ thuật khác của công ty và đồng nghiệp cũ của Bezos tại D. E. Shaw, người từng là hacker khi ở tuổi niên thiếu với biệt danh Nova.

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Holden nằm trong đội ngũ lãnh đạo của Amazon lâu hơn bất kỳ ai khác trong nhóm và có mối quan hệ cá nhân thân thiết với Bezos. Nếu những thành viên của nhóm S là những hành tinh quay xung quanh Mặt Trời, thì Holden là Sao Thủy, có quỹ đạo bay đặc quyền và nhận nhiều chỉ trích một phần là do sự ghen tị. Bây giờ, khi đã ở tuổi 35, Holden vẫn có thói quen nói nhanh, uống soda không đường và Frappuccino nhanh trong các cuộc họp sản phẩm. Giống Bezos, ông là một giám đốc có tham vọng luôn muốn nhìn thấy thành quả nhanh chóng.

Trên cương vị phó chủ tịch phụ trách khai thác web, Holden quản lý trên 500 nhân viên trong các phòng ban khác nhau: Cá nhân hóa trải nghiệm, mua bán tự động, liên kết hợp tác quảng cáo sản phẩm của Amazon, tiếp thị qua thư điện tử và phòng phụ trách công cụ tìm kiếm. Tuy nhiên sau đó, Holden bắt đầu thấy rằng nhóm của Manber quá tập trung vào những thách thức trong tìm kiếm chung trên web mà không quan tâm đến những vấn đề thiết thực hơn như chạy tìm kiếm cho trang web Amazon và giải quyết vấn đề thời gian trả kết quả tìm kiếm trên Amazon.com. Vấn đề trên xuất phát từ thực tế Holden giữ quyền kiểm soát tìm kiếm trên trang web trong khi Manber chịu trách nhiệm về công nghệ tìm kiếm chung. Về cơ bản, họ phụ thuộc lẫn nhau.

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Cuối cùng, sau khi vấn đề trở nên ngày càng rắc rối, Holden đã kết luận rằng họ không thể tiếp tục làm việc với nhau. Ông thuê kỹ sư Darren Vengroff bí mật xây dựng công cụ tìm kiếm của Amazon tại Seattle, sử dụng công cụ mã nguồn mở như Lucene và Solr. Vài tháng sau, Holden mô tả bản mẫu đầu tiên cho Bezos và ông đồng ý cho họ chạy thử. Holden nói với Bezos muốn phát triển hơn nữa công cụ dựa trên Solr và nếu mọi thứ tốt đẹp, ông sẽ chuyển việc phát triển công nghệ tìm kiếm về Seattle. Bezos nói rằng sẽ suy nghĩ về điều này nhưng sau đó lại đồng ý với đề xuất của Manber, người cảm thấy rằng đang bị ném đá giấu tay.

Giờ đây mọi người đều ở tình cảnh khó khăn. Bezos trở lại và yêu cầu cả Holden, Manber cùng thành lập nhóm chung để đánh giá hướng phát triển mới. Có nhiều phiên bản tường thuật khác nhau cho đoạn sau của câu chuyện, nhưng cuối cùng Manber và Holden không thể làm việc cùng nhau. Sau thời gian đánh giá, Bezos quyết định rằng việc tìm kiếm nên để dành cho A9 – trung tâm phát triển đầu tiên của Amazon. Holden cực kỳ thất vọng. Ông lập luận rằng cách tổ chức quản lý của ông nhắm trực tiếp vào mục tiêu của dự án và làm việc chăm chỉ để sửa chữa những vấn đề tìm kiếm còn tồn tại dai dẳng trên trang web. Bezos chỉ ra rằng những điều này chỉ mang tính cảm xúc, không logic.

Cảm thấy Bezos chọn Manber, Holden lên kế hoạch rời khỏi Amazon. Cùng với Vengroff, ông thành lập công ty tìm kiếm trên điện thoại di động Pelago (sau này bị Groupon thâu tóm). Mặc dù, đây là giai đoạn khó khăn trong mối quan hệ của họ, nhưng Holden và Bezos vẫn là những người bạn và Bezos đã đầu tư vào Pelago. Tuy nhiên, khi Holden ra đi, Bezos đã mất một trong những người bạn lâu năm nhất ở công ty và một trong những nhà cải cách tài năng nhất của Amazon. Nhưng vẫn may mắn khi ông còn có Udi Manber.

Nhưng sau đó Manber cũng ra đi.

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Manber nói rằng ông không thích quản lý một trung tâm phát triển ở xa và cảm thấy bị cách ly khỏi tổng hành dinh ra quyết định tại Seattle. Nhưng thực chất, ông bực tức khi Bezos cho phép Holden tiến hành phát triển công cụ tìm kiếm riêng tại Seattle. Ông nói với Bezos và Rick Dalzell rằng ông đang xem xét việc quay trở trường đại học để nghiên cứu đề tài khoa học về trí nhớ. Bezos đã nài nỉ Manber ở lại với cương vị bạn hữu của Amazon và Manber nói rằng ông sẽ cân nhắc.

Trong khi đó, Urs Holzle, một trong những nhân viên đời đầu của Google và phó chủ tịch phụ trách kỹ thuật, muốn từ bỏ giám sát công cụ tìm kiếm để chuyển sang tập trung vào hệ thống cơ sở hạ tầng cho Google. Holzle mời Udi Manber bữa tối và gây ngạc nhiên cho nhà khoa học Israel khi đề nghị Manber thay thế vị trí của ông, trở thành người phụ trách công nghệ tìm kiếm. Lúc đầu Manber lưỡng lự và nói rằng ông đang dự định rời khỏi ngành. Sau đó vài tuần, ông thay đổi ý định và quyết định rằng có thể muốn nghe cụ thể về lời đề nghị của Google. Holzle sắp xếp bữa tối với Larry Page trong phòng riêng của nhà hàng Il Fornaio nằm trong khu trung tâm Palo Alto vào tháng Một. Chắc chắn Page và Manber từng người một đi riêng vào nhà hàng. Giữa bữa ăn, Sergey Brin nhập cuộc. Vị CEO Google, Eric Schmidt xuất hiện ở bữa tráng miệng. Nỗ lực thuyết phục Manber gia nhập Google thật sự hoành tráng và ấn tượng.

Khoảng tháng Hai, Manber nhận được đề nghị cực kỳ hấp dẫn là điều hành nhóm tìm kiếm của Google, và ông đã quyết định nắm lấy cơ hội. Đặt vấn đề tiền bạc sang một bên, thì vào thời điểm đó, với bất kỳ kỹ sư nào trong lĩnh vực tìm kiếm thì việc gia nhập Google đồng nghĩa với việc bước chân vào sân chơi lớn nhất thế giới và trở thành thành viên của nhóm xuất sắc nhất. Đối với Google, công ty đã đánh cắp một trong những bộ óc thông minh nhất trong lĩnh vực tìm kiếm. Đồng thời, với cú ra đòn nhanh như chớp, Google cũng cắt đứt nỗ lực của đối thủ cạnh tranh trực tiếp.

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Giờ đây, Manber phải thông báo với Bezos quyết định ra đi ngay trong thời điểm có quá nhiều cuộc đào tẩu sang Google của nhân viên Amazon. Ông gọi điện cho Bezos để thông báo. Nhân viên Amazon thuật lại diễn biến tiếp theo và ví đây như là một trong những cơn giận dữ nhất của Bezos từ trước tới nay. Manber dự đoán rằng Bezos sẽ thất vọng và có lẽ cố gắng thuyết phục ông ở lại lần nữa. “Đó là những gì tôi hi vọng Jeff sẽ làm, nhưng ông ấy đã không làm vậy,” Manber nói. “Ông ấy, tất nhiên, cực kỳ tức giận và chỉ trích tôi. Tôi không nhớ rõ từng từ, nhưng điều gì đó tương tự như ‘Không! Không! Không! Không. Anh không thể làm thế được!’ Ông ấy trách mắng tôi như đứa trẻ vừa làm điều gì đó cực kỳ sai trái.”

Lúc đó, Manber cảm thấy như vừa mất đi một người bạn. Ông biện minh với Bezos rằng bất kỳ kỹ sư có nền tảng kiến thức, kinh nghiệm làm việc cũng như niềm đam mê nào cũng sẽ không thể từ chối cơ hội điều hành nhóm tìm kiếm của Google. Bezos coi đó là sự phản bội cá nhân. Lần này, ông ấy đã không thể cho qua dễ dàng. “Ông ấy không phải là người thích vòng vo và tôi thấy thật kinh khủng. Ông ấy luôn đối xử tử tế với tôi, thân thiết như người cố vấn bên cạnh và tôi đã để ông thất vọng,” Manber nói. “Tôi không biết liệu ông ấy có tha thứ cho tôi không, có thể là không nhưng tôi không có sự lựa chọn nào tốt hơn. Tôi [đã] quyết định rời Amazon và quyết định đó mang ý nghĩa giúp tôi bước lên đỉnh cao trong lĩnh vực hoặc tôi sẽ bắt đầu từ số không trong lĩnh vực mới.”

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Vài ngày sau, Bezos bình tĩnh lại và thử thuyết phục Manber thay đổi ý định, nhưng đã quá muộn. Bezos đã mất đi hai đồng nghiệp thân thiết nhất, là những người phụ trách kỹ thuật vào đúng vào thời điểm Amazon đang nỗ lực thoát khỏi cái bóng nhà bán lẻ và trở thành công ty công nghệ. Điều này khiến chiến lược của Amazon gặp trở ngại rất lớn. Công cụ tìm kiếm chung trên web tại A9.com thất bại và bị hủy bỏ một năm sau khi Manber rời đi. Block View nép vế hoàn toàn trước Street View của Google. Tìm kiếm bên trong cuốn sách thú vị nhưng khó có thể thay đổi cuộc chơi và những kỹ sư tốt nhất thế giới đang trốn chạy khỏi văn hóa ngột ngạt của Amazon, chạy tới Google và những công ty Internet hấp dẫn khác tại thung lũng Silicon. Nếu Bezos định chứng tỏ với thế giới rằng Amazon là công ty công nghệ thực sự như những gì đã khẳng định, ông cần một bước đột phá.

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Đầu năm 2002, nhà truyền bá về web và xuất bản sách trên máy tính, Tim O’Reilly, đã bay tới Seattle để đả thông suy nghĩ của Jeff Bezos. O’Reilly, sau này tiếp tục giúp xây dựng nền tảng Web 2.0 và khởi xướng ngày hội cho những người đam mê phần cứng mang tên Maker Faire, cho rằng Amazon đang hoạt động giống như một trang web tách biệt. Ông muốn Amazon công bố dữ liệu bán hàng và cho phép ông cùng những nhà xuất bản khác có thể theo dõi xu hướng tiêu thụ để giúp họ quyết định sẽ xuất bản gì tiếp theo. Bezos không để tâm tới việc cung cấp những dịch vụ như vậy và đã lập tức đáp trả rằng ông không thấy điều đó sẽ đem lại lợi ích gì cho Amazon.

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Nhiều năm trôi qua, O’Reilly và Bezos xây dựng mối quan hệ bạn bè nhưng đôi khi đối đầu. Vào tháng Hai năm 2000, O’Reilly phát động làn sóng phản đối trên mạng chống lại Amazon, khi công ty từ chối cho phép những nhà bán lẻ khác trên Internet sử dụng hệ thống 1-Click. (Bezos giải quyết vấn đề đầy thông minh bằng cách tham gia cùng O’Reilly chỉ trích hệ thống bản quyền và ủng hộ ý tưởng của O’Reilly về thành lập công ty độc lập BountyQuest, cho phép các công ty trả thù lao cho các tài liệu, khi đó bản quyền sở hữu trí tuệ sẽ bị suy yếu.) O’Reilly cũng viết blog công khai kêu gọi những người yêu thích các cửa hàng sách trên phố mua sách ở đó, thậm chí kể cả khi mua trực tuyến rẻ hơn. Ông lập luận rằng nếu không làm vậy, những cửa hàng sách trên phố sẽ biến mất. Thông điệp được dán trên máy tính tiền của vài cửa hàng sách độc lập trên toàn quốc.

Tuy nhiên, trong một chuyến thăm Bezos đặc biệt vào năm 2002, O’Reilly đã lập luận thuyết phục và Bezos lắng nghe. Ông đã chỉ cho Bezos về Amarank, công cụ tinh vi mà công ty của ông đã phát triển để truy cập trang web Amazon mọi lúc và sao chép bảng xếp hạng những cuốn sách của nhà xuất bản O’Reilly Media cùng đối thủ cạnh tranh. Quá trình rườm rà này dựa trên kỹ thuật cơ bản có tên quét màn hình. O’Reilly gợi ý Amazon nên phát triển công cụ trực tuyến có tên giao diện lập trình ứng dụng (API) cho phép bên thứ ba lọc thông tin dễ dàng về giá cả, sản phẩm và bảng xếp hạng doanh số.

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O’Reilly phát biểu đầy tham vọng về việc đóng gói toàn bộ các phân mục của Amazon và cho phép những trang web khác xây dựng dựa trên đó. “Các công ty cần nghĩ rằng họ không chỉ nhận lợi ích từ công nghệ mới mà còn hỗ trợ những công ty khác,” ông nói.

Sau chuyến thăm của O’Reilly, Bezos triệu tập cuộc họp với Rick Dalzell, Neil Roseman và Colin Bryar để bàn về vấn đề O’Reilly đưa ra. Dalzell nói rằng công ty hiện nay cũng đang có hệ thống tương tự và giới thiệu với Bezos kỹ sư trẻ Rob Frederick, nhà sáng lập công ty chuyên về thương mại di động Convergence mà Amazon đã thâu tóm vào năm 1999. Nhóm của Frederick đang nghiên cứu API để cho phép những thiết bị di động như điện thoại và PalmPilot truy cập vào Amazon.com. Sau cuộc họp đó, Bezos mời O’Reilly nói chuyện về bài học kinh nghiệm rút ra từ lịch sử phát triển máy tính và tầm quan trọng của việc trở thành một cổng giao tiếp với nhóm kỹ sư và sau này trong cuộc họp các bên của Amazon.

Bezos đưa nhóm của Frederick vào nhóm cộng tác do Colin Bryar quản lý và giao cho nhóm nhiệm vụ tạo ra một loạt API mới, cho phép những lập trình viên truy xuất vào trang Amazon. Sau đó, những trang web khác có thể đưa nội dung có chọn lọc từ Amazon, bao gồm giá, mô tả chi tiết sản phẩm và sử dụng hệ thống thanh toán, giỏ hàng. Bezos quyết định điều chỉnh quản lý trang web theo hướng mở. Trong nội bộ Amazon nêu ý kiến rằng công ty nên đưa những công cụ mới đến những lập trình viên và “khiến họ ngạc nhiên” trong vài tháng tới. Công ty tổ chức hội nghị cho lập trình viên đầu tiên vào mùa thu và mời các cá nhân đang cố xâm nhập vào hệ thống của Amazon. Giờ thì những lập trình viên trở thành bên quan trọng tại Amazon, cùng với khách hàng và bên bán hàng thứ ba. Và nhóm mới thành lập, được điều hành bởi Colin Bryar và Rob Frederick, được đặt tên chính thức: Dịch vụ web Amazon.

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Đó là điểm khởi đầu cho con đường khám phá đầy may rủi của Amazon.

Dịch vụ web Amazon (AWS) hiện nay là mảng kinh doanh cơ sở hạ tầng máy tính cơ bản như: lưu trữ, cơ sở dữ liệu và khả năng tính toán dữ liệu. Dịch vụ trở thành phần quan trọng ở thung lũng Silicon và cộng đồng công nghệ thông tin nói chung. Những công ty mới khởi nghiệp như Pinterest và Instagram thuê dung lượng trống cùng các chu trình trên máy tính của Amazon và điều hành hoạt động thông qua Internet như thể những chiếc máy chủ siêu mạnh đang được đặt trong văn phòng của họ vậy. Ngay cả những công ty lớn cũng dựa vào AWS, như Netflix, để đưa đoạn video đến cho khách hàng. AWS giúp giới thiệu khái niệm điện toán đám mây, phần quan trọng đối với vận mệnh tương lai của những công ty công nghệ mới ra đời. Quỹ đầu tư mạo hiểm thường đánh giá cao đối với những công ty mới khởi nghiệp sử dụng công nghệ này. Hàng loạt cơ quan chính phủ Mỹ như NASA và Cơ quan tình báo trung ương Mỹ, cũng trở thành khách hàng nổi tiếng của AWS. Mặc dù Amazon giữ kín con số tài chính và lợi nhuận của AWS, nhưng những nhà phân tích của Morgan Stanley ước tính rằng trong năm 2012, dịch vụ này mang lại cho Amazon khoảng 2,2 tỉ đô la.

Sự phát triển nhanh chóng của Dịch vụ web Amazon đặt ra một số nghi vấn. Làm thế nào nhà bán lẻ trực tuyến có thể tạo ra mảng kinh doanh hoàn toàn không liên quan như vậy? Làm cách nào mà nhóm kỹ sư kiến tạo ban đầu cho Dịch vụ web Amazon – nhóm chuyên về API thương mại – phát triển thành công dịch vụ hoàn toàn khác biệt, trở thành dịch vụ cơ sở hạ tầng công nghệ cao? Những nhà quan sát từ đầu đưa ra kiến giải rằng việc kinh doanh bán lẻ của Amazon mang tính thời vụ quá lớn – phát đạt trong những tháng nghỉ lễ – nên Bezos quyết định tận dụng công suất máy tính trong lúc nhàn rỗi. Tuy nhiên, lý giải trên bị những thành viên Amazon phủ nhận, một phần bởi nếu đúng như vậy thì Amazon sẽ phải đẩy những lập trình viên khỏi máy chủ mỗi khi mùa thu đến.

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Việc chuyển sang cung cấp dịch vụ cơ sở hạ tầng thực sự bắt đầu với việc chuyển sang Gurupa và cơ sở hạ tầng công nghệ đáng tin cậy hơn. Một quá trình được lấy đà từ năm 2003. Trong khi hệ thống nội bộ của Amazon đã bị chia nhỏ thành những phân mục riêng biệt bền vững hơn, thì nhân viên kỹ thuật của Amazon vẫn được tổ chức quản lý tập trung vào một nhóm truyền thống, có văn phòng làm việc riêng biệt trong tòa nhà gần nhà ga chính của Seattle. Nhóm sẽ kiểm soát chặt chẽ quyền truy cập máy chủ của Amazon và những nhóm khác trong công ty phải xin cấp nguồn tài nguyên phục vụ trong các dự án và tính năng mới. Quy trình này khiến công việc bị chậm lại và gây thất vọng cho nhiều giám đốc dự án của Amazon. “Bạn có vô số người quản lý những cỗ máy này, những “thầy tu” canh giữ phần cứng và phần còn lại là chúng tôi đang chống lại điều này,” Chris Brown, giám đốc phát triển phần mềm vào thời điểm đó, nói. “Chúng tôi muốn có không gian tài nguyên, nơi chúng tôi có thể tự do thử nghiệm những ý tưởng mới.”

Bezos cũng cảm thấy bực tức. Công ty đã cải tiến hệ thống lấy hàng theo tín hiệu đèn trong các trung tâm FC và hệ thống cơ sở hạ tầng cũng được lập trình lại thành công theo phân mục dịch vụ, nhưng việc cung cấp tài nguyên máy tính vẫn mắc kẹt. Vấn đề trở nên trầm trọng đến nỗi những giám đốc dự án trình lên nhóm S Team bản tường trình dài sáu trang. Trong phần thảo luận, họ thú nhận rằng không thể kiểm nghiệm thực tế các dự án. Rick Dalzell nhớ về cuộc họp đặc biệt khi Matt Round, giám đốc phụ trách Cá nhân hóa vào thời điểm đó, phàn nàn không có tài nguyên phục vụ cho thử nghiệm tính năng mới. “Cuối cùng Jeff nổi giận với tôi,” Dalzell nói. “Tôi luôn kiểm soát bản thân khá tốt trước những cơn giận dữ của Jeff, nhưng thú thật ông ấy có quyền tức giận. Chúng tôi đang bế tắc trong sự sáng tạo. Dù chúng tôi có thể nhanh hơn 99% những công ty trên thế giới, nhưng chúng tôi vẫn quá chậm.”

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Vào thời điểm đó, Bezos say mê cuốn sách có tựa đề Sáng tạo (Creation) của Steve Grand, lập trình viên trò chơi video của thập niên 90 mang tên Creatures (sinh vật). Trò chơi cho phép người chơi dẫn dắt và nuôi dưỡng sinh vật có trí tuệ trên màn hình máy tính. Grand viết rằng mục đích của ông là tạo ra thứ có thể lưu trữ và xử lý dữ liệu, nhằm tập trung vào việc thiết kế khối hợp nhất điện toán đơn giản, được gọi là primitive (nguyên gốc), sau đó nghỉ ngơi và quan sát những hành vi bất ngờ xuất hiện.

Mặc dù cuốn sách dày và nội dung khó đọc, nhưng nó được thảo luận rộng rãi trong câu lạc bộ sách của các nhà quản lý Amazon vào thời điểm đó. Nó giúp gắn kết các tranh cãi về những vấn đề xảy ra với hệ thống cơ sở hạ tầng của công ty. Nếu Amazon muốn kích thích, sáng tạo của các lập trình viên, thì không nên phán đoán loại dịch vụ gì họ có thể muốn; những suy đoán như vậy sẽ dựa vào mô hình hành vi cũ. Thay vào đó, công ty nên tạo ra primitive (nguyên gốc) – khối hợp nhất về điện toán – và sau đó để phần còn lại cho các lập trình viên. Nói cách khác, công ty cần chia nhỏ hệ thống cơ sở hạ tầng thành những nguyên tử đơn giản nhất và cho phép các lập trình viên truy xuất tự do linh hoạt nhất có thể. Theo hầu hết nhân viên Amazon, thì thời điểm Bezos đã công bố quyết định như sau: “Những lập trình viên là nhà luyện kim và công việc của chúng ta là phải làm mọi thứ có thể để họ làm việc.”

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Bezos chỉ đạo các nhóm kỹ sư phụ trách đưa ra các ý tưởng có thể về primitive (nguyên gốc). Lưu trữ, băng thông, nhắn tin, thanh toán và xử lý được đưa vào danh sách triển khai. Một cách không chính thức – như thể công ty không hoàn toàn hiểu hết primitive (nguyên gốc) – Amazon bắt đầu xây dựng nhóm phát triển những dịch vụ được liệt kê trong danh sách trên.

Vào cuối năm 2004, Chris Pinkham, giám đốc cơ sở hạ tầng IT của công ty, nói với Dalzell quyết định quay về với gia đình ở Nam Phi. Vào thời điểm đó, A9 đã đặt nền móng tại Palo Alto, và Dalzell quá bận rộn thành lập trung tâm phát triển từ xa tại Scotland, Ấn Độ và những nơi khác. Dalzell gợi ý Pinkham thay vì rời khỏi Amazon, ông hãy mở văn phòng tại Cape Town. Họ đưa ra ý tưởng cho các dự án và cuối cùng quyết định thử xây dựng dịch vụ trên máy chủ của Amazon, cho phép lập trình viên chạy bất kỳ ứng dụng nào, và không bị giới hạn bởi loại ứng dụng. Pinkham và vài đồng nghiệp cùng nhau nghiên cứu vấn đề và đưa ra kế hoạch sử dụng công cụ mã nguồn mở mới, được gọi là Xen, phần mềm cho phép chạy hàng loạt ứng dụng trên một máy chủ riêng rẽ trong trung tâm dữ liệu dễ dàng hơn.

Pinkham mang theo anh chàng đồng nghiệp Chris Brown đến Nam Phi và thành lập phòng phát triển trong tổ hợp văn phòng tại Constantia, nằm ở phía đông bắc Cape Town, cạnh trường học và trại vô gia cư nhỏ. Nỗ lực làm việc của họ trở thành Môi trường điện toán đám mây co giãn (EC2) – dịch vụ trung tâm của AWS và trở thành công cụ hỗ trợ bùng nổ Web 2.0.

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EC2 được nghiên cứu và phát triển độc lập. Ít nhất trong năm đầu, Pinkham chỉ trao đổi rời rạc, gián đoạn với các đồng nghiệp tại Seattle. Văn phòng Constantia phải làm mọi việc chỉ với hai đường truyền băng thông rộng. Trong suốt mùa hè nóng nực năm 2005, do một trong hai nhà máy điện hạt nhân bị hỏng, nên các kỹ sư phải làm việc trong điều kiện hạn chế sử dụng điện. Pinkham sau này nói rằng sự độc lập đem lại lợi ích, nó giúp tạo khoảng cách dễ chịu với vị CEO Amazon. “Phần lớn thời gian tôi cố gắng lẩn tránh Bezos,” Pinkham nói. “Ông là người có thể nói chuyện vui vẻ nhưng bạn không muốn ở trong dự án mà ông đặc biệt ưa thích. Ông thích gây ra sự sao lãng.”

Hàng chục kỹ sư tham gia phát triển dịch vụ lưu trữ đơn giản của Amazon (S3) không có được sự xa xỉ đó. Những kỹ sư làm việc trong văn phòng trên tầng tám của Pac Med, hàng ngày cùng nhau ăn trưa trong gần hai năm và thường chơi bài cùng nhau sau giờ làm. Không ai trong số họ hay quản lý của họ, Alan Atlas, cựu nhân viên của công ty truyền thông kỹ thuật số Real Networks, có thể giấu đi “một nửa thế giới”.

Bezos đặc biệt quan tâm tới tiến trình phát triển những dịch vụ web và thường đi sâu vào những chi tiết nhỏ nhặt nhất của dự án S3, đưa ra câu hỏi chi tiết về cách thức dịch vụ sẽ đáp ứng yêu cầu và liên tục bắt các kỹ sư đứng trước bảng liệt kê đơn giản thiết kế của S3. “Nó luôn bắt đầu đầy phấn khởi và vui vẻ với tiếng cười giòn tan của Jeff,” Atlas nói. “Sau đó, điều gì đó xảy ra, cuộc họp trở nên căng thẳng và bạn sẽ cảm thấy sợ hãi. Tôi luôn nghĩ rằng tôi sẽ bị sa thải sau mỗi cuộc họp như vậy.”

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Atlas nói rằng trong thời gian làm việc cho dự án S3, ông thường xuyên gặp khó khăn trong việc nắm bắt những suy nghĩ vĩ đại của Bezos. “Ông ấy mường tượng về hàng chục nghìn chiếc máy giá rẻ 200 đô la chất đống trên kệ. Và nó phải có khả năng mở rộng không giới hạn,” Atlas nói. Bezos nói với ông rằng: “Điều này phải phát triển vô tận không dừng lại. Vô tận!”

Trong cuộc họp, Atlas mắc sai lầm ngớ ngẩn khi gợi ý rằng họ thể tìm ra cách theo kịp bất kỳ tăng trưởng ngoài dự đoán nào sau khi dịch vụ đưa ra thị trường. Điều này khiến Bezos phát khùng. “Ông nghiêng người về phía tôi và nói ‘Tại sao anh lãng phí cuộc đời của tôi vậy?,’ và tiếp tục đả kích Keyston Cops,” Atlas nói. “Ông ấy thực sự tức giận. Tôi không nắm bắt kịp suy nghĩ của ông ấy và điều này xảy ra nhiều lần. Ông ấy đi trước chúng tôi quá xa.”

Nhân dịp chính thức cung cấp dịch vụ lưu trữ đơn giản (S3), Atlas đã phát áo phông kỷ niệm cho đồng nghiệp; ông sử dụng thiết kế của trang phục siêu nhân và chữ S3 thay cho S trên ngực. Tất nhiên, ông phải tự trả tiền cho những chiếc áo phông.

Khi tham vọng phát triển dịch vụ web được triển khai ở cả hai văn phòng Nam Phi và Seattle, Bezos và Dalzell bắt đầu cân nhắc ai sẽ là người lãnh đạo. Bezos gợi ý Al Vermeulen, phụ trách công nghệ của Amazon, nhưng Al V. đang đi lại bằng máy bay giữa Seattle với Corvallis và Oregon hàng ngày và không muốn công việc hành chính văn phòng. Ông tự xin giáng chức xuống kỹ sư làm việc trong S3 với Alan Atlas. Do vậy, Dalzell đề cử Andy Jassy, người khởi nghiệp không may mắn tại Amazon nhiều năm trước, khi đánh trúng Jeff Bezos bằng mái chèo thuyền kayak trong trận thi đấu khúc côn cầu trong buổi tổ chức trò chơi đầu tiên của công ty.

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Nếu kỷ nguyên mới trong lĩnh vực công nghệ cao thực sự trở thành thời đại của các giáo sư khoa học thì Jassy sẽ chứng tỏ là trường hợp ngoại lệ. Tốt nghiệp Đại học kinh doanh Harvard với niềm đam mê dành cho cánh gà rán và đội thể thao New York, Jassy dường như không phù hợp trong công ty công nghệ mới. Có lẽ vì vậy mà con đường sự nghiệp của Jassy tại Amazon trắc trở và đôi khi khó khăn. Đó chính là anh chàng Jassy, người đã thuyết trình kế hoạch kinh doanh đầu tiên vào năm 1998, có nội dung về mở rộng sang kinh doanh âm nhạc. Nhưng sau đó anh chàng đứng nhìn một quản lý khác được phụ trách dự án một cách đầy thất vọng. Vài năm sau, trong cuộc tái cấu trúc tổng thể công ty, Jassy được chọn để quản lý nhóm Cá nhân hóa, nhưng những kỹ sư kỹ thuật trong phòng từ chối bị chỉ đạo bởi một người mà vào thời điểm đó, họ cho là ngoại đạo.

Jassy được trao cơ hội duy nhất. Bezos yêu cầu anh chàng nắm giữ vị trí “cái bóng”– vai trò mới đòi hỏi Jassy theo sát vị CEO và ngồi cùng ông trong tất cả cuộc họp.Những công ty công nghệ khác như Intel và Sun đều có vị trí tương tự và Bezos cũng thử nghiệm phương án này trước đó với những vị quản lý mới trong công ty – bao gồm cả một kỹ sư đến từ D. E. Shaw, John Overdeck và người sáng lập Accept.com, Danny Shader. Tuy nhiên, vị trí này chưa bao giờ là công việc toàn thời gian, nhiều người trong số những “cái bóng” trước đó đã rời khỏi công ty.

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Jassy băn khoăn về lời đề nghị của Jeff. “Tôi thấy hãnh diện khi được làm việc cùng Jeff nhưng không háo hức vì đã chứng kiến những bài học trước đó,” Jassy nói. “Tôi hỏi Jeff thành công trông như thế nào. Ông trả lời thành công sẽ đến khi tôi hiểu ông ấy, ông ấy hiểu tôi và chúng tôi tin tưởng nhau.” Jassy đồng ý và dành hầu hết thời gian trong 18 tháng tiếp theo bên cạnh Bezos, đi công tác cùng ông, thảo luận sự kiện hàng ngày, quan sát phong cách và cách thức tư duy của vị CEO. Jassy xác định vai trò của “cái bóng” như là cố vấn. Hiện tại, vị trí “cái bóng” của Bezos chính thức thực hiện vai trò cố vấn kỹ thuật. Nó trở thành vị trí được khao khát và đem lại cho người nắm giữ tầm nhìn rộng trong công ty. Đối với Bezos, một trợ lý đắc lực bên cạnh sẽ giúp ông tăng khả năng tiếp cận mọi vấn đề ở tầm nhìn rộng hơn và cùng ông thảo luận những vấn đề quan trọng cũng như bảo đảm các vị trí khác thực hiện theo đúng nhiệm vụ và tiến độ đề ra.

Khi Jassy kết thúc vai trò “cái bóng”, ông trở thành ứng viên hiển nhiên cho vị trí đứng đầu AWS. Một trong những nhiệm vụ đầu tiên của ông là viết tầm nhìn cho dịch vụ mới; ông phải kết nối những mảnh vụn thành báo cáo dài sáu trang. Báo cáo đưa ra tầm nhìn rộng cho AWS: “Để giúp các nhà phát triển và công ty sử dụng dịch vụ web xây dựng những ứng dụng tinh vi và có khả năng phát triển. Chúng tôi cố gắng để tạo ra viễn cảnh một sinh viên trong phòng ký túc xá cũng được trang bị cơ sở hạ tầng theo nhu cầu như những công ty lớn nhất trên thế giới,” Jassy nói. “Chúng tôi nghĩ những công ty mới thành lập, những công ty nhỏ, có thể có cấu trúc chi phí giống như những công ty lớn, một sân chơi công bằng.”

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Jassy, Bezos và Dalzell trình kế hoạch phát triển AWS lên hội đồng quản trị của Amazon và vấp phải phản ứng của “những cái đầu khó chơi”. John Doerr, đưa ra ý kiến mà Bezos sau này gọi là “hoài nghi tích cực”, đặt câu hỏi hiển nhiên: Vào thời điểm Amazon đang gặp khó khăn tuyển dụng kỹ sư và cần đẩy mạnh mở rộng ra nước ngoài, “Tại sao chúng ta cần tham gia vào lĩnh vực kinh doanh này?”

“Bởi vì chúng ta cũng cần điều này,” Bezos trả lời và đưa ra ý kiến rằng nhu cầu của Amazon cho dịch vụ tương tự phản ánh nhu cầu chung của thị trường. Jassy vẫn nhớ Doerr nói với ông sau cuộc họp rằng, ông là người may mắn khi được làm việc trong công ty chấp nhận đầu tư vào dự án có mức độ táo bạo và liều lĩnh như vậy.

Vào thời gian này, Bezos đang theo đuổi một dự án khác và ban đầu cũng vấp phải phản kháng của hội đồng quản trị Amazon. Khi những người sáng lập trang web mua sắm Junglee rời Amazon vào cuối những năm 1990, họ đã đưa ra điều khoản thỏa thuận, theo đó, họ sẽ vẫn giữ mối quan hệ mật thiết với ban lãnh đạo Amazon và thậm chí cùng nỗ lực phát triển. Anand Rajaraman và Venky Harinarayan, hai trong số các nhà đồng sáng lập, sau này thành lập công ty chuyên cung cấp hạ tầng Internet mang tên Cambrian Ventures. Bezos muốn Amazon tham gia đầu tư. Tuy nhiên, hội đồng quản trị Amazon đã bác bỏ. Đó là một hành động hiếm hoi chống lại ý kiến của Bezos. Do vậy, Bezos đành phải đầu tư cá nhân. Kết quả của quyết định đầu tư cho ra dịch vụ web không ai nghĩ là từ Amazon. Tuy nhiên, đây là dấu hiệu khác cho thấy công ty đang cố gắng phát triển ngoài lĩnh vực bán lẻ trực tuyến.

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Vào thời điểm Cambrian Ventures đang trong quá trình thành lập ở Thung lũng Silicon, dịch vụ chia sẻ tệp tin qua mạng đồng đẳng Napster đang thống trị và gây hoang mang cho ngành công nghiệp âm nhạc. Các kỹ sư của Cambrian nghĩ đến Napster và sức mạnh của mạng liên kết trên toàn thế giới. Họ băng khoăn, bạn có thể làm điều gì đáng giá với mạng phân bố đó, điều gì đó tốt hơn việc ăn cắp nhạc? Câu hỏi đó trở thành khởi nguồn cho dự án Agreya – tiếng Phạn có nghĩa là “đầu tiên”.

Ý tưởng sẽ là phát triển phần mềm và khai thác Internet để kết nối mọi người trên toàn thế giới, giải quyết các vấn đề mà những chiếc máy tính không thể xử lý ổn thỏa. Chẳng hạn, một hệ thống máy tính sẽ gặp khó khăn để xác định hàng loạt bức ảnh thú nuôi địa phương và xác định bức ảnh nào là mèo hoặc chó một cách đáng tin cậy. Tuy nhiên, con người có thể làm điều này dễ dàng. Các nhà lãnh đạo của Cambrian Ventures đưa ra giả thuyết rằng họ có thể xây dựng dịch vụ trực tuyến kết nối lực lượng lao động lương thấp trên toàn thế giới và bán khả năng tiếp cận nguồn nhân lực rẻ cho các công ty tài chính và tập đoàn lớn khác. Năm 2001, họ xin cấp bản quyền sáng chế cho ý tưởng và đặt tên là “Sắp xếp tính toán kết hợp với con người/máy móc”.

Thế giới mãi sau mới biết đến ý tưởng và tiếp nhận nó như dịch vụ nguồn lực sử dụng ưu thế đám đông. Tuy nhiên, dự án Agreya chứa đựng ý tưởng đi trước thời đại, và những công ty tài chính không hiểu rõ lý do tạo ra nó. Nhóm Agreya ở New York cố gắng quảng bá khái niệm trong tuần lễ 11 tháng Chín. Đầu tư cạn dần sau vụ tấn công khủng bố, nên họ đóng cửa dự án Agreya.

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Năm 2003, Rajaraman và Harinarayan quyết định đóng cửa Cambrian Ventures để thành lập công ty mới, Kosmix, chuyên phát triển công nghệ tổ chức thông tin trên web theo chủ điểm. Là một phần trong quá trình đóng cửa Cambrian, họ phải thỏa thuận với Bezos về khoản đầu tư của ông trong công ty. Không ngạc nhiên, Bezos chứng tỏ là nhà đám phán cứng rắn và bảo vệ vững chắc lợi ích tài chính cá nhân, thậm chí khi cổ phần đóng góp chỉ chiếm tỉ lệ không đáng kể trong tổng giá trị tài sản của ông. Rajaraman và Harinarayan nhớ lại quãng thời gian đàm phán kéo dài hai tháng gay cấn. Bezos đồng ý hoán đổi tiền đầu tư biến mất theo Cambrian Ventures thành cổ phần trong Kosmix. Trong lúc thỏa thuận, họ tình cờ đề cập với Bezos về bản quyền Agreya. Ông ngay lập tức quan tâm và yêu cầu thêm nó vào trong thỏa thuận chung. Nhìn thấy cơ hội kết thúc thỏa thuận, họ nhanh chóng đồng ý bán.

Trước sự ngỡ ngàng của hai người, sau đó Bezos thực sự triển khai phát triển phiên bản dự án Agreya trong Amazon. Ông đổi tên thành Mechanical Turk, theo tên chiếc máy chơi cờ tự động thế kỷ XVIII che giấu người chơi – một cao thủ chơi cờ – người nấp bên trong và điều khiển chiếc máy di chuyển quân cờ. Đã có khoảng hơn 20 nhân viên Amazon làm việc trong dự án từ tháng Một năm 2004 đến tháng Mười một năm 2005. Được coi là dự án của Jeff nên giám đốc phụ trách sản phẩm gặp Bezos vài tuần một lần và nhận email đều đặn từ vị CEO. Các email thường chứa gợi ý chi tiết lạ thường và đến vào lúc đêm muộn.

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Năm 2005, Amazon bắt đầu áp dụng thử nghiệm Mechanical Turk trong hoạt động nội bộ công ty. Nguồn lực con người được sử dụng trong những công việc như rà soát công cụ Tìm kiếm bên trong cuốn sách, quét và kiểm tra hình ảnh đưa lên Amazon của khách hàng để bảo đảm chúng không phải là ảnh khiêu dâm.

Khi công ty chuẩn bị giới thiệu Mechanical Turk ra thị trường, đội PR của Amazon và một vài nhân viên phàn nàn họ không thoải mái với tên gọi hệ thống vì nó liên tưởng tới người Thổ Nhĩ Kỳ. Bezos thích cái tên vì tính lịch sử nhưng đồng ý để nhân viên truyền thông và đội Mechanical Turk đưa ra ý tưởng thay thế. Họ tập trung xem xét cái tên Cadabra, liên tưởng đến cái tên đầu tiên của công ty Amazon. Nhưng cuối cùng, Bezos gạt bỏ lo ngại và nói rằng ông sẽ chịu trách nhiệm cá nhân cho quyết định này.

Mechanical Turk đã được phát hành một cách lặng lẽ vào tháng Mười một năm 2005. Hiện nay, bất kỳ người dùng Internet nào cũng có thể tham gia dịch vụ mà Amazon gọi là nhiệm vụ trí tuệ con người. Thông thường, mỗi người dùng sẽ kiếm được vài xu mỗi việc. Những công ty cần sử dụng nhân lực có thể đưa ra danh sách công việc trên trang web Mechanical Turk, Amazon lấy 10% phí trả thanh toán. Một trong những ứng dụng đầu tiên, từ một công ty có tên là Casting Words, đã trả cho công nhân vài xu mỗi phút để nghe và chép lại podcast.

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Mechanical Turk đem đến cho Bezos cơ hội khác để minh chứng khả năng của Amazon phát triển xa hơn, ngoài lĩnh vực kinh doanh bán lẻ chủ đạo và thể hiện nỗ lực cá nhân trong việc kết tinh những khái niệm trừu tượng. Ông gọi Mechanical Turk là “trí tuệ nhân tạo” và tham gia phỏng vấn về dịch vụ trên tờ New York Times và Economist. Nguồn gốc tên gọi không bao giờ bị chỉ trích, nhưng những nhà hoạt động vì người lao động coi dịch vụ là “công xưởng bèo bọt ảo” và “mặt trái của toàn cầu hóa”

Trước khi bước vào năm 2007, có hàng trăm nghìn người lao động tham gia Mechanical Turk ở hơn 100 quốc gia. Tuy nhiên, dịch vụ không cất cánh theo cách mà Bezos hi vọng trước đó, hoặc ít nhất là chưa. Một lý do hiển nhiên đó là mức lương thấp kỷ lục chỉ có sức hấp dẫn lớn ở những nước kém phát triển. Tuy nhiên, những công nhân ở thế giới thứ ba không thể sở hữu nổi máy tính kết nối Internet. Bezos dành nhiều thời gian và nguồn lực cho những dịch vụ web khác của Amazon khi chúng thành công ngoài mong đợi trong những năm tiếp theo. Trong những ngày đầu của Amazon, khi cá nhân hóa tự động thay thế việc biên tập, thì máy móc chứ không phải con người đã thúc đẩy bước đột phá đầy mong đợi của Amazon.

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Tháng Ba năm 2006, Amazon giới thiệu dịch vụ lưu trữ đơn giản (S3), cho phép những trang web và nhà phát triển khác lưu trữ tập tin máy tính như ảnh, tài liệu, hoặc video trên máy chủ Amazon. S3 vẫn đơn độc và đôi khi bị bỏ qua, như một phần của hàng rào không được hoàn thành. Một tháng sau khi ra mắt, Alan Atlas nhớ lại, dịch vụ bị gián đoạn trong chín giờ và hầu như không ai bên ngoài chú ý tới điều này. Sau đó vài tháng, dịch vụ điện toán đám mây co giãn đưa ra phiên bản beta cho công chúng, cho phép các lập trình viên chạy chương trình riêng trên máy tính của Amazon. Theo lời của Chris Brown, người trở về từ Nam Phi để ra mắt dịch vụ, Amazon mở những chiếc máy chủ đầu tiên cho khách hàng ở Bờ Đông của nước Mỹ và những lập trình viên đổ dồn đăng ký sử dụng dịch vụ quá nhanh đến nỗi những chiếc máy tính ban đầu định dành cho Bờ Tây đã bị chiếm hết.

Một phần lý do AWS ngay lập tức thu hút được sự chú ý của những công ty mới thành lập là do mô hình kinh doanh. Bezos nhìn nhận dịch vụ web tương tự như tiện ích điện năng, cho phép khách hàng chi trả cho những gì mà họ đã sử dụng, tăng hoặc giảm lượng tiêu thụ bất cứ lúc nào. “Sự giống nhau nhất mà tôi biết là hệ thống đường dây điện,” Bezos nói. “Trở lại thời điểm 100 năm trước, nếu muốn có điện, bạn phải tự mình tạo ra máy phát điện nhỏ và rất nhiều nhà máy đã sản xuất ra chúng. Ngay khi có đường điện, họ bỏ đi những cỗ máy phát điện và bắt đầu mua điện từ mạng lưới. Điều này phù hợp. Và đó là những gì bắt đầu diễn ra với hệ thống hạ tầng máy tính.”

Bezos muốn AWS trở thành tiện ích có mức giá thấp, thậm chí điều này có nghĩa là mất đi khoản thu về ngắn hạn. Willem van Biljon, làm việc cùng Chris Pinkham trong dự án EC2 và ở lại thêm vài tháng sau khi Pinkham rời đi năm 2006, đã đề nghị mức giá cho dịch vụ EC2 là 15 xu một giờ. Ông tin rằng mức giá này cho phép công ty hòa vốn dịch vụ. Trong một cuộc họp với nhóm S Team trước khi EC2 chính thức được tung ra, Bezos đã đơn phương quyết định mức giá 10 xu. “Ông sẽ thấy ông có thể mất lợi nhuận trong thời gian dài,” Van Biljon trao đổi với Bezos. “Được thôi,” Bezos đáp lại.

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Bezos tin rằng công ty có lợi thế trong cấu trúc chi phí và khả năng tồn tại trong môi trường có tỉ suất lợi nhuận thấp. Ông nghi ngờ những công ty như IBM, Microsoft và Google sẽ ngần ngại khi thâm nhập vào thị trường giá thấp bởi vì làm như vậy sẽ giảm lợi nhuận tổng thể của những công ty này. Bill Miller, giám đốc phụ trách đầu tư tại Quỹ quản lý vốn Legg Mason và là cổ đông lớn của Amazon, yêu cầu Bezos đưa ra kịch bản triển vọng lợi nhuận cho AWS vào thời điểm đó. Bezos đã dự đoán kết quả kinh doanh tốt trong dài hạn, nhưng nói rằng ông không muốn lặp lại “sai lầm của Steve Jobs” về định giá bán cho iPhone, khiến thị trường điện thoại thông minh có mức lợi nhuận hấp dẫn thu hút đối thủ cạnh tranh tham gia.

Lý giải trên phản ánh cho triết lý kinh doanh khác biệt của ông. Bezos tin rằng mức lợi nhuận biên cao sẽ thu hút đối thủ đầu tư vào nghiên cứu phát triển và khiến thị trường cạnh tranh ngày càng khốc liệt, trong khi đó tỉ suất lợi nhuận thấp thu hút khách hàng và tạo ra lợi thế cạnh tranh bền vững. (Phần nào ông đã đúng về trường hợp iPhone; mức lợi nhuận khổng lồ thực sự thu hút hàng loạt đối thủ, khởi đầu với điện thoại thông minh chạy hệ điều hành Android của Google. Nhưng điện thoại thông minh tiên phong cũng là sản phẩm sinh lợi khổng lồ cho Apple và cổ đông, trong khi AWS chưa làm được như vậy, ít nhất cho tới thời điểm đó.)

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Niềm tin của Bezos đã được củng cố. Mức giá thấp của AWS ngay từ đầu đã tạo ra những hiệu ứng dự đoán. Chủ tịch Google Eric Schmidt nói rằng, ông đã phải mất ít nhất hai năm trước khi nhận ra rằng những người sáng lập của hầu hết những công ty mới thành lập mà ông đến thăm đang xây dựng hệ thống trên máy chủ của Amazon. “Thật kinh ngạc, tất cả đều trên Amazon,” Schmidt nói. “Một lợi ích to lớn khi toàn bộ các công ty mới thành lập, phát triển nhanh, đầy triển vọng đều bắt đầu trên nền tảng của bạn.” Microsoft đưa ra dịch vụ điện toán đám mây tương tự với tên Azure vào năm 2010. Năm 2012, Google tung ra Compute Engine. “Hãy tán thưởng họ,” Schmidt nói. “Những chàng trai chuyên về sách lấn sân sang khoa học máy tính, họ đã phân tích và xây dựng một điều tuyệt vời.”

Như tác giả Steve Grand của cuốn Sự Sáng tạo (Creation) đã dự đoán, những sinh vật sống sẽ tiến hóa theo cách mà Bezos không thể tưởng tượng ra. Đó là sự kết hợp của EC2 và S3 – lưu trữ và tính toán, hai primitive (nguyên gốc) liên kết với nhau – đã biến đổi cả AWS và thế giới công nghệ. Những công ty mới thành lập không cần phải chi nhiều vốn đầu tư mua máy chủ và thuê những kỹ sư chuyên ngành để điều hành. Chi phí cơ sở hạ tầng của các công ty thay đổi, thay vì là chi phí cố định, và chúng lên theo con số doanh thu và trở thành chi phí biến đổi. Nó đã giải thoát các công ty khỏi quá trình thử nghiệm, thay đổi mô hình kinh doanh với thiệt hại ít nhất và bắt kịp xu hướng phát triển nhanh chóng của các mạng xã hội như Facebook và Twitter.

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Những điều này diễn ra trong nhiều năm, đòi hỏi nỗ lực phi thường và những nhà lập trình gặp vô số thách thức, chướng ngại. Andy Jassy, cùng với kỹ thuật viên Charlie Bell và Werner Vogels qua mặt đối thủ bằng cách đưa thêm dịch vụ thanh toán linh hoạt và dịch vụ tìm kiếm đám mây của Amazon kèm theo EC2 và S3. Những phòng ban trong Amazon được yêu cầu sử dụng AWS khi dịch vụ vẫn chưa hoàn thiện. Một yêu cầu khiến các kỹ sư trong công ty kinh ngạc. Khi những công ty mới thành lập và thậm chí cả công ty lớn bắt đầu phụ thuộc vào AWS, thì tình trạng thiếu hụt tài nguyên đã gây ra hậu quả đáng kể. Amazon thấy rằng công ty sẽ nhận được cảm thông từ cộng đồng nếu chủ động giải thích và thông báo trước.

Tuy nhiên, theo một số cách thì sự nổi lên của dịch vụ web Amazon mang tính chuyển giao. Dịch vụ web dễ dàng truy xuất và ít tốn kém của Amazon hỗ trợ hành trình khởi nghiệp cho hàng nghìn công ty Internet mới. Trong số đó có những công ty không thể tồn tại nếu không có dịch vụ web của Amazon. Amazon cũng hoàn toàn đánh vào sườn những nhà sản xuất phần cứng lớn vào thời đó, như Sun Microsystems, Hewlett Packard và định hướng phát triển cho làn sóng tiếp theo của hệ thống máy tính doanh nghiệp.

Có lẽ chuyển giao lớn nhất chính là về hình ảnh của Amazon. AWS mở rộng phạm vi định nghĩa về cửa hàng có mọi thứ và cung cấp cho Amazon những sản phẩm phi vật thể như Spot Instance và lưu trữ dung lượng khủng terabyte. Tất cả đã biến Amazon trở thành mục tiêu không rõ ràng của Walmart và những bán lẻ khác, cũng như giúp công ty thu hút hàng loạt kỹ sư tài năng tìm kiếm lời giải cho các vấn đề thú vị nhất thế giới. Cuối cùng, sau nhiều năm trắc trở và mâu thuẫn nội bộ, Amazon đã trở thành công ty công nghệ, điều mà Bezos luôn nghĩ đến.

—ooOoo—

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FIONA

Trở về giai đoạn đầu của Internet, khoảng năm 1997, Martin Eberhard, một doanh nhân, đang ngồi trong quán cà phê Palo Alto với anh bạn Marc Tarpenning, nhấm nháp ly latte và suy nghĩ về tương lai tươi sáng chắc chắn của máy tính xách tay. Chiếc PalmPilot, trợ lý kỹ thuật số cá nhân đầu tiên, vừa được ra mắt và điện thoại di động phát triển nhanh chóng trở thành những thiết bị mảnh mai, có thể dễ dàng bỏ trong túi áo khoác. Eberhard và Tarpenning làm việc cho nhà sản xuất ổ đĩa và vừa trở về từ hội nghị DiskCon. Nói cách khác, họ chán công việc hiện tại và đang tìm kiếm điều gì đó mới mẻ, hấp dẫn hơn để làm. Cả hai tình cờ đều là những con mọt sách.

Sau buổi cà phê hôm đó, đôi bạn đặt ra mục tiêu tạo ra một chiếc máy tính đọc sách kỹ thuật số. Mọi người đã nói về điều này trong nhiều năm. Dự án Gutenberg, một tổ chức phi lợi nhuận được thành lập vào đầu những năm 1970 tại Champaign, Illinois, lập ra sứ mệnh số hóa toàn bộ sách trên thế giới và đưa chúng vào máy tính cá nhân. Eberhard và Tarpenning đưa ra ý tưởng khác. Họ muốn một thứ gì đó di động, để mọi người có thể mang theo cả thư viện sách trong thiết bị đọc sách điện tử chuyên dụng. Mùa xuân năm đó, họ thành lập NuvoMedia và phát triển một trong những thiết bị đọc sách điện tử cầm tay đầu tiên trên thế giới có tên Rocket e-Book, hay Rocketbook.

Eberhard đã từng thành lập công ty mạng máy tính vào những năm 1980 và tiếp cận Thung lũng Silicon vài lần. Do vậy, ông biết rằng ông cần một nhà đầu tư rủng rỉnh vốn, cũng như có mối quan hệ để dẫn dắt ông trong thế giới phức tạp và cưng chiều của ngành kinh doanh xuất bản sách. Eberhard tin rằng ông cần Jeff Bezos và Amazon.com.

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Cuối năm 1997, những người sáng lập NuvoMedia và luật sư đại diện mang theo mẫu thử nghiệm Rocketbook đến Seattle. Hai người dành ba tuần đàm phán với Bezos và những quản lý cấp cao. Họ ở một khách sạn rẻ tiền trong thành phố và di chuyển thường xuyên đến tòa nhà Columbia cũ kỹ trên đại lộ số Hai để thảo luận khả năng đầu tư của Amazon vào NuvoMedia. Bezos “thực sự bị thu hút bởi thiết bị của chúng tôi,” Eberhard nói. “Ông ấy hiểu rằng công nghệ hiển thị cuối cùng cũng khá ổn.”

Mẫu thử nghiệm trông còn sơ khai, với phần mặt được sơn và cài đặt phần mềm đơn giản. Tuy nhiên, thiết bị hoạt động tốt, hiển thị những cuốn sách như Alice ở xứ sở thần tiên (Alice in Wonderland) và Câu chuyện về hai thành phố (A Tale of Two Cities) trên màn hình LCD. Thiết bị nặng gần 500g, trọng lượng theo chuẩn hiện nay. Nó có thể được cầm bằng một tay, như một cuốn sách thông thường và pin dùng trong 20 tiếng có bật đèn nền.

Bezos dường như ấn tượng với thiết bị nhưng vẫn còn lưỡng lự. Để tải sách, khách hàng cần kết nối thiết bị với máy tính. “Chúng tôi thảo luận về kết nối không dây, nhưng thời điểm đó nó cực kỳ đắt đỏ,” Eberhard nói. “400 đô la đội vào giá thành cho mỗi sản phẩm và kết nối dữ liệu nhà mạng thì cực kỳ đắt đỏ.” Màn hình của chiếc Rocketbook không dễ dàng đọc như những thiết bị đọc sách hiện đại, nhưng Eberhard đã thử sử dụng phương án thay thế khác. Trong đó có thể kể đến như E Ink, công nghệ hiển thị đang được phòng thí nghiệm truyền thông MIT phát triển và công nghệ e-paper của Xerox để chống lóa và tiết kiệm điện năng. Tuy nhiên, công nghệ vẫn chưa ổn định và đắt đỏ.

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Sau ba tuần đàm phán, hai bên gặp phải trở ngại lớn. Bezos bày tỏ lo lắng với Eberhard rằng khi chống lưng cho NuvoMedia và giúp công ty thành công, ông có thể tạo ra cơ hội cho Barnes & Noble nhảy vào và mua công ty sau này. Do vậy, ông yêu cầu điều khoản độc quyền trong bất kỳ hợp đồng thỏa thuận nào giữa hai công ty và muốn có quyền phủ quyết nhà đầu tư tương lai. “Nếu chúng tôi đánh cược vào tương lai của thiết bị, chúng tôi muốn biến nó thành sản phẩm thành công thông qua việc giới thiệu rộng rãi thiết bị với khách hàng,” David Risher, cựu phó chủ tịch cấp cao phụ trách lĩnh vực bán lẻ tại Mỹ, người tham gia vào đàm phán, nói. “Tuy nhiên, cách duy nhất hợp lý là chúng tôi được độc quyền. Nếu không, chúng tôi đang giới thiệu đến khách hàng đối thủ cạnh tranh tiềm năng.”

Eberhard không thể đồng ý giới hạn cơ hội huy động vốn trong tương lai của công ty, nên nỗi lo của Bezos có khả năng trở thành sự thật. Rõ ràng hai công ty đã đi vào ngõ cụt. Eberhard và Tarpenning đáp máy bay đến New York để gặp Len và Stephen Riggio của công ty Barnes & Noble. Họ bắt tay đồng ý hợp tác ngay trong tuần đó. Nhà bán sách và nhà xuất bản khổng lồ Bertelsmann đã đồng ý mỗi công ty đầu tư hai triệu đô la và cùng nhau sở hữu xấp xỉ phân nửa cổ phần của NuvoMedia.

Phải nói rằng Rocketbook và những đối thủ cạnh tranh lúc đó như SoftBook đi trước thời đại quá nhiều và thế giới chưa sẵn sàng đọc sách số.

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Tuy nhiên, đó không phải là toàn bộ câu chuyện. NuvoMedia bán 20.000 thiết bị trong năm đầu và đang trên đường thẳng tiến đến con số gấp đôi. Công ty thỏa thuận những hợp đồng sách điện tử đầu tiên với hầu hết nhà xuất bản chính (Hiệp hội tác giả lên án những hợp đồng này không tính đến lợi ích thỏa đáng của tác giả). Năm 1999, Cisco đầu tư vào NuvoMedia, đem đến cho công ty sự tín nhiệm và mối quan hệ hợp tác chiến lược. Đánh giá về thiết bị của người sử dụng nhìn chung là tốt. Oprah Winfrey liệt kê Rocketbook nằm trong danh sách Mười thứ yêu thích nhất trong ấn bản đầu tiên của tạp chí O và tờ Wired đã viết về thiết bị: “Nó như vật dụng sẽ gây dậy sóng tương lai”.

NuvoMedia đề ra con đường phát triển đầy tham vọng. Eberhard lên kế hoạch tận dụng tính kinh tế của quy mô và những tiến bộ trong công nghệ để nâng cấp chất lượng màn hình Rocketbook và thời gian sử dụng pin trong khi hướng đến việc giảm giá. (Trong mùa nghỉ lễ năm 1999, phiên bản đơn giản của thiết bị có giá 169 đô la.) Tuy nhiên, NuvoMedia vẫn cần thêm vốn và Eberhard lo lắng về quả bóng dot-com không ổn định và đang tác động xấu đến việc huy động vốn. Tháng Hai năm 2000, ông bán NuvoMedia cho công ty Gemstar chuyên cung cấp dịch vụ TV tương tác, có trụ sở tại thành phố Burbank với giá trị chuyển nhượng cổ phần trị giá 187 triệu đô la. Gemstar cũng thâu tóm SoftBook.

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Đó là một bước đi sai lầm. Mục đích chính của Gemstar khi thâu tóm là nắm giữ danh mục bản quyền sáng chế thông qua kiện tụng. Vài tháng sau thương vụ, Eberhard và Tarpenning rời công ty trong thất vọng. Gemstar tung ra phiên bản tiếp theo cho cả Rocketbook và SoftBook. Nhưng sau khi doanh số bán thấp và nhận được ít sự đồng cảm nội bộ, công ty đã rút chúng khỏi thị trường vào năm 2003. CEO của Gemstar, Henry Yuen, người đứng đầu vụ thâu tóm, sau này lẩn trốn đến Trung Quốc do bị buộc tội gian lận kế toán.

Sự sụp đổ của Gemstar không chỉ phá hủy tương lai đầy triển vọng của Rocketbook và SoftBook, mà dường như nó còn khiến toàn bộ niềm hứng khởi dành cho lĩnh vực sách kỹ thuật số trôi theo mây khói. BarnesandNoble.com ngừng bán sách điện tử sau khi Rocketbook biến mất và Palm cũng bán mảng kinh doanh sách điện tử vào cùng thời điểm. Đối với đa số mọi người, sách điện tử có vẻ đến hồi chấm hết và không còn hi vọng gì nữa.

Bezos và Eberhard vẫn duy trì quan hệ bạn bè trong những năm này, và Bezos quan sát sự thăng trầm của Rocketbook một cách chú tâm. “Tôi hoàn toàn tin rằng phần lớn sách sẽ được số hóa,” ông nói vào cuối những năm 1990. “Tôi cũng tin rằng một chặng đường dài cần bước trong tương lai, có thể mất đến hơn 10 năm.”

Bezos đã đánh giá thấp triển vọng của sản phẩm, có lẽ ông cố ý làm vậy. Năm 2004, trong quá trình tập trung sức mạnh hồi sinh của công ty máy tính Apple, ông định hướng chiến lược kỹ thuật số cho Amazon và cho khởi động một dự án bí mật tại thung lũng Silicon có tên Lab126.

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Kỹ thuật viên phần cứng tại Lab126 được giao nhiệm vụ khó khăn: Họ sẽ phá vỡ lĩnh vực kinh doanh sách của chính Amazon, đồng thời cũng phải đáp ứng yêu cầu về tiêu chuẩn cực kỳ cao của giám đốc thiết kế Amazon, chính là Bezos. Để Amazon có thể chuẩn bị cho một thư viện kỹ thuật số mới, mối quan hệ của công ty với thế giới sách được dùng để thúc đẩy các nhà xuất bản hợp tác. Điều này dường như là nhiệm vụ không tưởng khi phải thực hiện với ngân sách phân bổ eo hẹp. Nhiều sai lầm đã xảy ra, một vài trong số đó vẫn để lại dư âm cho đến tận bây giờ.

Tuy nhiên, vào năm 2007, vài tuần sau khi Amazon tiết lộ kết quả dự án là chiếc Kindle đầu tiên, Bezos đã gọi điện cho Martin Eberhard đang ở nhà riêng tại thung lũng Silicon để hỏi xem Martin có nghĩ rằng cuối cùng liệu Amazon có đi đúng hướng.

Trong những năm ở Apple, Steve Jobs thường xỉ vả đồng nghiệp, nhân viên dưới quyền khi họ đào ngũ và từ bỏ sứ mệnh đúng đắn của công ty. Mặc dù, Diego Piacentini rời Apple để đến với công ty mới thành lập mà Jobs nghi ngờ không chỉ kinh doanh trong lĩnh vực bán lẻ, thì cả hai vẫn giữ mối quan hệ thân mật. Có lẽ nguyên nhân là do Piacentini để Apple có sáu tháng tìm người thay thế cho vị trí giám đốc vận hành khu vực châu Âu. Jobs thường xuyên liên lạc với Piacentini khi ông cần biết điều gì đó từ Amazon, và đầu năm 2003, Piacentini đã gửi thư điện tử cho ông chủ cũ kèm theo đề nghị của chính ông. Amazon muốn hợp tác cùng Apple.

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Piacentini mang theo Neil Roseman và H. B. Siegel đến cuộc họp vào mùa xuân năm đó tại trụ sở chính của Apple. Họ là những kỹ sư công nghệ đã thành lập và phát triển nhóm truyền thông kỹ thuật số non trẻ của công ty. Những nhà quản lý Amazon không hi vọng gặp riêng Jobs và đã bất ngờ khi vị đồng sáng lập chào đón và dành vài giờ tiếp chuyện họ trong ngày hôm đó.

Thời điểm đó, Apple không kinh doanh âm nhạc; phần mềm iTunes cho phép người sử dụng sắp xếp, tổ chức bộ sưu tập nhạc của họ trên máy tính và chuyển sang chiếc iPod. Jobs muốn càng nhiều máy tính cài đặt iTunes càng tốt và thoáng nghĩ về ý tưởng Amazon phân phối những chiếc đĩa CD chứa phần mềm iTunes đến khách hàng. Piacentini và đồng nghiệp có kế hoạch khác: Họ gợi ý về một cửa hàng âm nhạc chung, nơi những người sở hữu iPod mua nhạc kỹ thuật số từ trang web của Amazon.

Chẳng có đề xuất hợp tác nào có kết quả. Jobs thuyết trình minh họa triển vọng Apple sẽ bán album và bài hát trực tiếp từ iTunes trên chiếc bảng trắng trong phòng họp. Những nhà quản lý của Amazon nói rằng một cửa hàng âm nhạc chắc chắn nên có trên web, chứ không phải trở thành một phần chức năng của phần mềm máy tính cần phải nâng cấp thường xuyên. Tuy nhiên, Jobs muốn đưa đến cho khách hàng trải nghiệm tiện dụng từ cửa hàng âm nhạc đến thiết bị chơi nhạc cầm tay và phải cực kỳ dễ dàng sử dụng để những khách hàng mù tịt công nghệ cũng có thể dùng. “Rõ ràng Jobs không đếm xỉa đến kinh doanh trên Web và ông không nghĩ có ai đó quan tâm về sách,” Neil Roseman nói. “Ông ấy có ý định phát triển phiên bản ứng dụng của cửa hàng iTunes trên máy người sử dụng và ông ấy để chúng tôi biết lý do tại sao ứng dụng phải trở thành trải nghiệm tuyệt vời nhất cho người dùng.”

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Jobs tự tin nhận định rằng Apple sẽ nhanh chóng vượt qua doanh số âm nhạc của Amazon, và ông ấy đã đúng. Tháng Tư năm 2003, Apple giới thiệu cửa hàng âm nhạc iTunes và chỉ trong vài năm, Apple thành công nhanh chóng, vượt qua Amazon, Best Buy và Walmart để trở thành nhà bán lẻ âm nhạc số một nước Mỹ.

Vào thời điểm gay cấn đó, các nhà đầu tư Amazon “phải cần đến kính hiển vi để tìm thấy doanh số” từ hàng loạt sáng kiến phát triển lĩnh vực kỹ thuật số cho công ty do Bezos đề ra. Công ty đã bán sách điện tử có thể tải về ở định dạng ưu tiên trên Microsoft và Adobe để đọc trên màn hình máy tính. Tuy nhiên, cửa hàng sách điện tử vẫn không nổi bật trên Amazon.com và sinh ít doanh số. Khám phá bên trong cuốn sách và Tìm kiếm bên trong cuốn sách được cho là thuộc về hướng phát triển sách kỹ thuật số, nhưng mục đích vẫn phải nhắm tới trải nghiệm mua sắm và tăng doanh số bán sách bản cứng. Đàm phán với NuvoMedia, Bezos đang nghĩ sẽ không thể tránh được việc chuyển sang nội dung kỹ thuật số. Tuy nhiên, vấn đề cấp thiết hơn trong thời gian đó như cải tạo trung tâm FC và hệ thống cơ sở hạ tầng công nghệ của Amazon đã chiếm ưu tiên làm việc của Bezos.

Trong vài năm sau, Apple thống trị ngành kinh doanh âm nhạc và khiến các chuỗi cửa hàng như Tower Records và Virgin Megastore trở thành đồ bỏ đi (với sự hỗ trợ đắc lực từ vi phạm bản quyền trên Internet). Ban đầu, Bezos không để tâm đến iTunes vì cho rằng bán mỗi bài hát với giá 99 xu sẽ không thể có lãi và rằng mục tiêu của Apple chỉ là tăng doanh số bán iPod. Bezos đã đúng, nhưng khi iPod xuất hiện khắp mọi nơi, Apple bắt đầu tận dụng triệt để iTunes để xâm nhập vào định dạng nghe nhìn tương tự như video. Khi đó, Amazon mới bắt đầu để tâm. “Chúng tôi đã thảo luận nhiều về nguyên nhân khiến iPod thành công khi không điều gì làm được trước đó,” Neil Roseman nói.

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Các nhà quản lý của Amazon dành nhiều tháng xem xét các chiến lược kinh doanh nhạc số khác nhau. Cuối cùng, họ nhìn thấy triển vọng cung cấp dịch vụ tải trước những bài hát trong những CD khách hàng đã mua trên trang web vào những chiếc iPod bán trên Amazon. Khi họ biết rằng không thể khiến các nhà phát hành đồng ý với ý tưởng, Amazon quyết định đưa ra dịch vụ âm nhạc số, tương tự như Rhapsody, trong đó khách hàng đăng ký theo tháng và được quyền truy xuất không giới hạn vào kho nhạc số. Amazon gần như hoàn tất mọi việc vào năm 2005. Dịch vụ sẽ sử dụng bản nhạc có mã hóa tương thích theo phần mềm chống sao chép trái phép Janus, công nghệ DRM (quản lý bản quyền số) của Microsoft. Tuy nhiên, vài thành viên của nhóm phản đối vì cho rằng còn nhiều thiếu sót trong phương án này. Theo Janus nhạc mã hóa sẽ không thể chạy trên những chiếc iPod mà khách hàng Amazon đã mua. “Tôi nhận ra mình thà chết chứ không tung ra cửa hàng như vậy,” Erich Ringewald, giám đốc sản phẩm tham gia phương án, nói. Bezos đồng ý bỏ đi phương án và bắt đầu lại. Trong khi đó, Apple ngày càng chứng tỏ vị trí thống trị trong lĩnh vực nội dung số. Cuối cùng, Amazon cho ra mắt cửa hàng MP3 vào năm 2007, với những bài hát không mã hóa theo DRM, người dùng có thể thoải mái sao chép. Tuy nhiên, Apple nhanh chóng đàm phán thỏa thuận tương tự và Amazon vẫn chỉ là kẻ tụt hậu trong lĩnh vực âm nhạc.

Đồng nghiệp và bạn bè của Bezos thường cho rằng sự chậm trễ của Amazon trong lĩnh vực nhạc số là do Bezos không thích thú với âm nhạc. Khi còn học phổ thông, Bezos học thuộc bức thư kêu gọi của đài phát thanh Miami địa phương, trong nỗ lực đánh lừa bạn bè về kiến thức âm nhạc của ông trong khi trò chuyện.

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Ngược lại, Steve Jobs sống và hít thở trong bầu không khí âm nhạc. Ông là người hâm mộ nổi tiếng của Bob Dylan, ban nhạc The Beatles và đã từng hẹn hò với ca sĩ Joan Baez. Sở thích cá nhân của Jobs ảnh hưởng đến chiến lược của Apple. Đam mê khác thường của Bezos cũng ảnh hưởng tương tự đến Amazon. Bezos không chỉ yêu sách – sách chiếm trọn tâm trí ông, mà còn cẩn thận xử lý từng chi tiết. Stewart Brand, tác giả cuốn How Buildings Learn hồi tưởng về khoảnh khắc giật mình khi Bezos đưa cho ông cuốn sách xuất bản năm 1995. Mỗi trang đều chi chít những ghi chú tỉ mỉ của Bezos.

Năm 2004, việc Apple thống trị nền âm nhạc số đã tạo ra trào lưu mới – tìm kiếm trên Amazon. Sách, nhạc và phim ảnh chiếm 74% doanh thu của Amazon trong năm đó. Nếu những loại hình này đều không thể tránh khỏi con đường chuyển sang kỹ thuật số, như những thành công của Apple chứng tỏ với âm nhạc, thì Amazon phải nhanh chóng tự bảo vệ. “Chúng tôi hốt hoảng và lo sợ về những gì iPod đã gây ảnh hưởng đến lĩnh vực kinh doanh âm nhạc của Amazon,” giám đốc John Doerr nói. “Chúng tôi lo ngại trên thị trường sẽ xuất hiện một loại thiết bị khác của Apple hoặc công ty nào đó sẽ nhắm vào lĩnh vực kinh doanh chủ chốt: Sách.”

Nhà đầu tư Bill Miller từ Legg Mason thường thảo luận với Bezos về chuyển giao kỹ thuật số khi hai người có cơ hội gặp mặt. “Tôi cho rằng điều khiến Bezos bất ngờ và cạnh tranh với Kindle là iPod, thiết bị khiến ngành kinh doanh âm nhạc chuyển mình, thay đổi mạnh mẽ hơn những gì Jeff nghĩ,” Miller nói. “Ông ấy luôn hiểu xu hướng chuyển sang kỹ thuật số nhưng ông không lường trước được lĩnh vực kinh doanh CD của Amazon lại nhanh chóng đi xuống như vậy.”

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Cuối cùng Bezos nhận ra rằng nếu Amazon muốn tiếp tục cạnh tranh trong thị trường sách ở thời đại kỹ thuật số, công ty phải sở hữu thị trường sách điện tử giống như những gì Apple đã kiểm soát ngành âm nhạc. “Tự mình chiếm đoạt bớt doanh thu của công ty hơn là để kẻ khác làm,” Diego Piacentini phát biểu tại Trường Kinh doanh – Đại học Stanford vài năm sau đó. “Chúng tôi không muốn chung số phận với Kodak.” Câu chuyện nhắc đến gã khổng lồ tuổi đời trăm năm trong ngành nhiếp ảnh. Kỹ sư của hãng Kodak đã sáng chế ra nhiều chiếc máy ảnh kỹ thuật số vào những năm 1970. Nhưng lợi nhuận công ty vào thời điểm đó quá tốt nên những nhà quản lý không muốn chấp nhận rủi ro đầu tư vào chiến lược có mức lợi nhuận thấp hơn. Rõ ràng Bezos đang dự liệu cho ra đời thiết bị đọc sách điện tử chuyên nghiệp sớm nhất vào năm 2003 – cùng thời điểm Gemstar ra mắt Rocketbook. Andreas Weigend, kiến trúc sư trưởng trong thời gian ngắn của Amazon, nhớ lại Bezos đã trao đổi với đội kỹ thuật về một thiết bị như vậy và nói rằng “Nó sẽ là thiết bị sử dụng bằng một tay”. Weigend tưởng tượng về bàn tay còn lại có thể làm những gì, ông cười lớn và mọi người trong phòng họp cũng cười theo.

Năm 2004, đội ngũ quản lý của Amazon tính đến việc đóng cửa cửa hàng sách điện tử mới ra đời. Trên đó, Amazon bán chủ yếu sách định dạng tương thích cho Adobe và Microsoft. Bezos ghét tất cả đặc điểm của cửa hàng: số lượng và chủng loại sách giới hạn, giá bán cao và trải nghiệm của khách hàng khi tải về đọc sách trên màn hình PC hoặc PDA thì thật khủng khiếp. Tuy nhiên, Theo lời của Piacentini, Bezos, vẫn cương quyết theo đuổi sách điện tử. Mặc dù gặp phải những sai lầm triển khai ban đầu, nhưng sách điện tử rõ ràng là tương lai của ngành kinh doanh sách.

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Sau vài tuần thảo luận, trong cuộc họp của nhóm S Team, Bezos thông báo Amazon sẽ tự mình phát triển thiết bị đọc sách điện tử chuyên nghiệp để đọc văn bản dài. Đây là “sắc lệnh” đầy bất ngờ. Phát triển phần cứng là quá trình đắt đỏ và phức tạp. Và đây hoàn toàn không phải là thế mạnh của Amazon. Hiển nhiên trong công ty xuất hiện làn sóng phản đối gay gắt. Đặc biệt, Jeff Wilke có nền tảng chuyên môn và kiến thức trong ngành sản xuất nên định hình được những thách thức phía trước cho công ty nếu cố sản xuất và bán thiết bị riêng. “Tôi đã nghĩ sẽ thực sự khó khăn và có thể thất bại. Tôi thực sự hoài nghi liệu đây có phải quyết định phù hợp để phân bổ nguồn lực công ty không,” ông nói. “Hóa ra hầu hết kịch bản dự đoán đều xảy ra và chúng tôi vẫn còn năng lượng vượt qua bởi vì Jeff không bị nhụt chí bởi những trở ngại trước mắt.”

Diego Piacentini cũng phản đối. Ông đã chứng kiến tận mắt Apple vật lộn ra sao để vượt qua những năm 1990 do dư thừa sản phẩm, phải loại bỏ lượng lớn hàng tồn kho. “Tôi và tất cả những ai suy nghĩ thấu đáo khác đều cho rằng đó là vụ đầu tư cực kỳ mạo hiểm,” ông nói.

Bezos gạt bỏ toàn bộ những ý kiến phản đối và khăng khăng cho rằng, để thành công trong lĩnh vực sách như Apple đã làm được trong âm nhạc, thì Amazon cần kiểm soát toàn bộ trải nghiệm khách hàng, kết hợp thiết bị phần cứng chạy mượt mà với kho sách kỹ thuật số dễ dàng sử dụng. “Chúng ta sẽ dùng cách riêng để giành lấy những tài năng,” ông nói với đội ngũ quản lý trong cuộc họp. “Tôi biết rõ điều này sẽ rất khó khăn. Chúng ta sẽ học hỏi dần cách làm trong quá trình thực hiện.”

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Những quản lý cấp cao tuân theo những ý tưởng của Jeff Bezos được nhân viên trong công ty gắn cho biệt danh “Jeff Bots”(Những chú rô bốt của Jeff). Cụm từ đùa cợt nhạo báng, ẩn chứa cả sự ghen tị lộ liễu, ám chỉ sự tận tâm mù quáng cũng như trung thành và hiệu quả. Những Jeff Bots tiếp nhận các ý tưởng vĩ đại của vị CEO rồi tung ra thế giới và tận tụy thực hiện theo. Họ hoàn toàn thấm nhuần triết lý kinh doanh của Bezos và tạo dựng góc nhìn thế giới của bản thân theo đó. Họ tường thuật tư tưởng Jeff như những chú vẹt – cách họ bắt đầu từ khách hàng và làm việc cho công ty sau đó… – như thể cuộc sống của họ gắn chặt với nó. Bạn sẽ tận mắt chứng kiến khả năng phát biểu cực kỳ trôi chảy về những đóng góp của Amazon và triết lý kinh doanh đồng cảm cùng khách hàng khi phỏng vấn một Jeff Bot. Họ thà tự nhai răng hàm của mình còn hơn tiết lộ những chủ đề mà Amazon không cho phép công khai – những nội dung như cạnh tranh và bất kỳ vấn đề gì có thể xảy ra với sản phẩm.

Trong suốt lịch sử của Amazon, có lẽ không Jeff Bot nào trung thành và dám làm như Steve Kessel, quản lý cấp cao sinh ra ở Boston, tốt nghiệp Đại học Dartmouth và Trường Kinh doanh – Đại học Stanford, gia nhập Amazon vào năm 1999. Những năm đầu ở công ty, ông điều hành phân nhóm sách. Khi đó, Amazon đang xây dựng mối quan hệ trực tiếp với các nhà xuất bản và cố gắng xoa dịu nỗi lo của họ về bên thứ ba kinh doanh sách cũ trên trang web. Trong suốt giai đoạn đầy thách thức, cam go của Amazon, Bezos dần tin tưởng ông tuyệt đối.

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Một ngày vào năm 2004, Bezos gọi Kessel vào văn phòng và đột ngột tước đi vị trí công việc, cùng với tất cả trách nhiệm và nhân viên cấp dưới. Ông muốn Kessel đảm nhiệm mảng kinh doanh kỹ thuật số non trẻ của Amazon. Kessel nghi ngờ. “Phản ứng đầu tiên là tôi đang có công việc tốt nhất trên thế giới,” ông nói. “Jeff nói về việc xây dựng những thứ hoàn toàn mới và tôi bắt đầu hứng thú với những thách thức đặt ra.” Bezos hoàn toàn tin rằng Kessel có khả năng điều hành tốt cùng lúc cả lĩnh vực kinh doanh số và truyền thống. “Nếu điều hành cả hai lĩnh vực, anh sẽ không bao giờ bỏ qua cơ hội kinh doanh số,” Bezos nói.

Trước đó, Bezos và đội ngũ quản lý đã hào hứng thảo luận về một cuốn sách khác sẽ gây ảnh hưởng sâu sắc đến chiến lược của công ty trong giai đoạn sau: Thế lưỡng nan của nhà cải cách (The Innovator’s Dilemma) của giáo sư trường Harvard, Clayton Christensen. Christensen viết rằng những công ty lớn thất bại không phải vì họ muốn trốn tránh thay đổi đột phá, mà bởi vì họ không sẵn sàng thâm nhập vào những thị trường mới đầy hứa hẹn do chúng có thể làm giảm sút thị trường kinh doanh truyền thống và không đáp ứng yêu cầu tăng trưởng trong ngắn hạn. Ví dụ trong trường hợp của Sears, công ty đã thất bại khi chuyển từ cửa hàng bách hóa sang bán hàng giảm giá; IBM không thể chuyển từ máy tính truyền thống cồng kềnh sang máy tính nhỏ gọn. Theo như Christensen viết trong cuốn sách, những công ty giải quyết thành công vấn đề tiến thoái lưỡng nan bằng cách “xây dựng những bộ phận tự quản độc lập phụ trách xây dựng những ngành kinh doanh mới và độc lập dựa trên công nghệ mới”.

Học hỏi những điều viết trong cuốn sách, Bezos tách Kessel khỏi bộ phận kinh doanh truyền thống của Amazon.

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“Nhiệm vụ của anh bây giờ là phải tiêu diệt chính ngành kinh doanh chủ đạo hiện nay của chúng ta,” ông nói với Kessel. “Tôi muốn anh hành động như thể mục tiêu nhắm đến là phải buộc những ai kinh doanh sách bản cứng truyền thống thất nghiệp.” Bezos nhấn mạnh mức độ cấp thiết của kế hoạch. Ông tin rằng nếu Amazon không đứng đầu thế giới trong thời đại sách số thì Apple hoặc Google sẽ chiếm lấy. Khi Kessel hỏi Bezos về thời hạn phát triển hoàn thiện chiếc máy đọc sách số đầu tiên, Bezos nói với ông: “Về cơ bản là anh đã muộn rồi.”

Bản thân không có kiến thức về lĩnh vực phần cứng và công ty chưa có nguồn lực nào cả, nên Kessel đã đề ra nhiệm vụ tìm kiếm dữ liệu nguồn từ Thung lũng Silicon. Ông gặp gỡ những chuyên gia phần cứng của Apple, Palm và những quản lý từ công ty thiết kế công nghiệp nổi tiếng Ideo. Ông thấy rằng Amazon không chỉ cần nhà thiết kế mà cả kỹ sư điện tử, kỹ sư cơ khí, kỹ sư kết nối không dây – một danh sách dài.

Thực hiện theo những lời chỉ dẫn của Christensen như thể đó là công thức nấu nướng, Kessel thành lập một chi nhánh khác ở Palo Alto, ngoài A9 đã có. Ông tuyển dụng Gregg Zehr, quản lý chi nhánh mới. Gregg là cựu phó chủ tịch phụ trách kỹ thuật của Palm Computing. Jateen Parekh, cựu kỹ sư của nhà sản xuất thiết bị giải mã tín hiệu ReplayTV (đối thủ cạnh tranh giai đoạn đầu của TiVo), trở thành nhân viên đầu tiên và một số kỹ sư khác tham gia sau đó. Do không có văn phòng nên họ đã lấy một phòng trống trong trụ sở A9. Zehr và đồng nghiệp chịu trách nhiệm nghĩ ra một cái tên, sao cho lôi cuốn được những kỹ sư thông minh và giỏi nhất của Thung lũng Silicon. Cuối cùng, họ quyết định sử dụng tên Lab126. Số 1 đại diện cho a, 26 đại diện cho z; ám chỉ giấc mơ đem đến cho khách hàng mọi cuốn sách từng xuất bản từ a đến z của Bezos.

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Zehr và nhóm của ông dành vài tuần đầu nghiên cứu khả năng phát triển hộp giải mã tín hiệu kết nối Internet và thậm chí chiếc máy chơi nhạc MP3. Cuối cùng, những kỹ sư phần cứng mới của Amazon được trao sứ mệnh: Họ sẽ phát triển thiết bị đọc sách điện tử. “Chúng tôi được chỉ đạo thực hiện một sứ mệnh lớn với sự tập trung điên cuồng,” Tom Ryan, kỹ sư phần mềm từ Palm mà Zehr kéo về mùa thu năm đó, nói. “Khát khao được trở thành Apple.”

Năm sau, nhóm sáp nhập nơi làm việc cùng A9. Khi trung tâm nghiên cứu A9 chuyển về văn phòng cũ của công ty luật tại Lytton và Alma trong trung tâm Palo Alto, Lab126 chuyển theo họ và nhận thư viện cũ của công ty luật. Họ nghiên cứu những thiết bị đọc sách điện tử đang có trên thị trường, như Sony Libre sử dụng pin chữ A và có doanh số thấp. Họ nhận định rằng thị trường vẫn đang có nhiều cơ hội rộng mở. “Thiết bị duy nhất chưa được ai phát triển hoàn hảo trên thị trường,” Perekh nói.

Lab126 sớm được tiếp thêm nguồn lực, tuy nhiên nhóm cũng phải tranh đấu với những hình dung không giới hạn của Bezos. Người sáng lập Amazon muốn thiết bị đọc sách mới phải dễ dàng sử dụng đối với cả người cao tuổi và ông cho rằng thiết kế thiết bị làm việc với mạng Wifi thì quá phức tạp cho những người sử dụng không thạo công nghệ. Ông không muốn bắt khách hàng kết nối thiết bị với máy tính, nên cách duy nhất thay thế là thiết lập truy cập không dây với nhà mạng, tương tự như gắn điện thoại di động vào mỗi thiết bị. Chưa có điều gì tương tự trước đó được thử. Bezos khăng khăng rằng khách hàng không nên biết liệu có kết nối không dây khả dụng không hay hay thậm chí là cả việc phải trả tiền truy cập. “Tôi nghĩ điều đó thật điên rồ, thực sự tôi nghĩ vậy đó,” Parekh nói.

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Trong những tháng đầu, danh sách tính năng thiết kế ban đầu của Kindle được lập ra. Zehr và Parekh quyết định khám phá công nghệ màn hình đen trắng tốn ít năng lượng có tên E Ink mà nhiều năm trước Martin Eberhard cho rằng quá thô sơ và tốn kém.

Không như màn hình LCD, công nghệ này cho kết quả hiển thị tốt dưới ánh sáng chiếu trực tiếp, tiêu thụ ít năng lượng và cực kỳ dễ đọc. Amazon đã gặp may. Công nghệ hoàn toàn phù hợp khi đọc sách nhiều trang trên thiết bị (và thực sự khủng khiếp cho những ứng dụng khác) chỉ vừa hoàn thiện sau một thập kỷ phát triển.

Trong những tháng kinh hoàng của năm 2004, những kỹ sư đầu tiên của Lab126 đã chọn tên mã cho dự án mới. Trên bàn làm việc của Zehr có cuốn Thời đại kim cương(The Diamond Age) của Neal Stephenson, tiểu thuyết viễn tưởng về một kỹ sư đánh cắp cuốn sách quý cho con gái, Fiona. Những kỹ sư Lab126 nghĩ rằng cuốn sách hư cấu trong tiểu thuyết sẽ trở thành hình mẫu cho những gì họ đang phát triển. Michael Cronan, nhà thiết kế đồ họa người San Francisco và phụ trách marketing, sau này được thuê để đặt tên chính thức cho thiết bị. Ông đưa ra cái tên Kindle, gợi ý tưởng về việc bắt đầu đám cháy lớn, nó vừa là danh từ, vừa là động từ. Tuy nhiên trước đó, nhóm Kessel vẫn gọi thiết bị với cái tên Fiona và cố gắng thuyết phục Bezos giữ lại nhưng thất bại. Dù sao, khao khát tri thức của Fiona trong thế giới tiểu thuyết hư cấu của Stephenson cũng trở thành vị thánh bảo trợ Amazon trong hành trình mạo hiểm tiến vào thế giới số.

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Zehr và đồng nghiệp tại Lab126 đảm trách xây dựng phần mềm và phát triển mối quan hệ với các nhà sản xuất châu Á. Văn phòng San Francisco của công ty thiết kế toàn cầu Pentagram chịu trách nhiệm thiết kế thiết bị đọc sách điện tử mới của Amazon. Zehr đã từng cộng tác cùng Robert Brunner tại Apple trong những năm 1990 và ông giới thiệu Brunner với Steve Kessel cùng gợi ý rằng Pentagram có thể cung cấp phương thức hợp tác nhanh chóng và riêng biệt hơn những công ty lớn hơn như Ideo. Brunner phân công hai nhân viên Tom Hobbs và Symon Whitehorn phụ trách công việc.

Những nhà thiết kế của Pentagram đều là người Anh, bắt đầu nghiên cứu việc đọc sách trên thực tiễn – những phương diện hành vi của thú giải trí như cách người đọc lật trang và giữ sách trên tay. Họ tự mình đọc sách trên những thiết bị đọc sách điện tử hiện có trên thị trường, như chiếc Sony Libre, Rocketbook cũ, cũng như trên những chiếc PDA như iPaq của Compaq và Treo của Palm. Họ chọn lựa nhóm đối tượng người đọc để nghiên cứu, và tiến hành phỏng vấn qua điện thoại. Thậm chí nhóm thiết kế còn đến Seattle nói chuyện trực tiếp với Bezos, cố gắng nghiên cứu hành vi đọc sách của con người đã được chấp nhận trong hàng trăm năm. Nghiên cứu cho ra kết quả quan trọng là một cuốn sách hay sẽ biến mất trên tay người đọc. Sau này, Bezos gọi đây là mục tiêu thiết kế đỉnh cao. “Kindle cũng phải tạo ra cảm giác đó, biến mất để bạn có thể bước vào thế giới của tác giả,” ông nói.

Những nhà thiết kế của Pentagram làm việc trong dự án Kindle trong gần hai năm. Họ gặp Steve Kessel, Greg Zehr và Charlie Tritschler – cựu nhân viên của Palm tham gia dự án Lab126 – vào mỗi sáng thứ Ba tại A9 ở Palo Alto và sau đó là văn phòng mới của Lab126 ở Mountain View. Họ định kỳ bay đến Seattle để báo cáo tình hình tiến độ công việc cho Bezos và phải trình bày với vị CEO, theo chuẩn Amazon, báo cáo tường thuật dài sáu trang.

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Những cuộc họp bao giờ cũng sẽ dần căng thẳng. Hobbs, Whitehorn và muốn bỏ qua tính năng phức tạp và tạo ra sản phẩm càng đơn giản, càng hiệu quả càng tốt. Bezos cũng muốn thiết kế đơn giản nhưng khăng khăng phải có bàn phím để người dùng có thể tìm kiếm sách và viết chú thích dễ dàng. (Ông hình dung hình ảnh ngồi trong taxi cùng nhà bình luận Walt Mossberg của Tờ Wall Street Journal và tìm kiếm rồi tải sách điện tử về ngay trong xe.) Bezos mang theo thiết bị nhắn tin của BlackBerry và nói với những nhà thiết kế: “Tôi muốn các anh kết hợp chiếc BlackBerry và sách.”

Trong chuyến đi đến Seattle, những nhà thiết kế kiên quyết mang theo các sản phẩm mẫu không có bàn phím. Bezos nhìn khiến họ bối rối. “Nhìn này, chúng ta đã nói về điều này,” ông nói. “Tôi có thể sai nhưng tôi ở vị trí cao hơn các anh.” “Tôi nhớ rằng cuộc họp sau đó diễn ra trong yên lặng,” Hobbs nói. Họ tuân theo chỉ đạo và thiết kế bàn phím dựa theo phong cách BlackBerry, trong khi cố gắng điều tiết góc ngón tay người đọc sao cho có thể di chuyển dọc thiết bị.

Tranh cãi tương tự cũng xảy ra với tính năng kết nối không dây. Những nhà thiết kế của Pentagram không thể hiểu nổi làm cách nào tính năng kết nối không dây có thể thỏa mãn bài toán kinh tế và đưa ra giả thuyết rằng Amazon sẽ phải yêu cầu người dùng trả thêm phí kết nối không dây mỗi lần khách hàng mua sách. Họ đề ra phương án giải quyết yêu cầu Kindle kết nối kho sách qua máy tính tương tự của iTunes. Bezos phản đối. “Hãy xem tình huống này. Tôi đang đến sân bay. Tôi cần đọc cuốn sách nào đó. Tôi muốn truy cập ngay trên thiết bị và tải về ngay trên ô tô.”

“Nhưng ông không thể làm điều đó,” Hobbs đáp lại.

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“Tôi sẽ quyết định những gì tôi có thể làm,” Bezos nói. “Tôi sẽ quyết định và nó sẽ không giống mô hình kinh doanh mà anh hiểu đâu. Anh là nhà thiết kế, tôi muốn anh thiết kế như vậy và tôi sẽ đưa ra mô hình kinh doanh.”

Pentagram tham gia dự án Fiona đến giữa năm 2006. Sau này, Lab126 thuê đội ngũ thiết kế riêng và tiếp nhận toàn bộ dự án. Những nhà thiết kế của Pentagram sẽ vừa yêu vừa ghét Kindle, khi cuối cùng họ nhìn thấy nó xuất hiện trên thị trường. Nó trông quá lộn xộn với dãy bàn phím, thiết kế nhìn quá rối mắt. Sau khi kết thúc dự án, Symon Whitehorn rời Pentagram đến làm cho Kodak. Ông thuê Tom Hobbs và họ cùng nhau tạo ra máy ảnh kỹ thuật số độc đáo, cho phép người chụp ảnh đưa hiệu ứng màu cổ điển Kodachrome vào mỗi bức hình. Thiết bị báo trước cho sự ra đời các ứng dụng trên điện thoại di động như Instagram. Kodak đã khai tử dự án trước khi đưa thiết bị ra thị trường.

Khi Pentagram rời dự án Kindle, thiết bị gần như đã sẵn sàng và chuẩn bị tung ra thị trường, tuy nhiên vì một số lý do nên bị trì hoãn. E Ink đã gửi màn hình từ châu Á và do khác biệt về nhiệt độ và độ ẩm, nên lô hàng bán ra trên thị trường có độ tương phản thấp hoặc bị mờ khi sử dụng thường xuyên. Intel bán bộ phận sản xuất chíp xử lý XScale mà Amazon sử dụng trên chiếc Kindle cho công ty chíp Marvell. Qualcomm và Broadcom, hai công ty công nghệ kết nối không dây sản xuất chi tiết kết nối dữ liệu cho chiếc Kindle, kiện nhau vào năm 2007 và dường như tòa án sẽ không cho phép một số chi tiết chính của Kindle nhập vào Mỹ. Chính bản thân Bezos cũng khiến kế hoạch ra mắt sản phẩm chậm lại, ông luôn tìm thấy chi tiết chưa hài lòng của thiết bị và yêu cầu chỉnh sửa.

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Dự án Kindle bị trì hoãn quá lâu đến nỗi nó trở thành chủ đề bàn tán dai dẳng trong nội bộ công ty, mặc dù không ai được biết về sự tồn tại của dự án. Trong một cuộc họp các bên tại rạp hát Moore vào mùa thu năm 2006, ai đó đứng dậy và đặt ra câu hỏi, “Anh có thể cho chúng tôi biết Lab126 là gì không?”

Bezos đáp trả cộc cằn: “Nó là trung tâm phát triển ở phía bắc California. Câu hỏi tiếp theo.”

Để dự án Kindle thành công trong dài hạn, Amazon cần kho sách điện tử – tựa sách phong phú, đa dạng. Bezos đã chứng kiến Rocketbook và sau này là Sony Reader lâm vào tình cảnh khó khăn vì lượng sách ít ỏi. Chẳng có nhiều đầu sách điện tử cho chủ sở hữu thiết bị. Mục tiêu của ông là phải xây dựng kho sách một trăm nghìn tựa sách, gồm 90% các đầu sách bán chạy nhất theo tờ New York Times, sẵn sàng tải về khi thiết bị được tung ra thị trường. Vào thời điểm đó, các nhà xuất bản đã số hóa những sách mới xuất bản có doanh số tốt, vào khoảng 20.000 tựa sách. Kho sách Kindle hoàn thành đã giúp ông hiện thực hóa phần nào giấc mơ về cửa hàng triệu đồ, một thư viện lưu trữ toàn diện, cực kỳ thuận tiện cho khách hàng truy cập. Và để hiện thực hóa giấc mơ này, Amazon sẽ phải gây áp lực, phỉnh phờ và thậm chí cả đe dọa một số đối tác lâu năm, những công ty đã coi Amazon như đối tác tin cậy tuyệt đối.

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Trở lại những ngày đầu, mối quan hệ giữa Amazon và những nhà xuất bản sách thường đơn giản và phần nhiều mang tính cộng sinh. Công ty lấy hầu hết sách từ Ingram, Baker & Taylor và những nhà phân phối khác. Trong vài trường hợp hiếm hoi khi những nhà phân phối này không còn tựa sách trong kho, Amazon mua trực tiếp từ nhà xuất bản. Điều này thường xuyên xảy ra nhưng không có cuộc chạm trán đáng kể nào trong những năm đó. Bezos thường phát biểu công khai rằng những nhà xuất bản ghét khách hàng nhận xét tựa sách của họ, sợ rằng những lời lẽ chỉ trích gay gắt, nặc danh trên mạng có thể làm giảm doanh số. Những nhà xuất bản và Hiệp hội tác giả cũng phàn nàn về sự xuất hiện của người bán sách, bên thứ ba kinh doanh sách cũ trên trang web.

Về phần mình, một Amazon trẻ tuổi liên tục kêu gọi các nhà xuất bản để có thêm “siêu dữ liệu”, thông tin bổ sung của sách, như tiểu sử tác giả, mô tả toàn diện về chủ đề và hình ảnh kỹ thuật số của bìa. Tuy nhiên, nhiều nhà xuất bản coi Amazon như một vị cứu tinh, một đối trọng rất cần thiết với Barnes & Noble, Borders và Waterstones ở Anh, tất cả đều đang mở ra các siêu thị mới và sử dụng quy mô và tốc độ tăng trưởng của họ để thúc đẩy giảm giá nhiều hơn cho giá bán buôn.

Sinh sống tại Seattle, cách xa thành phố New York, Bezos gây dựng vài mối quan hệ bạn bè với thế giới xuất bản. Một trong những mối quan hệ cá nhân hiếm hoi đó là với Larry Kirshbaum, vị CEO của tập đoàn Time Warner và bộ óc tuyệt vời, James Patterson, cùng vài tác giả khác.

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Kirshbaum tin tưởng sâu sắc vào sứ mệnh của Amazon, nên ông đã mua cổ phiếu công ty trong đợt phát hành lần đầu ra công chúng vào tháng Năm năm 1997. Vài tháng sau, trong một đêm mưa tầm tã ở Manhattan, Bezos và Kirshbaum dạo bộ qua sáu khu nhà từ tòa nhà Time-Life để tham gia bữa tiệc do Rupert Murdoch tổ chức cho Jane Friedman, vị CEO mới của chi nhánh sách HarperCollins của tập đoàn News. Những người có ảnh hưởng lớn trong lĩnh vực xuất bản đều tập trung tại quán Monkey Bar trên đường Fifty-Fourth. Trong một đêm hiếm hoi, Bezos mở rộng mối quan hệ với những nhân vật quan trọng trong ngành mà Amazon đang ấp ủ ý định thay đổi những điều không tưởng. “Một trong những khoảnh khắc mà bạn sẽ nhớ mọi điều,” Kirshbaum người sẽ trở thành giám đốc chi nhánh xuất bản New York của Amazon vào năm 2011, nói. “Thực ra, tôi nghĩ Bezos vẫn nợ tôi chiếc ô.”

Amazon bắt đầu theo đuổi mục tiêu lợi nhuận bằng mọi giá sau thời điểm chuyển giao thế kỷ và thái độ của công ty với thế giới sách bắt đầu thay đổi. Trước 2004, Amazon bán lượng lớn sách tại thị trường Mỹ. Do vậy, công ty tìm kiếm những điều khoản hợp tác tài chính có lợi hơn với những nhà xuất bản và cố gắng thu về những lợi ích đến từ quy mô tăng trưởng nhanh chóng. Trong những năm quan trọng này, người quản lý mối quan hệ của Amazon với các nhà xuất bản, Lyn Blake, cô ấy là một người kỳ cựu trong ngành, cựu giám đốc điều hành bộ phận sách máy tính của Macmillan.

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Blake gia nhập Amazon năm 1999. Công việc đầu tiên bà đảm nhiệm là thiết lập mối quan hệ trực tiếp, gắn kết hơn với các nhà xuất bản và xây dựng tiêu chuẩn đóng gói sách chuyển cho các trung tâm FC của Amazon. Blake đề ra nhiều quy định và phân tích chuỗi cung ứng sách của Amazon, giám sát tạo ra hệ thống tự động mua hàng từ bất kỳ nguồn nào – nhà phân phối hay nhà xuất bản – đang có sách trong kho và chào giá tốt nhất. Bà khởi động chương trình đồng hợp tác đầu tiên của Amazon, bán những vị trí đẹp trên trang web cho những nhà xuất bản sẵn sàng trả thêm phí quảng cáo. Đây là những chiến thuật thông thường để tạo lợi nhuận của bất kỳ nhà bán lẻ lớn nào và Blake học được từ những chuỗi bán lẻ khác trong thời gian ở Macmillan.

Blake là nhà quản lý khác thường ở Amazon. Bà từ chối mang BlackBerry và rời văn phòng hàng ngày vào lúc năm giờ để gặp cô con gái ở nhà. Bà là nhà thương thuyết cứng rắn và biết cách tránh né Đạo luật Robinson-Patman ra đời năm 1936. Đạo luật chống độc quyền cấm các nhà sản xuất bán hàng hóa cho các nhà bán lẻ lớn ở mức giá thấp hơn giá bán cho những đối thủ cạnh tranh nhỏ hơn. Từng ở phía bên kia bàn đàm phán, bà hiểu những yêu cầu của nhà xuất bản sách và thường biện hộ nâng đỡ cho họ khi trao đổi nội bộ trong công ty. “Mối quan hệ của tôi với các nhà xuất bản lớn rất tốt,” Blake nói. “Tất nhiên tôi thúc đẩy họ làm việc tốt hơn và chăm chỉ hơn, nhưng khi họ có vấn đề với chúng tôi, tôi sẵn sàng thảo luận để giải quyết.”

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Hành động mang tính dung hòa của Blake dần trở nên không vừa mắt ông chủ. Bezos đã theo đuổi mục tiêu cung cấp sách giá thấp cho khách hàng trong nhiều năm và để cung cấp nguồn tài chính cho những chương trình như chuyển hàng siêu tiết kiệm và Prime, ông ép Blake và nhóm của bà phải đạt được thỏa thuận điều kiện tài chính với các nhà xuất bản sách có lợi hơn cho Amazon và tăng tỉ suất lợi nhuận bất cứ khi nào có thể. Bezos tin rằng Amazon sẽ nhận được phần thưởng xứng đáng cho những lợi ích công ty đem đến cho ngành sách. Trang web có hàng triệu đầu sách, không chỉ 150.000 hay số sách bày trên giá sách trong các cửa hàng sách của Barnes & Noble. Không như các nhà bán lẻ truyền thống, Amazon trả lại số lượng sách không bán được rất ít và thường ở mức dưới 5%. Các chuỗi bán sách lớn thường trả lại 40% số sách lấy từ các nhà xuất bản và nhận toàn bộ số tiền sách. Một thỏa thuận gần như độc vô nhị trong ngành bán lẻ.

Năm 2004, phòng mua sách Amazon đang tích lũy sức mạnh cho trận chiến quyết liệt sắp diễn ra. Nhân viên mua sách tham gia khóa đào tạo kỹ năng đàm phán, cũng như những mức giới hạn và linh hoạt trong Đạo luật Robinson-Patman. Blake vừa ép các nhà xuất bản nhượng bộ, trong khi vẫn nhắc nhở ông chủ rằng nếu các nhà xuất bản chống đối, Amazon có thể bị tổn thất. “Có những thời kỳ khi ngồi bên trong Amazon, chúng tôi sợ rằng ngành xuất bản sẽ lấy đi tất cả,” Erick Goss, giám đốc cấp cao của phân nhóm sách, nói. “Lyn là đại sứ của chúng tôi. Tôi đánh giá cao bà vì vẫn duy trì được mối quan hệ trong thời kỳ khó khăn như vậy.”

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Amazon tiếp cận những nhà xuất bản lớn một cách quyết liệt. Công ty đưa ra những điều kiện như chiết khấu cao hơn cho đơn hàng số lượng lớn, thời gian thanh toán lâu hơn và phương thức chuyển hàng sao cho Amazon nhận được chiết khấu cao từ UPS. Đối với các nhà xuất bản không tuân theo, Amazon đe dọa đẩy sách họ xuất bản ra khỏi hệ thống giới thiệu và cá nhân hóa tự động cho khách hàng. Điều này đồng nghĩa với việc danh sách tác phẩm giới thiệu cho khách hàng của Amazon sẽ không có họ. “Các nhà xuất bản không thực sự hiểu Amazon. Họ quá ngây thơ về những điều đang diễn ra với danh sách sách của họ,” Goss nói. “Đa số họ không biết rằng doanh số của họ tăng là do danh sách sách của họ tiếp cận được với khách hàng trên trang web.”

Amazon dễ dàng chứng tỏ sức mạnh thao túng thị trường. Khi một nhà xuất bản không đầu hàng thì công ty sẽ ngừng chạy thuật toán đề xuất cho những cuốn sách do nhà xuất bản đó phát hành, và doanh số thường sẽ giảm khoảng 40%. “Thông thường, sẽ mất khoảng 30 ngày trước khi họ quay lại và nói, làm sao chúng tôi có thể quay lại được?” Christopher Smith, nhân viên phụ trách mua sách, nói.

Bezos liên tục thúc ép. Ông yêu cầu Blake đòi hỏi điều khoản có lợi hơn nữa từ các nhà xuất bản nhỏ nhất, các công ty sẽ phá sản nếu họ không có doanh số ổn định từ Amazon. Nhân viên làm trong phân nhóm sách gọi chương trình trên là dự án linh dương Gazelle. Bezos đã gợi ý cho Blake trong cuộc họp rằng, Amazon nên tiếp cận những nhà xuất bản nhỏ như cách loài báo đốm Cheetah rượt đuổi con linh dương Gazelle yếu đuối.

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Nằm trong dự án Gazelle, nhóm của Blake phân loại các nhà xuất bản theo mức độ phụ thuộc vào Amazon và chọn những công ty phụ thuộc, dễ bị tổn thương nhất để đàm phán. Ba nhân viên mua sách vào thời điểm đó nhớ về việc thực hiện kế hoạch. Blake nói rằng Bezoz đề cập đến sự tương đồng giữa báo đốm Cheetah và linh dương Gazelle chỉ là nói đùa thôi và chương trình được triển khai quá mạnh tay. Tuy nhiên, chương trình rõ ràng cho thấy chính sách thực tế khi tiếp cận các nhà xuất bản, một thái độ tàn nhẫn khiến ngay cả nhân viên Amazon cũng giật mình. Chẳng bao lâu sau khi dự án Gazelle được triển khai, luật sư của Amazon biết về chương trình và kiên quyết bắt đổi thành chương trình đàm phán với các nhà xuất bản nhỏ, một cái tên ôn hòa hơn.

Chương trình gây ra sự hoảng loạn trong các nhà xuất bản. Công ty mà họ từng nhìn nhận như một đối trọng đáng mừng cho chuỗi phân phối sách, giờ đây cho thấy những yêu cầu mới. Những yêu cầu đưa ra hoàn toàn núp dưới danh nghĩa đem lại lợi ích cho khách hàng của Amazon, nhưng dù như vậy thì điều đó vẫn đáng ngại. Khi Amazon chuyển phần chi phí tiết kiệm sang cho khách hàng bằng cách giảm giá vận chuyển hoặc miễn phí giao hàng, các nhà bán lẻ sách truyền thống bị gây sức ép nặng nề, bao gồm cả cửa hàng sách độc lập và càng làm tăng sức mạnh đối với thị trường của Amazon.

Cũng vào thời điểm này, đại diện của Amazon yêu cầu các nhà xuất bản cung cấp danh sách các tựa sách cho chương trình Tìm kiếm bên trong cuốn sách. Trong khi đó, nằm một phần trong nỗ lực xây dựng cơ sở dữ liệu cho việc tìm kiếm sách trực tuyến, Google đã bắt đầu tiến hành quét chuyển đổi dạng số cho những cuốn sách bản cứng mà không được sự chấp thuận của chủ sở hữu bản quyền.

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Năm 2005, Hiệp hội tác giả và Hiệp hội nhà xuất bản Mỹ bắt tay đâm đơn kiện Google lên tòa án liên bang. Vụ kiện là câu chuyện tiếp nối lịch sử tranh chấp pháp lý phức tạp diễn ra trong ngành. Tuy nhiên, có thể thấy rằng các nhà xuất bản sách đang ngày càng lo sợ: Họ sợ mất quyền kiểm soát lĩnh vực kinh doanh của mình cho các công ty Internet có tiềm lực vốn dồi dào tại Bờ Tây. Những công ty theo đuổi kinh doanh sách với suy nghĩ rằng sắc thái văn học đều được gói gọn trong các thuật toán.

Lyn Blake rời Amazon vào đầu năm 2005. Bà đạt được thành công về tiền bạc ngoài mong đợi và muốn dành thời gian bên gia đình. Bà thú nhận rằng bà cũng nhìn thấy cách tiếp cận tuyệt giao của Amazon trong mối quan hệ với các nhà xuất bản. “Có thể tôi dần thấy rằng công ty đang hướng theo cách tiếp cận đó,” bà nói. “Tôi thích hợp tác kinh doanh mà cả hai bên đều nhận được lợi ích. Điều này có nghĩa là đàm phán có thể diễn ra theo cách dung hòa.”

Những người kế nhiệm bà không theo định hướng chia sẻ lợi ích với các nhà xuất bản hay tiếp cận xã giao khéo léo, mềm mỏng. Trước khi rời đi, Blake đề cử Randy Miller, một trong những người sáng lập phân nhóm hàng trang sức của Amazon, đảm nhiệm công việc quan hệ với các nhà cung cấp sách tại châu Âu. Theo những gì Miller thú nhận, ông càng ngày càng o ép các nhà xuất bản sách để Amazon nhận được những điều khoản thỏa thuận tài chính có lợi. Ông chia các nhà xuất bản châu Âu theo nhóm, dựa theo tiêu chí về doanh số và tỉ suất lợi nhuận mà Amazon nhận được. Sau đó, vẫn bằng chiêu thức đe dọa giảm quảng bá trên trang web, ông và đồng nghiệp thuyết phục các nhà xuất bản giao hàng chậm thay đổi điều khoản hợp tác có lợi cho Amazon. Miller nói rằng ông và đồng nghiệp đặt tên cho chương trình là Trả để chơi. Một lần nữa, luật sư Amazon biết được và đổi tên thành Chương trình sắp xếp lại các nhà cung cấp.

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Năm sau, Miller liên hệ với chi nhánh châu Âu của nhà sách Randon, Hachette và Bloomsbury, nhà xuất bản seri truyện nổi tiếng Harry Potter. “Tôi đã làm mọi thứ có thể để giảm sức hút của họ,” ông nói. Ông bán giá không chiết khấu và xóa sách khỏi công cụ giới thiệu sách của Amazon cho khách hàng; với một số sách, như sách du lịch, ông quảng bá sách từ đối thủ cạnh tranh của nhà xuất bản đó. Những phương thức mới của Miller đánh thẳng vào thần kinh của các tác giả thường xuyên xem bảng so sánh tác phẩm của mình so với các tựa sách khác trên trang web. “Chúng tôi liên tục gặp gỡ các tác giả, nên chúng tôi biết ai thường xuyên xem bảng xếp hạng,” Miller nói. “Tôi biết những tác giả này sẽ gọi khi lần thứ hai nhìn thấy doanh số giảm.”

Những chiến thuật trên không chỉ riêng Amazon áp dụng. Cuối cùng công ty cũng học những mánh khóe bán lẻ hiện đại trong ngành có tuổi đời trăm năm. Tỉ suất lợi nhuận thì có hạn. Điều khoản tài chính tốt hơn từ các nhà cung cấp sẽ trực tiếp tạo ra doanh thu cao – và xây dựng nền tảng cho mục tiêu giá rẻ hàng ngày trở thành hiện thực.

Walmart lão luyện trong chiến thuật ép buộc không ngừng lên các nhà cung cấp, dựa trên niềm tin rằng họ sẽ đem đến sản phẩm giá thấp, như tã lót, cho khách hàng trung lưu và thu nhập thấp ở Mỹ. Walmart nổi tiếng vì yêu cầu các nhà cung cấp mở văn phòng tại Bentonville, Arkansas và tích hợp sử dụng công nghệ nhất định, như chíp RFIP vào sản phẩm. Công ty cũng được biết đến với chính sách tự quyết định giá trả cho sản phẩm và yêu cầu nhượng bộ gay gắt nếu công ty tin rằng tỉ suất lợi nhuận của nhà cung cấp quá cao.

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Trong những năm đầu thành lập, khi các công ty như Sony và Disney từ chối bán hàng trực tiếp cho Amazon, thì Bezos nằm ở thế yếu. Ông biết rằng đây là trò chơi trực diện. Giờ đây, thế trận đã thay đổi. Các nhà cung cấp cần Amazon hơn là Amazon cần họ.

Trong thế chuyển dịch sức mạnh, Amazon bắt đầu ép các nhà xuất bản đưa sách lên Kindle.

Hai phái viên đại diện cho Kindle của Amazon gặp gỡ các nhà xuất bản ở New York và trình bày viễn cảnh không chắc xảy ra trong tương lai. Dan Rose, một giám đốc phát triển kinh doanh lâu năm của Amazon, đã dẫn đầu nỗ lực ban đầu để đưa các nhà xuất bản vào cuộc. Rose có chiều cao trung bình, mặc quần áo in logo chấm-com ở ngoài và trong là áo sơ mi oxford màu xanh hoàng gia, và dễ dàng nói về những cơ hội sắp tới của thời đại kỹ thuật số. Anh ấy đã đến thăm các nhà xuất bản cùng với một cựu giám đốc sản phẩm của Microsoft tên là Jeff Steele, một vận động viên thể hình đồng tính nam cao sáu foot công khai mặc vest đen và đeo cà vạt và có thân hình quyến rũ — nhưng thực tế là người có tính khí cực kỳ hiền lành.

Mục tiêu đặt ra từ nửa đầu năm 2006 là phải thuyết phục được các nhà xuất bản đang trong tâm trạng lo lắng đặt cược vào sách điện tử, mặc dù trước đó đã có nhiều tấm gương thất bại. Hai người gặp khó khăn khi thực hiện sứ mệnh được giao: Bezos không thực sự cho phép họ thừa nhận Kindle tồn tại, đây vẫn là bí mật lớn.

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Do vậy, Rose và Steele buộc phải tiếp cận vấn đề vòng vo, đề cập đến Tìm kiếm bên trong cuốn sách và tiêu chuẩn sách điện tử do công ty Pháp, Mobipocket, mà Amazon thâu tóm năm 2005 với mục đích thâm nhập thị trường sách điện tử. Sở hữu công nghệ Mobi cho phép sách điện tử Amazon tiếp cận nhiều loại thiết bị khác nhau như điện thoại di động và PDA.

Do không thấy được triển vọng phát triển sáng sủa của sách điện tử trong ngắn hạn, các nhà xuất bản miễn cưỡng tham gia. Họ đã số hóa hầu hết các đầu sách phổ biến theo chuẩn hỗ trợ của Sony, Adobe, Microsoft và Palm. Tuy nhiên, sách điện tử vẫn chỉ chiếm tỉ trọng doanh thu nhỏ. Việc số hóa toàn bộ sách cũng vấp phải vấn đề về luật pháp. Những cuốn sách xuất bản trước cuối những năm 1990 đã gặp vấn đề khi không xác định rõ được ai là người thực sự sở hữu bản quyền số. Điều này dẫn đến việc các nhà xuất bản thường phải miễn cưỡng đặt lại vấn đề bản quyền với các tác giả và người đại diện của họ, và họ có thể nhân cơ hội này để đàm phán lại toàn bộ điều khoản hợp tác trước đó giữa hai bên.

Tiến độ công việc của Rose và Steele vẫn ì ạch. Bezos tăng thêm áp lực khi yêu cầu họ phải báo cáo hai tuần một lần về mục tiêu đạt 100.000 đầu sách điện tử. Mùa hè năm đó, cặp đôi cuối cùng cũng thuyết phục được Bezos rằng không thể giữ kín quả bóng lâu hơn nữa: Họ phải để các nhà xuất bản biết về Kindle. “Một khi họ thấy thiết bị này, họ sẽ hào hứng về tương lai của nó,” Steele lập luận. Bezos miễn cưỡng đồng ý cho phép các nhà xuất bản xem chiếc Kindle mẫu, miễn là họ ký điều khoản bảo mật thông tin.

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Mùa thu năm 2006, Amazon bắt đầu đưa thiết bị cho các nhà xuất bản xem. Khi đó, Fiona không để lại ấn tượng gì sâu sắc; nó chỉ như chiếc BlackBerry màu kem được kết hợp với chiếc máy tính điện tử. Thiết bị thường bị treo trong khi hoạt động. Các nhà xuất bản nghĩ rằng Amazon có thể đang tiếp cận sách điện tử theo cách tương tự Betamax, dịch vụ cung cấp video ở nhà thất bại của Sony vào những năm 1970. Họ thấy những đặc tính như: không màu, không chạy video, không đèn nền. Những mẫu sản phẩm đầu tiên không có kết nối không dây và hai phái viên Amazon cố gắng minh họa trải nghiệm sản phẩm của khách hàng khi sử dụng kết nối thẻ SD.

Trong những tháng nghiên cứu phát triển sản phẩm, các kỹ sư Amazon phát hiện ra Topaz, lối tắt tiềm năng để đến mục tiêu. Topaz là chương trình quét tập tin số từ Tìm kiếm bên trong cuốn sách và định dạng tập tin quét ở dạng phù hợp cho Kindle. Amazon đưa ra giải pháp này cho các nhà xuất bản và thuyết phục họ rằng chi phí số hóa sách theo định dạng phù hợp cho Kindle sẽ giảm nhiều. Bản quyền độc quyền tập tin số hóa vẫn thuộc về Kindle. Những nhà xuất bản lớn như Simon & Schuster không muốn ngày càng phụ thuộc vào Amazon, nhưng vài nhà xuất bản nhỏ hơn tham gia nhiệt tình.

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Đến năm 2007, Amazon đã có thể đưa ra phiên bản Kindle kết nối không dây và cuối cùng vài nhà xuất bản hiểu ra tiềm năng của sản phẩm. John Sargent, CEO của Macmillan và vài giám đốc điều hành khác đã thay đổi quan điểm khi họ nhận ra rằng thiết bị sẽ đem đến cho khách hàng sự hài lòng tức thời – tải tức thì bất kỳ cuốn sách điện tử nào vào bất kỳ thời điểm nào – và trở thành cơ hội thành công cho Amazon, khác với kết cục thảm bại của Sony và những công ty đi trước. Tất nhiên, như Bezos lo lắng, thông tin sản phẩm bị rò rỉ ra bên ngoài. Engadget, blog công nghệ, đưa những chi tiết đầu tiên về thiết bị đọc sách điện tử mới của Amazon và ngay sau đó, Victoria Barnsley, CEO của HarperCollins Anh, khẳng định trong sự kiện của ngành rằng bà đã nhìn thấy thiết bị và nhận xét nó “khá ấn tượng”.

Chiếc Kindle dự định được bán vào kỳ nghỉ lễ năm 2006. Tuy nhiên, thời hạn ra mắt bị lùi lại một năm do Bezos không ngừng gây áp lực cho Steve Kessel và đội của ông. Bezos ép họ chỉnh sửa những tính năng mới và hoàn thiện thư viện sách điện tử lớn hơn. Trước đó, Dan Rose đã rời Amazon và gia nhập mạng xã hội tiềm năng, Facebook, và Jeff Steele cùng nhóm của ông báo cáo trực tiếp cho Kessel. Steele cũng làm việc cùng giám đốc hàng hóa từ phân nhóm sách bản cứng, Laura Porco.

Porco, cử nhân Đại học bang Ohio do Lyn Blake tuyển dụng, là người ủng hộ trực tiếp và kiên định các mục tiêu của Amazon. Bà triệt để tôn sùng các quan điểm của Bezos, không ngừng hướng tới mục tiêu tăng tỉ suất lợi nhuận của Amazon trong mối quan hệ hợp tác với các nhà cung cấp, bất kỳ khi nào có thể.

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Theo lời một đồng nghiệp của Porco, trước khi tham gia nhóm Kindle, bà gây chiến với các xưởng phim, kéo Disney ra khỏi danh sách giới thiệu của Amazon khi đang trong giai đoạn đàm phán (chiến thuật không thành công) và mâu thuẫn gay gắt với các nhà quản lý Warner Home Video đến nỗi xưởng phim cấm bà không được ra vào các tòa nhà của họ. Một quản lý của nhà xuất bản Random House gọi bà là “cỗ máy công phá thành” của Amazon. Thậm chí đồng nghiệp cũng khiếp sợ trước sự tàn nhẫn khi thực hiện công việc của bà.

Vài năm sau khi đàm phán đầu tiên của Kindle diễn ra, một quản lý trong ngành xuất bản đến thăm Amazon và đề nghị làm việc tại công ty. Nhiều nhà quản lý phân nhóm sách của Amazon tham gia phỏng vấn ông, trong đó có cả Porco, người đưa ra câu hỏi duy nhất: “Chiến lược đàm phán của anh là gì?” Vị quản lý trả lời rằng, đám phán thành công phải mang lại chiến thắng cho cả hai bên. Theo quan điểm nhìn nhận của Porco thì vị quản lý này (người không được nhận vào công ty) mang những tư tưởng “không hợp Amazon” và câu trả lời chính xác là một bên phải luôn giành chiến thắng.

Câu hỏi phỏng vấn không bắt buộc nhắm đến tuyển chọn bất kỳ vị trí quản lý cụ thể nào, nhưng cho thấy quan điểm của Amazon. Vào thời điểm đó, văn hóa đề cao bản thân tồn tại trong công ty. Những ai không thể theo tư tưởng đại diện lợi ích tuyệt đối cho Amazon và khách hàng của Bezos thì không ở lại được. Những ai có thể thì ở lại và thăng tiến trong sự nghiệp.

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Erick Goss, cựu thành viên của một công ty sách, không còn chịu đựng được các Jeff Bot và chuyển đến Nashville. Goss chuyển đến công ty đối thủ, Magazines.com và Amazon đe dọa kiện ông vi phạm điều khoản không cạnh tranh. (Vấn đề được giải quyết nội bộ giữa hai bên sau đó.) Goss thừa nhận trong ông tồn tại những cảm xúc lẫn lộn về Amazon. Ông tự hào về những thử thách, khó khăn mà ông và đồng nghiệp đã vượt qua. Tuy nhiên, ông cũng cảm thấy khó khăn khi phải điều hòa bản thân giữa chiến thuật tiếp cận của công ty dành cho các đối tác và các giá trị Cơ đốc giáo. Ông nói rằng trong năm đầu tiên rời khỏi Amazon, ông bị mắc chứng rối loạn căng thẳng sau khủng hoảng.

Jeff Steele, quý ông thanh lịch, người chĩa mũi nhọn tấn công của Amazon vào các nhà xuất bản, cũng dần không thích phong cách công kích hung hăng của Amazon. “Tôi không thích bắt nạt người khác. Mọi thỏa thuận hợp tác kinh doanh hợp lý nên có chút gì đó thỏa hiệp cho-và-nhận,” ông nói. “Tôi chỉ cảm thấy không thoải mái”. Và khi cốc nước tràn ly, Steele tranh cãi với Kessel về điều khoản thỏa thuận giữa Amazon và Nhà xuất bản Đại học Oxford, liên quan đến việc cung cấp từ điển số cho Kindle. Kessel muốn đàm phán lại hợp đồng đã nhất trí trước đó để đạt được điều kiện có lợi hơn cho Amazon. Steele nói thẳng với Kessel rằng thỏa thuận đã chốt và không đúng nguyên tắc xử sự thông thường nếu đàm phán lại. Sau đó, Steele tranh cãi nảy lửa với Laura Porco và Kessel đã yêu cầu cầu ông gói gém đồ đạc và rời khỏi công ty. Porco thay thế đảm nhận dự án Kindle.

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Bầu không khí trong vài tháng sau đó cực kỳ căng thẳng. Kèm theo những lời dụ dỗ ngọt nhạt dành cho các nhà xuất bản, thì Amazon cũng đồng thời đe dọa họ. Các nhà xuất bản không số hóa đủ theo danh mục và không tiến hành kịp theo yêu cầu đặt ra, đã trở thành những đối tượng bị đe dọa. Amazon nói rằng họ sẽ mất đi vị trí hiển thị ưu tiên trong kết quả tìm kiếm và giới thiệu sách dành cho khách hàng của Amazon. Nhiều năm trước, do phải đối mặt với sự đe dọa lớn hơn từ hành vi vi phạm bản quyền âm nhạc tràn lan, những công ty âm nhạc đã nằm gọn trong tay của Apple. Tuy nhiên, sách không dễ bị ăn cắp và chia sẻ trực tuyến nên các nhà xuất bản không phải đối mặt với vấn đề tương tự. Cuối cùng, Bezos phải biến Amazon thành một khối.

Điều gì xảy ra khi việc Amazon cầu cứu các nhà xuất bản giúp đỡ lại biến thành việc cha mẹ đe dọa con cái. Sau khi phát hiện ra công ty chưa có cuốn sách Trăm năm cô đơn (One hundred Years of Solitude) của nhà văn Gabriel Garcia Marquez, nằm trong danh sách sách của Oprah Winfrey, Porco gửi thư điện tử cho giám đốc bán hàng của nhà xuất bản Random House yêu cầu được biết tại sao không có. Bức thư đến vào lúc nửa đêm, có những lời lẽ khinh thường và kích động đễn nỗi nó được lan truyền rộng rãi trong các công ty xuất bản.

Các nhà xuất bản cảm thấy bị mắc kẹt trong cuộc tấn công dồn dập, những lời năn nỉ và đe dọa của Amazon và thay vì tăng tốc đáp ứng, họ trì hoãn. Porco và nhóm của bà đưa ra hết danh sách này đến danh sách khác cần số hóa cho các nhà xuất bản, rồi la mắng nếu không kịp tiến độ.

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Amazon cũng tiếp cận trực tiếp các đại diện tác giả và tác giả. Điều này khiến các nhà xuất bản bị cô lập và không hài lòng khi thấy một trong những nhà bán lẻ lớn nhất thế giới tiếp cận những tác giả nổi tiếng nhất của họ. “Tôi thấy rõ sự điên rồ hướng thẳng vào chúng tôi xuất phát trực tiếp từ Jeff Bezos, người cuồng về số lượng cuốn sách sẽ có trên Kindle,” một quản lý xuất bản nói.

Amazon và các đối tác xuất bản giờ đây có quan điểm riêng biệt. Lĩnh vực sách điện tử không đem lại nhiều ý nghĩa nên các nhà xuất bản không thể hiểu tại sao họ đang bị mắng nhiếc và trừng phạt vì không theo kịp. Quản lý Amazon thì thấy rằng họ đang chạy đua với thời gian và cố gắng đáp ứng trọn vẹn tầm nhìn của Bezos về việc đưa toàn bộ sách lên thư viện số. Đồng thời, họ cũng đang cố gắng hết mình đánh bại Apple và Google trong giai đoạn quan trọng tiếp theo của cuộc cách mạng số hóa.

Và trong bầu không khí ngột ngạt, một quyết định của Bezos đã làm tăng thêm phần thú vị. Bezos quyết định mức giá 9,99 đô la cho hầu hết những cuốn sách số phổ biến và mới xuất bản. Con số đưa ra không dựa trên bất kỳ nghiên cứu nào – chỉ là con số mà Bezos cho là phù hợp, dựa theo thành công của mức giá 99 xu của Apple cho mỗi bài hát trên iTunes. Ngoài ra, Bezos tin rằng người tiêu dùng sẽ mong muốn trả số tiền cho sách điện tử thấp hơn bản in truyền thống, bởi vì sách điện tử không mất chi phí in ấn và lưu kho.

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Amazon mua sách điện tử từ nhà xuất bản với giá ngang bằng mua sách in, vào khoảng 15 đô la giá bán buôn và bán lẻ với giá 30 đô la. Như vậy, công ty càng bán nhiều sách càng lỗ. Bezos thấy không có vấn đề gì cả – ông tin rằng các nhà xuất bản cuối cùng sẽ bị ép giảm giá bán buôn sách điện tử vì chi phí xuất bản thấp hơn. Một phương án đầu tư cho tương lai Amazon mà Bezos yêu thích. “Khách hàng thông minh và chúng tôi thấy rằng họ sẽ mong muốn và xứng đáng mua sách bản số ở giá thấp hơn bản in,” Steve Kessel nói.

Amazon hoàn toàn hiểu rõ rằng các nhà xuất bản sẽ ghét mức giá 9,99 đô la. Sách điện tử giá 9,99 đô la được cho là hấp dẫn hơn với khách hàng so với bản in đắt đỏ. Lợi nhuận đến nhiều hơn từ sách in truyền thống và mức giá thấp như vậy sẽ đẩy các nhà bán lẻ truyền thống khỏi cuộc chơi, đặc biệt là các cửa hàng độc lập, những người bỗng dưng thấy giá sách chứa đầy sách mà người mua có thể cho rằng quá đắt. Ai cũng thấy hoàn cảnh tương tự từ cuộc chơi trong lĩnh vực âm nhạc với hậu quả khốc liệt dành cho các cửa hàng bán lẻ âm nhạc truyền thống.

Amazon quyết định không để các nhà xuất bản biết về mức giá 9,99 đô la. Quyết định đưa ra cũng dễ hiểu và hợp lý; các nhà bán lẻ không có nghĩa vụ phải thông báo giá bán dự kiến cho các nhà cung cấp sản phẩm. Ngoài ra, nếu công ty tiết lộ sẽ làm tăng thêm nỗi lo điều chỉnh giá dọc trên lý thuyết và thu hút sự chú ý của cơ quan chống độc quyền. Tuy nhiên, Amazon đã tiếp cận các nhà xuất bản như đối tác và giờ đây cố tình giấu thông tin quan trọng. “Chúng tôi được chỉ thị không đề cập về giá bán,” Jeff Steele nói. “Chúng tôi biết rằng nếu chúng tôi bán quá rẻ, họ sẽ lo ngại rằng điều đó làm giảm giá trị sách. Nên chúng tôi chỉ nói giá bán chưa được quyết định.”

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Không biết gì về kế hoạch giá bán sách của Amazon, các nhà xuất bản cặm cụi số hóa lượng sách lớn hơn trong thư viện sở hữu. Đến mùa thu năm 2007, Amazon có trong tay 90.000 đầu sách trong thư viện Kindle, gần đạt đến con số yêu cầu của Bezos. Những người sở hữu chiếc Kindle sẽ có trong tay số lượng sách ngang ngửa của Barnes & Noble.

Cuối cùng, Bezos cũng quyết định cho ra mắt chiếc Kindle phiên bản đầu tiên. Các nhà quản lý từ tất cả các nhà xuất bản sách lớn đều tập trung đến buổi họp báo giới thiệu. Mặc dù bị Amazon ép tiến độ và hành hạ trong mấy năm qua nhưng họ vẫn tụ họp đông đủ. Hành động đồng lòng của các nhà xuất bản trong ngành thể hiện những bước đi thận trọng tiến về tương lai đầy hứa hẹn.

Ngày 19 tháng Mười một năm 2007, Jeff Bezos bước lên bục sân khấu của khách sạn W ở Manhattan để giới thiệu Kindle. Ông phát biểu trước hàng trăm nhà báo và quản lý trong ngành xuất bản, số lượng khá ít so với đám đông chật ních tham gia buổi giới thiệu của Apple. Khoác trên người chiếc áo thể thao màu xanh và quần kaki, Bezos phát biểu rằng thiết bị mới của Amazon kế thừa sáng chế của người thợ rèn Johannes Gutenberg 550 năm trước, chiếc máy in hiện đại đầu tiên. “Tại sao những cuốn sách trở thành pháo đài cuối cùng của công nghệ analog?” Bezos đặt ra câu hỏi. “Câu hỏi đặt ra là, liệu bạn có thể cải tiến điều gì đã phát triển ở mức độ cao và phù hợp như sách và nếu có thì bằng cách nào?”

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Chiếc Kindle đầu tiên có giá 399 đô la, rõ ràng là kết quả của sự thỏa hiệp và lo lắng trong suốt ba năm phát triển. Mang trong mình sứ mệnh “biến mất” trong tay người đọc, tuy nhiên Kindle lại có thiết kế thân máy góc cạnh cùng hàng loạt nút bấm. Với thiết kế trên, công ty muốn đưa ra thông điệp về một sản phẩm táo bạo và cho phép người dùng nhập văn bản dễ dàng. Bezos muốn một thiết bị chuyên dụng và ưu tiên tuyệt đối tính năng đọc sách. Tuy nhiên, những kỹ sư làm việc ở Lab126 khi đó nhận thấy chiếc PalmPilot bị vượt mặt bởi những thiết bị đa chức năng hơn, nên cuối cùng họ tích hợp cho chiếc Kindle những tính năng khác như lướt web và chơi nhạc MP3, những tính năng không nằm trong phân mục trọng tâm của sản phẩm.

Chiếc Kindle đầu tiên trở thành câu trả lời đắc chí của Bezos. Xét trên nhiều khía cạnh, Kindle ưu việt hơn vị tiền bối sử dụng kỹ thuật analog, sách giấy. Thiết bị nặng 283 gram có thể chứa 200 cuốn sách. Màn hình sử dụng công nghệ E Ink giúp việc đọc sách thoải mái, dễ dàng. Whispernet, hệ thống mạng dữ liệu 3G miễn phí Amazon cung cấp cho Kindle, cho phép người đọc tải sách với tốc độ cao. “Tôi nghĩ lý do Kindle thành công trong khi những thiết bị khác thất bại nằm ở chỗ chúng tôi bị ám ảnh không cố gắng xây dựng thiết bị có bề ngoài cuốn hút nhất toàn thế giới, mà [dự định xây dựng] cái gì đó thực sự đáp ứng hoàn toàn những mong muốn của con người,” Russ Grandinetti, một Jeff Bot trung thành, sau này tham gia nhóm Kindle, nói.

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Những đối thủ cạnh tranh bất chợt nhận ra thành công của Kindle. Vài tuần trước sự kiện ở khách sạn W, tôi đã viết về buổi ra mắt sắp diễn ra cho tờ New York Times và nói chuyện với Stephen Riggio, rồi vị CEO của Barnes & Noble. Chiếc Rocketbook vẫn để lại cho Riggio và anh trai những dấu ấn không thể phai nhòa và họ cảm thấy khách hàng không chấp nhận sách điện tử. “Giá trị hữu hình của sách in không thể cảm nhận trên sách điện tử,” Riggio nói với tôi. “Con người thích sưu tầm sách và cất giữ chúng trong nhà và trên giá sách. Tôi có thể nói rằng sẽ chẳng có thứ gì có thể tái tạo hoàn toàn chính xác bởi vì giá trị của sách giống như những đồ vật hữu hình trong tâm trí người tiêu dùng.”

Riggio nghe tin đồn về sự ra mắt của Kindle nhưng nghi ngờ viễn cảnh của Amazon. “Chắc chắn là có cơ hội quay về lĩnh vực kinh doanh này, nhưng chúng tôi nghĩ rằng nó không đáng kể vào thời điểm hiện tại và có thể sẽ tiếp tục nhỏ bé trong tương lai vài năm tới,” ông nói. “Khi thị trường có nhu cầu, chúng tôi sẽ xuất hiện.”

Một sai lầm chiến lược lớn của đại gia bán lẻ. Sau đó, Barnes & Noble phải vắt chân lên cổ để theo kịp Amazon trong phân khúc thị trường sách điện tử. Bắt chước kế hoạch thâm nhập của Amazon, công ty mở văn phòng phát triển ở Bắc California như Amazon thành lập Lab126. Trớ trêu thay, nhà bán lẻ lại thuê Robert Brunner, người từng làm cho Apple và rời bỏ Pentagram để mở công ty riêng, Ammunition, trở thành nhà thiết kế cho thiết bị mới. Brunner và nhân viên đã từng tranh cãi với Bezos về việc đưa thêm bàn phím vào Kindle. Do vậy, có lẽ không ngạc nhiên, thiết bị mới của B&N – mang tên Nook – sẽ không có bàn phím mà tập trung vào màn hình cảm ứng và quảng cáo sản phẩm tập trung vào “Sách không có nút bấm”.

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Tất nhiên chiếc Kindle không gặt hái thành công nhanh chóng, nhưng nó nhận được sự quan tâm dồn dập của công chúng và vị trí nổi bật trên trang chủ Amazon, bảo đảm sản phẩm nhanh chóng cháy hàng. Steve Kessel đã nghiên cứu kỹ lưỡng chiến lược ra mắt sản phẩm của những thiết bị điện tử tiêu dùng tương tự như iPod và đặt hàng lần đầu số lượng khiêm tốn, chỉ 25 nghìn chiếc. Lượng hàng nhanh chóng được bán sạch bay. Sau đó, Amazon phát hiện ra rằng công ty đã phát triển Kindle quá lâu. Một trong những nhà cung cấp Đài Loan đã dừng sản xuất chi tiết chính trong mô đun kết nối không dây và Amazon phải mất nhiều tháng tìm kiếm thay thế. Khi lô hàng Kindle mới đến vào mùa thu, Bezos xuất hiện trong buổi nói chuyện của Oprah Winfrey và thổi bay số lượng hàng về. “Khi lên kế hoạch số lượng sản xuất đầu tiên cho Kindle, chúng tôi nghĩ rằng chúng tôi đã quá lạc quan,” Bezos nói. “Đó là kế hoạch tồi.”

Sự khan hiếm chiếc Kindle nảy sinh một số xích mích nội bộ. Sau khi thiết bị bán hết sạch, Bezos vẫn muốn quảng bá mạnh mẽ hơn trên trang chủ Amazon, với mục đích tiếp tục hướng khách hàng đến phương thức đọc sách mới và xây dựng thương hiệu. Jeff Wilke, giám đốc phụ trách bán lẻ khu vực Bắc Mỹ hiện nay, nghĩ rằng đó là hành động thiếu trách nhiệm khi quảng bá sản phẩm không có sẵn trong kho va làm̀ lãng phí vị trí đắc địa nhất của Amazon. Những bức thư điện tử phản hồi chứa đựng lời lẽ tức giận xung quanh vấn đề ngày càng tăng đã biến thành tranh cãi nảy lửa trong văn phòng Bezos. “Cả hai đều dễ kích động và chưa đầy năm phút sau, chúng tôi đều nổi điên,” Wilke, người sau này thừa nhận Bezos đúng, nói. Và ông hiểu rằng đau đớn trong ngắn hạn là xứng đáng để xây dựng hệ thống chuỗi phân phối Kindle. Tất nhiên, Bezos giành phần thắng, nhưng Wilke ít nhất đã thuyết phục Bezos thông báo rõ ràng hơn trên trang web rằng Amazon không còn chiếc Kindle nào trong kho cả.

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Như những gì Clayton Christensen dự đoán trong cuốn Thế lưỡng nan của nhà cải cách (The Innovator’s Dilemma) tiến bộ công nghệ gây ra đau đớn cho các công ty trong ngành nói riêng và toàn ngành nói chung. Không ai cảm nhận rõ điều này hơn các nhà xuất bản sách. Amazon dành trọn hai năm phỉnh phờ và đe dọa các nhà xuất bản tham gia xây dựng định dạng số cho những cuốn sách. Tuy nhiên, trong toàn bộ câu chuyện này, Amazon đã giữ bí mật chi tiết mấu chốt và Bezos chỉ tiết lộ trong bài phát biểu ra mắt sản phẩm. Vốn dĩ thời lượng ban đầu Bezos dự định phát biểu là 17 phút, sau đó ông tăng lên 40 phút. “Sách bán chạy nhất do tờ New York Times bình chọn và sách mới xuất bản chỉ có giá 9,99 đô la,” Bezos thông báo khi gần hết nửa bài phát biểu tại khách sạn W.

Trong số các nhà quản lý xuất bản có mặt tại buổi họp báo giới thiệu Kindle, một số người cảm thấy bối rối. Liệu mức giá 9,99 đô la có phải là giá khuyến mại trong dịp ra mắt? Liệu nó chỉ dành cho sách bán chạy nhất? Thậm chí sau sự kiện, các nhà quản lý Amazon đã trả lời các công ty trong ngành xuất bản rằng họ không biết hoặc không thể phát biểu gì. Không mất quá nhiều thời gian, giới kinh doanh sách biết chính xác mức giá đồng nhất 9,99 đô la không phải tạm thời. Amazon đang định biến nó thành mức giá chuẩn mới trong ngành. Bezos tham gia hàng loạt chương trình truyền thông cho Kindle sau sự kiện ra mắt để tạo ra tiền đề hậu thuẫn thuyết phục cho những thay đổi của ngành kinh doanh sách. Ông xuất hiện trong chương trình như Chương trình đối thoại của Charlie Rose, tuyên truyền rộng rãi mức giá 9,99 đô la cho sách mới xuất bản và bán chạy nhất. “Có một sự thật hiển nhiên không được nhiều người biết đến, rằng sách sẽ mãi mãi được in nhờ vào việc tàn phá cây cối,” ông trao đổi với Rose.

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Cuối cùng thực tiễn nghiệt ngã đã nhấn chìm tất cả và các nhà quản lý trong ngành xuất bản đã tự hại chính mình vì sự khờ dại. “Nó để lại dư vị thật tồi tệ. Họ đưa ra quyết định như vậy sau khi thúc ép chúng tôi bắt kịp tiến độ danh sách quái quỷ từ tháng này qua tháng khác,” một quản lý của nhà xuất bản lớn nói. “Tôi không nghĩ họ làm sai, nhưng tôi nghĩ cách họ thực hiện thì sai. Nó chỉ như thêm chiếc móng vuốt nhỏ bé vào trong chiếc hòm bí mật. Không ai trong chúng tôi nhận ra mặc dù nó được cất giữ ngay gần [chúng tôi] như vậy, thậm chí khi chúng tôi đối thoại hàng ngày về nó.”

“Tôi nghĩ chúng tôi hoàn toàn ngây thơ khi đồng ý cung cấp bản sách số mà không thắc mắc hay tìm hiểu sâu hơn,” một quản lý khác đến từ một trong sáu nhà xuất bản chiếm thị phần lớn trong thị trường sách: “Nếu tôi có thể viết lại lịch sử, tôi muốn nói rằng, ‘Cảm ơn nhiều, tôi thích ý tưởng Kindle, nhưng hãy thỏa thuận trước rằng bạn sẽ không bán với giá thấp hơn chi phí.’ Tôi cảm thấy như thể đang ngủ cạnh chiếc máy kéo vậy.”

Mức giá thấp đối với những cuốn sách bán chạy đã thay đổi mọi thứ. Hướng thị trường sách theo lĩnh vực số, tăng áp lực cho các nhà bán lẻ truyền thống, đe dọa các cửa hàng sách độc lập, đồng thời khiến cho Amazon tăng sức mạnh. Những nhà xuất bản đã từng chứng kiến Amazon sử dụng đòn bẩy sức mạnh kiểu này trong nhiều năm. Khi có thêm sức mạnh, công ty đòi hỏi thêm sự nhượng bộ và chuyển những lợi ích nhận được cho khách hàng khi cung cấp giá bán thấp và vận chuyển ưu đãi. Như vậy, công ty càng mở rộng thị phần – càng đàm phán lấy thêm lợi ích.

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Tất cả quá trình chỉ mất vài năm để công chúng biết đến. Tuy nhiên, thế giới nhanh chóng hiểu ra khi Kindle phát triển mạnh mẽ và chiếc Kindle thế hệ 2 ra mắt vào đầu năm 2009. Những chú linh dương Gazelle đã bị thương, báo đốm Cheetah dần thả lỏng và lĩnh vực kinh doanh hấp dẫn giới truyền thông và những vở kịch pháp lý xảy ra sau đó sẽ làm rung chuyển ngành kinh doanh sách đến tận gốc.

Amazon đã lớn mạnh từ kẻ sống sót sau bong bóng dot-com. Cuộc khủng hoảng khởi nguồn từ sự thăng trầm của thị trường chứng khoán, ảnh hưởng lên các công ty đa ngành có sản phẩm và triết lý kinh doanh ảnh hưởng đến cộng đồng địa phương, kinh tế quốc gia và môi trường tự do ý tưởng. Giống như tất cả các công ty quyền lực khác, Amazon trở thành đối tượng nghiên cứu, phân tích đặc điểm và dõi theo không chỉ ở mức độ phục vụ khách hàng mà cả cách công ty đối xử với các bên liên quan trong “vòng sinh thái”, bao gồm nhân viên, đối tác và chính phủ. Việc phát triển Fiona đặt nền móng cho giai đoạn mới trong lịch sử Amazon và cho thấy công ty theo đuổi tiến bộ không ngừng cũng như đầy tính toán và nhẫn tâm. Hành vi của Amazon biểu hiện cho bản tính thích cạnh tranh của chính Bezos và trí thông minh siêu việt, cũng như tầm nhìn xa trông rộng của ông về viễn cảnh của ngành.

—ooOoo—

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CẤT CÁNH

Trung tâm phân phối hàng được đặt tên là Phoenix 3 nằm ở phía đông thành phố lớn nhất của Arizona. Trung tâm đó rộng khoảng 56.206 m2. Các sản phẩm được sắp xếp gọn gàng, nhưng dường như chúng cũng được xếp ngẫu nhiên trên giá. Các nhân vật hành động trong bộ phim Star Wars đặt cạnh những chiếc túi ngủ; sản phẩm bagel chips đặt bên cạnh trò chơi video Xbox. Trong khu vực đặt các sản phẩm giá trị có “nguy cơ cao”, một chiếc máy quay video được đặt ở trên cao để giám sát; loại đồ chơi tình dục Impulse Jack Rabbit được đặt giữa một chiếc đĩa CD có phần mềm học tiếng Tây Ban Nha, Rosetta Stone, và một chiếc iPod Nano. Amazon đã đặt những sản phẩm không giống nhau bên cạnh một sản phẩm khác nhằm giảm thiểu khả năng các nhân viên chọn sai sản phẩm, nhưng điều này dường như không xảy ra. Mỗi sản phẩm, giá đặt sản phẩm, xe nâng hàng, xe đẩy hàng và thẻ nhân viên đều có một mã vạch, và thuật toán vô hình tính trước các con đường hữu ích nhất cho người lao động xuyên suốt qua cơ sở này.

Các lối đi của Phoenix 3 rất ồn ào, náo nhiệt, nhưng khoảng không gian lớn lại hoàn toàn yên tĩnh. Âm thanh thường thấy nhất đến từ 102 chiếc máy điều hòa không khí ồn ào trên tầng thượng và điệp khúc tiếng kêu bip bip của những chiếc xe điện. Terry Jones, một nhân viên hỗ trợ với mức lương 12 đô la một giờ, đẩy chiếc xe chở hàng với một số lượng lớn sản phẩm được xếp cao chót vót đi qua các lối đi, và nói to bằng giọng ngọt ngào trên đường đi: “Xe đẩy đang tới! Yu-up! Hãy cẩn thận!”

Jones nói rằng anh muốn biến thời gian làm việc của mình tại Amazon trở nên “vui vẻ và thú vị”, trong khi vẫn tuân thủ các quy tắc an toàn nghiêm ngặt của công ty. Và những cảnh báo tương tự cũng có thể đến với các nhà bán lẻ trên thế giới vào năm 2007: Amazon đã đến.

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Các nhà phân tích phố Wall bắt đầu chú ý đến sự thay đổi của các con số tài chính tại công ty trong năm đó. Doanh số bán hàng của Amazon được đẩy mạnh, trong khi những người bán hàng bên thứ ba được thông báo về sự đột biến của hoạt động trên trang web và giảm tương ứng với đối thủ như Ebay. Thật kỳ lạ, lượng hàng tồn kho của Amazon cũng tăng lên. Công ty đã trữ hàng hóa ở nhiều nơi như Phoenix 3, như thể họ dự kiến một cách tự tin rằng khách hàng bắt đầu mua nhiều hơn.

Scott Devitt, nhà phân tích tại ngân hàng đầu tư Stifel Nicolaus, đã nhận ra những thay đổi này sớm nhất và khuyến nghị nhà đầu tư từ nắm giữ chuyển sang mua cổ phiếu vào tháng Một năm 2007. Ông đã thay đổi đánh giá của mình trong cùng một ngày khi một nhà tư vấn tên là Merrill Lynch đưa ra phân tích truyền thống hơn, đó là lợi nhuận của Amazon là vô vọng và có thể sẽ không tạo ra tiền nữa. Devitt nói: “Mọi người đã đứng ngoài mọi thành phần của luận điểm đầu tư. Vào thời điểm đó, họ nghĩ rằng Amazon là lừa đảo phi lợi nhuận.”

Bên trong Amazon, nỗi buồn kéo dài trong suốt bảy năm trước đã được đền bù xứng đáng. Theo một người biết về tình hình tài chính nội bộ của công ty vào thời điểm đó, trung bình lượng khách hàng của Amazon trong thời kỳ đầu tăng gấp đôi, và họ mua sắm trên trang web. Một khách hàng thời kỳ đầu giống như một người mua hàng bước vào kho hàng Costco để mua bia và ra khỏi cửa hàng với bia cộng với một đống đĩa DVD, thịt giăm bông hun khói nặng 4 kg và một chiếc ti vi màn hình phẳng.

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Những khách hàng thời kỳ đầu mua nhiều sản phẩm hơn (dự kiến), và kết quả là điều này đã thuyết phục người bán để Amazon trữ hàng hóa của họ và chuyển đơn hàng từ trung tâm phân phối, điều đó có nghĩa là sản phẩm của họ đủ điều kiện cho hai ngày vận chuyển. Amazon hài lòng với những gì các nhà phân tích gọi là đòn bẩy hoạt động (operating leverage) – công ty đã nhận được nhiều hơn từ các tài sản của mình và lợi nhuận cực nhỏ bắt đầu tăng lên. (Mặc dù điều đó chỉ là tạm thời – họ sẽ thu nhỏ lại một vài năm sau đó).

Tất cả những điều này lần đầu tiên trở nên rõ ràng hơn vào ngày 24 tháng Tư năm 2007, khi Amazon thông báo những kết quả đáng ngạc nhiên trong quý đầu tiên của họ. Lần đầu tiên, doanh số bán hàng theo quý đạt mức 3 tỉ đô la – tăng 32% trong một năm, cao hơn doanh số trước đây, trong đó 20% là tốc độ tăng trưởng hàng năm và 12% là tốc độ phát triển hàng năm cho phần còn lại của thương mại điện tử. Điều đó có nghĩa là Amazon đã tìm được khách hàng từ những người dùng Internet khác, thậm chí từ những chuỗi hoạt động ngoại tuyến (offline chains). Trong năm 2007, khi các nhà đầu tư đã hiểu về những ảnh hưởng tốt của dịch vụ chuyển hàng hai ngày, cổ phiếu của Amazon đã tăng 240% – chỉ giảm trong cuộc khủng hoảng tài chính và đợt suy thoái kinh tế toàn cầu tiếp theo.

Vào thời điểm đó, bánh đà của Amazon được tăng tốc còn eBay thì chưa. Sức hấp dẫn của đấu giá trực tuyến đã mờ nhạt; khách hàng muốn sự thuận tiện và tất nhiên là được mua bán nhanh chóng, chứ không phải chờ đợi trong bảy ngày để xem liệu việc trả giá thấp tích cực của anh ta cho một loạt gậy đánh gôn của câu lạc bộ gôn Cobra đã giành chiến thắng hay chưa.

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Tuy nhiên, các vấn đề của eBay còn nằm ở việc định dạng đấu giá. Amazon và eBay đã đi những con đường hoàn toàn trái ngược nhau. Amazon đã phải chịu đựng nỗi đau khi làm gián đoạn hoạt động kinh doanh bán lẻ của chính mình với Amazon Marketplace giống như eBay, cho phép người bán bên thứ ba liệt kê sản phẩm của họ trên các trang chi tiết của công ty; eBay, khởi đầu là nền tảng đấu giá của bên thứ ba, nhận ra rằng nhiều khách hàng của họ muốn có một giải pháp thay thế giá cố định giống Amazon hơn nhưng không thể tự cung cấp thuốc đắng cần thiết trong một liều duy nhất. Nó đã dành hai năm để làm việc trên một điểm đến riêng biệt cho bán lẻ giá cố định, được gọi là eBay Express, không có lưu lượng truy cập khi nó ra mắt vào năm 2006 và nhanh chóng bị đóng cửa. Chỉ sau đó, eBay cuối cùng đã cam kết cho phép bán hàng với giá cố định để chia sẻ không gian cùng với các cuộc đấu giá trên trang web và trong kết quả tìm kiếm trên eBay.com.

Trong khi đó, Amazon đã đầu tư mạnh vào công nghệ, thay đổi tích cực với các sáng kiến kỹ thuật số như Kindle. Amazon cũng tập trung vào việc sửa chữa và nâng cao hiệu quả thực hiện của các trung tâm phân phối. Giám đốc điều hành của eBay tìm kiếm việc tăng trưởng cao ở một nơi khác, có được dịch vụ gọi của Skype trong năm 2005, trang web bán vé trực tuyến StubHub năm 2007 và một loạt các trang web quảng cáo được phân loại khác. Nhưng lại để trang web chính của nó tàn lụi. Khách hàng hài lòng hơn với kinh nghiệm mua sắm trên Amazon và dần dần trở nên bất mãn hơn khi đối mặt với các thách thức của việc tìm kiếm các mục trên eBay và giao dịch với những người bán hàng tính phí vận chuyển quá đắt. Amazon đã chiến đấu và làm chủ được tình hình, còn eBay thì không.

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Năm 2008, Meg Whitman đã đến gặp John Donahoe, cựu cầu thủ bóng rổ của Đại học Dartmouth, rất cao và lịch thiệp, cũng là cựu tư vấn cho Bain & Company. Một trong những chuyến đi đầu tiên của Donahoe với tư cách mới là tới Seattle. Ông đến thăm Bezos tại trụ sở chính của Amazon với một tác phong lịch sự. Các giám đốc điều hành nói về việc đổi mới, thuê nhân viên, và làm thế nào họ có thể đối mặt được với căng thẳng. Giờ đây, Bezos làm việc thường xuyên ở bên ngoài và theo một chế độ ăn ít protein nghiêm ngặt.

Tại cuộc họp, Donahoe bày tỏ sự tôn trọng của ông dành cho nhà tiên phong về thương mại điện tử: “Tôi không thể điềm tĩnh bằng ông”, Donahoe nói với Bezos. “Tôi rất ngưỡng mộ những gì ông đã làm”. Bezos nói rằng ông không coi Amazon và eBay là những đối thủ trong một trận chiến mà kẻ thắng sẽ có tất cả. “Công việc của chúng tôi là phát triển chiếc bánh thương mại điện tử và nếu chúng tôi làm điều đó, sẽ có chỗ cho cả Amazon và eBay nữa”, Bezos nói. “Tôi chưa bao giờ nói một điều gì tiêu cực về eBay và tương lai cũng như vậy. Tôi không muốn bất cứ ai xem đây là một trò chơi có tổng lợi nhuận bằng không.”

Năm đó, cổ phiếu của eBay đã mất hơn một nửa giá trị thị trường và vào tháng Bảy, Amazon đã vượt qua eBay lần đầu tiên trong gần một thập kỷ. Bây giờ Bezos đã hoàn thành được nhiều mục tiêu ban đầu của mình, như đưa Amazon trở thành cửa hàng chính trên trang web. Trang web đã bán nhiều mặt hàng hơn so với trước đây. Amazon thông báo, năm 2007 doanh số bán hàng của họ đạt 14,8 tỉ đô la, nhiều hơn hai đối thủ của họ kết hợp lại: Barnes & Noble thu về 5,4 tỉ đô là và eBay là 7,7 tỉ.

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Điều đó tất nhiên chưa là gì. Mặc dù tại Phoenix 3 hàng hóa rất phong phú nhưng Bezos vẫn nhìn ra các khoảng trống trong những dãy sản phẩm. “Để trở thành một công ty 200 tỉ đô la, chúng ta phải tìm cách bán quần áo và thực phẩm”, Bezos thường xuyên nói điều đó với các đồng nghiệp. Con số đó không phải được lựa chọn ngẫu nhiên; nó đề cập đến doanh số bán hàng của Walmart trong những năm giữa thập kỷ. Để tạo ra bước đột phá mới đối với hàng hóa tiêu thụ, Bezos đã thuê Doug Herrington, cựu giám đốc điều hành tại Webvan, đã thất bại trong kinh doanh khi bong bóng dot-com vỡ. Sau hai năm làm việc, nhóm của Herrington bắt đầu cho thử nghiệm Amazon Fresh, một dịch vụ giao hàng tạp hóa tại quê hương Seattle của Amazon.

Cùng thời điểm đó, Bezos đã đưa về cựu giám đốc điều hành may mặc kỳ cựu, Steven Goldsmith, và mua lại trang web bán hàng hóa hạng sang, Shopbop, để giúp Amazon học cách thức kinh doanh quần áo. Cùng với Goldsmith, Russ Grandinetti là người vô cùng kiên quyết, sẽ phụ trách đổi mới mảng may mặc.

Trong bối cảnh mở rộng việc bán lẻ ở Amazon, Bezos dường như đã cố gắng để điều chỉnh phong cách quản lý của mình và nổi tiếng là người đánh giá nhân viên nghiêm ngặt. Diane Lye – sau này là giám đốc của hệ thống tự động hóa cơ sở hạ tầng nói: “Bạn có thể thấy, trên thực tế ông ấy đã nhận được thông tin phản hồi và tham gia một cách nghiêm túc.” Trong một cuộc họp đáng nhớ, Bezos đã khiển trách Lye và đồng nghiệp của bà, nói rằng họ thật ngu ngốc và nên “trở lại trong một tuần khi đã tìm ra mình đang làm gì”. Sau đó Bezos bước đi một vài bước, rồi giống như bị đóng băng khi một điều gì đó bất ngờ xảy ra, ông ta quay trở lại và nói thêm: “Nhưng các bạn đã làm rất tốt!”

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S Team đã phối hợp làm việc cùng nhau ăn ý hơn rất nhiều vào thời điểm hiện tại. Sự thân mật đã tạo ra lòng tin và dường như dập tắt mâu thuẫn giữa các nhà quản lý của Amazon. Vào thời điểm đó, Bezos đã làm việc với cả ban lãnh đạo như Jeff Wilke, Jeff Blackburn, Diego Piacentini, giám đốc tài chính Tom Szkutak và luật sư Michelle Wilson vì kết quả tốt hơn của thập kỷ.

Nhưng một thành viên được yêu quý của S Team đã không còn làm việc tại công ty. Trong một cuộc gặp gỡ gồm tất cả các thành viên quan trọng của công ty tại rạp hát Moore vào tháng Mười một năm 2007, Jeff Bezos đã thông báo với các nhân viên rằng Rick Dalzell, cánh tay phải lâu năm của ông, đã nghỉ hưu. Là quản lý cấp cao của các kỹ sư trong công ty, Dalzell đã cố gắng để xin nghỉ việc trong một thời gian.

Rick Dalzell đã 50 tuổi, tăng cân và sẵn sàng dành nhiều thời gian hơn cho gia đình. Sau khi Bezos thông báo, có hai người đàn ông xúc động ôm chặt lấy nhau trên sân khấu. Vào ngày cuối cùng Dalzell làm việc tại công ty, đồng nghiệp đã tổ chức một bữa tiệc chia tay đầm ấm tại quán rượu Jilian ở phía nam của Lake Union.

Bốn tháng sau, Dalzell quyết định tới thăm con gái đang theo học tại Đại học Oregon. Vợ ông đã thuê một chiếc máy bay riêng cho ông. Bà và cha mẹ chồng cũng cùng đi. Nhưng kỳ lạ là người lái xe đã không đưa họ đến sân bay như thường lệ mà lại tới một sân bay tư nhân. Cuối cùng, Dalzell bắt đầu chú ý đến có một điều gì đó không ổn khi chiếc xe dừng lại tại một nhà chứa máy bay quen thuộc và có một chiếc Dassault Falcon đang chờ tại đó. Khi bước lên máy bay, ông nhìn thấy đầy đủ bạn bè, đồng nghiệp và Jeff Bezos. Mọi người đều hét lên: “Ngạc nhiên chưa!” Họ đã tới Hawaii để tham dự một buổi dạ tiệc vì công ty đánh giá cao thời gian phục vụ của Dalzell, giống như sự kiện Shelebration dành cho Shel Kaphan chín năm trước. Bezos và MacKenzie đã mời Andy Jassy cùng vợ, cựu đồng nghiệp Bruce Jones, một nhóm bạn bè của gia đình Dalzell và những bạn bè thân trong quân ngũ.

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Họ ở lại trong những ngôi nhà gỗ trên một bãi biển ở Kona. Những người phục vụ được gọi đến theo yêu cầu và một đầu bếp làm món sushi xuất hiện vào lúc 4 giờ mỗi buổi chiều. Những chiếc bánh mì dài được mang đến dùng cho các bữa tối và vào một ngày, họ đi một tour du lịch trên không đến công viên quốc gia núi lửa, nhưng bằng máy bay phản lực, không phải máy bay trực thăng. Bruce Jones nói: “Jeff không phải là một chàng trai dùng máy bay trực thăng nữa”.

Bezos đã làm việc với các nhân viên cấp dưới của mình tới kiệt sức, cung cấp rất ít tiện nghi dùng trong công ty và để nhiều nhân sự chủ chốt rời khỏi công ty mà không hối tiếc. Nhưng ông cũng có thể bộc lộ thái độ hòa nhã, cùng sự thể hiện về việc bất ngờ đánh giá cao. Dalzell đã thể hiện mình trong một thập kỷ và đưa công ty đi đúng hướng trong những ngày ảm đạm khi cơ sở hạ tầng còn là một mớ hỗn độn và Google thì muốn có được các kỹ sư.

Qua một vài năm, Dalzell quan sát Amazon từ xa và ngạc nhiên trước cách Bezos biến mình thành một trong những lãnh đạo doanh nghiệp được ngưỡng mộ nhất trên thế giới. Dalzell nói: “Jeff làm một vài điều tốt nhiều hơn bất cứ ai tôi đã từng làm việc cùng. Ông ấy tin vào sự thật. Rất nhiều người nói về sự thật, nhưng họ không tham gia vào việc ra quyết định xung quanh những sự thật tốt nhất tại thời điểm đó.”

“Điều thứ hai là ông không bị trói buộc bởi những suy nghĩ thông thường. Điều làm tôi ngạc nhiên là ông chỉ bị ràng buộc bởi các định luật vật lý. Ông ấy không thể thay đổi chúng. Ông ấy nhìn mọi thứ chỉ là để thảo luận.”

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Trong bối cảnh doanh số bán hàng ngày càng tăng và tiếp tục mở rộng các mặt hàng, Amazon mua lại được rất ít. Nhiều bài học từ thời kỳ mua lại ban đầu vào cuối những năm 1990 vẫn được cảm nhận là hiện diện trong công ty. Amazon đã hấp tấp bỏ ra hàng trăm triệu để mua lại những công ty khởi nghiệp chưa qua nhiều thử thách, không thể sắp đặt một cách có hệ thống và hầu hết các chuyên gia đều rời đi. Với việc cắt giảm chi tiêu, Amazon đã trở nên tính toán chi li hơn trong việc sáp nhập và mua lại.

Jeff Blackburn, giám đốc phát triển kinh doanh của Amazon cho biết, những tổn thương của Amazon từ những năm 1990 đã giúp tạo ra một “văn hóa xây dựng” trong công ty. Mỗi công ty lớn phải đối mặt với những quyết định về việc liệu nó nên xây dựng hay thêm những tính năng mới. Blackburn nói: “Jeff rất thích việc xây dựng”. Bezos đã tiếp thu những bài học từ cuốn kinh thánh về kinh doanh Good to Great (Từ tốt đến vĩ đại), mà tác giả của cuốn sách, Jim Collins, đã tư vấn cho các công ty giành được các công ty khác khi họ đã làm chủ hoàn toàn tư cách đạo đức của mình, và sau đó “là một người làm tăng tốc độ của lực bánh đà, không phải người sáng tạo ra nó.”

Vì vậy, cuối cùng Amazon đã làm chủ được bánh đà của mình, và đó là thời gian để phô trương ầm ĩ. Đối với Bezos và Amazon, sự lôi cuốn không thể cưỡng lại được là Zappos.com, nhà bán lẻ quần áo và trang phục trực tuyến được thành lập vào năm 1999, do một doanh nhân có giọng nói nhẹ nhàng nhưng kiên trì khác thường tên là Nick Swinmurn.

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Bằng tất cả các biện pháp, ý tưởng không chắc chắn thành công của Swinmurn – để mọi người mua giày trên trang web mà không thử trước – nên để trôi đi cùng với những thứ vô giá trị khác trong vụ nổ bong bóng dotcom. Nhưng sau khi bị từ chối bởi hàng tá các công ty có vốn mạo hiểm, cuối cùng Swinmurn cũng đã thu hút được một khoản đầu tư từ một doanh nhân kiên trì giống mình tên là Tony Hsieh, con trai của người nhập cư người Đài Loan và một tay chơi bài poker dày dạn, người đã bán công ty đầu tiên của mình, LinkExchange, cho Microsoft với giá 250 triệu đô la tiền cổ phiếu. Do am hiểu về cuộc khủng hoảng dotcom, Hsieh chỉ đơn giản từ chối để Zappos sụp đổ, đã đầu tư số vốn của mình vào đó là 1,5 triệu đô la và bán đi một số tài sản cá nhân của mình để giữ cho Zappos thịnh vượng. Ông đã chuyển công ty từ San Francisco tới Las Vegas để cắt giảm chi phí và dễ dàng tìm được nhân viên cho trung tâm cuộc gọi dịch vụ khách hàng của mình.

Năm 2004, Hsieh đã thu hút đầu tư từ Sequoia Capital, công ty từng hỗ trợ LinkExchange. Sequoia, từng từ chối Zappos một vài lần, đã đầu tư tổng cộng 48 triệu đô la qua một vài vòng và một đối tác là Michael Moritz đã tham gia vào ban giám đốc. Ở Las Vegas, cuối cùng công ty cũng tìm ra hướng đi cho mình và trong tâm trí của những người mua sắm trên web, tên của công ty và website đã trở nên đồng nghĩa với ý tưởng mới lạ của việc mua giày dép trực tuyến.

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Theo cách nào đó, Zappos là phiên bản Bizarro World của Amazon; mọi thứ đều giống một chút nhưng thực ra lại hoàn toàn khác nhau. Hsieh, cũng giống Bezos, vun đắp cho nền văn hóa nội bộ kỳ lạ và thường xuyên nói về công ty ở nơi công cộng để củng cố thương hiệu Zappos trong tâm trí khách hàng. Nhưng anh ấy còn đi xa hơn nữa. Mỗi nhân viên mới được đề nghị một nghìn đô la cố định để nghỉ việc trong tuần đầu tiên làm việc, giả định rằng những người nhận tiền thưởng dù sao cũng không phù hợp với công ty. Các nhân viên được khuyến khích trang trí lộng lẫy phòng làm việc của họ tại trụ sở chính của Zappos ở Henderson, Nevada, và mỗi bộ phận sẽ đứng dậy chào mừng những vị khách đã tham quan các văn phòng. Hsieh cảm thấy mạnh mẽ rằng tất cả mọi người, ngay cả các giám đốc điều hành cấp cao, nên nhận mức lương thấp hơn thị trường để làm việc ở đó vì văn hóa nội bộ tuyệt vời mà công ty cung cấp.

Giống như Bezos, Hsieh bị ám ảnh với các trải nghiệm của khách hàng. Zappos hứa sẽ giao hàng miễn phí trong vòng từ 5 đến 7 ngày và nhằm tạo bất ngờ cho khách hàng, công ty sẽ giao hàng trong vòng hai ngày ở hầu hết các khu đô thị chính. Người dùng của trang web có thể trả lại các mặt hàng miễn phí trong tối đa một năm sau khi mua hàng của họ, cho phép khách hàng đặt bốn đôi giày, thử tất cả và trả lại ba đôi.

Hsieh khuyến khích những nhân viên đại diện tại các trung tâm trả lời điện thoại dành nhiều thời gian cần thiết nói chuyện với khách hàng để giải quyết những vấn đề của họ. Bezos lại coi các cuộc điện thoại từ khách hàng là dấu hiệu của những góc khuyết trong hệ thống Amazon và ông cố gắng làm giảm số lượng liên hệ của khách hàng cho mỗi mặt hàng được bán ra. Trên thực tế, việc tìm kiếm số điện thoại miễn phí trên trang web Amazon có thể là một cuộc săn lùng của những kẻ nhặt rác.

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Doanh số bán hàng của Zappos tăng từ 8,6 triệu đô la năm 2001 lên 70 triệu đô la năm 2003 và 370 triệu đô la năm 2005. Hsieh và nhóm của mình đã đánh bại Amazon trong thị trường may mặc, xây dựng Zappos như một sự hiện diện linh hoạt, mạnh mẽ trong tâm trí khách hàng và tạo lập mối quan hệ tốt với những thương hiệu giày có tiếng như Nike. Lần đầu tiên, Bezos có lý do để ngưỡng mộ và theo dõi sát một công ty kinh doanh thương mại điện tử có tiềm năng phát triển và đã lấy đi vài mảng kinh doanh của mình.

Vào tháng Tám năm 2005, Bezos đã gửi một email tới Hsieh nói rằng ông sẽ tới Las Vegas và muốn đến thăm Hsieh một lần. Buổi gặp mặt đã diễn ra trong một phòng họp tại khách sạn Double Tree với một vài khối từ văn phòng của Zappos. Bezos đi cùng Jeff Blackburn. Hsieh đi cùng Nick Swinmurn, Michael Moritz và Alfred Lin, người vừa gia nhập Zappos với vị trí chủ tịch và trưởng ban điều hành. Nhằm hạ thấp văn hóa “nhóm hai pizza” nổi tiếng của Amazon, bên phía Zappos đã phục vụ hai chiếc bánh pizza, một chiếc bánh có thêm xúc xích cay và chiếc còn lại với ớt jalapeno, lấy từ một nhà hàng địa phương. Cuộc họp ngắn ngọn và diễn ra trong không khí gượng gạo. Các giám đốc điều hành của Zappos đã gợi ý về một sự sắp xếp cho quan hệ đối tác tiềm năng, nhưng Bezos lịch sự đáp lại rằng ông thích sở hữu toàn bộ ngành kinh doanh này. Hsieh cũng thẳng thừng đáp trả họ đang dự định sẽ xây dựng một công ty độc lập. Sau đó, ủy viên ban quản trị của Amazon nghĩ rằng có thể mua lại Zappos với chi phí khoảng 500 triệu đô la nhưng Bezos, người muốn trở thành một người thâu tóm tiết kiệm theo thói quen, đã tưởng tượng ra chỉ trả một phần nhỏ trong số đó.

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Vào thời điểm đó, Bezos nhìn nhận bối cảnh cạnh tranh giống như bàn cờ của tuổi trẻ. Vị trí của các mảnh trong trò chơi đặc biệt này ủng hộ cho đối thủ của ông. Theo luật, các nhà sản xuất không được phép đưa ra giá bán lẻ, nhưng họ có thể quyết định đối tác họ muốn làm việc cùng và họ thường đưa ra các quyết định khôn ngoan. Những thương hiệu giày như Nike và Merrell đã coi Amazon là một nhà kinh doanh giá rẻ nguy hiểm, một công ty có khả năng biến những sản phẩm mới theo mùa của họ trở thành một món hời trong nỗ lực thu hút khách hàng mới và tăng thị phần. Kết quả, những thương hiệu hàng đầu đã miễn cưỡng cung cấp hàng cho Amazon, tuy nhiên sự lựa chọn giày trên trang web rất thưa thớt.

Amazon cũng có những bất lợi khác trong việc kinh doanh giày. Trang web của Amazon không phù hợp với những sản phẩm có nhiều loại, ví dụ như một đôi giày với 6 màu sắc, 8 kích cỡ và có một vài độ rộng khác nhau. Amazon.com đã liệt kê tất cả những yếu tố này trên một đôi giày duy nhất và khách hàng không thể tìm kiếm những mẫu giày khác với cả hai yếu tố màu sắc và kích cỡ.

Muốn vượt qua ma trận phức tạp này, Bezos đã đưa ra một nước cờ không chắc chắn. Ông quyết định xây dựng một trang web hoàn toàn riêng biệt lại từ đầu, dành riêng cho các loại giày dép và túi xách. Bezos đã đưa kế hoạch đó cho các thành viên trong hội đồng quản trị của mình, những người phải chuẩn bị tinh thần để thực hiện cuộc đầu tư tốn kém và không thực tế vào cùng thời điểm họ đã đặt cược rất nhiều vào Kindle và các dịch vụ web Amazon. Trong cuộc họp hội đồng quản trị, giám đốc tài chính Tom Szkutak đã hỏi Bezos: “Ông muốn chi bao nhiêu tiền cho việc này?” và Bezos đã hỏi lại: “Ông có bao nhiêu?”

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Theo một nhân viên thuộc dự án, công ty đã làm việc trên trang web mới trong năm 2006 và chi khoảng 30 triệu đô la cho việc thiết kế mới hoàn toàn, sử dụng bộ công cụ web được biết đến là AJAX. Các giám đốc điều hành gần như đã gọi trang web đó là Javari.com, nhưng sau đó người chủ sở hữu của URL đó đã không giữ lời hứa với thỏa thuận trao đổi và yêu cầu nhiều tiền hơn. Cuối cùng trang web cũng ra mắt vào tháng Mười hai với trang truy cập là Endless.com. Vào ngày đầu tiên hoạt động, Endless đã đưa ra dịch vụ chuyển hàng miễn phí trong đêm và trả hàng miễn phí. Thỏa thuận đảm bảo rằng Amazon sẽ mất phí trong mỗi lần bán hàng, nhưng rõ ràng điều này đã gây áp lực với một công ty ở Las Vegas. Các thành viên hội đồng quản trị của Zappos đã xem xét động thái này của Amazon. Họ tức giận và một tuần sau đó họ cũng thực hiện việc chuyển hàng miễn phí trong đêm. Sự khác biệt là Endless.com, không giống với đối thủ cạnh tranh, thích thú với việc gần như không có việc vận chuyển hay sản lượng tiêu thụ, do đó với những đơn đặt hàng trong đêm sẽ mất ít hơn; trong khi đó tỉ suất lợi nhuận của Zappos bị tác động trực tiếp.

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Qua năm sau đó, Endless đã đạt được bước tiến nhỏ với vai trò là một địa chỉ bán lẻ độc lập. Trang web đã thu hút được các thương hiệu như Kenneth Cole và Nine West, phát triển các tính năng như một công cụ tìm kiếm linh hoạt hơn và những hình ảnh về sản phẩm được mở rộng khi khách hàng đưa con trỏ chuột qua chúng. Nhưng dường như Amazon đang chơi trò đi trên dây hết sức bấp bênh, khi cố gắng để xoa dịu sự e ngại của các công ty có thương hiệu với việc định giá theo tiêu chuẩn công nghiệp, trong khi cũng sử dụng Endless như một cách để hạ giá của Zappos. Vào đầu năm 2007, với việc theo dõi sát sao bất kỳ dấu hiệu giảm giá nào đối với các thương hiệu may mặc, Amazon đã thêm một phần thưởng trị giá 5 đô la cho các cuộc gọi đặt hàng để vận chuyển hàng miễn phí trong đêm. Nói cách khác, mỗi khách hàng sẽ được tặng 5 đô la chỉ để mua một món hàng gì đó trên trang web. Đó là một mánh khóe thông minh nhưng minh bạch, một nỗ lực nhằm vào Zappos. Những nhân viên làm việc cho trang Endless nói rằng, đương nhiên đó là ý tưởng của Jeff Bezos. Nhưng Zappos vẫn tiếp tục phát triển. Năm 2007, tổng doanh thu của Zappos đạt 840 triệu đô la, năm 2008 đạt 1 tỉ đô la. Năm đó, Bezos biết được rằng Zappos đã được quảng cáo dưới đáy của các thùng nhựa tại các điểm kiểm tra an ninh tại sân bay. Bezos phát biểu trong một cuộc họp: “Họ đã nhanh trí hơn chúng ta”.

Nhưng bên trong Zappos, một vấn đề lớn xuất hiện. Người ta đã mua lại hàng tồn kho với hạn mức tín dụng xoay vòng là 100 triệu đô la, và cuộc khủng hoảng tài chính được đẩy mạnh với sự sụp đổ của Lehman Brothers vào mùa thu năm 2008, đã đóng băng thị trường vốn. Với việc người tiêu dùng giảm chi tiêu, hàng tồn kho của Zappos gặp trở ngại bởi giới hạn mức vay mới và cuộc cạnh tranh với Amazon đã làm thâm hụt lợi nhuận của công ty, tốc độ tăng trưởng ngoạn mục hàng năm trước đây của Zappos đã sụt giảm khoảng 10%. Công ty đã hạ giá xuống mức cũ, bảo đảm vận chuyển hàng qua đêm miễn phí và Hsieh bất đắc dĩ phải sa thải 8% lực lượng lao động của mình.

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Trong cuốn sách bán chạy mang tên Chuyển giao hạnh phúc: Con đường tới lợi nhuận, đam mê và mục đích (Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose), Hsieh viết, trong thời gian này Amazon tiếp tục đưa ra lời đề nghị mua lại và những nhà đầu tư của Zappos ngày càng quan tâm tới đề nghị đó vì họ không đủ kiên nhẫn để chứng kiến lợi nhuận đầu tư của họ. Michael Moritz có một chút khác biệt. Khi đầu tư vào Zappos, ông muốn nó trở thành một công ty đại chúng, độc lập, “cung cấp mọi sản phẩm là quần áo cho khách hàng từ đầu tới chân”. Nhưng ông cũng chứng kiến Amazon đóng cửa một công ty đầu tư, eToys, một thập kỷ trước đó và biết rằng để cạnh tranh với Amazon thì Zappos cần nhiều kỹ sư hơn và năng lực hoàn thành công việc phức tạp hơn. Moritz nói: “Chúng tôi chưa đủ nhanh. Việc tuyển dụng quá chậm, bộ phận kỹ thuật không đủ tốt, phần mềm kém hơn Amazon. Đó là điều gây bực bội và vị trí ở Las Vegas, cộng với việc không sẵn sàng bỏ ra chi phí cho việc cạnh tranh đã khiến cho vấn đề trở nên khó khăn hơn để tuyển dụng nhân tài. Chúng tôi bắt đầu cạnh tranh với những đối thủ mạnh nhất trong kinh doanh và họ có rất nhiều “mũi tên” để làm cho cuộc sống của chúng tôi khó khăn hơn. Điều cuối cùng chúng tôi muốn làm là bán hàng. Thật mất thể diện”.

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Hsieh muốn tiếp tục nhưng thậm chí bản thân cũng phải thừa nhận rằng, Amazon có thể là một ngôi nhà tốt cho Zappos. Một trong các nhân tố Hsieh xem xét đến là các nhân viên của Zappos sống ở Las Vegas và gần trung tâm phân phối ở Kentucky đang sống ở mức số 0 trong cuộc khủng hoảng về nhà ở. Nhiều người đã nhìn thấy giá trị căn nhà của họ đang sụt giảm và điều duy nhất có giá trị là họ sở hữu chứng khoán Zappos. Hsieh thấy rằng việc sáp nhập có thể đem lại một khoản trợ cấp cho người lao động tại một thời điểm khi nhiều người cần đến. Hội đồng quản trị Zappos cuối cùng đã quyết định bán công ty cho Amazon; việc bỏ phiếu có vui buồn lẫn lộn nhưng tất cả đều thống nhất.

Sau một vài tháng, Alfred Lin đàm phán thỏa thuận với Peter Krawiec, phó chủ tịch phát triển doanh nghiệp của Amazon. Bezos và Krawiec đã hoàn thành thỏa thuận tại nhà của Hsieh ở phía nam Highlands, một khu dân cư cao cấp được xây dựng quanh một sân gôn. Buổi thảo luận bắt đầu với hai chiếc bánh pizza và kết thúc với việc Hsieh làm món bánh mì kẹp thịt ở sân trong nhà mình. Một vài tuần sau đó, Bezos đã ghi lại một video dài 8 phút để gửi tới các nhân viên của Zappos khi ông đi du lịch ở châu Âu. “Khi được lựa chọn sẽ chịu ám ảnh bởi đối thủ cạnh tranh hay khách hàng, chúng tôi đã lựa chọn bị ám ảnh bởi khách hàng”, Bezos thuật lại một cách nhàm chán, đánh giá lại một vài năm trước, khi cạnh tranh với Zappos. “Chúng tôi chú ý đến những gì đối thủ cạnh tranh của chúng tôi làm, nhưng đó không phải là điều chúng tôi tập trung năng lượng.”

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Một số giám đốc điều hành của Amazon đã lắc đầu kinh ngạc. Bezos đã theo đuổi và bắt giữ được “con mồi” của mình, chi tiêu (những gì mà một giám đốc điều hành của Amazon) ước tính khoảng 150 triệu đô la trong hai năm vào những dự án như Endless.com. Có lẽ điều đó đã tiết kiệm tiền cho công ty, vì nó có thể là một trận chiến hoặc việc mua lại sẽ tốn kém hơn sau suy thoái kinh tế. Tuy nhiên, Hsieh, Lin và Moritz đã chiến đấu quyết liệt, và có thể coi đây là một trận hòa. Giá mua lại khoảng 900 triệu đô la, cao hơn so với mức Bezos mong muốn ban đầu và hội đồng quản trị của Zappos đã đưa ra yêu cầu khôn ngoan, đó là Amazon sẽ thanh toán bằng vốn cổ phần thay cho tiền mặt. Do thời gian thỏa thuận đã hết, trong tháng Mười một năm 2009, giá cổ phiếu của Amazon một lần nữa đạt mức cực đỉnh và những giám đốc điều hành của Zappos, nhân viên và nhà đầu tư – những người nắm giữ cổ phiếu của họ được khen thưởng một cách hào phóng. Amazon đã rút ra được một vài bài học từ cuộc chiến với Zappos, đó là họ sẽ kiên trì áp dụng các giao dịch của mình với các công ty khởi nghiệp thương mại điện tử trong những năm tiếp theo.

Cuộc đại khủng hoảng kinh tế bắt đầu vào tháng Mười hai năm 2007 và kéo dài cho đến tháng Bảy năm 2009, nhìn theo một phương diện khác lại là món quà cho Amazon. Cuộc khủng hoảng không chỉ đưa Zappos vào tay Amazon, mà còn gây thiệt hại đáng kể đến doanh số bán hàng của những chuỗi bán lẻ ngoại tuyến lớn nhất trên thế giới, khiến các ban lãnh đạo phải hối hả tìm phương thức để tồn tại. Cố gắng tìm cách để bảo vệ lợi nhuận, nhiều nhà bán lẻ đã phản ứng lại bằng cách sa thải nhân viên, cắt giảm sản phẩm, làm giảm chất lượng dịch vụ tổng thể của họ, và điều này cũng giống như Bezos đầu tư vào các danh mục mới và phân phối nhanh chóng hơn. Khủng hoảng kinh tế có chức năng như một phương thức tàng hình, giấu đi sự phát triển của Amazon với đối thủ cạnh tranh đa dạng và nguy hiểm. Những người bán lẻ sợ hãi, nhưng kẻ đáng sợ lại là kẻ làm đảo lộn kinh tế toàn cầu và làm suy giảm mức tiêu dùng, không phải Amazon.

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Cuộc khủng hoảng kinh tế khủng khiếp đã xác nhận những nhà bán lẻ yếu nhất và làm biến mất một vài thương hiệu đã tồn tại lâu dài trong lịch sử. Circuit City từng là một nhà bán lẻ thiết bị điện tử lớn nhất trong nước. Vào thời kỳ đỉnh cao, The Richmond, có trụ sở tại Virginia đã có trên 700 cửa hàng và đạt 12 tỉ đô la doanh thu. Sau đó, vào những năm 1990, một làn sóng thay đổi đã làm suy yếu mô hình bán hàng có tiền hoa hồng là trung tâm. Những công ty như Best Buy, Walmart và Costco đã mở ra một kỷ nguyên mới về việc mua sắm tự phục vụ và những cửa hàng lớn. Khách hàng có thể lấy ti vi ra khỏi kệ, đưa nó ra quầy tính tiền và họ có thể được hỗ trợ bởi một nhân viên được trả lương thấp theo giờ. Circuit City đã chờ đợi quá lâu để giảm lực lượng bán hàng. Máy tính đã trở thành sức lôi cuốn chính trong các cửa hàng điện tử, nhưng Circuit City đã bất đắc dĩ mang tới một dòng sản phẩm lợi nhuận thấp nằm lẫn với dòng sản phẩm có lợi nhuận cao. Hơn nữa, ban lãnh đạo cũng mất tập trung trong những năm 1990, không quan tâm tới chuỗi bán lẻ CarMax, chi hơn 100 triệu đô la vào hệ thống cho thuê DVD gọi là DIVX, nhưng sau đó cũng nhanh chóng thất bại.

Sau đó Amazon đã phát triển lên mô hình tự phục vụ và một lần nữa Circuit City đã bị đóng băng bởi sự thay đổi đột phá. Circuit City đã cho phép Amazon khai thác trang web của họ từ năm 2001 đến năm 2005, nhưng sau đó họ cũng không hình thành được mạng lưới Internet mạnh mẽ. Công ty đã không đáp ứng được nhu cầu của khách hàng và nó không bao giờ biết nắm giữ thời cơ. Khi chuỗi cửa hàng cần tài trợ cho sự xoay vòng vào giữa cuộc khủng hoảng tài chính thì thị trường vốn đã không đáp ứng được. Vì vậy, vào năm 2009, Circuit City, công ty đã có 60 năm hoạt động, từng được ca ngợi trong một trong số những cuốn sách yêu thích của Bezos mang tên Từ tốt đến vĩ đại (Good to Great), đã thanh toán mọi khoản để dừng kinh doanh và sa thải 34.000 nhân viên.

Một vài năm sau, chuỗi cửa hàng sách của Borders đi xuống cùng con đường ảm đạm.

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Hai anh em Louis và Tom Borders đã thành lập công ty ở Ann Arbor, Michigan vào năm 1971 sau khi phát triển một hệ thống để theo dõi doanh số bán sách và hàng hóa tồn kho. Năm 1992, hai anh em nhà Borders đã rời đi khi công ty được Kmart mua lại, sau đó nó đã bị tách ra. Những năm 1990, Borders phát triển mạnh; các nhà sách cao tầng nằm trong khu trung tâm mua sắm ở Mỹ, Singapore, Australia, Vương quốc Anh và tại các quốc gia khác; doanh số bán hàng tăng từ 224,8 triệu đô la năm 1992 lên 3,4 tỉ đô la năm 2002.

Nhưng cũng giống như Circuit City, Borders có một quan điểm hoạt động với phạm vi hẹp và nhiều lần bỏ lỡ thị hiếu đang thay đổi của người tiêu dùng. Đó là công ty bị ám ảnh với việc tập trung vào mở những cửa hàng mới và làm tăng doanh số bán hàng trong cùng một cửa hàng, trong khi đối đầu với Barnes & Noble trên mọi phương diện, và đáp ứng mong đợi hàng quý của phố Wall. Internet không phù hợp với phép tính truyền thống này, do đó không nhận được vốn của công ty hoặc ban giám đốc tài năng nhất của nó. Giống như Circuit City, Borders cho phép Amazon chạy kinh doanh trực tuyến, vì vậy nó có thể tập trung vào các cửa hàng. Một giám đốc làm việc cho Borders đã lâu, yêu cầu giấu tên, nói rằng nhận thức đầu tiên về Amazon là nó “chỉ là một catalog khác – một phiên bản của Lands’ End”. Ông cho rằng quan điểm này hiện nay phù hợp với một người kiên trì thành công.

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Trong thập kỷ qua, Borders đã bị cạnh tranh bởi việc gia tăng bán sách online, sau đó là bởi Kindle, tiếp đến là do sự hạn chế trong việc chi tiêu sau khủng hoảng tài chính. Borders cũng giống như Circuit City không thể cắt giảm chi phí đủ nhanh, bởi họ phải chi trả cho hợp đồng thuê bất động sản từ 15 đến 20 năm cho các cửa hàng. Vào thời điểm nộp đơn phá sản, theo CEO của công ty, một nửa cửa hàng vẫn thu được lợi nhuận cao nhưng công ty không thể huy động vốn để mua lại hợp đồng cho thuê vì vị trí xấu. Việc giảm giá của Borders tăng tốc trong suốt thời gian khủng hoảng kinh tế và nó đã ngừng kinh doanh vào năm 2011, sa thải 10.700 nhân viên.

Giống như một vài chuỗi cửa hàng khác, Target, nhà bán lẻ lớn thứ hai ở Mỹ vẫn tồn tại sau suy thoái với việc sa thải nhân viên ở trụ sở chính tại Minneapolis và đóng cửa một trong số những trung tâm phân phối. Target đã thuê ngoài các hoạt động trực tuyến của Amazon vào năm 2001, nhưng mối quan hệ này không được hoàn hảo với các dự án hợp tác thường xuyên giảm so với kế hoạch. “Chúng tôi không có nguồn lực để xây dựng cơ sở hạ tầng cho Target”, Faisal Masud – người làm việc cho công ty Target tại Amazon nói. “Tất cả dành cho Amazon trước tiên, sau đó mới đến Target”.

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Nhưng vào năm 2006, Target đã nhận ra rằng công ty không có khả năng phát triển trang web của riêng họ và thật khó tin là công ty đã gia hạn hợp đồng với Amazon trong 5 năm tiếp theo. Sau khi hợp đồng mới được ký kết, Jeff Bezos đã quay trở lại Minneapolis để gặp hai giám đốc của Target là Robert Ulrich và Gerald Storch, thực hiện một bài thuyết trình dành cho bất cứ nhân viên của Target nào muốn tham gia. Dale Nitschke, giám đốc điều hành trang Target.com vào thời điểm đó nhớ lại rằng để lấp đầy khán phòng, ông đã phải đích thân yêu cầu nhân viên tới tham dự. Ông đã nói với các đồng nghiệp: “Những anh chàng này sẽ trở thành đối thủ cạnh tranh tầm cỡ thế giới, các bạn phải theo sát họ”.

Target biết rằng họ phải làm chủ được trang web của chính mình và đưa công ty thoát ra khỏi sự phụ thuộc nguy hiểm vào đối thủ cạnh tranh. Năm 2009, Target tuyên bố sẽ rời khỏi Amazon, và cuối cùng kết thúc mối quan hệ khi hợp đồng hết hạn hai năm sau đó. Đó là một cuộc chia tay khá nặng nề. Trang web mới của nhà bán lẻ, được xây dựng và quản lý với sự giúp đỡ của IBM và Oracle, đã suy giảm khoảng 6 lần trong suốt kỳ nghỉ năm 2011 và giám đốc bộ phận trực tuyến đã từ chức.

Mặc dù nhiều năm bị Amazon đánh bại trong lĩnh vực thương mại điện tử, nhưng Walmart đã chống lại sự cám dỗ để thuê ngoài trang web của mình một cách thông minh. Nhưng hoạt động Internet của họ được xây dựng vào năm 1999 ở Brisbane, phía bắc Thung lũng Silicon, đã tạo ra được bước tiến nhỏ, tác động tới vị trí dẫn đầu của Amazon. Sau cuộc khủng hoảng kinh tế, Walmart bắt đầu nhìn nhận Internet là nhân tố mang tính cấp thiết mới.

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Vào tháng Chín năm 2009, tôi viết một câu chuyện dài cho tờ New York Times với tiêu đề: “Liệu Amazon có thể là Walmart trên trang web?” Dòng tiêu đề đó rõ ràng đã gợi lại nỗi buồn ở Bentonville. Một vài tuần sau khi bài báo xuất hiện, Raul Vazquez, sau đó là giám đốc điều hành chính của Walmart.com đã nói với tờ Wall Street Journal: “Nếu có điều gì đó trở thành ‘Walmart trên trang web’ thì đó sẽ là trang web Walmart.com. Mục tiêu của chúng tôi là trở thành trang web bán lẻ lớn nhất và có lượng truy cập nhiều nhất”. Trong thế cân bằng thương mại điện tử với một cuộc tấn công quân sự phủ đầu, sau đó Walmart đã hạ giá 10 cuốn sách mới của các tác giả nổi tiếng, như Stephen King và Dean Koontz, thành 10 đô la mỗi cuốn. Amazon cũng điều chỉnh mức giá đối với những cuốn sách tương tự trong vòng vài giờ. Sau đó Walmart.com lại hạ giá xuống một lần nữa thành 9 đô la và Amazon cũng bắt kịp. Đó là áp lực giá cả từ Walmart mà các giám đốc điều hành của Amazon luôn luôn lo lắng, nhưng đã quá muộn để gây nên sự bất lợi cho Amazon. Hiện nay, Amazon đã đủ lớn mạnh để có thể dễ dàng đối mặt với vấn đề này.

Qua một vài tháng sau đó, cuộc chiến giá cả ăn miếng trả miếng lan rộng giống một cuộc xung đột. Target cũng tham gia vào cuộc chiến và tất cả ba công ty đều giảm giá đối với các mặt hàng đĩa DVD, máy chơi game, điện thoại di động, thậm chí cả chiếc lò nướng nhỏ Easy-Bake, một món đồ chơi 45 năm tuổi từ Hasbro, được biết đến với khả năng làm nóng những chiếc bánh nhỏ. Không có tình trạng căng thẳng giữa các công ty trị giá hàng tỉ đô la. Vì cả ba nhà bán lẻ đều giảm giá đối với một loạt sách bìa cứng, Hiệp hội các nhà bán sách Mỹ, một nhóm kinh doanh các hiệu sách độc lập, đã gửi thư đến Bộ Tư pháp Mỹ than phiền rằng “toàn bộ ngành công nghiệp sách đang có nguy cơ trở thành tài sản thế chấp thiệt hại” trong một cuộc chiến giữa những người khổng lồ.

Nhưng họ không nhận ra những điều khác.

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Tháng Hai năm 2009, Amazon đã tiếp quản một khán phòng dưới tầng hầm trong thư viện và bảo tàng Morgan ở New York để chuẩn bị cho việc thông báo về Kindle 2. Sự tiếp tục của Fiona, Kindle 2 (có tên mã là Turin) đưa ra một phiên bản mỏng hơn, thiết kế đơn giản và trực quan hơn, và không có sự thái quá của thiết bị đầu tiên. Amazon đã sửa chữa những vấn đề liên quan đến sản xuất mang tính chất thường xuyên, nhưng công ty vẫn chưa nắm vững nghệ thuật cho ra mắt sản phẩm. Trong buổi diễn tập đầy căng thẳng đêm trước sự kiện, Bezos đã phân chia những nhân viên truyền thông của mình với sự tính toán sai lầm, trong đó có một thực tế là màn hình lớn phía sau bục diễn giả đã che khuất các slide của ông. Ông nói và thở dài một cách nặng nề: “Tôi không biết liệu các bạn không có những tiêu chuẩn cao hay các bạn không biết những gì mình đang làm.”

Nếu Kindle gốc làm thay đổi Amazon và tái định vị nó cho một tương lai kỹ thuật số thì Kindle 2 có thể được coi là thiết bị cách mạng hóa ngành kinh doanh xuất bản và thay đổi cách mọi người trên thế giới đọc sách. Với sự công nhận thương hiệu ngay lập tức và sản phẩm luôn sẵn có, Kindle mới được nhiều khách hàng ưa chuộng và cuối cùng đã thỏa mãn được tầm nhìn của Bezos về một thiết bị đọc điện tử chủ đạo với mức giá phải chăng. Với việc Nook và iPad chưa được đưa ra thị trường, Amazon có 90% khả năng chỉ huy thị trường đọc kỹ thuật số tại Mỹ.

Đối với các nhà xuất bản sách lớn, sự độc quyền thời kỳ đầu của Amazon trong mảng sách điện tử khá đáng sợ. Các nhà cung cấp đã học được trong suốt thập kỷ qua, cho dù không có hạng mục, Amazon vẫn nắm giữ sức mạnh thị trường của mình, không hời hợt cũng không trang nhã, sử dụng một chút đòn bẩy để nâng cao lợi nhuận của riêng mình và cùng tiết kiệm cho khách hàng.

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Nếu công ty không nhận được những gì nó muốn, phản ứng có thể khá nghiêm trọng. Khi Kindle 2 đã sẵn sàng, ở Anh Amazon đã không còn bán một số cuốn sách nổi tiếng nhất của gã khổng lồ xuất bản nước Pháp, Hachette Livre – một phần của cuộc tranh chấp kéo dài và gay gắt trong mối quan hệ giữa Amazon và Hachette. Khách hàng chỉ có thể mua những cuốn sách của Hatchette từ bên thứ ba trên trang web của Amazon.

Các nhà xuất bản vẫn gặp khó khăn do mức giá 9,99 đô la của Amazon dành cho các ấn phẩm mới xuất bản và bán chạy. Họ đã sống với thực tế đầy ác mộng của mọi nhà sản xuất – ví dụ, Nike từ chối cung cấp giày cho Endless.com. Theo các giám đốc xuất bản cảm nhận, Amazon đã gửi những sản phẩm theo mùa của họ (sách mới, hơn là giày) tới khu vực bán hàng giảm giá ngay lập tức khi chúng vừa được phát hành. Giá thấp được cho là sự thể hiện của việc giảm chi phí in ấn và phát hành sách kỹ thuật số. Nhưng người ta thường bỏ quên chi phí mới mà nhà xuất bản phải đối mặt trong việc chuyển đổi kỹ thuật số và cũng gây áp lực rất lớn đối với các nhà bán lẻ khác, đặc biệt là các nhà sách độc lập, điều này giúp Amazon củng cố sự kiểm soát đối với thị trường. Các nhà xuất bản đã xem xét một vài cách để giải thoát mình ra khỏi đống lộn xộn này. Vào đầu mùa thu năm 2009, hai nhà xuất bản HarperCollins và Hachette đã thử nghiệm với việc tạo cửa sổ chọn sách điện tử – nghĩa là hoãn phát hành sách điện tử cho tới khi phiên bản bìa cứng đã ra trong một vài tháng. Nhưng người tiêu dùng phản ứng mạnh mẽ và đưa ra những bình luận có tính chất coi thường trên Amazon.

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Có một lý do khác khiến các nhà xuất bản ngày càng lo lắng. Năm đó, Amazon đã giới thiệu Kindle Digital Text Platform (sau này được đổi tên thành KDP), một chương trình cho phép các tác giả tự xuất bản tác phẩm của họ trong cửa hàng Kindle của Hoa Kỳ. Công ty sẽ sớm mở rộng nỗ lực ra nước ngoài và cấp cho các tác giả 70% tiền bản quyền trên doanh thu của họ. Dịch vụ được hiểu rộng rãi là bước đầu tiên của Amazon trong việc xuất bản; vào lúc này, đó chỉ là những nhà văn vô danh.

Trước kia, các nhà bán lẻ khác cũng lo lắng về các nhà xuất bản sách, Barnes & Noble từng có chương trình xuất bản của riêng họ. Nhưng bản thân Amazon đã có những công cụ để tách các nhà xuất bản lớn hoàn toàn khỏi quá trình bán sách: Một vị trí thống trị trong thị trường sách điện tử thông qua thành công của Kindle và một đơn vị xuất bản theo yêu cầu có tên là CreateSpace có thể in được một cuốn sách khi có khách hàng đặt hàng trên Amazon.com. Amazon dường như chuyên tâm cho mối quan hệ của mình với tác giả và đại lý, và công ty đã thuê một cựu giám đốc điều hành của Random House là David Naggar để tham gia vào nhóm Kindle. Dường như tất cả chỉ hướng tới hoài bão to lớn của Jeff Bezos nhằm kiểm soát bàn cờ ngành xuất bản. “Amazon là một nơi tuyệt vời để tiến hành chương trình của họ tới bất kỳ quy mô nào có thể tưởng tượng được”, Eoin Purcell – biên tập viên sách – viết blog, sau khi giới thiệu về Encore. “Ngoài những gì tác giả và các đại lý của họ có thể có được, Amazon với Encore đã đạt được thành công riêng của mình trong việc kiểm soát toàn bộ chuỗi giá trị”.

Các nhà xuất bản tin rằng họ đang trong một tình thế khó khăn. Quan điểm này được thảo luận rộng rãi trong giới xuất bản vào thời điểm đó, giải thích cho những gì xảy ra tiếp theo: Một tình trạng hỗn loạn kéo dài trong nhiều năm, kịch tính và lan rộng, sẽ được phơi bày trong hàng ngàn trang của các văn bản pháp luật và những bằng chứng trong phòng xử án, có kết quả từ những hoạt động chống độc quyền, chống lại các nhà xuất bản bởi Liên minh châu Âu và Bộ Tư pháp Mỹ.

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Suốt năm 2009, lãnh đạo của sáu nhà xuất bản lớn của Mỹ gồm Penguin, Hachette, Macmillan, HarperCollins, Random House và Simon & Schuster đã tập hợp lại, được cho là để thảo luận về tình hình khó khăn chung của họ. Họ liên lạc qua điện thoại, email và trong phòng ăn riêng của những nhà hàng cao cấp tại thành phố New York và sau đó DOJ tuyên bố rằng họ tránh để lại bằng chứng về những cuộc thảo luận mà có thể được hiểu là sự thông đồng này. Ban lãnh đạo của các nhà xuất bản nói rằng, cuộc họp không được tổ chức với mục đích bàn luận về Amazon và chúng liên quan đến các vấn đề kinh doanh khác. Nhưng chính phủ Mỹ tin rằng các nhà xuất bản này đặc biệt quan tâm đến Amazon và chiến dịch về giá sách điện tử tai hại của công ty, hoặc như các nhà xuất bản gọi nó (theo tài liệu tòa án) là “vấn đề 9,99 đô la”.

Theo hồ sơ của Bộ Tư pháp Mỹ, ban giám đốc của các nhà xuất bản tin rằng cách duy nhất để làm thay đổi cán cân quyền lực với Amazon là khiến ngành công nghiệp của họ hành động, sử dụng lực đòn bẩy đến từ quá trình sản xuất – lên tới 60% số sách mà Amazon bán ra. Tài liệu của tòa án cho thấy họ xem xét một loạt các lựa chọn, bao gồm việc lao vào kinh doanh sách điện tử. Sau đó, vào mùa thu năm 2009, hiệp sĩ trắng của Apple, Steve Jobs xuất hiện.

Steve Jobs có lý do để chống lại Amazon. Ông biết rằng Amazon có thể sử dụng ưu thế của họ trong mảng sách điện tử để chuyển thành các loại phương tiện truyền thông kỹ thuật số – bản thân Steve Jobs đã sử dụng iTunes trong thời đại âm nhạc kỹ thuật số để mở rộng ra các chương trình truyền hình, phim ảnh và một chương trình sẵn có (âm nhạc/video) ở định dạng kỹ thuật số để tải về qua internet. Vào thời điểm đó, Apple bắt đầu tiếp cận với các nhà xuất bản, Jobs chuẩn bị giới thiệu iPad. Đối với phát minh mới và quý giá của Apple, Jobs muốn tất cả các phương tiện truyền thông đều sẵn sàng – bao gồm cả sách.

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Ban giám đốc các nhà xuất bản đã thương lượng với người đứng đầu của iTunes là Eddy Cue và phó là Keith Moerer (thật hài hước khi đó là một cựu nhân viên của Amazon), và kết quả sắp xếp với Apple sẽ giải quyết vấn đề 9,99 đô la của nhà xuất bản, giảm bớt một số áp lực cho các nhà sách và cho phép Apple tham gia vào không gian đọc sách điện tử mà không phải phù hợp với mức giá trợ cấp của Amazon đối với sách bán chạy và sách mới phát hành. Trong mô hình sách điện tử mới, bản thân các nhà xuất bản sẽ chính thức trở thành nhà bán lẻ và có thể thiết lập mức giá riêng của họ, thông thường là khoảng từ 13 đến 15 đô la. Apple sẽ giữ vai trò là một nhà môi giới, nhận khoản hoa hồng khoảng 30%, và mức giá cũng tương tự với các ứng dụng điện thoại di dộng trên iPhone. Là một phần của sự thay đổi này với mô hình đại lý, Apple nhận được một sự đảm bảo rằng các nhà bán lẻ khác sẽ không hạ giá sách điện tử. Theo Bộ Tư pháp, điều đó có nghĩa là các nhà xuất bản sẽ phải buộc Amazon áp dụng mô hình tương tự.

CEO của các nhà xuất bản đều nói rằng, họ sẽ xem xét mức giá Amazon đưa ra một cách độc lập, cũng như những gì được biết đến về sự tàn nhẫn của công ty và sau đó quyết định chuyển mô hình đại lý. Đó không phải là sự lựa chọn không đau đớn. Bằng cách chuyển cho các nhà bán lẻ 30% tiền hoa hồng, các nhà xuất bản sẽ kiếm được ít tiền hơn đối với mỗi đầu sách điện tử, so với khi họ làm theo mô hình bán buôn truyền thống, trong đó họ thường thu được một nửa giá niêm yết. “Về mặt ngắn hạn, mặc dù đại lý đắt đỏ hơn nhưng những lợi thế chiến lược hấp dẫn đến nỗi chúng tôi cảm thấy rằng đây là con đường đúng đắn”, một giám đốc xuất bản nói với tôi.

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Có một người hay trì hoãn: Markus Dohle, giám đốc điều hành của nhà xuất bản Random House, lo lắng rằng tính kinh tế trong mức giá của các đại lý là không thuận lợi và ông sẽ duy trì hiện trạng tốt hơn. Trong số sáu nhà xuất bản lớn, chỉ có duy nhất Random House là quyết định gắn bó với mô hình bán buôn truyền thống trong thời gian tiếp theo, vì vậy Apple từ chối bán sách của nhà xuất bản này trong iBookstore mới.

Apple giới thiệu iPad vào ngày 27 tháng Một năm 2010 tại trung tâm nghệ thuật Yerba Buena, San Francisco. Đó là một trong những lần xuất hiện trước công chúng cuối cùng của Jobs. Sau sự kiện này, nhà bình luận của tờ Wall Street Journal, Walter Mossberg đã hỏi Jobs rằng tại sao mọi người vẫn mua sách điện tử từ Apple khi Amazon bán với mức giá thấp hơn. Câu trả lời của Steve Jobs “Mức giá sẽ như nhau” đã vô tình nâng cao một lá cờ lớn cho luật chống độc quyền, bằng cách gợi ý rằng các công ty đã cùng nhau hành động. “Các nhà xuất bản thực sự từ chối cung cấp sách của họ cho Amazon vì họ không hài lòng”.

Trong khi các nhà xuất bản khác thông báo cho Amazon ý định mới của họ thông qua email hoặc điện thoại, thì CEO của nhà xuất bản Macmillan là John Sargent đã bay đến Seattle để thông báo về sự thay đổi của công ty (một cách cá nhân), hướng tới một mô hình giá cả đại lý. Trong một cuộc họp căng thẳng kéo dài 20 phút với giám đốc Kindle bao gồm Laura Porco, Russ Grandinetti và David Nagar, Sargent đưa ra đề nghị với Amazon phải gắn với các điều khoản cũ và giá bán buôn, nhưng với mức phí của việc nhận được sách điện tử vài tháng sau khi chúng được xuất bản. Điều này rõ ràng là không tốt.

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Amazon phản ứng với động thái này bằng nỗ lực áp đảo, kéo các nút Mua từ sách điện tử và sách giấy của Macmillan trên website. Khách hàng vẫn có thể mua sách giấy của Macmillan trên Amazon nhưng chỉ từ người bán là bên thứ ba. Các phiên bản trên Kindle hoàn toàn biến mất và vẫn không có sẵn vào tuần cuối của tháng Một. Đối với những người không nhận thức được về lịch sử căng thẳng giữa Amazon và các nhà xuất bản – những cuộc thương lượng giữa “báo đốm và linh dương” và hơn thế nữa. Sloan Harris, đồng giám đốc của ban văn học tại Quản lý sáng tạo quốc tế phát biểu vào thời điểm đó: “Tôi cho rằng tất cả mọi người nghĩ rằng họ đã chứng kiến một cuộc chiến gay go”, “Và có vẻ như chúng ta đã tiến đến kho vũ khí hạt nhân”.

Một vài ngày sau đó, dưới một loạt những lời chỉ trích khiến tác giả và khách hàng gặp thiệt hại trong cuộc chiến, Amazon đã bớt gay gắt hơn. Bezos và nhóm Kindle của ông cùng đưa ra một thông điệp công khai. Họ đăng trên một diễn đàn trực tuyến Amazon: “Chúng tôi đã bày tỏ sự bất đồng mạnh mẽ của mình và mức độ nghiêm trọng của vấn đề này là việc tạm ngừng bán tất cả các đầu sách của Macmillan. Tuy nhiên, chúng tôi muốn bạn biết rằng cuối cùng chúng tôi sẽ phải đầu hàng và chấp nhận những điều khoản của Macmillan, bởi vì Macmillan có những đầu sách độc quyền riêng và chúng tôi muốn đưa họ đến với bạn, thậm chí ở mức giá chúng tôi tin là cao ở mức không cần thiết cho sách điện tử… Kindle là mảng kinh doanh khó khăn của Amazon và nó cũng là một nhiệm vụ. Chúng tôi không bao giờ nghĩ nó sẽ dễ dàng!”

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Trớ trêu thay, sự chuyển đổi sang mô hình đại lý giúp cho công việc kinh doanh của Kindle có được nhiều lợi nhuận hơn, vì Amazon bị buộc phải trả phí nhiều hơn cho sách điện tử và đã tổ chức gần như độc quyền đối với doanh số bán sách điện tử. Điều này giúp Amazon duy trì được sự giảm dần mức giá của phần cứng Kindle. Chưa đầy hai năm sau đó, công cụ đọc sách điện tử Kindle rẻ nhất có giá 79 đô la.

Nhưng Amazon không ngồi chờ hoặc để những người khác áp chế lên những điều khoản riêng của họ. Trong năm sau đó, Amazon đã phản ứng mạnh mẽ theo một vài cách. Russ Grandinetti, người chuyển sang Kindle từ may mặc và David Naggar, người mới được tuyển dụng từ Random House đã đi kiểm tra những nhà xuất bản hạng trung như Houghton Mifflin. Theo một số giám đốc điều hành tại những cơ quan này, họ cảnh báo rằng họ không có lực đẩy để chuyển sang một mô hình định giá đại lý và Amazon sẽ dừng bán sách của họ nếu họ làm như vậy. Amazon cũng tăng cường tập trung vào công việc kinh doanh xuất bản trực tiếp, việc này sẽ gây ra một làn sóng lo ngại cho các nhà xuất bản trong những năm tới.

Trong cố gắng nới lỏng sự kìm kẹp của Amazon trên thị trường sách điện tử, các nhà xuất bản và Apple đã tạo ra một vấn đề mới có ý nghĩa quan trọng cho bản thân. Một ngày sau khi bế tắc với Macmillan, theo tài liệu của tòa án, Amazon đã gửi một báo cáo nghiên cứu chuyên sâu tới Ủy ban Thương mại Liên bang và Bộ Tư pháp Mỹ, trình bày một chuỗi sự kiện và nghi ngờ rằng các nhà xuất bản và Apple đã tham gia vào một âm mưu bất hợp pháp để ấn định giá sách điện tử.

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Nhiều lãnh đạo nhà xuất bản nghi ngờ rằng Amazon giữ một vai trò quan trọng trong việc kích thích mớ hỗn độn pháp lý. Nhưng các nhà điều tra chống độc quyền có thể không cần nhiều sự khuyến khích. Thật kinh ngạc, thậm chí mặc dù Steve Jobs đã qua đời vào mùa thu năm 2011, nhưng ý kiến trước đó của ông đã đào sâu hơn chiếc hố pháp lý cho Apple và năm nhà xuất bản. Trong cuốn sách viết về tiểu sử Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson trích dẫn lời Jobs như sau: “Amazon đã xử lý rất kém tình huống này… Trước khi Apple xuất hiện, một số hiệu sách đã bắt đầu giữ lại những cuốn sách từ Amazon. Vì vậy chúng tôi nói với các nhà xuất bản, ‘Chúng tôi sẽ chuyển sang mô hình đại lý, nơi các bạn định giá và chúng tôi nhận được 30%, tất nhiên khách hàng trả tiền nhiều hơn một chút nhưng dù sao đó cũng là những gì các bạn muốn.’’’

Lời tuyên bố trịch thượng của Jobs có khả năng bị buộc tội. Nếu các nhà xuất bản đã tham gia vào một nỗ lực chung để buộc khách hàng phải “trả nhiều hơn một chút”, thì đó chính là cơ sở cho những vụ kiện chống độc quyền được hình thành. Bộ Tư pháp Mỹ đã kiện Apple và năm nhà xuất bản vào ngày 11/4/2012, buộc tội họ cấu kết bất hợp pháp nhằm nâng giá sách điện tử. Tất cả các nhà xuất bản cuối cùng đã lắng xuống mà không thừa nhận trách nhiệm pháp lý trong khi một mình Apple kiên trì, tuyên bố rằng họ không làm gì sai cả và mục đích của họ chỉ là để mở rộng thị trường cho sách kỹ thuật số.

Vụ kiện chống lại Apple diễn ra tại một phòng xử án ở Manhattan và kéo dài trong 17 ngày. Thẩm phán quận Denise Cote dựa trên việc Apple phải chịu trách nhiệm, đã quyết định rằng họ có âm mưu với các nhà xuất bản để loại bỏ sự cạnh tranh về giá và nâng giá sách điện tử; do đó đã vi phạm Điều 1 của Luật Chống Độc quyền Sherman. Apple tuyên bố sẽ kháng cáo. Một buổi điều trần về những thiệt hại sắp tiến hành vào năm 2014 thời điểm cuốn sách này được xuất bản.

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Cuộc chiến sách điện tử đã diễn ra công khai trong cả phiên toà và trên thị trường. Tuy nhiên, mặc dù vụ kiện xuất hiện trên các phương tiện truyền thông, nó vẫn là hoạt động phụ tác động đến sự phát triển của Amazon vào thời điểm đó, một sự đi lên bị gián đoạn bởi cuộc suy thoái kinh tế, đã được khôi phục lại với sức sống mới sau đó.

Bắt đầu từ năm 2009, khi màn sương của cuộc khủng hoảng kinh tế đã tan đi, tốc độ tăng trưởng hàng quý của Amazon trở lại mức trước khủng hoảng và qua hai năm sau đó, cổ phiếu đã tăng 236%. Thế giới đã nhận ra tiềm năng của Amazon – sức mạnh của thời kỳ sơ khai, mạng lưới phân phối hùng mạnh, lời hứa của AWS, lợi nhuận ổn định ở châu Á và châu Âu. Một phần vì cuộc chiến tranh về giá sách điện tử, các nhà đầu tư bắt đầu hiểu rằng Kindle có thể giành lấy một phần lớn trong kinh doanh sách và có tiềm năng để làm cho hiệu sách những gì iTunes đã làm cho các cửa hàng băng đĩa. Các nhà phân tích đã đồng loạt nâng cấp xếp hạng của họ đối với cổ phiếu Amazon và các nhà quản lý quỹ chung đã thêm vào công ty những danh mục đầu tư của họ. Lần đầu tiên, Amazon có tiếng nói ngang với Google và Apple – không phải lời giải thích đến sau mà là một sự tương đương. Công ty đã ở một tầm cao mới.

—ooOoo—

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SỨC THUYẾT PHỤC CÓ LỢI

Sự gia tăng ngoạn mục về tầm nhìn, cùng sức mạnh thị trường của Amazon trong bối cảnh suy thoái kinh tế, đã đưa công ty xuất hiện thường xuyên hơn trước công chúng, nhưng sự chú ý không phải lúc nào cũng là tâng bốc. Trong hai năm 2010, 2011, công ty phải đấu tranh với một nhóm các nhà phê bình đối với vấn đề tránh thu thuế tiêu thụ, cơ chế phía sau hai vụ mua bán lớn, sự thay đổi trong lĩnh vực kinh doanh xuất bản sách (trong sự cạnh tranh với các nhà cung cấp riêng của công ty) và việc không quan tâm có tính hệ thống đối với chính sách giá cả của các nhà sản xuất lớn. Gần như chỉ trong chớp mắt, công ty từng nhìn nhận bản thân mình là bên thua cuộc vĩnh viễn, thì bây giờ giống như một người khổng lồ kiêu ngạo, đang cố gắng chơi bằng chính những nguyên tắc do mình thiết lập.

Bezos (và một vài Jeff Bots mà Amazon cho phép nói chuyện trước công chúng) thể hiện một thái độ lúng túng khi phải đối mặt với những lời phê bình. Bezos thường nói rằng Amazon “sẵn sàng để bị hiểu lầm”, đó là một phần rất ấn tượng của thuật hùng biện – ngụ ý rằng các đối thủ của Amazon không hiểu về công ty. Bezos cũng làm chệch hướng các cuộc tấn công bằng cách tuyên bố rằng Amazon là một công ty truyền giáo, không phải là một công ty vụ lợi. Sự phân đôi đó bắt nguồn từ cựu thành viên hội đồng quản trị John Doerr, người đã phát biểu sau khi đọc cuốn sách triết học – kinh tế Thầy tu và câu đố (The Monk and the Riddle) năm 2001 của Randy Komisar – người cộng sự của mình. Nhà truyền giáo có những mục tiêu chính đáng và cố gắng để khiến thế giới trở nên tốt đẹp hơn. Lính đánh thuê thường không có tiền bạc và quyền lực.

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Bezos nói rằng: “Tôi sẽ luôn chọn một nhà truyền giáo hơn là một lính đánh thuê”. “Một trong những nghịch lý lớn nhất là nhà truyền giáo thường là người cuối cùng làm ra nhiều tiền hơn”.

Người phát ngôn của Amazon tiếp cận với những tranh luận này bằng các quan điểm đơn giản, trực tiếp, được họ lặp đi lặp lại, hiếm khi chuyển hướng sang các chi tiết gây khó chịu nằm trong chiến thuật tấn công của công ty. Những lập luận có lợi thế là hoàn toàn hợp lý, đồng thời cũng phục vụ cho lợi ích chiến lược của Amazon. Và đó là lời thuyết phục có lợi, có các mức độ khác nhau, giúp Amazon vượt qua giai đoạn giám sát của công chúng lớn nhất.

Trong khi suy thoái kinh tế là một món quà dành cho Amazon theo cách nào đó, thì nguồn tài chính xấu đi của chính quyền địa phương tại Mỹ và châu Âu đã thúc đẩy một cuộc chiến mới trong việc thu thuế bán hàng – việc né tránh luật pháp là một trong những lợi thế về chiến thuật lớn nhất của công ty. Đó là một cuộc chiến có nhiều hơn hai bên tham gia, không bên nào hoàn toàn trung thực và sự thuyết phục sâu sắc của Amazon chỉ nhằm đem lại lợi ích lâu dài cho chính công ty.

Bắt đầu từ cuối năm 2007, khi thống đốc bang New York, Eliot Spitzer, đưa ra một đề xuất nhằm gia tăng hàng triệu đô la bằng cách xác định lại việc tính thuế trong bang, thì Amazon phải đối mặt với khả năng là việc tăng từ 5-10% trong thuế bán hàng vào giá của hầu hết sản phẩm – thứ đã hình thành những quyết định đầu tiên về nơi tiến hành các hoạt động và nơi đặt trụ sở chính của công ty – đã sắp kết thúc.

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Ban đầu, đề xuất của Spitzer thất bại. Ông đã rút lại đề xuất ngay sau ngày đưa ra, trong hoàn cảnh tỉ lệ người ủng hộ ông giảm nhanh và sự phản ứng dữ dội với những gì giám đốc ngân sách của Spitzer đã phát biểu, là mối quan tâm mà những người dân có thể xem xét về dự luật tăng thuế. Nhưng bang New York đã bị thâm hụt ngân sách 4,3 tỉ đô la rất cần được lấp đầy. Tháng Hai sau đó, một tháng trước khi sự nghiệp chính trị của Spitzer sụp đổ trong một vụ bê bối liên quan đến gái mại dâm, Spitzer đã đề xuất lại về dự luật. David Paterson, người kế nhiệm sau đó cũng ủng hộ đề xuất này, và vào tháng Tư, nó đã được cơ quan lập pháp của tiểu bang thông qua tại Albany.

Luật pháp đã khéo léo lảng tránh một quy định của Tòa án Tối cao năm 1992, Quill v. North Carolina, quy định rằng chỉ có những thương nhân có sự hiện diện hữu hình hoặc có mối liên hệ, như một cửa hàng hoặc một văn phòng trong một bang sẽ phải thu tiền thuế tiêu thụ ở đó. (Một cách chính xác, nguồn thuế vẫn đến từ hoạt động mua hàng trực tuyến, nhưng khách hàng được cho là phải trả tiền). Luật của New York quy định rằng, một trang web chi nhánh cam kết chuyển khách hàng tới một nhà bán lẻ trực tuyến là một đại lý của nhà bán lẻ đó, và do đó, nhà bán lẻ chính thức có sự hiện diện trong tình trạng của chi nhánh đó. Với phán quyết này, nếu một trang web của fan Yankees ở New York thu được tiền mỗi khi có một người truy cập nhấp chuột vào một liên kết trên trang và mua cuốn hồi ký của cựu huấn luyện viên Joe Torre trên trang Amazon.com, thì Amazon có trụ sở ở Seattle đã có một cửa hàng chính thức ở New York và sau đó sẽ phải thu thuế tiêu thụ đối với mọi cuộc mua bán được thực hiện ở bang đó.

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Amazon không thích thú về điều này. Luật của New York đã có hiệu lực trong mùa hè năm 2008 và cùng với trang Overstock.com, một nhà bán lẻ khác, Amazon bị kiện tại tòa án của tiểu bang – và thua kiện. Công ty công khai phàn nàn rằng, việc thu thuế này là phức tạp và không thực tế.

Amazon đã tránh việc thu thuế tiêu thụ trong nhiều năm với nhiều thủ thuật thông minh. Tại những bang mà Amazon có các trung tâm phân phối hoặc những văn phòng như Lab126, Amazon đều dựa trên định nghĩa của thống đốc bang về những gì cấu thành nên sự hiện diện hữu hình, bằng cách phân loại các cơ sở này như các chi nhánh của công ty thuộc sở hữu hoàn toàn mà không có doanh thu. Ví dụ, trung tâm phân phối ở Fernley, Nevada, hoạt động như một thực thể độc lập gọi là Amazon.com.nvdc, Inc. Những sự sắp xếp này không chắc có thể thành công để trì hoãn việc giám sát trực tiếp, nhưng Amazon đã thương lượng cẩn thận với mỗi bang khi mở các cơ sở của mình, đảm bảo việc giải quyết với chính sách không can thiệp trong việc trao đổi để tạo ra việc làm mới của công ty và hoạt động kinh tế. Bezos đã xem xét việc miễn thuế của mình từ việc thu thuế tiêu thụ tới một lợi thế chiến lược rất lớn. Năm 2008, ông phát biểu trong một cuộc họp cổ đông như sau: “Chúng ta không thực sự được hưởng lợi từ bất cứ dịch vụ nào mà những bang này cung cấp tại địa phương, vì vậy sẽ không công bằng nếu chúng ta có nghĩa vụ phải là đại lý thu thuế”.

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Bezos cũng nghĩ rằng việc miễn thuế từ thuế tiêu thụ là một lợi ích lớn dành cho khách hàng và viễn cảnh đánh mất nó để tăng giá khiến ông dễ cáu giận. Ông có lý do để lo lắng về tác động của việc thu thuế tiêu thụ. Khi New York thông qua luật thuế tiêu thụ trên mạng Internet, doanh số bán hàng của Amazon tại bang New York giảm 10% trong quý tiếp theo, theo lời một người quen thuộc với tình hình tài chính của Amazon tại thời điểm đó.

Luật của New York lan ra như một trận cảm lạnh tồi tệ. Tương tự, những bang không đủ tiền như IIinois, North Carolina, Hawaii, Rhode Island và Texas đã thử cách tiếp cận tương tự để tuyên bố rằng những trang web chi nhánh cấu thành mối liên hệ. Đáp lại, Amazon mượn một chiến thuật không khoan nhượng, đó là Overstock đã được sử dụng ở New York và đã chia tách quan hệ với các chi nhánh ở mỗi bang. Những trang web này thường được điều hành bởi các blogger và doanh nhân, những người cần sự ủy nhiệm liên kết và họ đã tức giận khi nhận ra, họ đang đứng giữa một chính quyền bang thiếu nguồn cung tiền và một bên là người khổng lồ trực tuyến tham chiến, bám chặt vào thủ thuật tránh nộp thuế rõ ràng.

Các chi nhánh không phải là nạn nhân duy nhất trong giai đoạn này của cuộc chiến về thuế tiêu thụ. Vadim Tsypin là một kỹ sư của Amazon, thường xuyên làm việc tại nhà của ông ở Quebec, Canada. Cuối năm 2007, trong khoảng thời gian Eliot Spitzer đề xuất dự luật thuế và những luật sư của Amazon đang trở nên lo lắng, thì nhà quản lý của Tsypin cho ông thấy chính sách hạn chế của công ty Canada khi tuyên bố rằng Amazon không có nhân viên nào làm việc tại quốc gia đó. Quản lý của ông đã nói với Tsypin rằng, họ phải che giấu việc ông làm việc ở nhà và theo tài liệu của tòa án, “Amazon có thể có những vấn đề về hàng triệu đô la. Nếu chúng ta có một nhân viên ở đây, thì đó là sự vi phạm lớn vào luật pháp Mỹ và Canada”.

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Tsypin đã từ chối thay đổi bảng thời gian cũ và các đánh giá của mình, tin tưởng rằng nó không thể đương đầu với sự kiểm tra kỹ lưỡng. Ông tuyên bố rằng Amazon đã chỉ đạo, sau đó nó bắt đầu khiến ông lo lắng phải từ bỏ, điều đó dẫn đến việc ông bị ốm (“chứng đau nửa đầu liên tục và chứng mất trí nhớ tạm thời”) và ông đã nghỉ phép để điều trị y tế. Năm 2010, ông kiện Amazon ra tòa án tối cao hạt King để chấm dứt sự bất công, vi phạm hợp đồng, cảm xúc buồn bực và việc tuyển dụng cẩu thả – và ông đã thua kiện. Thẩm phán nhìn nhận tình trạng của Tsypin có liên quan đến công việc nhưng nói rằng khiếu nại không đủ mạnh để yêu cầu trách nhiệm dân sự.

Những công ty lớn như Amazon thường xuyên là mục tiêu của những tuyên bố chấm dứt bất công. Nhưng trường hợp của Vadim Tsypin không bình thường, bởi vì nó xuất phát từ chính mối lo ngại về thuế tiêu thụ ngày càng gia tăng của Amazon và bởi giai đoạn khám phá đã đưa cuốn sách về việc tránh thuế rộng rãi của Amazon vào hồ sơ công khai. Hàng chục trang sách về quy định nội bộ công ty, biểu đồ tiến trình, bản đồ được đệ trình lên tòa án tối cao hạt King, ở trung tâm thành phố Seattle. Họ đã cùng nhau công khai một bức chân dung hấp dẫn của một công ty liều lĩnh thay đổi bản thân để phù hợp với môi trường thuế đang thay đổi nhanh chóng.

Những hướng dẫn tiếp cận theo hướng siêu thực. Các nhân viên của Amazon phải tìm kiếm sự chấp thuận để tham dự hội chợ thương mại và được nhắc nhở tránh các hoạt động có liên quan đến việc thúc đẩy bán bất cứ sản phẩm nào trên trang web của Amazon. Họ không thể viết blog hay trao đổi với báo chí nếu không được phép, phải tránh thuê bất kỳ tài sản nào trên chuyến đi, và không thể đặt hàng trên Amazon từ những máy tính của công ty. Họ có thể ký hợp đồng với những công ty khác, ví dụ như các nhà cung cấp hàng hóa để bán trên trang web, nhưng chỉ ở Seattle.

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Sau đó, các vách ngăn dường như tùy ý trong cấu trúc doanh nghiệp của công ty càng trở nên quan trọng hơn. Các nhân viên đi du lịch làm việc cho tổ chức bán lẻ Bắc Mỹ của Amazon được cho biết họ đã làm việc cho một công ty có tên là Amazon Services, không phải Amazon.com và mang theo danh thiếp. Theo một tài liệu, họ được hướng dẫn nói: “Tôi làm việc với Amazon Services, nhà điều hành trang web www.amazon.com và nhà cung cấp các giải pháp và dịch vụ thương mại điện tử, và tôi ở đây để thu thập thông tin mới nhất ngành công nghiệp hot trend,” nếu họ từng bị giới truyền thông truy vấn về việc họ tham dự một triển lãm thương mại.

Những tấm bản đồ được mã hóa bằng màu sắc đã được phân phát rộng rãi cho các nhân viên tại trụ sở chính ở Seattle. Đi tới các bang có màu xanh lá như Michigan rất ổn, nhưng với những bang có màu cam như California lại yêu cầu phép nghỉ đặc biệt để bộ phận hợp pháp có thể theo dõi số ngày tích lũy mà các nhân viên của Amazon trải qua ở đây. Nếu đi tới các bang có màu đỏ như Texas, New Jersey và Massachusetts, thì nhân viên được yêu cầu phải hoàn thành một bảng câu hỏi gồm 17 câu về chuyến đi để xác định liệu họ có làm cho công ty dễ bị tấn công với những nỗ lực thu thuế tiêu thụ hay không (câu số 16: “Bạn sẽ tổ chức một trò chơi xổ số chứ?”). Những luật sư của Amazon sau đó hoặc là không chú ý đến chuyến đi hoàn toàn, hoặc nhận được một lá thư riêng từ bang đó, giải thích rõ cách xử lý riêng đối với tình huống cụ thể.

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Theo các nhân viên cao cấp vào thời điểm đó, có rất ít cuộc thảo luận nội bộ về việc quản lý đó là đúng hay sai và liệu nó có tác động đến tinh thần của các nhân viên hay không. Đó chỉ là một chiến lược, một cách để duy trì lợi thế quan trọng về thuế, cho phép công ty đưa ra một mức giá tương đối thấp. “Triển vọng kinh tế tại nhiều bang khá ảm đạm”, theo một biên bản thuế nội bộ cho người lao động đầu năm 2010, đã được đệ trình trong trường hợp của Vadim Tsypin. “Kết quả là các bang theo đuổi các đối tượng nộp thuế tích cực hơn so với trước đây. Những trải nghiệm gần đây của Amazon với các bang New York và Texas được cung cấp kịp thời và những dẫn chứng phù hợp về độ rủi ro cao. Đó là lý do tại sao sự quan tâm của chúng tôi đối với các vấn đề liên quan đến các mối quan hệ quan trọng hơn bao giờ hết”.

Cùng năm đó (2010), từ Amazon, Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Home Depot và Sears đã gạt sự thù địch truyền đời của họ sang một bên để tham gia trong một liên minh khác thường. Họ ủng hộ một tổ chức mới gọi là Alliance cho sự công bằng của phố Main, dùng chung ngôn ngữ dân túy và – bằng cách nào đó để che giấu sự châm biếm – nói về tầm quan trọng của việc giữ gìn sự sống còn của những nhà bán lẻ theo mô hình kinh doanh gia đình. Tổ chức này thuê một nhóm những người vận động hành lang có khả năng tài chính tốt, xây dựng một trang web công phu, chạy những tấm biển và quảng cáo truyền hình trên toàn bang. CEO của những nhà bán lẻ lớn này đã giám sát chiến dịch chặt chẽ. Theo hai nhà vận động liên quan đến chiến dịch, thì Mike Duke, CEO của hãng Walmart đã yêu cầu những chỉ dẫn thường xuyên đối với cuộc chiến về thuế tiêu thụ.

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Amazon đã chiến đấu mạnh mẽ để chống lại sự mở rộng của thuế tiêu thụ, thu hút sự hợp tác từ các chính trị gia bằng cách triển khai cả “cây gậy” và “củ cà rốt” trong phạm vi mà họ có thể cảm thấy nó rõ nhất – việc làm. Ở Texas, năm 2011, cơ quan lập pháp đã đưa ra một dự luật, buộc các nhà bán lẻ trực tuyến với chức năng phân phối trong bang phải thu thuế tiêu thụ và Amazon đã đe dọa đóng cửa trung tâm phân phối của mình nằm bên ngoài Dallas, sa thải hàng trăm lao động địa phương và từ bỏ kế hoạch xây dựng những trung tâm khác trong bang. Thống đốc bang Texas là Rick Perry đã nhanh chóng phủ quyết dự luật. Ở Nam Carolina, Amazon đã được miễn thuế với một điều luật mới, bằng cách dùng sự đe dọa tương tự và họ đã đồng ý gửi email cho khách hàng để nhắc nhở họ rằng, họ có nghĩa vụ trả tiền thuế tiêu thụ của chính họ. Ở Tennessee, các nhà lập pháp đã đồng ý trì hoãn một dự luật khi Amazon đề nghị xây dựng ba trung tâm phân phối mới trong tiểu bang.

Trong thời gian đụng độ này, Bezos ủng hộ cho một dự luật liên bang, đó là đơn giản hóa mã số thuế tiêu thụ và áp dụng nó với toàn bộ ngành công nghiệp thương mại điện tử. (Điều này có lợi thế của một tình huống không dễ dàng xảy ra, khi xem xét sự bế tắc chính trị ở Washington, DC vào thời điểm đó.) “Nếu tôi nói với khách hàng ‘Chúng tôi không đòi hỏi thu thuế tiêu thụ. Hiến pháp quy định rõ ràng rằng, các bang không thể buộc các nhà bán lẻ nằm ngoài bang phải thu thuế tiêu thụ và không thể can thiệp vào vấn đề thương mại giữa các tiểu bang, nhưng chúng tôi sẽ làm điều đó một cách tự nguyện’, thì điều đó không thể đứng vững được”, Bezos nói với tôi trong một cuộc phỏng vấn vào năm 2011. “Khách hàng sẽ phản đối. Cách này có tác dụng nếu bạn phải sửa đổi Hiến pháp hoặc bạn phải vượt qua luật của liên bang.”

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Cuộc chiến lên đến đỉnh điểm vào năm 2012. Amazon đã từ bỏ ở Texas, Nam Carolina, Pennsylvania và Tennessee; thương lượng dàn xếp để đổi lấy việc miễn thuế cho một vài năm nữa, đổi lấy việc đặt những trung tâm phân phối ở mỗi bang. Ở California, bang đông dân nhất, nơi Amazon nghĩ rằng họ có thể ngăn chặn được điều không thể tránh khỏi, họ đã chuẩn bị cho một cuộc chiến. Sau khi cơ quan lập pháp của tiểu bang thông qua luật thuế bán hàng, Amazon đã nghĩ ra một chiến dịch nhằm lật ngược tình thế và chi 5,25 triệu đô la cho việc thu thập chữ ký và chạy chương trình quảng cáo trên radio. Các nhà quan sát dự kiến công ty sẽ phải chi hơn 50 triệu đô la để nhìn trận chiến đi tới hồi kết.

Rõ ràng là một trận chiến như vậy sẽ rất tốn kém, cạnh tranh đầy cay đắng và luẩn quẩn. Liên minh Alliance vì sự công bằng cho phố Main đã “rải thảm” toàn bang với những quảng cáo chống lại Amazon, và các nhà văn cùng blogger chủ yếu đứng về phía chuỗi các cửa hàng lớn. “Nỗ lực của Amazon để tránh thuế tiêu thụ là một dẫn chứng buồn về tư duy ngắn hạn, chi phối công việc kinh doanh của người Mỹ”, người truyền bá web, Tim O’Reilly, viết trên blog và ông biết làm cách nào để thúc đẩy “chiếc nút” của Bezos – người luôn tự hào về suy nghĩ dài hạn của mình. Bên trong Amazon, ngày càng rõ ràng là công ty đang được trang bị chiếc mũ đen của kẻ xấu. Cùng thời gian đó, Amazon đang chuẩn bị để đối đầu với Apple (với Kindle Fire) trong thị trường máy tính bảng bằng số tiền góp vốn lớn. Các đồng nghiệp khẳng định với Bezos rằng, Amazon không đủ khả năng để nhìn thấy thương hiệu của mình bị lu mờ tại một thời điểm quan trọng như vậy.

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Vì vậy vào mùa thu năm đó, Amazon đã đảo ngược hướng đi và đạt được thỏa thuận với California: Công ty sẽ bỏ dự luật của mình để đổi lấy thêm một mùa Giáng Sinh miễn thuế nữa và hứa là sẽ xây dựng những trung tâm phân phối mới bên ngoài San Francisco và Los Angeles. Ngay sau đó, Paul Misener đã chứng thực trước Ủy ban Giao thông và Khoa học thương mại thượng viện, đồng thời nhắc lại sự ủng hộ của Amazon cho dự luật liên bang – như những người cùng phe mới của Amazon trong cuộc chiến về thuế tiêu thụ đã làm, Best Buy, Target và Walmart. Hiện tại, eBay, một “chiến binh” khác trong cuộc chiến thuế tiêu thụ đã đứng một mình khi cố gắng bảo vệ các thương nhân nhỏ nhất của mình, giống như người mẹ nghỉ tại nhà đã làm ra tiền bằng cách bán đồ chạm khảm thủ công. Họ chủ trương rằng luật không nên áp dụng cho các doanh nghiệp có ít hơn 50 nhân viên hoặc có doanh thu hàng năm dưới 10 triệu đô la, mặc dù hầu hết các dự luật về thuế tiêu thụ của quốc gia được đề xuất miễn thuế ở mức dưới 1 triệu đô la. Theo văn bản này, dự luật thu thuế tiêu thụ của quốc gia chưa được cả hai viện của quốc hội thông qua.

Amazon đã mất đi một lợi thế khá lớn, nhưng Bezos từng là một người chơi cờ nhìn xa trông rộng, đã được đền bù bằng cách nuôi dưỡng những cái mới. Những trung tâm phân phối mới của Amazon sẽ gần với các thành phố lớn, cho phép khả năng giao hàng trong cùng một ngày hoặc vào ngày hôm sau, và triển khai rộng kinh doanh cửa hàng tạp phẩm, Amazon Fresh. Amazon cũng mở rộng thử nghiệm với Amazon Lockers – những chiếc tủ lớn có khóa màu cam được đặt tại các siêu thị, nhà thuốc và các chuỗi cửa hàng như Radio Shack, mà khách hàng có thể có được những thùng hàng Amazon gửi đến nếu họ thích.

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Khi thời đại của việc mua hàng trực tuyến được miễn thuế chấm dứt ở nhiều tiểu bang, kiến trúc sư thực sự về chiến lược thuế của Amazon và là người đứng đầu của phòng thuế gồm 80 người, một luật sư có tên Robert Comfort đã hiện diện. Comfort, một cựu sinh viên của Princeton gia nhập Amazon vào năm 2000, đã trải qua hơn một thập kỷ sử dụng tất cả các thủ thuật trong các cuốn sách và phát minh ra nhiều cái mới để giảm thiểu gánh nặng về thuế cho công ty. Năm 2012, cơ cấu thuế bí mật này gần như sụp đổ giữa làn sóng người dân châu Âu theo chủ nghĩa dân túy giận dữ nhắm vào Amazon và các công ty khác của Mỹ, bao gồm Google – người đã cố gắng để giảm thiểu gánh nặng thuế ở nước ngoài.

Comfort đã tuyên bố nghỉ hưu và rời khỏi Amazon vào đầu năm 2012, đúng lúc người thu thuế gõ cửa công ty. (Ông đã đảm nhận một công việc mới – một vị trí với chức vụ danh nghĩa là lãnh sự danh dự của Seattle cho Đại Công quốc Luxembourg).

Và lần đầu tiên trong lịch sử của công ty, Amazon phải chiến đấu với các đối thủ cạnh tranh trên một sân chơi bình đẳng.

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Có một nhóm tồn tại bí mật bên trong Amazon, với tên gọi dường như được rút ra từ một bộ phim về James Bond: Trí thông minh cạnh tranh. Từ năm 2007, nhóm này đã hoạt động trong bộ phận tài chính, dưới sự quản lý của các giám đốc lâu năm là Tim Stone và Jason Warnick. Nhóm đã mua một khối lượng lớn các sản phẩm từ đối thủ và đánh giá chất lượng cùng tốc độ dịch vụ của họ. Nhiệm vụ của nhóm là điều tra xem liệu có bất kỳ đối thủ nào đang làm việc tốt hơn Amazon không, sau đó gửi dữ liệu tới một ủy ban, thường bao gồm Bezos, Jeff Wilke và Diego Piacentini, những người đảm bảo rằng công ty sẽ giải quyết bất cứ mối đe dọa nào đang nổi và bắt kịp đối thủ một cách nhanh chóng.

Vào cuối những năm 2000, nhóm Trí thông minh cạnh tranh bắt đầu theo dõi một đối thủ với cái tên khó phát âm và có mối quan hệ tốt với khách hàng là nữ giới. Quidsi (quid si trong tiếng La tinh nghĩa là “nếu”) là một công ty ở New Jersey, được biết đến với trang web Diapers.com. Những người bạn từ thời trung học, Marc Lore và Vinit Bharara bắt đầu khởi nghiệp vào năm 2005, giúp những điều dưỡng viên thiếu ngủ lên lịch định kỳ những lô hàng vật tư quan trọng. Đến năm 2008, công ty đã mở rộng sang bán tất cả các thiết bị cần thiết cho những người mới làm cha mẹ, bao gồm khăn lau trẻ em, sữa bột, quần áo và xe đẩy.

Việc đưa những đứa trẻ hay la hét tới cửa hàng là một rắc rối lớn của các bậc cha mẹ, nhưng Amazon chỉ bắt đầu bán tã lót trẻ em cho tới một năm sau khi Diapers.com và Walmart.com hay Target.com đầu tư đáng kể cho danh mục này. Quay trở lại khi những đám mây đen của vụ phá sản bong bóng dot-com vẫn còn treo trong ngành công nghiệp thương mại điện tử, các nhà bán lẻ cảm thấy họ sẽ không kiếm được tiền từ việc vận chuyển các sản phẩm lớn, cồng kềnh, lợi nhuận thấp như những gói lớn của hãng Huggies Snug & Dry tới trước cửa của khách hàng.

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Lore và Bharara đã khiến nó hoạt động bằng cách tùy chỉnh hệ thống phân phối của họ dành cho đồ trẻ em. Những trung tâm phân phối của Quidsi do cựu giám đốc điều hành của Boeing là Scott Hilton thiết kế, đã sử dụng phần mềm để tích hợp tất cả các đơn đặt hàng với các hộp vận chuyển nhỏ nhất có thể (có khoảng 23 kích thước có sẵn), giảm thiểu trọng lượng dư thừa, do đó làm giảm chi phí vận chuyển cho mỗi đơn hàng. Quidsi lựa chọn những kho hàng nằm ngoài các trung tâm có dân số lớn để tận dụng giá vận chuyển rẻ và có thể cam kết vận chuyển miễn phí qua đêm trong 2/3 của đất nước. Những nhà sáng lập Quidsi nghiên cứu về Amazon rất kỹ và thần tượng Jeff Bezos, gọi ông là “thầy” trong những cuộc trò chuyện riêng.

Những bà mẹ quan tâm tới việc xuất hiện có vẻ ma thuật của tã lót dành cho trẻ em trên ngưỡng cửa nhà họ đã nhiệt tình nói chuyện với bạn bè về Diapers.com. Một vài công ty có vốn mạo hiểm, bao gồm Accel Partners – người hậu thuẫn của Facebook, đã mua cổ phần của công ty với dự đoán là Lore và Bharara đã xác định được một điểm yếu trong bộ áo giáp của Amazon và họ đã đầu tư khoảng hơn 50 triệu đô la vào công ty. Khoảng thời gian này, Jeff Bezos và đội phát triển doanh nghiệp của ông cùng các đối tác của Amazon ở Walmart đã bắt đầu chú ý.

Ban lãnh đạo và các đại diện chính thức từ Amazon, Quidsi và Walmart đều từ chối thảo luận chi tiết về cuộc chiến tiếp theo. Jeff Blackburn, người đứng đầu việc mua bán và sáp nhập của Amazon, nói rằng Quidsi giống Zappos, đều là một “công ty độc lập kiên quyết xây dựng đặc quyền kinh doanh cực kỳ linh hoạt”. Ông cũng nói rằng, mọi thứ Amazon làm sau đó trong thị trường tã lót dành cho trẻ em được lên kế hoạch trước và không liên quan đến việc cạnh tranh với Quidsi.

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Câu chuyện này sau đó đã được ghép lại từ hồi ức của những người trong cuộc ở tất cả ba công ty. Họ đều giữ kín danh tính và kể lại trong tâm trạng lo lắng, vì sức mạnh của các thỏa thuận không được tiết lộ nghiêm ngặt của Walmart và Amazon, cùng khả năng của các hậu quả về mặt pháp lý nếu họ công khai về chuyện đó.

Năm 2009, Blackburn đưa ra một thông báo đáng ngại cho người đồng sáng lập Quidsi, đó là người khổng lồ thương mại điện tử đã sẵn sàng đầu tư vào hạng mục đó và họ nên suy nghĩ nghiêm túc về việc bán cho Amazon. Lore và Bharara đáp lại họ muốn giữ nguyên tình trạng hiện tại và xây dựng một công ty độc lập. Blackburn nói với những người sáng lập Quidsi rằng họ nên gọi cho anh ta nếu họ xem xét lại.

Ngay sau đó, Quidsi nhận thấy Amazon đã giảm giá những sản phẩm dành cho trẻ em lên tới 30%. Để thử nghiệm, các nhà quản lý của Quidsi đã điều chỉnh mức giá của họ, sau đó quan sát trang web của Amazon thay đổi giá cho phù hợp. Thiết bị định giá nổi tiếng của Amazon hoạt động như tia laze trên trang Diapers.com.

Quidsi vẫn hoạt động tốt trước cuộc tấn công của Amazon, ít nhất là thời gian đầu. Quidsi không cố gắng để sánh được với mức giá thấp của Amazon, nhưng đã đầu tư vốn vào sức mạnh của thương hiệu và tiếp tục được hưởng lợi nhờ phương thức truyền miệng. Họ cũng dùng mối quan hệ tin tưởng với khách hàng và dùng chuyên môn để mở hai trang web mới là Soap.com cho hàng hóa gia đình và BeautyBar.com cho đồ trang điểm. Nhưng sau một thời gian, cuộc cạnh tranh gay gắt bắt đầu lấy đi một khoản phí của công ty. Quidsi đi từ con số không và đạt mức doanh thu hàng năm là 300 triệu đô la chỉ trong một vài năm, nhưng khi cạnh tranh với Amazon, tăng trưởng về doanh thu bắt đầu chậm lại. Các nhà đầu tư miễn cưỡng cung cấp cho Quidsi số vốn bổ sung và công ty vẫn chưa đủ lớn mạnh cho việc phát hành cổ phiếu ra công chúng lần đầu. Lần đầu tiên, Lore và Bharara phải suy nghĩ về việc bán công ty.

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Khoảng thời gian này, Walmart đang tìm cách để xây dựng nên vị trí họ từng mất vào tay Amazon, và nhà bán lẻ đã cải tổ kênh trực tuyến của mình. Phó chủ tịch của Walmart là Eduardo Castro-Wright đã tiếp nhận Walmart.com, và một trong những cuộc gọi đầu tiên của ông tới Marc Lore tại Diapers.com để mở đầu cho cuộc đàm phán về việc mua lại. Lore nói rằng Quidsi muốn có một cơ hội để nhận được “tiền Zappos” – 900 triệu đô la, trong đó bao gồm khoản lợi tức mở rộng trong nhiều năm, gắn liền với mục tiêu hoạt động. Walmart đồng ý về mặt nguyên tắc và bắt đầu khảo sát tính khả thi. Mike Duke, CEO của Walmart, thậm chí đã tới thăm một trung tâm phân phối của Diapers.com ở New Jersey. Tuy nhiên, lời đề nghị chính thức tiếp theo đến từ Bentonville là theo số tiền yêu cầu.

Vì vậy, Lore đã nhấc điện thoại lên và gọi tới Amazon. Ngày 14/9/2010, Lore và Bharara đã tới Seattle để gặp Jeff Bezos về việc mua lại Quidsi. Trong khi họ đang trong cuộc họp buổi sáng với Bezos, Amazon đã gửi đi một thông cáo báo chí, giới thiệu về một dịch vụ mới gọi là Amazon Mom. Đó là một thỏa thuận ngọt ngào cho những người mới làm cha mẹ: Họ có thể nhận được dịch vụ vận chuyển hai ngày miễn phí đáng giá, kéo dài trong một năm (một chương trình mất phí tham gia là 79 đô la) và nhiều đặc quyền khác có sẵn, bao gồm thêm 30% chiết khấu đối với sản phẩm tã dành cho trẻ em nếu họ đăng ký giao tã thường xuyên theo tháng như một phần của dịch vụ Đăng ký và Tiết kiệm. Tại New Jersey, những nhân viên của Quidsi đã cố gắng hết sức để liên lạc với những người sáng lập công ty, thảo luận về phản ứng công khai với dịch vụ Amazon Mom. Không phải ngẫu nhiên khi họ không thể tiếp cận được. Họ không hề hay biết về cuộc họp trong văn phòng của Amazon.

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Bây giờ Quidsi có thể hiểu rõ về chính mình. Trong tháng đó, Diapers.com đã liệt kê một trường hợp về sản phẩm Pampers ở mức giá 45 đô la; Amazon đưa ra mức giá cho cùng sản phẩm đó là 39 đô la và những khách hàng của Amazon Mom với dịch vụ Đăng ký và Tiết kiệm có thể nhận được một hộp Pampers với mức giá thấp hơn 30 đô la. Lúc đó, các nhà lãnh đạo của Quidsi đã có được những gì họ cần biết về mức giá vận chuyển, được xem như một nhân tố trong giá bán buôn của Procter & Gamble; và tính được rằng Amazon đang trên đà làm mất 100 triệu đô la trong vòng ba tháng chỉ với mặt hàng tã dành cho trẻ em.

Bên trong Amazon, Bezos đã hợp lý hóa những thay đổi này, trở thành yếu tố nằm trong lợi ích lâu dài của công ty trong việc làm hài lòng khách hàng và xây dựng ngành kinh doanh hàng tiêu dùng. Ông nói với phó giám đốc phụ trách phát triển doanh nghiệp, Peter Krawiec, không trả quá số tiền nhất định để mua Quidsi, nhưng vẫn đảm bảo rằng trong bất kỳ hoàn cảnh nào, Amazon vẫn không mất thỏa thuận với Walmart.

Theo kết quả cuộc họp giữa Bezos với Lore và Bharara, Amazon có khoảng thời gian ba tuần để nghiên cứu vấn đề tài chính của Quidsi và đưa ra đề nghị. Vào cuối giai đoạn, Krawiec đề nghị với Quidsi mức giá 540 triệu đô la và nói rằng đó là một “mức giá căng”. Ông đã dành cho Quidsi 48 giờ để trả lời và làm rõ ràng vấn đề là nếu những nhà sáng lập không chấp nhận, cuộc cạnh tranh sẽ tiếp tục.

Walmart có một lợi thế đương nhiên trong cuộc chiến này. Jim Breyer, đối tác quản lý của một trong số những người tài trợ vốn mạo hiểm của Quidsi, Accel, cũng nằm trong ban giám đốc của Walmart. Tuy nhiên, Walmart vẫn chưa sẵn sàng. Vào thời điểm Walmart gia tăng mức đề nghị lên 600 triệu đô la, Quidsi đã tạm chấp nhận. Mike Duke đã gọi điện và để lại tin nhắn cho một vài thành viên hội đồng quản trị của Quidsi, khẩn khoản rằng họ đừng bán cho Amazon. Những tin nhắn này sau đó được ghi chép lại và gửi đến Seattle, vì Amazon đã quy định cùng với điều khoản sơ bộ là Quidsi phải chuyển thông tin về bất kỳ lời đề nghị nào sau đó.

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Khi các giám đốc điều hành của Amazon biết được ý định của Walmart, họ liền nâng cao áp lực hơn nữa, đe dọa những người sáng lập Quidsi rằng Bezos, một đối thủ cạnh tranh khốc liệt, sẽ đẩy giá của mặt hàng tã dành cho trẻ em, nếu họ đồng hành với Walmart. Hội đồng quản trị của Quidsi đã nhóm họp để thảo luận về đề nghị của Amazon và có khả năng họ sẽ nối lại đàm phán với Walmart. Nhưng sau đó, sự sốt sắng giống như Khrushchev của Bezos trong cuộc chiến về giá cả của tã giấy đã làm Quidsi lo lắng rằng, công ty có thể chịu tổn thất nếu làm điều gì đó sai lầm trong suốt quá trình kết hợp với Walmart. Vì vậy, các nhà lãnh đạo của Quidsi mắc kẹt với Amazon, phần lớn là vì sợ hãi. Thỏa thuận đã được công bố vào ngày 8/11/2010.

Chương trình Amazon Mom đang làm ăn thua lỗ được giới thiệu rõ ràng để đưa Diapers.com vào thế bế tắc và buộc công ty phải thỏa thuận; nếu có ai vào thời điểm đó nghi ngờ về điều này, những nghi ngờ sẽ nhanh chóng bị xua tan bởi các hành động tiếp theo của Amazon.

Một tháng sau khi công bố việc mua lại Quidsi, Amazon đã dừng chương trình với các thành viên mới. Tuy nhiên sau đó, Ủy ban Thương mại Liên bang đã xem xét thỏa thuận này và một vài tuần sau khi dừng chương trình, Amazon đã mở lại mặc dù mức chiết khấu ít hơn nhiều.

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Ủy ban Thương mại Liên bang đã xem xét kỹ lưỡng việc mua lại này trong bốn tháng rưỡi, đi xa hơn việc xem xét tiêu chuẩn tới giai đoạn yêu cầu thứ hai, khi các công ty phải cung cấp nhiều thông tin hơn về giao dịch. Theo một quan chức của Ủy ban Thương mại Liên bang, thỏa thuận này là một lời cảnh báo. Một cuộc cạnh tranh đối đầu quan trọng và sau đó sáp nhập đã dẫn đến sự sụp đổ của một người chơi chính trong hạng mục này. Nhưng thỏa thuận này cuối cùng đã được chấp nhận, một phần bởi vì nó không dẫn đến tình trạng độc quyền. Có một loạt các công ty khác như Costco, Target bán tã lót dành cho trẻ em cả bằng trực tuyến và ngoại tuyến.

Một lần nữa Bezos đã giành chiến thắng, vô hiệu hóa một đối thủ cạnh tranh mới xuất hiện và đưa vào một tập hợp các kệ hàng khác trong cửa hàng triệu đồ của mình. Giống như Zappos, Quidsi được phép hoạt động độc lập trong Amazon (từ New Jersey) và ngay sau đó mở rộng sang các nguồn cung cấp vật nuôi với Wag.com và đồ chơi với Yoyo.com. Walmart đã bỏ lỡ cơ hội để có được một đội các doanh nhân tài năng, những người đối đầu với Amazon trong một danh mục sản phẩm chủ chốt. Và những người trong cuộc lại một lần nữa há hốc mồm vì kinh ngạc, tự hỏi Bezos đã bố trí sẵn một vụ mua lại khác bằng cách nào. Theo lời một người quan sát thì: “Họ sẵn sàng thắp sáng không gian xung quanh để xuất hiện như một người chiến thắng”.

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Nỗi lo lắng xuất hiện khi Amazon không bị giới hạn tới New Jersey, Las Vegas và những địa điểm khác của Mỹ. Thành phố công nghiệp của Solingen, nước Đức, nằm giữa Dusseldorf và Cologne, nổi tiếng với việc sản xuất dao và dao cạo chất lượng cao. Nghề thợ rèn tại địa phương có từ 2000 năm nay và ngày nay thành phố này là thủ phủ của ngành công nghiệp dao tại châu Âu và là quê hương của các thương hiệu nổi tiếng như Wusthof, một công ty 200 tuổi được quản lý bởi bảy thế hệ kế tiếp của gia đình Wusthof. Trong những năm 1960, Wolfgang Wusthof đã giới thiệu các sản phẩm cao cấp của công ty tới Bắc Mỹ, đi xe buýt từ thị trấn này tới thị trấn khác với một chiếc va ly chứa đầy dao. 40 năm sau, cháu trai của ông Harald Wusthof đã tiếp quản công ty và bắt đầu bán hàng cho các chuỗi Williams-Sonoma và Macy’s. Sau đó, vào đầu những năm 2000, Wusthof bắt đầu cung cấp hàng hóa cho Amazon.com.

Trong suốt 50 năm tại Mỹ, Wusthof đã xây dựng hình ảnh cho mình là một thương hiệu cao cấp, có được những lời khen ngợi thường xuyên từ tạp chí Consumer Reportsvà Cook’s Illustrated. Vì lý do đó, họ có thể tính phí 120 đô la cho một con dao làm bếp dài khoảng 20 cm, làm từ thép nhiều các-bon được kiểm tra qua tia laze, mặc dù những con dao làm bếp có cùng kích thước được bán với giá 20 đô la trên Target. Việc duy trì giá cao là điều quan trọng đối với một công ty thuê hàng trăm nghệ nhân lành nghề trong nhà máy, nhưng họ phải cạnh tranh với một loạt các sản phẩm có chất lượng kém hơn, mà với con mắt chưa qua đào tạo, thì tất cả trông gần giống nhau.

Đó là lý do tại sao mối quan hệ kéo dài 5 năm của Amazon với Wusthof — cũng như mối quan hệ của họ với rất nhiều thương hiệu và nhà sản xuất trên khắp thế giới — diễn ra đẫm máu như một cuộc đấu dao thực sự.

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Các nhà sản xuất không được phép đưa ra giá bán lẻ cho các sản phẩm của họ. Nhưng họ có thể quyết định bán cho nhà bán lẻ nào và có một cách để họ thể hiện quyền lực là thiết lập mức giá sàn với một công cụ gọi là MAP hoặc giá thông báo tối thiểu. MAP yêu cầu các nhà bán lẻ như Walmart giữ ở trên mức giá cụ thể trong các quảng cáo trên báo chí và thông báo của họ. Những nhà bán lẻ trực tuyến có một gánh nặng lớn hơn. Trang sản phẩm của họ được coi là một hình thức quảng cáo, vì vậy họ phải xây dựng mức giá bằng hoặc cao hơn MAP, hoặc đối mặt với nỗi tức giận của nhà sản xuất và rủi ro của việc giới hạn số lượng sản phẩm của công ty khi giao hoặc thu hồi chúng hoàn toàn.

Trong vài năm đầu tiên bán dao của Wusthof, Amazon luôn tôn trọng mong muốn định giá của các công ty Đức. Amazon cũng là một đối tác tốt, đặt lượng hàng lớn khi lượng truy cập tăng và giải quyết các hóa đơn đúng hạn. Amazon nhanh chóng trở thành nhà bán lẻ trực tuyến hàng đầu của Wusthof và lớn thứ hai ở Mỹ, sau Williams-Sonoma. Sau đó, những căng thẳng trong mối quan hệ bắt đầu xuất hiện. Khi phần mềm giá tự động của Amazon trở nên tốt hơn ở việc làm sạch trang web và tìm kiếm, phù hợp với mức giá thấp ở những nơi khác, Amazon đã nhiều lần vi phạm các yêu cầu MAP của Wusthof, bán các sản phầm như dao làm bếp Grand Prix có giá 125 đô la với giá 109 đô la. Wusthof cảm thấy họ cần MAP để bảo vệ giá trị của thương hiệu cùng các cửa hàng bán dao nhỏ, độc lập chịu trách nhiệm cho khoảng ¼ doanh số bán hàng của công ty và không có khả năng thích ứng với mức giảm giá như vậy. René Arnold, CEO của Wusthof-Trident ở Mỹ nói: “Đó là những người xây dựng nên thương hiệu của chúng tôi”. “Amazon không thể bán một con dao mới nào nữa. Họ không thể giải thích rằng nó giống như một cửa hàng”.

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Cuối cùng Wusthof đã chấm dứt việc cung cấp sản phẩm cho Amazon vào năm 2006. “Chúng tôi cảm thấy khá đau đớn”, Arnold nói. “Họ làm mất doanh số bán hàng, ít nhất là trong thời gian ngắn. Nhưng chúng tôi tin rằng sản phẩm và thương hiệu của chúng tôi vẫn mạnh hơn thương hiệu của các nhà phân phối cho chúng tôi.” Ba năm tiếp theo – tới năm 2009, khi Wusthof thay đổi suy nghĩ và khởi đầu cho phần hai mối quan hệ với Amazon – dao của Wusthof đã vắng mặt trên các giá của cửa hàng triệu đồ.

Các công ty tạo ra sản phẩm và các công ty bán chúng đã tiến hành nhiều phiên bản của trận chiến này trong nhiều thế kỷ. Với cam kết để mức giá thấp hàng ngày và kết hợp khéo léo việc bán lẻ trực tiếp với một thị trường của bên thứ ba, Amazon đã đẩy những căng thẳng lên một mức độ mới. Giống như Sam Walton, Bezos nhìn nhận nó như nhiệm vụ của công ty để vượt ra khỏi chuỗi cung ứng và cung cấp mức giá thấp nhất có thể cho khách hàng. Ban lãnh đạo của Amazon nhìn nhận MAP và những kỹ thuật tương tự như những vết tích cuối cùng của một con đường cũ trong kinh doanh, những mánh lới quảng cáo mà các công ty hoạt động không hiệu quả sử dụng, để bảo vệ lợi nhuận to lớn của họ. Amazon đã đưa ra rất nhiều cách giải quyết, bao gồm một phương pháp gọi là ẩn giá. Trong một số trường hợp, khi Amazon phá vỡ MAP, họ không liệt kê giá trên trang sản phẩm của mình. Một khách hàng có thể nhìn thấy mức giá thấp chỉ khi ông ta đưa sản phẩm vào trong giỏ hàng của mình.

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Đó là một giải pháp thiếu tinh tế, được thúc đẩy bởi mong muốn từ lâu của Amazon, nhằm có được mức giá thấp nhất ở bất cứ nơi đâu và khả năng mới của các thuật toán về giá cả để nhanh chóng phù hợp với bất kỳ bên bán quan trọng nào. Wilke dự đoán: “Nếu các nhà cung cấp hoặc thương hiệu rời xa Amazon thì cuối cùng họ cũng sẽ trở lại, bởi vì khách hàng tin tưởng Amazon là nhà cung cấp thông tin tuyệt vời và khách hàng đánh giá về sự lựa chọn sản phẩm phong phú. Nếu bạn có khách hàng sẵn sàng mua sản phẩm của bạn và bạn có cơ hội nói với họ về sản phẩm của mình, thì cuối cùng thương hiệu nào không muốn điều đó?”

Dyson, nhà sản xuất máy hút bụi người Anh, là dẫn chứng về một thương hiệu đã thận trọng xuất hiện để xử lý Amazon. Loại máy hút bụi này được bán trên Amazon nhiều năm và sau đó James Dyson, nhà sáng lập, đã tới văn phòng của Amazon dưới danh nghĩa cá nhân để trút nỗi thất vọng của mình về sự vi phạm lặp đi lặp lại của MAP. Kerry Morris đã tiếp đón Dyson trong chuyến viếng thăm đáng nhớ đó, nói: “Ngài James nói rằng ông ấy đã tin tưởng chúng tôi nhưng chúng tôi đã làm đổ vỡ niềm tin đó”. Dyson đã rút máy hút bụi ra khỏi Amazon trong năm 2011, tuy nhiên một số mẫu vẫn được bán trên Amazon Marketplace bởi các nhà buôn thuộc bên thứ ba chấp thuận. Qua một vài năm, những công ty như Sony và Black & Decker đã lần lượt rút các sản phẩm khác nhau ra khỏi trang web. Đặc biệt, Apple đã kiểm soát chặt chẽ Amazon, đem đến một nguồn cung cấp hạn chế iPods nhưng không có iPads hay iPhones.

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Thị trường bùng nổ của Amazon là nguồn căng thẳng chính giữa Amazon và các công ty khác. Trong những tháng nghỉ lễ năm 2012, 39% sản phẩm bán trên Amazon được môi giới qua thị trường bên thứ ba, tăng so với 36% của năm trước. Công ty cho biết hơn hai triệu người bán bên thứ ba trên toàn thế giới đã sử dụng Amazon Marketplace và họ đã bán được nhiều sản phẩm hơn 40% trong năm 2012 so với năm 2011. Kinh doanh Marketplace là một hoạt động mang lại lợi nhuận cho công ty, vì nó có mức hoa hồng cố định từ 6 đến 15% trên mỗi lần bán và không chịu chi phí mua và giữ hàng tồn kho.

Một số nhà bán lẻ bán hàng qua Amazon Marketplace dường như có mối quan hệ phân liệt với công ty, đặc biệt nếu họ không có điểm bán hàng duy nhất và bền vững, chẳng hạn như độc quyền trên một sản phẩm cụ thể. Amazon giám sát chặt chẽ những gì họ bán, nhận thấy bất kỳ mặt hàng nào đang bán chạy và thường bắt đầu bán chính những sản phẩm đó. Bằng cách trả hoa hồng cho Amazon và giúp nó tìm kiếm các sản phẩm hot, các nhà bán lẻ trên Amazon Marketplace đang hỗ trợ đối thủ cạnh tranh hung dữ nhất của họ.

Năm 2003, Michael Ross là giám đốc điều hành của Figleaves.com, một trang web về đồ bơi và đồ lót trực tuyến có trụ sở tại London, đã bán chiếc áo lót thể thao mang thương hiệu Shock Absorber của Anh. Trang web này đã thu hút sự chú ý của Amazon từ rất sớm. Để thúc đẩy cho sự xuất hiện của công ty tại Mỹ trên Marketplace của Amazon, Ross đã giúp sắp xếp một trận đấu tennis không cân bằng giữa Jeff Bezos và Anna Kournikova, người bảo lãnh nổi tiếng của Absorber.

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Figleaves đã bán đồ của mình trên Marketplace của Amazon trong một vài năm, nhưng đã dừng lại vào cuối năm 2008. Lúc đó, Amazon.com đã đăng một loạt sản phẩm gồm áo lót và đồ bơi của Shock Absorber; và Figleaves đã bán được rất ít trên trang web. “Trong một thế giới mà người tiêu dùng bị giới hạn lựa chọn, bạn cần phải cạnh tranh để có được vị trí”, Ross – người tiếp tục đồng sáng lập eCommera, một công ty tư vấn thương mại điện tử của Anh – nói. “Nhưng trong một thế giới khi khách hàng không có giới hạn trong lựa chọn, bạn cần phải cạnh tranh để có được sự chú ý. Và điều này sẽ đòi hỏi nhiều hơn là bán sản phẩm của người khác”.

Ngay cả những người bán hàng thành công trong Marketplace của Amazon cũng có xu hướng đánh giá điều đó một cách thận trọng. GreenCupboards, một trang web chuyên bán những sản phẩm “có trách nhiệm” với môi trường, ví dụ như chất tẩy rửa thân thiện với môi trường và vật nuôi, đã xây dựng một công ty có 60 nhân viên, gần như hoàn toàn thông qua Amazon, mặc dù thực tế là người sáng lập Josh Neblett nói rằng Marketplace khởi động “một cuộc đua hướng về xuất phát điểm”. Công ty của ông liên tục cạnh tranh với những người bán hàng khác và với chính tổ chức bán lẻ của Amazon để cung cấp mức giá thấp nhất có thể và để nắm bắt được “hộp mua” – là người bán hàng ngầm định của một sản phẩm cụ thể trên trang web. Cuộc cạnh tranh về giá cả dữ dội có xu hướng đẩy giá xuống thấp và xóa bỏ lợi nhuận. Kết quả, GreenCupboards phải nhận được nhiều hơn Amazon – giống như để tồn tại vậy. Neblett cho biết công ty đã nhận được nguồn sản phẩm mới tốt hơn, xóa bỏ tình trạng độc quyền và xây dựng một tổ chức tinh gọn. Ông nói: “Tôi luôn luôn coi nó như một trò chơi và chúng tôi đang tìm cách để chơi tốt hơn”.

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Tuy nhiên, như Wilke cho biết, một số công ty từng từ bỏ việc bán hàng trên Amazon cuối cùng đã trở lại, vì 200 triệu khách hàng thực sự và việc kinh doanh phát đạt. Các nhân viên của Amazon đã so sánh việc bán hàng của bên thứ ba trên trang web với việc nghiện heroin – những người bán hàng có một cuộc chạy đua hào hứng, bất ngờ và kéo dài doanh số bán hàng bùng nổ, sau đó tiến tới sự say mê và tự hủy diệt khi Amazon bắt đầu “rút ruột” lợi nhuận của người bán và bán rẻ. Những người bán “biết rằng họ không nên dùng heroin nhưng họ không thể dừng việc lấy heroin”, Kerry Morris nói. “Họ chê bai, phàn nàn, đe dọa cho đến khi cuối cùng họ nhận thấy họ phải giảm giá”.

Wusthof, nhà sản xuất dao của Đức, đã trở lại vào năm 2009, sau khi Amazon tìm hiểu sâu sắc về lời hứa liên quan đến mức giá đề nghị của nhà sản xuất. Công ty đã tái phân bổ sản phẩm tới các nhà bán lẻ trực tuyến, nhưng mô hình trước đó lại lặp lại. Ví dụ, bộ dao hai mảnh dành cho người sành ăn của Wusthof với một MAP có giá 199 đô la, xuất hiện trên trang web với giá 179 đô la. René Arnold, giám đốc tài chính, đã choáng ngợp với những khiếu nại từ các đối tác bán lẻ khác của mình, với mức giá cao hơn 10%. Những chủ cửa hàng nhỏ này hoặc bị mất doanh số bán hàng cho Amazon, hoặc bị khách hàng của họ buộc phải điều chỉnh mức giá giống với của Amazon. Trong những cuộc gọi đầy tức giận tới Arnold, họ đe dọa sẽ hạ giá bán lẻ và bây giờ, thật dễ dàng với Arnold và các đồng nghiệp để hình dung về một ngày nào đó, khi tất cả các nhà bán lẻ sẽ bắt đầu đòi hỏi mức giá bán buôn thấp hơn đối với sản phẩm dao của Wusthof. Tính kinh tế trong hoạt động sản xuất truyền thống của Wusthof tại Đức sẽ không còn ý nghĩa nữa.

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Khi Arnold phàn nàn, đối tác của ông tại Amazon là một nhà quản lý bán hàng tên là Kevin Bates đã trả lời rằng, công ty chỉ đơn thuần tìm kiếm và điều chỉnh mức giá thấp hơn trên trang web và trong Marketplace bên thứ ba của mình. Arnold biện luận rằng nhiều người bán không được phép bán lẻ và nhấn mạnh rằng mức giá của Amazon không phù hợp với họ. Bates nói rằng ông được yêu cầu làm vậy – Amazon luôn có mức giá thấp nhất.

Arnold thất vọng. Ông đã kiểm tra bên thứ ba của Amazon là Marketplace và tìm kiếm một số người bán hàng giá rẻ không quen thuộc, trong đó có Great Deals Now Online. Đối tượng bí ẩn này dường như luôn có dao của hãng Wusthof để bán, nhưng Arnold không biết họ là ai và Amazon cũng không cung cấp cách thức để liên hệ với họ. Arnold nói: “Họ hẳn biết về một ai đó đã nắm được sản phẩm dư thừa và họ có ai đó đang làm việc ở Bed, Bath và Beyond lấy trộm từ các trung tâm phân phối.” “Khách hàng sẽ không bao giờ đưa thẻ tín dụng của họ cho anh chàng này, nhưng vì anh ta dựa trên nền tảng của Amazon nên họ nghĩ rằng anh ta tốt”. Arnold cảm thấy rằng Marketplace của Amazon đã tạo điều kiện cho việc chiết khấu tiêu cực mà việc kinh doanh bán lẻ của họ được sử dụng như một lời bào chữa để cắt xén MAP.

Năm 2011, Wusthof quyết định kết thúc mối quan hệ với Amazon. Để giải thích với ông chủ tại sao Wusthof cắt một trong số những kênh bán hàng tốt nhất của mình, René Arnold đã yêu cầu một cuộc gặp gỡ với Amazon và đưa Harald Wsthof từ Đức tới. Wusthof, trong độ tuổi 40 với mái tóc lượn sóng, màu trắng và một nụ cười như của một bậc cha chú, chưa bao giờ chụp hình mà không có lưỡi dao sắc trong tay.

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Cuộc họp tại văn phòng của Amazon ở Seattle khá căng thẳng. Kevin Bates đi cùng với ông chủ của mình là Dan Joy, giám đốc của dòng sản phẩm dùng trong nhà bếp và phòng ăn. Bates và Joy dường như thực sự ngạc nhiên khi biết rằng Wusthof đã rút và tuyên bố sẽ mua lại dao của Wusthof thông qua thị trường chợ xám. Như Arnold nhớ lại, họ cũng cảnh báo công ty rằng mỗi lần một khách hàng tìm kiếm trên Amazon thương hiệu của Wusthof, Amazon nên hiển thị quảng cáo cho các đối thủ cạnh tranh như J. A. Henckels, một công ty sản xuất dao khác có trụ sở tại Solingen và Victorinox, hãng sản xuất dao cho quân đội của Thụy Sĩ.

Wusthof và Arnold bị sốc bởi sự quyết liệt trong lập trường của Amazon và đã quyết định phải rút lui. “Bất cứ ai cũng có thể bán nhiều hơn sản phẩm của Wusthof với mức giá bằng một nửa. Thật dễ dàng”, Arnold nói. “Nhưng nếu bạn bắt đầu bán ở mức giá thấp, có thể bạn sẽ có thời hoàng kim trong một vài năm, nhưng trong vòng hai hoặc ba năm, bạn sẽ lái việc kinh doanh của gia đình có truyền thống 200 năm vào một bức tường. Chúng tôi phải bảo vệ thương hiệu của mình. Đó là thời điểm quyết định chính. Vì vậy chúng tôi đã rút”.

Tại một hội chợ thương mại về nhà bếp và phòng tắm ở Chicago vào mùa xuân sau đó, Arnold ngạc nhiên khi nhận được một làn sóng ủng hộ từ phía các nhà cung cấp – những người từng mâu thuẫn với Amazon về các vấn đề như MAP và người bán là bên thứ ba bí ẩn. Trong khi đó Amazon đã theo chỉ dẫn để đăng quảng cáo cho các đối thủ của Wusthof. Vào giữa năm 2012, một người mua hàng táo bạo của Amazon bằng cách nào đó đã tìm cách nhờ một người ở trụ sở Wusthof ở Đức gửi cho anh ta một thùng dao lớn để đến Dubai. Nguồn cung cấp đó kéo dài khoảng sáu tuần.

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Đến cuối năm 2012, một đại diện bán hàng của Amazon bắt đầu tìm hiểu Wusthof một lần nữa, tha thiết đề nghị công ty xem xét lại, nhưng nhà sản xuất dao từ chối. Nhưng đây là một tác nhân khuyến khích: Khách hàng vẫn có thể tìm thấy một lựa chọn tốt về dao của Wusthof trên Amazon từ một vài người bán là bên thứ ba, thậm chí từ chính Amazon. Năm 2010, Amazon bắt đầu đưa Warehouse Deals vào hoạt động. Đơn vị này mua những sản phẩm đã được sử dụng hoặc tân trang lại, sau đó bán chúng trên Amazon Marketplace và Warehousedeals.com. Theo một giám đốc điều hành, mục tiêu của dự án là trở thành nhà thanh lý lớn nhất trên hành tinh. Những sản phẩm này thường được quảng cáo là “tốt như mới” và Amazon không bắt buộc phải bán chúng với MAP.

Theo văn bản này, Warehouse Deals đã lựa chọn hơn 60 sản phẩm của Wusthof ở mức chiết khấu cao. Những nhà buôn là bên thứ ba, hầu hết là các nhà bán lẻ được ủy quyền của Wusthof, cũng bán dao của họ trên Amazon, thường thông qua trung tâm phân phối bởi Amazon, cho phép những sản phẩm đủ điều kiện được chuyển đi. Vì vậy, ngay cả khi đối tác bỏ trốn, cơ sở mà Amazon đã đặt ra cũng đảm bảo rằng các kệ hàng của cửa hàng triệu đồ không bao giờ hoàn toàn trống không.

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Quay trở lại những ngày tháng đầy lo lắng sau khi bong bóng dot-com vỡ, khi Wusthof vẫn vui vẻ bán dao trên Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos đã theo sát một công ty được ông xem là một đối thủ nguy hiểm mới: Netflix. Vào thời điểm đó, Amazon đang tạo ra nhiều lợi nhuận bằng cách đặt tờ quảng cáo vào hộp giao hàng và bản thân Bezos đã nhận được một bưu kiện chứa một tờ quảng cáo của công ty DVDrental. Ông mang nó đến một cuộc họp và cáu kỉnh nói với các nhà quản lý đang cho chạy chương trình quảng cáo: “Thật dễ cho họ hủy hoại công ty hay họ bắt buộc phải làm việc này?”

Rõ ràng Bezos lo lắng về lực tích lũy của Netflix. Với những phong bì màu đỏ dễ nhận biết và chương trình trả phí muộn DVD bằng mail, công ty đã xây dựng được mối quan hệ với khách hàng và một thương hiệu mạnh trong các bộ phim, phương tiện truyền thông quan trọng. Các trợ lý của Bezos đã gặp CEO Reed Hastings vài lần trong những năm Netflix thành lập, nhưng họ luôn luôn báo cáo lại rằng Hastings “thờ ơ” với việc bán hàng, theo một giám đốc điều hành phát triển kinh doanh của Amazon. Bản thân Hastings cho rằng, Amazon chưa bao giờ thực sự nghiêm túc về việc mua lại Netflix bởi vì “nhịp điệu hoạt động cơ bản” của không gian cho thuê DVD, vốn yêu cầu nhiều trung tâm thực hiện nhỏ gửi đĩa đi và sau đó nhận lại, rất khác so với cốt lõi của Amazon kinh doanh bán lẻ. Ông nói: “Không có ý nghĩa gì đối với họ khi trở thành một nhà thầu tích cực vì điều đó không thực sự tận dụng được thế mạnh của họ”.

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Cũng giống như những người khác, ban giám đốc của Amazon biết rằng những ngày bán và vận chuyển đĩa DVD đã được tính đến, nhưng họ muốn được chuẩn bị và bố trí cho bất cứ điều gì xảy ra tiếp theo. Vì vậy, Amazon đã mở dịch vụ cho thuê DVD ở Vương quốc Anh và Đức với mục tiêu sẽ học được công việc kinh doanh cho thuê và xây dựng thương hiệu của mình trong thị trường mà Netflix chưa đặt chân tới. Nhưng các công ty sở tại đã đi trước và chi phí để có được khách hàng mới cao hơn so với mức Amazon đã dự đoán. Vào tháng Hai năm 2008, dường như Amazon đã “vẫy cờ trắng đầu hàng”, bán những khu vực kinh doanh của mình cho đối thủ cạnh tranh lớn hơn, Lovefilm, lấy khoảng 90 triệu đô la Mỹ nguồn hàng trong kho và một vị trí có quyền sở hữu 32% công ty ở châu Âu. Jeff Blackburn nói rằng, đến lúc đó Amazon đã nghi ngờ có rất ít tương lai cho các mô hình cho thuê và “chúng tôi đã bán việc kinh doanh DVD cho họ bởi vì họ dường như đánh giá quá cao nó”.

Lovefilm là một loại công ty do Frankenstein thành lập, là sự kết hợp của nhiều bản sao Netflix đã dần dần hợp nhất với nhau và kiểm soát phần lớn thị trường cho thuê của Anh và Đức. Do đó, nó có nhiều cổ đông (bao gồm một số công ty đầu tư mạo hiểm nổi tiếng), một ban giám đốc lớn và nhiều ý kiến nội bộ trái chiều về các động thái chiến lược của nó. Amazon trở thành cổ đông lớn nhất sau thương vụ này và sau đó củng cố quyền lực của mình đối với công ty khởi nghiệp khi một nhà đầu tư khác, công ty đầu tư mạo hiểm châu Âu Arts Alliance, bán công ty này 10% cổ phần. Greg Greeley, cựu giám đốc tài chính đang điều hành hoạt động của Amazon ở châu Âu, đã tham gia hội đồng quản trị Lovefilm. Như điều đó thường xảy ra, Amazon đã quan sát từ bên lề, học hỏi và kiên nhẫn chờ đợi sơ hở.

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Đầu năm 2009, thị trường video dùng tại gia đình đã nghiêng về phía dòng phim trực tuyến và tránh việc gửi đĩa qua đường bưu điện. Giống như Netflix, Lovefilm đã lên kế hoạch để chuyển đổi sang video theo yêu cầu. Họ đã sắp xếp để giao dịch với các hãng phim như Warner Brothers và đưa quyền truy cập danh mục của mình trên các thiết bị như PlayStation 3 của Sony. Nhưng công ty cần thêm vốn bổ sung để thực hiện những thay đổi trong kinh doanh, vì vậy năm đó họ đã thuê ngân hàng đầu tư Jefferies, bắt đầu việc lấn vào lĩnh vực giải trí và đề nghị đầu tư.

Trong khi các công ty cổ phần tư nhân như Silver Lake Partners bày tỏ sự quan tâm, thì Google lại là nhà thầu nổi bật nhất với Lovefilm. Nhóm điều hành của gã khổng lồ về tìm kiếm đã phát triển một kế hoạch trong mùa hè năm 2009 để có được cả Lovefilm cùng Netflix, và thêm một trọng tâm mới quan trọng là không được liên quan tới việc kinh doanh quảng cáo cốt lõi của công ty. Nikesh Arora và David Lawee, hai giám đốc phát triển kinh doanh của Google đã có một số cuộc họp với cả hai công ty trong năm đó và tạo ra một lá thư sơ bộ về ý định của Google nhằm mua lại Lovefilm với 200 triệu bảng Anh (khoảng 300 triệu đô la), theo ba người có kiến thức về trả giá. Nhưng những nỗ lực cuối cùng này thất bại; đã có sự phản đối từ YouTube của Google và nói e ngại là công ty có thể có được mảng kinh doanh video trực tuyến chứ không phải mục đích ban đầu kia.

Nhưng Lovefilm vẫn cần thêm vốn bổ sung. Vì vậy, qua mùa hè năm 2010, các giám đốc của công ty đã quyết định theo đuổi lời đề nghị công khai ban đầu. Sau đó Amazon quyết định muốn mua Lovefilm và mọi thứ đã thay đổi.

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Amazon đã chứng kiến sự phát triển ồ ạt của Internet, kết nối với đầu đĩa Blu-ray và máy chơi game trong chính cửa hàng điện tử của mình và biết rằng phải rời khỏi băng ghế dự bị. Dịch vụ phát trực tuyến ban đầu của nó, Amazon Video theo yêu cầu, là sự kế thừa của một cửa hàng tải xuống video quá phức tạp có tên Amazon Unbox, yêu cầu người dùng tải toàn bộ phim xuống PC của họ hoặc hộp giải mã TiVo trước khi họ có thể bắt đầu xem. Dịch vụ phát trực tuyến (không yêu cầu tải xuống) đã sớm có triển vọng nhưng công ty vẫn bị tụt lại so với Apple và Hulu trên thị trường video trực tuyến. Mua Lovefilm sẽ cho họ một “vị trí đổ bộ” tại châu Âu. “Họ đi từ việc có được một lợi ích tài chính, nơi họ nghĩ rằng có thể tạo ra lợi nhuận tài chính dựa trên đầu tư, tới một mối quan tâm chiến lược”, Dharmash Mistry, một đối tác cũ tại công ty có vốn đầu tư mạo hiểm ở London, Balderton Capital và một thành viên hội đồng quản trị của Lovefilm, nói. “Họ muốn sở hữu tài sản.”

Bây giờ các thành viên hội đồng quản trị của Lovefilm sẽ chứng kiến những chiến thuật tàn nhẫn tương tự, mà các nhà sáng lập Zappos và Quidsi đã từng chứng kiến. Amazon đã chỉ ra khá hợp lý rằng Lovefilm cần đầu tư hàng trăm triệu đô la để có được nội dung và tránh xa những đối thủ mạnh như tập đoàn cáp có quy mô lớn BSkyB, khi cuối cùng công ty đã tham gia vào thị trường châu Âu, Netflix. Amazon cũng cho rằng Lovefilm cần đầu tư vào khả năng thành công trong dài hạn của mình và không nên dành nhiều thời gian, tiền bạc đầu tư cho thị trường ở châu Âu. Con đường tốt nhất phía trước cho Lovefilm là bán cho Amazon. Đó là sự thuyết phục phù hợp theo phong cách Bezos – những lý luận có ưu điểm của tính hợp lý, trong khi vẫn phục vụ lợi ích chiến lược của Amazon.

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Trong khi cuộc tranh luận vẫn đang tiếp diễn, thì Amazon đã tìm ra cách để ngăn Lovefilm phát hành cổ phiếu lần đầu ra công chúng. Nếu công ty dự định bán cổ phiếu công khai cho công chúng, họ cần sửa đổi nội quy hoặc các điều khoản của hiệp hội – và là cổ đông lớn nhất, Amazon có thể ngăn chặn sự thay đổi này. Công ty có quyền phủ quyết hiệu quả đối với một IPO và Amazon đã làm rõ rằng, họ sẽ không cho phép hoặc công khai ủng hộ thay đổi, theo những thành viên hội đồng quản trị và những người gần gũi với công ty. Đó là một vấn đề rất lớn. Các nhà đầu tư tiềm năng có khả năng do dự nếu cổ đông lớn nhất của công ty không cho thấy rõ sự ủng hộ đối với lời đề nghị này.

Giám đốc của Lovefilm đã có một vài cuộc gặp gỡ với luật sư, cố gắng tìm ra một giải pháp để giải thoát bản thân khỏi tình huống này. Họ cũng cố gắng để thu hút các công ty tiềm năng khác, hi vọng châm ngòi cho một cuộc chiến đấu thầu nhưng không thành công. Mọi người đều nhận thấy rằng Amazon đã gần nắm được khối tài sản này.

Mặc dù Lovefilm là một công ty có uy tín ở châu Âu với thương hiệu mạnh và động lực vững chắc, nhưng Amazon chỉ đề nghị mức giá là 150 triệu bảng, mức thấp nhất trong phạm vi giá của Lovefilm. Khi không có lựa chọn thay thế, Lovefilm bắt đầu đàm phán. Trong các cuộc thảo luận kéo dài sau đó, Amazon đã tranh luận mọi điểm theo cách đặc trưng, như các gói đền bù cho quản lý và thời gian cho việc chi trả theo giao kèo. Các luật sư của Lovefilm đều ngạc nhiên với các vị trí do các nhà đàm phán của Amazon đảm nhận. Cuộc đám phán kéo dài hơn 7 tháng và cuối cùng việc mua lại được thông báo vào tháng Một năm 2011. Amazon phải trả gần 200 triệu bảng, tương đương khoảng 300 triệu đô la – gần bằng con số mà Google đã đề nghị, mặc dù trên thực tế Lovefilm đã mở rộng số lượng người muốn mua và danh mục kỹ thuật số của những bộ phim trong thời gian một năm rưỡi.

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Hiện nay, Amazon đã có chỗ đứng vững chắc trong thị trường video ở châu Âu. Một tháng sau khi Amazon tuyên bố việc mua lại Lovefilm, Amazon đã giới thiệu dịch vụ dòng video cho Amazon Prime ở Mỹ. Các thành viên của dịch vụ chuyển hàng hai ngày có thể xem miễn phí các bộ phim hoặc chương trình truyền hình, một danh mục có thể phát triển bền vững trong những năm tiếp theo khi Amazon ký thỏa thuận với các nhà cung cấp nội dung như CBS, NBC Universal, Viacom và kênh truyền hình trả phí Epix.

Bên trong công ty, Bezos đã hợp lý hóa khoản quà tặng bằng cách nói rằng nó duy trì và thậm chí bổ sung khoản phí 77 đô la cho Prime vào thời điểm khách hàng mua ít đĩa DVD hơn. Nhưng Prime Instant Video đóng một vai trò khác. Amazon hiện đang cung cấp, như một đặc quyền bổ sung, thứ gì đó mà Reed Hastings và các đồng nghiệp của anh ấy tại Netflix có giá từ 5 đến 8 đô la một tháng. Dịch vụ này đã tạo áp lực trực tiếp lên một đối thủ quan trọng và ngăn chặn nó chiếm đoạt mọi thứ quan trọng của cửa hàng. Amazon cũng sẽ cung cấp các bộ phim và chương trình truyền hình dưới bất kỳ hình thức nào mà khách hàng có thể muốn — tất cả chỉ bằng một nút bấm.

Với Jeff Bezos, có lẽ điều duy nhất không thể thay đổi được so với việc cung cấp cho khách hàng những lựa chọn đó là bán cho họ sản phẩm và dịch vụ ở mức giá thấp nhất có thể. Nhưng trong thế giới khó kiểm soát của ngành xuất bản sách, có lẽ vào đầu năm 2011, Amazon đã mất khả năng thiết lập mức giá thấp. Vào tháng Ba, Random House, nhà xuất bản sách lớn nhất ở Mỹ, đã làm theo các nhà xuất bản lớn khác và thông qua mô hình định giá đại lý, cho phép họ thiết lập mức giá cho sách điện tử và nộp một khoản hoa hồng 30% cho các nhà bán lẻ. Những giám đốc của Amazon đã mất thời gian đáng kể để thỏa thuận với đối tác Random House gắn bó với mô hình bán buôn nhưng không thể. Bezos đã không còn kiểm soát một phần quan trọng những kinh nghiệm khách hàng đối với một số nhà sách lớn nhất trên thế giới.

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Không có lợi thế về giá cả rõ rệt và cạnh tranh gia tăng từ Nook của Barnes & Noble, iBookstore của Apple và Kobo, thị trường sách điện tử của Amazon đã giảm từ 90% năm 2010 xuống 60% năm 2012. “Lần đầu tiên, một sân chơi bình đẳng đang gây áp lực tới Amazon”, James Gray – cựu giám đốc chiến lược của Ingram Content Group – nói. Các giám đốc của Amazon “về cơ bản rất tức giận”.

Amazon cảm thấy các nhà xuất bản lớn bị hạn chế về khả năng thử nghiệm với các định dạng kỹ thuật số mới. Ví dụ, Kindle 2 được giới thiệu với chức năng có thể đọc sách rõ ràng với giọng đọc của nam hoặc nữ người máy. Roy Blount Jr., chủ tịch của Authors Guild, đã dẫn đầu cuộc phản đối chống lại điều này. Ông đã viết một bài xã luận trên New York Times, lập luận rằng tác giả không được trả tiền cho tác quyền âm thanh. Amazon đã lùi lại và cho phép các nhà xuất bản và tác giả có thể kích hoạt tính năng cho các chức danh cụ thể; còn những điều khác thì từ chối.

Các nhà xuất bản sách đã từ chối chơi theo quy tắc của Amazon. Vì vậy, Amazon quyết định phát minh lại quy tắc. Nó đã bắt đầu một dấu ấn xuất bản tại New York với tham vọng cao cả là xuất bản những cuốn sách bán chạy nhất của các tác giả tên tuổi - thành công của ngành công nghiệp sách hai thế kỷ của New York.

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Vào tháng 4 năm 2011, một tháng sau khi Random House chuyển sang mô hình đại lý, một nhà tuyển dụng của Amazon đã gửi e-mail cho một số biên tập viên giỏi tại các nhà xuất bản ở New York. Cô ấy đang tìm người để ra mắt và giám sát một nhà xuất bản “sẽ tập trung vào việc mua lại các tác phẩm hư cấu và phi hư cấu nguyên bản có định hướng thương mại với mục tiêu trở thành những cuốn sách bán chạy nhất,” theo e-mail. “Dấu ấn này sẽ được hỗ trợ với một khoản ngân sách lớn và thành công của nó sẽ ảnh hưởng trực tiếp đến sự thành công của hoạt động kinh doanh chung của Amazon”. Hầu hết những người nhận e-mail đều lịch sự từ chối lời đề nghị, vì vậy, phó chủ tịch của Kindle, Jeff Belle, đã hỏi người đàn ông đã hướng dẫn anh ta tới những người có khả năng được tuyển dụng liệu bản thân anh ta có quan tâm đến công việc không. Larry Kirshbaum, một đại lý văn học và trước đó là người đứng đầu bộ phận sách của Time Warner trả lời: “Chà, ý nghĩ đó đã hiện ra trong đầu tôi”.

Kirshbaum, sáu mươi bảy tuổi vào thời điểm đó, là nội gián cuối cùng, được biết đến rộng rãi cho đến lúc đó, hầu như được mọi người yêu thích. Ông có bản năng rất tốt đối với những cuốn sách lớn, về văn hóa đại chúng và cảm nhận trực quan về sự tồn tại trong các tập đoàn lớn. Khi AOL mua lại Time Warner vào năm 2000, ông đã chỉ đạo nhân viên của Warner Books mặc áo phông I Heart AOL và làm một video quay cảnh mọi người đứng xung quanh cây đàn piano hát “Unforgettable” (công ty vừa xuất bản cuốn tự truyện của Natalie Cole). Anh ấy đã nghĩ về sách điện tử - và mất tiền từ chúng - rất lâu trước hầu hết bất kỳ ai khác trong ngành.

Kirshbaum trở lại một môi trường rất khác so với môi trường anh đã rời đi vào năm 2005 khi anh rời AOL Time Warner để trở thành một đặc vụ. Hoạt hình đối với Amazon đã trở thành một thực tế xác định của cuộc sống trong kinh doanh sách. Vì vậy, anh bị nhiều đồng nghiệp cũ của mình coi là kẻ đào ngũ, một kẻ đã đi về phe bóng tối, ý kiến mà họ không ngần ngại bày tỏ với anh, đôi khi bằng những từ ngữ cụ thể.

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Kirshbaum nói: “Có một vài cục gạch mà tôi phải từ bỏ, nhưng tôi có một thông điệp mà tôi thực sự tin tưởng, đó là chúng tôi đang cố gắng đổi mới theo những cách có thể giúp ích cho mọi người. Chúng tôi đang cố gắng tạo ra một đợt thủy triều có thể nâng tất cả các tàu thuyền lên”. Ông chỉ ra phản ứng tiêu cực tương tự của ngành đối với việc Barnes & Noble mua lại nhà xuất bản Sterling vào năm 2003, điều này làm dấy lên nỗi lo sợ rằng một nhà bán lẻ quyền lực đang cố gắng độc chiếm sự chú ý của độc giả. “Tất cả chúng tôi đều lo lắng mặt trời sẽ không mọc vào ngày hôm sau, nhưng nó đã xảy ra,” anh nói.

Về Amazon, anh ấy nói, “Chúng tôi chắc chắn muốn trở thành một công ty lớn, nhưng có hàng nghìn nhà xuất bản và hàng triệu cuốn sách. Tôi nghĩ hơi quá khi nói rằng chúng tôi đang lũng đoạn thị trường”.

Các ông chủ của Kirshbaum ở Seattle cũng có một lưu ý hòa giải tương tự. “Toàn bộ hoạt động kinh doanh xuất bản của chúng tôi là một phòng thí nghiệm cho phép chúng tôi thử nghiệm hướng tới mục tiêu tìm ra những cách mới và thú vị để kết nối tác giả và độc giả,” Jeff Belle nói với tôi trong một câu chuyện Businessweek phủ trên Amazon Publishing vào đầu năm 2012. “Đó là không phải mục đích của chúng tôi là trở thành Random House hay Simon & Schuster hoặc HarperCollins. Tôi nghĩ mọi người rất khó tin vào điều đó”.

Những giám đốc của Amazon đã cáo buộc rằng, các nhà xuất bản sách đã tiêu thụ không hợp lý so với khả năng nhượng lại của chính họ, và lưu ý rằng việc chống lại những thay đổi, ví dụ như sách bìa mềm và siêu thị hạ giá, là một dấu hiệu của ngành này. Và khi đến với câu hỏi về chủ đề này, các giám đốc của Amazon đã thể hiện sự lúng túng bị động, nhấn mạnh rằng phương tiện truyền thông đã quan trọng hóa vấn đề và quan tâm quá mức – đôi khi lại giải thích rằng đó là mối quan tâm phức tạp và kinh niên của nhà xuất bản.

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Donald Katz, nhà sáng lập, giám đốc điều hành công ty con Audible của Amazon phát biểu: “Những người bán nước đá thực sự là một phần quan trọng của văn hóa Mỹ trong nhiều năm và mục tiêu của họ là giữ cho thức ăn của bạn tránh bị hư hỏng. Nhưng khi tủ lạnh xuất hiện, vấn đề không phải là những người bán nước đá nghĩ gì, cũng không phải là có ai đó dành nhiều thời gian để viết về nó.”

Các nhà xuất bản chỉ cần nghe Jeff Bezos nói, nỗi sợ của họ lại bùng lên. Nhà sáng lập của Amazon nhiều lần ám chỉ rằng, ông dành rất ít sự kính trọng cho “người gác cổng” già của truyền thông đại chúng, mà mô hình kinh doanh đã được tôi luyện trong suốt thời kỳ mô hình hóa và chức năng của nó là xem xét nội dung, sau đó quyết định về mặt chủ quan những gì công chúng tiếp nhận. Đây là thời đại mới của sự sáng tạo, bất cứ ai cũng có thể tạo ra một cái gì đó, tìm kiếm khách hàng và cho phép thị trường xác định phần thưởng kinh tế thích hợp. “Thậm chí cũng có nghĩa là người gác cổng đổi mới chậm”, Bezos viết trong một bức thư gửi cho các cổ đông vào năm 2011. “Khi nền tảng là tự phục vụ, thậm chí có thể thử các ý tưởng không chắc sẽ xảy ra, bởi vì không có chuyên gia gác cổng sẵn sàng nói ‘điều đó sẽ không bao giờ thực hiện được!’ Và tôi đoán rằng – rất nhiều ý tưởng không chắc xảy ra sẽ thực hiện được và xã hội được hưởng lợi từ sự đa dạng đó.”

Một vài tuần sau khi bức thư được công bố, Bezos đã nói với Thomas Friedman của New York Times rằng: “Tôi nhìn thấy việc loại bỏ những “người gác cổng” ở khắp mọi nơi”. Trong trường hợp đó, Friedman đã tưởng tượng về một thế giới xuất bản, bao gồm “tác giả – người nhận tất cả số tiền nhuận bút, Amazon và độc giả”.

Một đại lý sách nổi tiếng cho biết vào thời điểm đó: “Ít nhất thì hiện tại tất cả đều đang mở cửa”.

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Một loại phản ứng miễn nhiễm toàn ngành sau đó đã có hiệu ứng. Thế giới sách đã từ chối những nỗ lực xuất bản mới của Amazon. Barnes & Noble và hầu hết các cửa hàng sách độc lập đã từ chối cung cấp sách cho Amazon; giám đốc xuất bản và truyền thông ở New York đã chế giễu những nỗ lực ban đầu của Kirshbaum cùng đội ngũ biên tập còn non trẻ của ông. Việc mua lại cuốn hồi ký của nữ diễn viên kiêm đạo diễn Penny Marshall với giá 800.000 đô la là mục tiêu để chế giễu và sau đó cuốn sách này cũng bán không chạy.

Trong khi đó, Amazon tiếp tục thử nghiệm với dạng sách điện tử mới và đẩy mạnh ranh giới giữa sự chấp nhận của tác giả và nhà xuất bản. Amazon đã giới thiệu Kindle Single, một định dạng sách điện tử dành cho tiểu thuyết dài và Prime Lending Library cho phép các thành viên của Prime sở hữu một thiết bị đọc sách Kindle để mượn một cuốn sách điện tử miễn phí trong vòng một tháng. Tuy nhiên, Amazon cũng đưa vào danh mục cho mượn những cuốn sách của nhiều nhà xuất bản hạng trung mà không xin phép. Họ lý luận rằng đã mua những cuốn sách này và tin rằng họ có thể đặt ra bất cứ mức giá nào mà họ muốn (trong trường hợp này là miễn phí). Với tình trạng rắc rối xảy ra sau đó, tác giả Guild đã gọi thư viện này là “một dẫn chứng về sức mạnh kinh tế tàn bạo” và Amazon đã lùi bước.

Bezos và các đồng nghiệp đã bác bỏ những thách thức ban đầu mà bộ phận Kirshbaum ở New York phải đối mặt và cho biết họ sẽ đánh giá thành công của nó trong dài hạn. Họ có thể định vị nỗ lực xuất bản trực tiếp của mình cho một tương lai nơi sách điện tử chiếm phần lớn thị trường xuất bản và nơi các chuỗi như Barnes & Noble có thể không tồn tại ở dạng hiện tại. Trong thế giới đó, chỉ có một mình Amazon sẽ vẫn đứng vững, không chỉ xuất bản những tác giả mới kém cỏi mà còn là những tác giả có thương hiệu nổi tiếng. Và Larry Kirshbaum một lần nữa có thể là một trong những người nổi tiếng nhất — và có thể là một trong những người xuất bản duy nhất — còn lại ở Thành phố New York. Ngay cả khi Kirshbaum tuyên bố rời Amazon vào tháng 10 năm 2013, công ty vẫn thề sẽ tiếp tục xây dựng chi nhánh xuất bản của mình tại chính cái nôi của xuất bản sách - Thành phố New York.

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Trong tháng Mười hai năm 2011, như thể tìm kiếm một kết luận phù hợp cho một năm đầy tranh cãi về thuế bán hàng, mua lại, MAPs và tính kinh tế của sách điện tử, Amazon đã chạy một chương trình quảng cáo vụng về đối với ứng dụng so sánh giá cả trên điện thoại thông minh. Ứng dụng này cho phép người sử dụng chụp ảnh hoặc quét mã vạch của sản phẩm trong các cửa hàng và so sánh với mức giá của Amazon. Vào ngày 10/12, Amazon đã đưa ra mức chiết khấu lên đến 15 đô la cho bất cứ ai sử dụng ứng dụng này để mua hàng trực tuyến, thay thế cho việc mua trong một cửa hàng. Mặc dù một số mặt hàng như sách được miễn thuế, nhưng cũng khuấy động những lời chỉ trích dồn dập.

Thượng nghị sĩ Olympia Snowe đã kêu gọi chương trình khuyến mãi “chống cạnh tranh” và “cuộc tấn công vào việc kinh doanh trên phố Main có sử dụng lao động trong cộng đồng của chúng ta”. Một nhân viên của cửa hàng sách Powell ở Portland, Oregon đã tạo ra một trang Occupy Amazon trên Facebook. Một người phát ngôn của Amazon đã lưu ý rằng, ứng dụng đó có ý nghĩa đối với việc so sánh giá cả của các chuỗi cửa hàng bán lẻ lớn, nhưng điều đó không quan trọng. Những người chỉ trích đã buộc tội Amazon sử dụng khách hàng của mình để theo dõi mức giá của đối thủ cạnh tranh và đang lấy đi doanh số bán hàng của các thương nhân kinh doanh theo mô hình nhỏ. “Lần đầu tiên tôi thấy ứng dụng so sánh giá của Amazon là kiêu ngạo và có ác ý, nhưng điều đó cũng có vẻ vụng về và sai lầm kỳ lạ”, tiểu thuyết gia Richard Russo đã viết trong một bài xã luận gay gắt trên tờ New York Times.

Cuộc xung đột lớn đối với ứng dụng kiểm tra giá đã giảm đi nhanh chóng. Nhưng nó cũng đặt ra các câu hỏi lớn: Liệu Amazon có tiếp tục được xem là một công ty sáng tạo và tạo ra giá trị để phục vụ và làm hài lòng khách hàng của mình, hay sẽ ngày càng được xem là một tổ chức lớn, chỉ đơn thuần chuyển tiền ra khỏi tài khoản của những công ty khác và cộng đồng địa phương vào kho bạc riêng giàu có của mình?

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Trong những năm xảy ra xung đột, Jeff Bezos đã suy nghĩ về các câu hỏi này. Khi Amazon trở thành một công ty với doanh thu 100 tỉ đô la, Bezos đã phân vân tự hỏi, làm thế nào để công ty được mọi người yêu mến. Bezos đã viết những suy nghĩ của mình thành một bản ghi nhớ và gửi tới các giám đốc hàng đầu của ông. Tôi cũng nhận được một bản sao nhờ một người thân cận với công ty (người đó muốn được giữ kín tên tuổi). Các bản ghi nhớ được Bezos đặt tiêu đề là Amazon.love đã đưa ra một tầm nhìn: Nhà sáng lập Amazon muốn công ty của mình đi theo đường hướng như thế nào và được thế giới nhìn nhận ra sao. Điều này phản ánh giá trị và quyết tâm của Bezos, thậm chí cả những điểm mà Bezos chưa nhìn ra.

Ông viết: “Một số công ty lớn phát triển trên cơ sở người hâm mộ cuồng nhiệt và được rất nhiều khách hàng yêu mến, thậm chí còn được coi là tuyệt vời”. “Vì những lý do khác nhau, theo những cách khác nhau, ở các mức độ khác nhau, các công ty như Apple, Nike, Disney, Google, Whole Foods, Costco và thậm chí là UPS đã gây ấn tượng với tôi như một minh chứng cho các công ty lớn được khách hàng yêu mến.” Ông cũng bổ sung, các công ty như Walmart, Microsoft, Goldman Sachs và ExxonMobil lại có xu hướng bị khách hàng e ngại.

Bezos đã mặc nhiên công nhận rằng công ty được nhìn nhận thuộc nhóm thứ hai, và có lẽ không công bằng khi tham gia vào các hành vi bóc lột. Bezos cũng phân vân lý do tại sao khách hàng của Microsoft chưa bao giờ xuất hiện để bảo vệ công ty chống lại những lời phê bình và suy đoán rằng có lẽ khách hàng đơn giản là không hài lòng với sản phẩm của công ty. Walmart đã phải đối phó với “nhiều đối thủ cạnh tranh đáng mến” trong những cửa hàng ở khu kinh doanh nhỏ cạnh tranh với họ.

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Nhưng Bezos đã không hài lòng với kết luận đơn giản đó, và áp dụng sự nhạy cảm trong phân tích thông thường của mình để tìm ra lý do tại sao một số công ty được yêu thích và các công ty khác thì không.

Khiếm nhã là không tốt.
Đánh bại những anh chàng bé nhỏ là hông tốt.
Theo sát là không tốt.
Trẻ trung là tốt.
Chấp nhận rủi ro là tốt.
Chiến thắng là tốt.
Lịch sự là tốt.
Đánh bại những kẻ lớn hơn là tốt.
Sáng tạo là tốt.
Những nhà thám hiểm là tốt.
Kẻ chinh phục là không tốt.
Ám ảnh về đối thủ cạnh tranh là
hông tốt.
Trao quyền cho người khác là tốt.
Nắm lấy tất cả giá trị chỉ dành cho công ty là không tốt.
Lãnh đạo là tốt.
Tin tưởng là tốt.
Trung thực là tốt.
Cố thỏa mãn đám đông là không tốt.
Đạo đức giả là không tốt.
Chân thực là tốt.
Nhìn xa trông rộng là tốt.
Bất ngờ là tốt.
Nhà truyền giáo là tốt.
Lính đánh thuê là không tốt.

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Trên một bảng tính đính kèm, Bezos đã liệt kê ra 17 thuộc tính, bao gồm lịch sự, đáng tin cậy, chấp nhận rủi ro và nhìn xa trông rộng; ông cũng xếp loại hàng chục công ty theo mỗi đặc tính cụ thể. Ông thừa nhận, phương pháp của ông mang tính chủ quan cao, nhưng kết luận mà ông đưa ra ở phần cuối của bản ghi nhớ Amazon.love nhằm mục đích gia tăng lợi thế của Amazon trở thành một trong số những công ty được yêu mến. Trở nên lịch sự, đáng tin cậy hoặc ám ảnh khách hàng đều không đủ. Được nhìn nhận như một công ty sáng tạo, một nhà thám hiểm chứ không phải người đi chinh phục là điều cực kỳ quan trọng. “Tôi thực sự tin rằng bốn công ty ‘không được yêu thích’ thực chất đều sáng tạo. Nhưng chúng không được coi là những nhà phát minh hay người đi tiên phong. Nó không đủ để được coi là sáng tạo – tinh thần tiên phong phải xuất hiện và khách hàng có thể nhận biết được”, ông viết.

Bezos kết luận: “Tôi đề nghị rằng một kết luận logic từ đây có thể dẫn tới một phân tích sâu hơn về chủ đề này của một phó giám đốc có suy nghĩ”. “Chúng ta có thể tìm thấy nhiều nhiệm vụ hữu ích sẽ làm gia tăng lợi thế của chúng ta, khiến chúng ta trở nên nổi bật trong nhóm đầu tiên của các công ty. Điều đó nghe có vẻ xứng đáng với tôi!”

—ooOoo—

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VƯƠNG QUỐC CỦA DẤU CHẤM HỎI

Khi gần đến lễ kỷ niệm lần thứ 20 của công ty, cuối cùng Amazon đã thể hiện tầm nhìn độc đáo của cửa hàng triệu đồ, điều này đã được Jeff Bezos và David Shaw định hình rất lâu trước đó, đồng thời cũng do Bezos và Shel Kaphan khởi động. Amazon đã bán được hàng triệu mặt hàng mới và đã qua sử dụng, ngoài ra còn tiếp tục mở rộng thêm các sản phẩm mới. Vật tư công nghiệp, trang phục cao cấp, tác phẩm nghệ thuật và rượu là những sản phẩm mới được giới thiệu trong năm 2012, 2013. Các sản phẩm này được trưng bày tại mặt trước cửa hàng của hàng ngàn các nhà bán lẻ trong thị trường nhộn nhịp của Amazon và cơ sở hạ tầng máy tính của hàng ngàn công ty công nghệ khác, các trường đại học, phòng thí nghiệm của chính phủ là một phần trong công việc kinh doanh dịch vụ web phát triển của công ty. Rõ ràng, Jeff Bezos tin rằng sứ mệnh của công ty là không giới hạn và rất nhiều sản phẩm có thể được bán trên internet.

Nếu bạn tìm kiếm thế giới đối cực của tập đoàn đầy màu sắc này thì một cửa hàng phát triển là sự lựa chọn không lớn nhưng mang tính phân loại riêng biệt của những sản phẩm cao cấp và phát triển mạnh không chỉ về lòng trung thành đối với thương hiệu mà còn là cá tính đáng yêu của chủ sở hữu. Bạn nên tới một cửa hàng xe đạp nhỏ ở phía bắc của Phoenix, thuộc Glendale, Arizona. Nó được gọi là Trung tâm xe đạp Roadrunner.

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Cửa hàng này nằm trong một không gian giống hình chiếc hộp đựng giày trong một trung tâm mua sắm bình thường khác, bên cạnh là spa và thẩm mỹ viện Hot Cutz, đi xuống một con đường từ cửa hàng tạp hóa Walmart. Cửa hàng trưng bày xe của hãng xe BMX và những chiếc xe đạp địa hình từ các công ty như Giant, Haro và Redline – những thương hiệu này đã lựa chọn kỹ đối tác bán lẻ của mình và thường không bán trên các trang web hoặc cửa hàng giảm giá. Nhiều khách hàng thường xuyên lui tới cửa hàng này trong nhiều năm, mặc dù nó đã chuyển địa điểm tới ba lần trong khu vực Phoenix.

Một khách hàng đã viết nhận xét online rất tốt về cửa hàng như sau: “Người quản lý của cửa hàng luôn luôn có mặt và bạn có thể nói ông ấy yêu thích việc sửa chữa và bán xe.” “Khi bạn mua hàng, ông ấy sẽ chăm sóc bạn. Đó cũng là nơi rẻ nhất tôi từng mua một chiếc xe đạp. Tôi thấy rằng đôi khi ông đã áp dụng mức giá đặc biệt là 30 đô la! Thật điên rồ!”

Một tấm poster đỏ với dòng chữ viết tay nghuệch ngoạc Ứng trước cho những ngày nghỉ! được tựa vào cửa sổ bên ngoài cửa hàng. Nó không khác gì nhiều so với bất cứ cửa hàng nhỏ mang tính chất gia đình nào trên khắp thế giới, được chủ nhân chăm sóc cẩn thận trong suốt 30 năm. Ngoại trừ trong trường hợp này, cửa hàng đã cho thấy sự đối lập mạnh mẽ với Amazon và bằng chứng được treo ở bên trong cửa hàng, phía dưới đèn huỳnh quang, bên cạnh quầy hàng phía trước. Được đóng khung trên tường là một tờ báo cũ dán nhiều lớp, có một bức ảnh của một cậu bé 16 tuổi với mái tóc húi cua, đứng trên bàn đạp của chiếc xe đạp một bánh, một tay đặt trên ghế, tay kia dang rộng.

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Tôi thấy Ted Jorgensen – cha đẻ của Jeff Bezos phía sau quầy tính tiền trong cửa hàng của ông vào cuối năm 2012. Tôi đã suy xét về một số cách ông có thể phản ứng với sự xuất hiện không báo trước của tôi, nhưng tôi lại không ngờ tới về những gì thực sự xảy ra: Jorgensen không biết Jeff Bezos là ai hoặc bất cứ điều gì về công ty tên là Amazon.com. Ông đã hoàn toàn nhầm lẫn bởi những gì tôi nói với ông và từ chối là cha của CEO nổi tiếng – một trong số những người giàu nhất thế giới.

Nhưng sau đó, khi tôi đề cập tới những cái tên Jacklyn Gise và Jeffrey – đứa con trai mà họ đã có trong cuộc hôn nhân tuổi vị thành niên ngắn ngủi của mình, khuôn mặt ông trở nên xúc động với sự thừa nhận và buồn bã. “Nó vẫn còn sống ư?”, ông hỏi vì chưa thực sự hiểu rõ.

Tôi nói với ông: “Con trai ông là một trong những người thành công nhất trên hành tinh này”. Tôi đã lấy một số bức ảnh của Bezos từ Internet và thật khó tin, lần đầu tiên trong 45 năm, Jorgensen đã nhìn thấy cậu con trai ruột của mình, đôi mắt ông chất chứa đầy cảm xúc và hoài nghi.

Tôi đưa Jorgensen và vợ của ông – Linda – tới ăn tối tại một nhà hàng phục vụ đồ nướng ở địa phương và ông đã kể lại câu chuyện của mình. Khi gia đình Bezos chuyển từ Albuquerque tới Houston trong năm 1968, Jorgensen đã hứa với Jackie và cha cô rằng, ông sẽ tránh xa cuộc sống của hai cha con. Ông vẫn ở Albuquerque, biểu diễn cùng đoàn kịch của mình – Unicycle Wranglers và làm các công việc vặt. Ông đã lái một chiếc xe cứu thương và làm việc như một người lắp đặt máy móc cho Western Electric – một công ty tại địa phương.

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Năm 20 tuổi, ông chuyển tới Hollywood để giúp người quản lý của Wranglers là Lloyd Smith bắt đầu với một cửa hàng xe đạp mới, sau đó ông đã tới Tucson để tìm việc. Năm 1972, ông đã bị tấn công bên ngoài một cửa hàng tạp hóa sau khi mua thuốc lá. Những kẻ tấn công đã đánh ông bằng một thanh gỗ và làm ông vỡ quai hàm.

Jorgensen đã chuyển tới Phoenix trong năm 1974, tái hôn và bỏ rượu. Lúc đó, ông đã mất liên lạc với người vợ cũ cùng đứa con của họ. Thậm chí ông còn quên tên mới của họ. Ông không có cách nào để liên lạc với con trai hay theo sát những tiến bộ của con. Ông nói rằng ông cảm thấy bối rối với lời hứa không can thiệp vào cuộc sống của họ.

Năm 1980, ông đã dùng tất cả số tiền của mình để mua lại cửa hàng xe đạp từ người chủ sở hữu vì họ muốn dừng công việc kinh doanh. Ông đã quản lý cửa hàng từ đó, chuyển địa điểm vài lần, thậm chí là tới vị trí hiện tại nằm ở rìa phía Bắc của khu vực thành phố Phoenix, tiếp giáp với rặng núi New River. Ông đã ly dị người vợ thứ hai và gặp Linda – người vợ thứ ba tại cửa hàng. Họ đã kết hôn được 25 năm. Linda nói rằng họ đã nói chuyện riêng về Jeffrey và suy nghĩ về những sai lầm tuổi trẻ của Ted trong nhiều năm.

Jorgensen không có thêm đứa con nào nữa. Linda thì có bốn người con từ cuộc hôn nhân trước đó và chúng rất thân thiết với cha dượng, nhưng ông không bao giờ tiết lộ với chúng rằng ông có một đứa con khác. Ông cảm thấy điều đó như một “ngõ cụt” và chắc chắn ông sẽ không bao giờ nhìn thấy hay nghe thấy bất cứ điều gì về con trai của mình thêm lần nào nữa.

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Hiện nay Jorgensen đã 69 tuổi. Ông có vấn đề về tim, bệnh tràn khí (phổi) và không muốn về hưu. “Tôi không muốn ở nhà và chỉ ngồi xem ti vi”, ông nói. Ông rất thân thiện, dễ mến và như vợ ông nói là có sự đồng cảm sâu sắc. (Bezos giống mẹ mình, đặc biệt là đôi mắt nhưng ông cũng giống cha ở chiếc mũi và đôi tai.) Cửa hàng của Jorgensen nằm ở vị trí cách khoảng 48 km so với bốn trung tâm phát hành khác nhau của Amazon, nhưng nếu ông đã nhìn thấy Jeff Bezos trên truyền hình hoặc đọc một bài báo về Amazon, ông cũng không tự liên lạc lại. Ông nói: “Tôi không biết nó ở đâu, liệu nó có một công việc tốt hay không, hay liệu nó còn sống hay đã chết”. Ông không thể hình dung về khuôn mặt của đứa con trong tâm trí ông gần nửa thế kỷ.

Jorgensen nói rằng ông luôn muốn gặp lại con trai – cho dù con ông làm nghề gì hay ở vị trí nào – nhưng ông đã đổ lỗi cho bản thân vì cuộc hôn nhân đổ vỡ đầu tiên của mình và thấy xấu hổ khi phải thừa nhận rằng, tất cả những năm tháng trước đây ông đã đồng ý không tham gia vào cuộc sống của con trai. Ông nói: “Tôi không phải là một người cha, người chồng tốt”. “Đó thực sự là lỗi của tôi. Tôi không đổ lỗi cho Jackie vì tất cả.” Thật đáng tiếc, Jeff Bezos đã làm việc rất chăm chỉ để vươn lên, nhưng điều đó vẫn treo một dấu ấn nặng nề lên cuộc sống của người cha.

Khi tôi chia tay Jorgensen và vợ của ông sau bữa tối, họ vẫn ở trong tâm trạng buồn bã, bị sốc và đã quyết định rằng họ sẽ không nói chuyện này với các con của Linda. Câu chuyện dường như quá xa vời.

Nhưng một vài tháng sau đó, vào đầu năm 2013, tôi nhận được một cuộc điện thoại từ người con trai út của họ – Darin Fala, một quản lý dự án cao cấp tại Honeywell. Anh cũng đang sống ở Phoenix và là người đã trải qua thời niên thiếu của mình với Jorgensen và mẹ.

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Fala nói với tôi rằng Jorgensen đã mở một cuộc họp gia đình vào chiều thứ Bảy tuần trước. (“Tôi cá là ông sẽ nói với chúng tôi, ông có một người con trai hoặc con gái bên ngoài”, vợ của Fala đã đoán như vậy). Jorgensen và Linda đã giải thích tình huống khó xảy ra này theo một cách gây ấn tượng sâu sắc.

Fala đã miêu tả buổi họp mặt với đầy sự bất ngờ và nước mắt. “Vợ tôi từng gọi tôi là đồ vô cảm vì cô ấy chưa bao giờ nhìn thấy tôi khóc”, Fala nói. “Ted cũng vậy. Thứ Bảy đó là ngày tôi nhìn thấy ông bộc lộ cảm xúc nhiều nhất với nỗi buồn cùng sự tiếc nuối. Điều đó thật quá sức chịu đựng.”

Jorgensen đã quyết định ông muốn cố gắng tiếp xúc với gia đình Bezos và thiết lập lại mối dây liên lạc. Fala đã giúp ông thảo bức thư gửi tới Bezos và người mẹ. Họ sẽ gửi những lá thư theo cách thông thường cũng như gửi qua email vào tháng Hai năm 2013 và kết thúc việc chờ đợi sau gần năm tháng đợi phản hồi. Sự im lặng của Bezos không có gì đáng ngạc nhiên: Ông thường hướng về tương lai hơn là nhìn lại quá khứ.

Trong cuộc gọi, Fala đã nói tới một phát hiện của riêng mình. Tò mò về Bezos, Fala đã xem một vài clip trên internet khi vị CEO của Amazon được phỏng vấn, trong đó có một clip với Jon Stewart từ The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Và Fala đã giật mình khi nghe thấy tiếng cười đặc biệt của Bezos.

Tiếng cười đó giống với tiếng cười ha hả không kiềm chế, từng vang vọng ra khỏi những bức tường trong căn nhà thời thơ ấu của Fala, mặc dù trong những năm qua nó đã dần dần trở nên thiếu tự nhiên bởi bệnh tràn khí màng phổi. “Bezos có tiếng cười của Ted!”, Fala nói trong sự hoài nghi. “Điều đó gần như chính xác.”

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Bezos chắc chắn đã nhận được và đọc email của Jorgensen – các đồng nghiệp của ông nói rằng, ông sẽ đọc tất cả các thư từ gửi đến địa chỉ thư điện tử được nhiều người biết đến jeff@amazon.com. Trên thực tế, rất nhiều chuyện xấu bên trong Amazon được bắt đầu bằng những email được gửi từ khách hàng mà Bezos đã chuyển tiếp tới những giám đốc điều hành hoặc nhân viên có liên quan. Ông chỉ thêm duy nhất một dấu chấm hỏi ở phía trên cùng mỗi bức thư. Đối với người nhận những lá thư điện tử này, ký hiệu đó có tác động giống như một quả bom hẹn giờ.

Bên trong Amazon, có một hệ thống chính thức nhằm xếp hạng tính chất nguy cấp của những trường hợp khẩn cấp trong nội bộ. Sev-5 là một vấn đề kỹ thuật tương đối không quan trọng, có thể được các kỹ sư giải quyết ngay trong ngày làm việc. Sev-1 là một vấn đề khẩn cấp, đặt ra một loạt những thứ có liên quan đến máy nhắn tin (Amazon vẫn gửi chúng cho các kỹ sư). Nó đòi hỏi phải phản ứng ngay lập tức và toàn bộ tình hình sau đó sẽ được xem xét bởi một thành viên của hội đồng quản lý của Bezos – S Team.

Tiếp theo, có một loại khủng hoảng hoàn toàn riêng biệt được một số nhân viên chính thức đặt tên là Sev-B. Đó là khi một bức thư điện tử có dấu chấm hỏi trực tiếp đến từ Bezos. Khi các nhân viên của Amazon nhận được một trong số những lá thư này, họ sẽ bỏ mọi thứ mình đang làm và lao nhanh vào giải quyết bất cứ vấn đề nào được vị CEO chỉ ra. Họ thường có một vài giờ để giải quyết vấn đề và chuẩn bị một lời giải thích kỹ lưỡng về việc nó đã xảy ra như thế nào; câu trả lời sau đó sẽ được một loạt các nhà quản lý xem xét trước khi được trình bày với Bezos. Những email với dấu chấm hỏi thường được gọi là sự leo thang, đó là cách của Bezos để đảm bảo rằng các vấn đề tiềm ẩn được giải quyết và tiếng nói của khách hàng sẽ luôn luôn được lắng nghe ở Amazon.

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Một trong những chi tiết đáng nhớ gần đây tại Amazon bắt đầu với một sự leo thang như vậy là vào cuối năm 2010. Lúc đó, khách hàng đã xem qua sản phẩm chất bôi trơn trong danh mục sản phẩm giữ gìn sức khỏe tình dục nhưng cuối cùng lại không mua. Những khách hàng này đã nhận được email cá nhân giới thiệu một loạt các loại gel. Mặc dù phạm vi giao tiếp của Bezos với các nhân viên truyền thông của mình chỉ gồm một dấu chấm hỏi duy nhất, nhưng họ biết rằng ông đã tức giận. Bezos tin rằng những email của bộ phận marketing khiến khách hàng bối rối và không nên gửi chúng đi.

Khi Bezos tức giận, ông ấy thích nói “hãy chờ năm phút nữa” và tâm trạng sẽ lướt qua như một cơn gió mạnh vùng nhiệt đới. Khi nói đến các vấn đề về dịch vụ khách hàng lộn xộn thì điều đó hiếm khi chính xác. Nhóm marketing qua thư điện tử biết chủ đề này khá nhạy cảm và lo lắng chuẩn bị một lời giải thích. Công cụ tiếp thị trực tiếp của Amazon là phân cấp thẩm quyền và các nhà quản lý danh mục có thể tạo ra các chiến dịch thư điện tử gửi tới khách hàng, những người có xem xét danh mục sản phẩm cụ thể nhưng không mua hàng. Những thư điện tử như vậy có xu hướng tác động tới các khách hàng đang do dự và chịu trách nhiệm cho hàng trăm triệu đô la trong doanh thu hàng năm của Amazon. Tuy nhiên trong trường hợp của thư điện tử về chất bôi trơn, người quản lý sản phẩm cấp thấp rõ ràng đã vượt quá giới hạn của sự đúng mực. Nhưng nhóm marketing không bao giờ có thể gửi đi lời giải thích này. Bezos đã yêu cầu một cuộc họp để thảo luận về vấn đề đó.

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Vào buổi sáng của một ngày trong tuần, Jeff Wilke, Doug Herrington, Steven Shure (phó chủ tịch của mảng marketing toàn cầu và cựu giám đốc của Time Inc.) cùng một số nhân viên khác đã tập hợp và ngồi chờ rất trang nghiêm trong phòng họp. Bezos bước đi mạnh mẽ. Ông bắt đầu cuộc họp theo cách của mình: “Xin chào tất cả mọi người” và sau đó là “Vậy là Steve Shure đã gửi đi những email về chất bôi trơn”.

Bezos không ngồi xuống ghế. Ông nhìn thẳng vào Shure. Rõ ràng là ông đang nổi giận. Ông nói: “Tôi muốn anh hãy đóng kênh đó lại”, “Chúng ta có thể xây dựng một công ty 100 tỉ đô la mà không cần gửi đi một email chết tiệt nào cả.”

Một cuộc tranh cãi sôi nổi đã diễn ra ở đó. Văn hóa của Amazon là sự đối đầu và nó bắt đầu với Bezos. Ông tin rằng giải pháp đúng đắn sẽ xuất hiện khi những ý tưởng và quan điểm phải được tương tác với nhau, đôi khi là dữ dội. Trong cuộc tranh luận sau đó, Wilke và các đồng nghiệp của ông cho rằng, chất bôi trơn có sẵn trong các cửa hàng tạp hóa, các hiệu thuốc và về mặt kỹ thuật nó không đáng xấu hổ. Họ cũng chỉ ra rằng, Amazon đã tạo ra doanh số lớn nhờ những email như vậy. Bezos không quan tâm đến điều đó, không có doanh thu nào đáng giá nếu không còn niềm tin của khách hàng. Đó là một khoảnh khắc tiết lộ và xác nhận. Bezos sẵn sàng gạt đi lợi nhuận kinh doanh hơn là kiểm tra mối quan hệ của Amazon với khách hàng. Bezos ngắt lời: “Ai trong căn phòng này cần đứng dậy và đóng cửa các kênh?”.

Cuối cùng họ đã thỏa hiệp. Email tiếp thị cho một số danh mục như chăm sóc sức khỏe và chăm sóc cá nhân đã chấm dứt hoàn toàn. Công ty cũng quyết định xây dựng một công cụ lọc trung tâm để đảm bảo rằng, các nhà quản lý theo danh mục không thể quảng bá các sản phẩm nhạy cảm, vì vậy những vấn đề về quy tắc không phụ thuộc vào sở thích cá nhân. Email tiếp thị dành cho một thời điểm khác.

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Câu chuyện này đã nêu bật một trong số các mâu thuẫn bên trong Amazon. Một thời kỳ dài khi sử dụng cách đánh giá của các nhân viên để hướng đến việc thay đổi trang web, công ty đã dựa vào các số liệu để đưa ra hầu hết các quyết định quan trọng, chẳng hạn như những tính năng để giới thiệu hoặc loại bỏ. Tuy nhiên, những câu chuyện ngẫu nhiên về khách hàng, đối lập với các con số lạnh lùng và khô khan, cũng có sức nặng to lớn và có thể thay đổi chính sách của Amazon. Nếu khách hàng có một trải nghiệm xấu, Bezos thường giả định rằng nó phản ánh một vấn đề lớn hơn và yêu cầu cách giải quyết vấn đề leo thang bên trong công ty với một dấu chấm hỏi.

Nhiều nhân viên của Amazon đã quá quen thuộc với những bài tập này và họ nhận thấy chúng thật ồn ào. “Tại sao toàn bộ nhóm lại phải gạt bỏ hết mọi công việc để trả lời cho một dấu chấm hỏi?”, một nhân viên đã từng hỏi trong một cuộc họp toàn công ty diễn ra năm 2011, được tổ chức tại KeyArena của Seattle – một đấu trường bóng rổ với hơn 17.000 chỗ ngồi.

Jeff Wilke đã trả lời: “Mỗi câu chuyện đến từ một vấn đề của khách hàng”. “Chúng ta nghiên cứu mỗi khách hàng vì họ nói cho chúng ta biết điều gì đó về số liệu và quy trình của chúng ta. Đây là sự kiểm định do khách hàng mang tới cho chúng ta. Chúng ta coi họ như một nguồn thông tin quý giá.”

Bản thân phong cách của Amazon là phân quyền mạnh mẽ và đảm bảo rằng các nhân viên mới có thể ra quyết định một cách độc lập. Nhưng Bezos có khả năng ngăn chặn bất cứ quá trình thất bại nào nếu nó tạo ra một vấn đề cho thậm chí chỉ một khách hàng. Trong 12 tháng sau cuộc khủng hoảng về chất bôi trơn, Bezos đã dọn sạch kênh thư điện tử như một nhiệm vụ cá nhân của mình. Các nhân viên của bộ phận đó đột nhiên nhận thấy bản thân họ ở điểm nóng nhất tại Amazon: dưới con mắt coi thường của chính nhà sáng lập.

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Mặc dù phải làm việc với tình trạng căng thẳng liên tục nhưng những cựu nhân viên của Amazon thường coi thời gian của họ tại công ty là hiệu quả nhất trong sự nghiệp của mình. Đồng nghiệp thông minh, công việc nhiều thách thức và sự thay đổi thường xuyên giữa các bộ phận đem đến cho họ nhiều cơ hội học hỏi liên tục. Faisal Masud từng làm việc năm năm trong ngành kinh doanh bán lẻ nói: “Mọi người đều biết công việc vất vả như thế nào và đã chọn làm việc ở đây.” “Bạn được học hỏi liên tục và quá trình sáng tạo thật ly kỳ. Tôi nộp các bằng sáng chế. Tôi sáng tạo. Có sự cạnh tranh mãnh liệt trong mọi thứ bạn làm.”

Nhưng có một số người cũng bày tỏ nỗi thống khổ về trải nghiệm của mình. Bezos nói rằng công ty thu hút những người thích đi tiên phong và sáng tạo, nhưng các nhân viên cũ thường xuyên phàn nàn rằng, Amazon có bộ máy hành chính cồng kềnh của một công ty lớn, với cơ sở hạ tầng và tốc độ phát triển ở mức khởi động và truyền thông kém, khiến mọi việc trở nên khó khăn. Những người làm việc tốt ở Amazon thường là những người tồn tại được trong bầu không khí đối địch và xung đột không dứt. Bezos ghét cay ghét đắng những gì ông gọi là “gắn kết xã hội”, thôi thúc tự nhiên để tìm kiếm sự đồng thuận. Ông muốn những nhân viên cấp dưới chiến đấu với những tranh luận được hỗ trợ bởi các con số và niềm đam mê, và ông đã hệ thống hóa phương pháp này thành một trong số 14 nguyên tắc lãnh đạo được đánh giá cao trong công ty và chúng thường được thảo luận và khắc sâu vào nhân viên mới.

CÓ SỨC MẠNH, KHÔNG ĐỒNG Ý VÀ CAM KẾT

Nhà lãnh đạo có nghĩa vụ phải thách thức các quyết định một cách trân trọng khi họ không đồng ý, thậm chí dù làm vậy họ có thể cảm thấy không thoải mái hoặc mệt mỏi. Các nhà lãnh đạo có sức thuyết phục và kiên trì. Họ không thỏa hiệp vì mục đích gắn kết xã hội. Khi một quyết định được xác lập, họ cam kết hoàn toàn.

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Một số nhân viên yêu thích văn hóa đối đầu này và nhận thấy rằng họ không thể làm việc hiệu quả ở một nơi khác. Trang web hệ thống chuyên nghiệp LinkedIn có nhiều giám đốc – những người đã rời khỏi Amazon nhưng sau đó đã quyết định quay trở lại. Trong công ty, điều này ám chỉ tới vũ khí boomerang.

Nhưng những người khác lại coi môi trường bên trong Amazon là “văn hóa đấu sĩ” và không nghĩ đến việc trở lại. Có nhiều người làm việc ở Amazon trong thời gian chưa tới hai năm. “Đó là sự kết hợp kỳ lạ của một công ty khởi nghiệp đang cố gắng trở thành một siêu doanh nghiệp và một doanh nghiệp đang cố gắng để vẫn là một công ty khởi nghiệp”, Jenny Dibble – người đã có thời gian năm tháng với vai trò là quản lý marketing năm 2011, đã cố gắng để công ty sử dụng nhiều công cụ truyền thông xã hội hơn nhưng không hiệu quả – nói. Cô nhận ra sếp không tiếp nhận những ý tưởng của cô và thời gian này không thích hợp. Cô nói: “Đó không phải là một môi trường thân thiện”.

Thậm chí việc rời khỏi Amazon có thể coi là một quá trình chiến đấu – nếu một nhân viên đảm nhận một công việc tương tự tại công ty đối thủ, Amazon sẽ gửi những lá thư đe đọa hành động hợp pháp. Có nhiều bằng chứng về việc “cạnh tranh khốc liệt” được Faisal Masud – người đã chuyển sang eBay trong năm 2010 và nhận được sự đe dọa về mặt pháp lý (eBay giải quyết vấn đề này một cách riêng tư) – đề cập. Tuy nhiên, việc các nhân viên rời khỏi công ty liên tục hầu như không ảnh hưởng tới Amazon. Amazon được hỗ trợ bởi sức hấp dẫn của giá cổ phiếu ngày càng tăng đã trở thành nhà tuyển dụng hoàn hảo đối với các tài năng mới. Chỉ riêng trong năm 2012, Amazon đã có 88.400 nhân viên toàn thời gian và bán thời gian, tăng 57% so với năm trước.

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Các gói đền bù tại Amazon được thiết kế để giảm thiểu chi phí cho công ty và tối đa hóa các cơ hội mà người lao động có được, thông qua những bất lợi có thể đoán trước, đi cùng với việc tham gia vào công ty. Nhân viên mới được đưa ra một mức lương dựa trên mức trung bình, một mức thù lao đáng chú ý trong hai năm và chuyển nhượng đơn vị cổ phiếu trong vòng bốn năm. Nhưng không giống như các công ty công nghệ khác, chẳng hạn như Google và Microsoft đã mở rộng việc chuyển nhượng cổ phiếu đồng đều, Amazon lại trì hoãn chuyển nhượng nhắm tới thời kỳ cuối của giai đoạn bốn năm. Về cơ bản, các nhân viên nhận được 5% cổ phần của họ vào cuối năm đầu tiên, 15% vào năm thứ hai, sau đó là 20% sau mỗi sáu tháng trong hai năm cuối. Các khoản trợ cấp tiếp theo được cấp trong vòng hai năm và cũng bị trì hoãn để đảm bảo rằng nhân viên tiếp tục làm việc chăm chỉ và không bao giờ có khuynh hướng chuyển việc.

Những nhà quản lý trong bộ phận có khoảng 50 người hoặc nhiều hơn, được yêu cầu hướng tới chất lượng cao nhất với cấp dưới của họ và phải sa thải những người làm việc kém hiệu quả nhất. Kết quả của cuộc kiểm tra này làm rất nhiều nhân viên của Amazon lúc nào cũng sống trong nỗi sợ hãi. Trải nghiệm chung của các nhân viên của Amazon là cảm giác bất ngờ thành thực khi họ nhận được lời nhận xét về việc thể hiện tốt. Quản lý cũng “tiết kiệm” lời khen rằng cấp dưới có xu hướng dành cả ngày để dự đoán về việc chấm dứt hợp đồng.

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Ở Amazon, có rất ít đặc quyền và tiền thưởng bất ngờ, mặc dù nó đã xuất hiện từ những năm 1990, khi Bezos từ chối những đề nghị ban đầu về việc cung cấp cho nhân viên vé xe buýt miễn phí vì ông không muốn họ cảm thấy áp lực phải rời đi vào một giờ phù hợp. Hiện nay, những nhân viên có thẻ ORCA được phép đi lại miễn phí trong hệ thống giao thông khu vực Seattle. Đỗ xe tại văn phòng công ty tại phía nam của Lake Union mất phí khoảng 220 đô la một tháng và Amazon hoàn trả cho người lao động 180 đô la.

Tuy nhiên, bằng chứng về sự tiết kiệm của công ty có ở khắp mọi nơi. Những chiếc bàn trong phòng hội nghị là một bộ sưu tập những chiếc bàn chỉ có mặt bàn và chân, gỗ vàng, được đặt cạnh nhau. Máy bán hàng tự động nhận thẻ tín dụng, và thực phẩm trong nhà ăn của công ty không được trợ cấp. Khi một nhân viên mới gia nhập công ty, anh ta nhận được một ba lô với một bộ chuyển đổi điện, gói thiết bị hỗ trợ máy tính xách tay và một số tài liệu hướng dẫn. Khi xin thôi việc, anh ta được yêu cầu nộp lại tất cả các thiết bị, bao gồm cả ba lô. Công ty không ngừng tìm kiếm cách làm giảm chi phí và chuyển những khoản tiết kiệm cho khách hàng thành hình thức giá thấp hơn. Điều này cũng được gắn với các nguyên tắc lãnh đạo bất khả xâm phạm:

TIẾT KIỆM

Chúng tôi cố gắng không tiêu tiền vào những thứ không quan trọng với khách hàng. Tiết kiệm tạo ra tính tháo vát, tự lập và sáng tạo. Không có thêm điểm bổ sung cho số lượng nhân viên, quy mô ngân sách hoặc chi phí cố định.

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Tất cả những điều này đều xuất phát từ Bezos. Những giá trị của Amazon là nguyên tắc kinh doanh của ông, được hình thành qua hai thập kỷ sống sót trong “bầu không khí mong manh” của tỉ suất lợi nhuận thấp và sự hoài nghi mãnh liệt từ thế giới bên ngoài. Nói cách khác, toàn bộ công ty được xây dựng thông qua bộ não của Bezos – một cỗ máy khuếch đại, hướng tới việc tuyên truyền cho sự khéo léo của Bezos và đi xa tới bán kính lớn nhất có thể. “Đó là giàn giáo để phóng đại tư duy đến phạm vi lớn nhất có thể”, Jeff Wilke nói khi tôi buộc anh phải nói. “Jeff đã học hỏi khi ông đi cùng. Ông ấy học mọi thứ từ chúng tôi, những người có chuyên môn và kết hợp những mảnh ghép tốt nhất vào mô hình tinh thần của mình. Hiện nay mọi người đều được mong đợi sẽ nghĩ nhiều như họ có thể, giống Jeff”.

Những lãnh đạo hàng đầu của Bezos luôn luôn được mô hình hóa hành vi giống Bezos. Vào mùa thu năm 2012, tôi đã có bữa ăn tối cùng Diego Piacentini tại La Spiga – nhà hàng Ý yêu thích của anh trong khu phố Capitol Hill của Seattle. Anh khăng khăng trả tiền hóa đơn và sau khi trả tiền, anh ấy gần như xé bỏ biên lai theo cách khá điệu bộ. “Công ty không trả tiền cho biên lai này”, anh nói.

Những hoạt động thường xuyên của Amazon cũng là của Bezos và các quy định của công ty cũng được điều chỉnh cẩn thận để Bezos xử lý thông tin theo cách ông thích và tối ưu hóa thời gian của mình. Ông đích thân điều hành việc đánh giá hoạt động sáu tháng một lần cho toàn bộ công ty, được đặt tên là OP1 (thực hiện qua mùa hè) và OP2 (thực hiện sau kỳ nghỉ lễ). Các nhóm đều làm việc cao độ để chuẩn bị cho những kỳ này, soạn thảo tài liệu dài sáu trang với nội dung là kế hoạch của họ cho năm tới. Một vài năm trước, công ty đã cải tiến quy trình này để dễ dàng hơn với “hệ tiêu hóa” của Bezos và các thành viên khác của đội S – những người xoay qua nhiều chủ đề thông qua các đánh giá này. Hiện nay, ở đầu trang của mọi tài liệu đều có một danh sách vài nguyên tắc được gọi là nguyên lý, quy tắc cho mỗi nhóm nhằm hướng dẫn các quyết định khó khăn và cho phép chúng chuyển đổi nhanh chóng mà không cần giám sát liên tục.

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Bezos cũng giống như một bậc thầy cờ vua, chơi rất nhiều trò chơi cùng một lúc, với cách tổ chức để ông có thể hướng tới mỗi trận đấu một cách hiệu quả.

Một số trò chơi nhận được sự quan tâm nhiều hơn so với các trò chơi khác. Bezos dành nhiều thời gian cho các ngành kinh doanh mới hơn của Amazon, ví dụ như dịch vụ web Amazon, sáng kiến về video trực tuyến của công ty, và đặc biệt là Kindle cùng những nỗ lực của Kindle Fire. Trong các bộ phận này, mức độ căng thẳng rất cao và vẻ bề ngoài của sự cân bằng giữa công việc và gia đình là không tồn tại.

Mỗi tuần một lần, thường là vào thứ Ba, các phòng ban khác nhau ở Amazon gặp gỡ các nhà quản lý của họ để xem lại bảng biểu dài của những dữ liệu quan trọng đối với công việc kinh doanh. Câu chuyện về khách hàng không được đề cập đến trong các cuộc họp. Bản thân các con số đại diện cho những gì có hiệu quả và chưa hiệu quả, khách hàng đang có xu hướng như thế nào và cuối cùng là toàn bộ công ty đang thể hiện tốt ra sao.

Các cuộc họp có thể căng thẳng và đáng sợ. “Đối với nhân viên, đó là những gì hoàn toàn đáng sợ và ấn tượng về ban điều hành. Họ buộc bạn phải nhìn vào các con số và trả lời tất cả các câu hỏi về việc tại sao những việc cụ thể lại xảy ra”, Dave Cotter – người đã làm việc bốn năm ở Amazon với vai trò là một nhà quản lý chung trong nhiều bộ phận – nói. “Bởi vì Amazon có nhiều vấn đề, nên đó là cách để đưa ra các quyết định một cách nhanh chóng và không rơi vào các cuộc tranh luận chủ quan. Các số liệu không nói dối.”

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Các cuộc họp với số liệu lên đến đỉnh điểm với việc xem xét lại công việc kinh doanh hàng tuần vào mỗi thứ Tư – một trong những trình tự quan trọng nhất ở Amazon, do Wilke tiến hành. 60 nhà quản lý trong ngành kinh doanh bán lẻ cùng tập trung trong một phòng để đánh giá lại bộ phận của họ, chia sẻ dữ liệu về các sai sót và lượng hàng tồn kho, nói về các dự báo và sự tương tác phức tạp giữa các bộ phận khác nhau trong công ty.

Bezos không tham gia các cuộc họp này. Nhưng ông luôn có thể khiến mọi người cảm thấy sự hiện diện của mình trong công ty. Sau cuộc khủng hoảng về chất bôi trơn, truyền thông qua thư điện tử đã nằm dưới phạm vi quản lý của ông. Ông đã cẩn thận giám sát những nỗ lực lọc tin nhắn có thể được gửi tới khách hàng và cố gắng suy nghĩ về những thách thức của quá trình tiếp cận thư điện tử theo những cách mới. Sau đó vào cuối năm 2011, ông đã có những gì mà ông coi là ý tưởng mới đầy ý nghĩa.

Bezos là một fan hâm mộ của thư thông báo bằng email, ví dụ như VSL.com – một loại mẩu tin văn hóa hàng ngày từ trang web và Cool Tools – một bản tóm tắt các thủ thuật công nghệ và đánh giá sản phẩm do Kevin Kelly – một biên tập viên sáng lập của Wired – viết ra. Cả hai email đều được viết ngắn gọn, cung cấp nhiều thông tin. Có lẽ, Bezos lý luận, Amazon nên gửi một email được viết một cách khéo léo hàng tuần – một tạp chí kỹ thuật số ngắn gọn – thay cho một chuỗi các bước marketing nhạt nhẽo. Ông cũng yêu cầu Phó giám đốc marketing là Steve Shure nghiên cứu ý tưởng này.

Shure thành lập một đội và họ đã dành hai tháng để đưa ra các ý tưởng thử nghiệm. Bezos cung cấp cho họ một chút định hướng nhưng nhiệm vụ lớn hơn của họ là tạo ra một loại thư điện tử hoàn toàn mới dành cho khách hàng – loại tiếng nói cá nhân mà Amazon đã mất hơn 10 năm trước khi họ cắt giảm nhân sự của bộ phận biên tập, sau khi cạnh tranh nội bộ gay gắt với P13N và Amabot.

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Từ cuối năm 2011 đến đầu năm 2012, nhóm của Shure đã trình bày nhiều khái niệm với Bezos, bao gồm một khái niệm xoay quanh Q và As nổi tiếng và một khái niệm khác nhấn mạnh thực tế mang tính lịch sử thú vị về sản phẩm trên trang web. Dự án không bao giờ tiến triển – nó ở trong tình trạng kém trong các thử nghiệm với khách hàng – nhưng một số người tham gia nhớ về quá trình này là nó đặc biệt tỉ mỉ. Trong một cuộc họp, Bezos lặng lẽ giở tài liệu xem các mô hình thử nghiệm, trong định dạng thông thường của một thông cáo báo chí, khi tất cả mọi người chờ đợi trong căng thẳng, im lặng theo sát mọi hành động. Sau đó ông xé các tài liệu. Ông nói: “Tài liệu này có vấn đề, tôi thấy chán”. Bezos có vẻ thích khái niệm mới nhất, trong đó đề nghị mô tả sơ lược việc lựa chọn các sản phẩm trên trang web bỗng nhiên trở thành sản phẩm được nhiều người quan tâm như mặt nạ Guy Fawkes và đĩa CD của ca sĩ người Anh đã giành giải Grammy – Adele. “Nhưng các tiêu đề cần phải có sức thuyết phục”, ông nói với cả nhóm, trong đó bao gồm cả tác giả của các tài liệu. “Và một số thứ trong đây viết rất tệ. Nếu chỉ làm điều này như một blogger, bạn sẽ chết đói.”

Cuối cùng ông chuyển sự chú ý sang Shure – người giống như rất nhiều phó giám đốc marketing khác trong lịch sử của công ty – là một mục tiêu thường xuyên.

“Steve, tại sao tôi không nhìn thấy bất cứ điều gì về điều này trong ba tháng?”

“Ồ, tôi phải tìm một người biên tập và làm việc thông qua mô hình thử nghiệm.”

“Nó đang phát triển quá chậm. Ông có quan tâm đến điều này không?”

“Tất nhiên rồi, Jeff.”

“Nó quá phức tạp, hãy giảm bớt thiết kế và nó cần được thực hiện nhanh hơn”.

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Nhanh hơn là một cách để mô tả năm 2012 và nửa đầu năm 2013. Qua những tháng này, cổ phiếu của Amazon đã tăng 60%. Công ty phát hành tổng cộng 237 thông cáo báo chí – trung bình là 1,6 thông báo trong thời gian hai tuần. Từ khi bắt đầu thu thuế doanh thu ở nhiều tiểu bang, công ty không phải tránh né các vấn đề về mối quan hệ và vì vậy đã mở ra hơn một tá các trung tâm dịch vụ khách hàng và trung tâm phân phối mới trên thế giới. Công ty đã mua lại Kiva Systems – một công ty ở Boston chuyên xây dựng những robot di động, hướng tới việc ngày nào đó sẽ thay thế cho những người lao động trong các trung tâm phân phối với 775 triệu đô la tiền mặt. Amazon cũng làm mới lại tính chủ động của mình với trang web chuyên dụng MyHabit.com và mở một cửa hàng mới với trang thiết bị khoa học và công nghiệp – Amazon Supply.

Amazon cũng mở rộng một dịch vụ cho phép các nhà quảng cáo tiếp cận được với khách hàng của Amazon trên tất cả các trang web và thiết bị của công ty. Được điều hành bởi Giám đốc phát triển kinh doanh Jeff Blackburn, quảng cáo tại Amazon là một mảng kinh doanh có lợi nhuận cao, trợ giúp việc vận chuyển miễn phí và giá thấp cùng nguồn vốn cho một số dự án dài hạn đắt tiền của công ty như xây dựng phần cứng của riêng mình.

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Vào mùa thu năm 2012, hàng trăm nhà báo cùng tới một kho chứa máy bay ở Santa Monica để nhìn thấy Bezos công bố một dòng sản phẩm mới: máy tính bảng Kindle Fire, bao gồm một phiên bản iPad cỡ lớn và Kindle Paperwhite có giá 119 đô la, một thiết bị đọc sách điện tử (e-reader) chuyên dụng với màn hình sinh động. “Sản phẩm này đã đạt được tầm nhìn ban đầu của chúng tôi”, Bezos nói với tôi trong một cuộc phỏng vấn sau sự kiện, đề cập đến thiết bị đọc chuyên dụng mới nhất. “Tôi chắc rằng chúng ta sẽ tìm ra cách để tiếp tục tiến về phía trước, nhưng đây là một sản phẩm có sự biến đổi từng bước.”

Trước đó cùng trong một tuần, một thẩm phán liên bang đã thông qua một thỏa thuận với ba trong số các nhà xuất bản sách lớn trong vụ kiện chống độc quyền đối với mức giá đại lý của Bộ Tư pháp. (Hai nhà xuất bản khác đã đặt mục tiêu trong cuộc điều tra sẽ giải quyết trong vòng vài tháng tới.) Hiện nay, Amazon tiếp tục tự do giảm giá sách điện tử mới và sách bán chạy nhất. Tôi đã hỏi Bezos về điều này nhưng ông không quan tâm lắm. “Chúng tôi rất vui mừng khi được phép giảm giá” là tất cả những gì ông nói.

Tháng Mười hai, Amazon đã tổ chức buổi hội thảo đầu tiên dành cho khách hàng của dịch vụ trên trang web Amazon tại trung tâm Sands Expo ở Las Vegas. 6.000 nhà phát triển đã có mặt và chăm chú lắng nghe khi Giám đốc AWS Andy Jassy và Werner Vogels thảo luận về tương lai của điện toán đám mây. Số lượng và niềm đam mê của số đông là sự xác nhận rõ ràng về việc xuất hiện (không chắc xảy ra) của Amazon như một nhà tiên phong trong lĩnh vực điện toán doanh nghiệp. Vào ngày thứ hai của hội thảo, Bezos đã lên sân khấu và trong cuộc thảo luận với Vogels, ông đã đưa ra quan điểm hiếm có về những dự án cá nhân của ông, giống như chiếc đồng hồ của Long Now – đó là chiếc đồng hồ cơ khí được thiết kế để kéo dài hàng thiên niên kỷ mà các kỹ sư đang chuẩn bị xây dựng bên trong một ngọn núi ở nông trại của Bezos tại Texas.

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“Biểu tượng quan trọng vì một vài lý do. Nếu [con người] nghĩ về lâu dài, chúng tôi có thể hoàn thành những thứ mà chúng tôi không thể hoàn thành”, Bezos nói. “Độ dài ước lượng về thời gian có tính chất quan trọng, chúng có rất nhiều ý nghĩa. Một điểm khác tôi muốn nói là con người chúng ta đang trở nên vô cùng phức tạp với các phương thức công nghệ và có nhiều khả năng là sẽ gây nguy hiểm cho bản thân. Dường như chúng ta phải bắt đầu suy nghĩ về những thứ lâu dài hơn. Vì vậy, đây là một biểu tượng. Tôi cho rằng biểu tượng có thể rất mạnh mẽ.”

Trên sân khấu, Bezos đưa ra dự đoán về làn sóng ổn định của chủ nghĩa Jeff, về tư duy dài hạn, về tinh thần dám thất bại và bị hiểu lầm, về sự khám phá gây sốc nhiều năm trước đây trong cửa hàng SoDo đầu tiên. Đó có thể là một ý tưởng tuyệt vời – Ông ấy sẽ không sẵn sàng để kể lại câu chuyện đó một lần nữa, đúng không?

Câu chuyện nhỏ trên bàn đối thoại có thể cho thấy thời đại của nó, nhưng Bezos cố gắng để củng cố các giá trị giống nhau. Giống như Steve Jobs, Bezos làm thay đổi dần nhân viên, nhà đầu tư và công chúng hoài nghi và khiến họ chuyển đổi theo cách suy nghĩ của mình. Bất kỳ quá trình nào cũng có thể được cải thiện. Khiếm khuyết không thể nhìn thấy các kiến thức có thể là điều hiển nhiên với những người mới đến. Các giải pháp đơn giản nhất là tốt nhất. Việc lặp đi lặp lại tất cả những giai thoại không phải là sự đơn điệu cũ rích – đó là chiến lược. Danny Hillis – bạn của Bezos nói: “Chúng tôi cố gắng làm rối tung lên với những mục tiêu mâu thuẫn, đầy phức tạp và khiến mọi người thấy khó giúp chúng tôi hơn”. “Jeff rất rõ ràng với các mục tiêu của mình và cách ông nói về chúng khiến nó dễ dàng hơn với người khác bởi vì nó nhất quán.”

“Nếu bạn tìm hiểu về lý do tại sao Amazon lại khác biệt so với hầu hết các công ty khác cùng khởi nghiệp sớm trên internet thì đó là bởi vì ngay từ đầu Jeff đã tiếp cận với tầm nhìn dài hạn”, Hillis tiếp tục. “Đó là một dự án nhiều thập kỷ. Quan điểm là ông có thể thực hiện một số lượng lớn dự án với khung thời gian lớn hơn nếu ông vẫn vững vàng, là triết lý cơ bản của Bezos.”

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Đến năm 2012, Amazon đã hoàn thành việc di chuyển tới các tòa nhà văn phòng mới ở phía nam Lake Union của Seattle. Một bước quá độ khác cũng xảy ra vào khoảng thời gian này, mặc dù nó rất rõ ràng đối với các nhân viên. Những dấu hiệu xung quanh khuôn viên mới và những đồ vật ít có như cốc và áo thun đều có sẵn cho nhân viên sau khi chuyển văn phòng, tên công ty được thể hiện một cách đơn giản là Amazon, không phải là Amazon.com. Trong nhiều năm, Bezos đã kiên quyết về việc sử dụng cái tên dài hơn, đó cũng là một phần trong nỗ lực khắc sâu địa chỉ trang web vào tâm trí khách hàng. Hiện nay, công ty đã tạo ra rất nhiều sản phẩm, bao gồm dịch vụ đám mây và phần cứng, mà cái tên lỗi thời ban đầu không còn ý nghĩa. Tên trên trang web được viết tắt vào tháng Ba năm 2012. Rất ít người chú ý đến nó.

Dường như Amazon là một công ty thay đổi liên tục. Nhưng có một vài thứ vẫn như cũ. Một buổi sáng thứ Ba lạnh lẽo đầu tháng Mười một năm 2012, khoảng 9 giờ sáng, một chiếc xe tải Honda nhỏ đã dừng tại Day One North, ở góc đường Terry Avenue và Republican Street, thuộc khu vực phía nam Lake Union của Seattle. Jeff Bezos ngồi trên ghế hành khách, cúi xuống hôn MacKenzie, sau đó chào tạm biệt rồi ra khỏi xe, bước đi một cách tự tin vào tòa nhà để khởi đầu một ngày mới.

Theo nhiều cách, cuộc sống của Bezos đã trở nên phức tạp giống Lee Scott vào năm 2000 khi ông đến thăm cựu CEO của Walmart và ngạc nhiên trước hàng rào an ninh xung quanh ông. Bezos không đến nơi làm việc trong một chiếc xe mui kín màu đen nhưng theo báo cáo tài chính của công ty, Amazon vẫn chi 1,6 triệu đô la cho vấn đề an ninh cá nhân của ông và gia đình.

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Cảnh gia đình nhỏ của Bezos và MacKenzie nói lên ít nhất một thói quen thường ngày mà ông đã cố gắng giữ gìn, giữa sự phức tạp không thể tưởng tượng được xảy đến với thành công xuất chúng của Amazon. Gia đình Bezos có thể thuê lái xe, họ có thể mua limousine và máy bay cá nhân, nhưng họ vẫn sở hữu một chiếc Honda giản dị, mặc dù một mô hình lớn hơn là Accord đã có trước đó một thập kỷ và MacKenzie thường đưa bốn đứa trẻ tới trường, sau đó đưa chồng đến văn phòng.

Tất nhiên, tài sản của họ không hề khiêm tốn như vậy. Hiện nay, tài sản của Bezos được ước tính đạt 25 tỉ đô la, khiến ông trở thành người giàu thứ 12 ở Mỹ.

Gia đình của Bezos sống rất kín đáo nhưng cuộc sống của họ không hoàn toàn tránh được những cái nhìn bên ngoài. Biệt thự bên hồ của họ nằm trong khu dân cư những người giàu có của Medina, gần nhà của Bill và Melinda Gates, đã được cải tạo vào năm 2010, rộng 21.650 m2. Không gian dành cho sinh hoạt gia đình rộng 2.697 m2 với hai tòa nhà, theo hồ sơ công khai và đó là chưa kể ngôi nhà gỗ nhỏ của người làm và một nhà thuyền – nơi Bezos lần đầu tiên tổ chức một đội xây dựng Amazon Prime.

Ngoài các nơi ở chính, gia đình Bezos còn sở hữu nhà ở Aspen, Beverly Hills và thành phố New York, cùng với nông trại rộng 116.000 hecta ở Texas, nơi công ty Blue Origin có cơ sở và nơi tên lửa sẽ bắt đầu chuyến du hành vào không gian. MacKenzie thuê một căn hộ có một phòng ngủ gần nhà của họ ở Medina và sử dụng nó như một văn phòng riêng dành cho việc viết lách. Bà là tác giả của hai cuốn tiểu thuyết, gồm Traps được xuất bản vào năm 2012. “Tôi chắc chắn là một người vô cùng may mắn”, bà nói với tạp chí Vogue trong một mô tả sơ lược hiếm hoi vào năm 2012, đề cập đến sự thành công của chồng bà.

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“Điều này khiến cuộc sống của tôi trở nên tuyệt vời theo nhiều cách nhưng đó không phải là tất cả. Thực tế là tôi có cha mẹ tuyệt vời, tin tưởng vào giáo dục và chưa bao giờ nghi ngờ tôi có thể trở thành nhà văn, cuối cùng tôi có một người bạn đời tôi yêu, đó mới là những điều để định nghĩa về tôi.”

Bezos và MacKenzie dường như chia sẻ kỹ năng phân bố thời gian hiệu quả của họ thông qua nhiều trách nhiệm cá nhân và dự án. Với Bezos, ngoài gia đình và Amazon, ông còn có Blue Origin, nơi ông thường dành mỗi ngày thứ Tư ở đó và Bezos Expeditions – công ty có vốn mạo hiểm cá nhân của ông – giữ vốn đầu tư trong những công ty như Twitter, dịch vụ taxi Uber, trang web tin tức Business Insider và công ty robot Rethink Robotics. Từ tháng Tám năm 2013, Bezos đã sở hữu tờ Washington Post và nói rằng ông muốn dành niềm đam mê của mình cho sự sáng tạo và thử nghiệm để làm hồi sinh tờ báo. Rodney Brooks, giáo sư về robot của đứng sau công ty Rethink Robotics muốn đưa những robot không đắt tiền vào sản xuất trong những dây chuyền lắp ráp, nói: “Bezos đầu tư vào những thứ mà công nghệ thông tin có thể phá vỡ những mô hình hiện có”. “Ông ấy là người tốt để nói chuyện cùng khi những câu hỏi hóc búa khác nhau xuất hiện. Khi chúng tôi hỏi, việc lắng nghe những câu trả lời của ông ấy rất có giá trị.”

Bezos phối hợp chặt chẽ với những người sáng tạo ra chiếc đồng hồ 10.000 năm và giám sát các buổi tổng kết hàng quý của họ mà các kỹ sư đồng hồ gọi là Ticks. Stewart Brand - đồng chủ tịch của quỹ Long Now nói: “Ông ấy rất quan tâm tới các chi tiết, thiết kế và khắt khe với việc chi phí sẽ được dùng vào việc gì.”

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Bezos và MacKenzie cùng tham gia vào Quỹ gia đình Bezos, thường trợ cấp về giáo dục và vận động sinh viên giúp đỡ những người trẻ tuổi khác ở các nước nghèo và khu vực gặp thiên tai. Quỹ này do Jackie và Mike Bezos, Christina Bezos Poore và Mark Bezos – những anh chị em của Jeff – điều hành. Đại gia đình này đã đưa một chút quản lý theo phong cách Amazon vào hoạt động từ thiện của họ. Trong phòng họp chính của văn phòng quỹ là một vài tòa nhà từ trụ sở của Amazon, là một con búp bê vải họ thường đặt trên một chiếc ghế trống trong suốt cuộc họp. Con búp bê đại diện cho những sinh viên họ đang cố gắng giúp đỡ, cũng giống như Bezos từng có thói quen đặt một chiếc ghế trống trong các cuộc họp để đại diện cho khách hàng của họ.

Gia đình Bezos thường vô cùng gắn bó và tập trung hướng tới tương lai. Vào tháng Sáu năm 2013, trong một buổi tối gần nửa đêm, cuối cùng Jeff Bezos đã trả lời tin nhắn của Ted Jorgensen - người cha ruột của ông. Trong một email ngắn gọn nhưng chân thành, gửi tới con trai riêng của Jorgensen vì bản thân Jorgensen không sử dụng internet, Bezos đã cố gắng để Jorgensen cảm thấy thoải mái. Bezos viết rằng ông đồng cảm với lựa chọn khó khăn mà cha mẹ ông trong độ tuổi thanh thiếu niên buộc phải thực hiện và nói rằng dù sao ông đã được hưởng một tuổi thơ hạnh phúc. Ông nói rằng ông được nuôi dưỡng tốt và ông yêu cầu Jorgensen phải gạt bất kỳ sự hối tiếc nào còn sót lại sang một bên trong hoàn cảnh cuộc sống của họ. Sau đó ông gửi tới cha ruột của mình những lời chúc tốt đẹp nhất.

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Khi bạn điều chỉnh bản thân cho phù hợp với thế giới quan của Jeff Bezos, sau đó đánh giá cả thành công và thất bại của Amazon trong suốt hai thập kỷ qua, tương lai của công ty sẽ trở nên dễ dự đoán hơn. Câu trả lời cho hầu hết các câu hỏi có thể tưởng tượng được là có.

Amazon sẽ chuyển sang giao hàng miễn phí trong ngày và trong ngày tiếp theo cho các thành viên Prime chứ? Tất nhiên, cuối cùng khi Amazon có rất nhiều khách hàng trong mỗi khu vực đô thị thì việc đặt một trung tâm phân phối bên ngoài mỗi thành phố sẽ trở thành sự thực. Mục tiêu của Bezos sẽ và luôn luôn vượt qua sự bất tiện của việc mua sắm trực tuyến và giao sản phẩm, dịch vụ cho khách hàng theo cách hiệu quả nhất có thể.

Sẽ có một ngày Amazon sở hữu xe tải riêng của mình chứ? Vâng, cuối cùng vì kiểm soát được cái gọi là giao hàng trên dặm cuối cùng tới khách hàng của mình có thể giúp thực hiện tầm nhìn đó và cải thiện khả năng của công ty để đáp ứng những lời hứa giao hàng chính xác, nó đã làm tăng thêm sự thích thú tới khách hàng.

Liệu Amazon có triển khai dịch vụ tạp hóa của mình, AmazonFresh, ngoài Seattle và các vùng của Los Angeles và San Francisco? Có, khi nó đã hoàn thiện cơ chế lưu trữ và phân phối có lợi cho các loại thực phẩm dễ hỏng, như rau và trái cây. Bezos không tin rằng Amazon có thể phát triển đến quy mô của Walmart nếu không nắm vững khoa học về hàng tạp hóa và may mặc.

Amazon sẽ giới thiệu điện thoại di động hay hộp giải mã truyền hình có kết nối Internet? Vâng, trên thực tế nó đã làm được cả hai điều đó vào năm 2014 sau khi cuốn sách này được xuất bản lần đầu. Công ty muốn cung cấp dịch vụ của mình trên tất cả các thiết bị được kết nối mà khách hàng sử dụng mà không cần phải phụ thuộc hoàn toàn vào phần cứng của các đối thủ cạnh tranh chính.

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Amazon sẽ mở rộng trên 10 quốc gia, nơi công ty hiện tại đang vận hành các trang web bán lẻ chứ? Tất nhiên. Mục tiêu dài hạn của Bezos là bán tất cả mọi thứ, ở tất cả mọi nơi. Ví dụ, ở Nga, phát triển cơ sở hạ tầng vận chuyển mạnh mẽ hơn và hệ thống xử lý thẻ tín dụng đáng tin cậy hơn, Amazon sẽ giới thiệu cửa hàng thương mại điện tử của mình và các dịch vụ kỹ thuật số ở đó, có thể bằng cách mua lại các công ty địa phương hoặc bằng cách “gieo hạt mầm” với Kindle và Kindle Fire như nó đã làm ở Brazil năm 2012 và Ấn Độ năm 2013.

Amazon sẽ thường xuyên mua các sản phẩm từ nhà sản xuất chứ? Không, tại một vài thời điểm, họ có thể in chúng ngay trong các trung tâm phân phối. Công nghệ đang phát triển được biết đến là công nghệ in ấn 3-D, trong đó những chiếc máy có kích thước bằng chiếc lò vi sóng đẩy vật liệu nhựa để tạo ra vật thể dựa trên mô hình kỹ thuật số, đã mê hoặc Bezos và có thể cho phép ông giảm nhiều chi phí hơn từ chuỗi cung ứng. Năm 2013, Amazon đã thực hiện bước đầu tiên vào thế giới này, mở ra một trang web về máy in 3-D và nguồn cung cấp.

Các cơ quan chống độc quyền cuối cùng sẽ đi tới việc xem xét kỹ lưỡng Amazon và sức mạnh thị trường của họ chứ? Tất nhiên, tôi tin rằng có khả năng này, bởi vì công ty đang phát triển vững chắc tại các thị trường như sách và thiết bị điện tử, và các đối thủ của họ đã đi chệch hướng. Tuy nhiên, như chúng ta đã thấy với các tranh chấp về thuế bán hàng và giá sách điện tử, Amazon là một nhà hàng hải bậc thầy về luật pháp và cẩn thận tuân thủ pháp luật. Giống như Google, họ thu được bài học từ thất bại trong việc chống độc quyền của Microsoft trong những năm 1990, đó là một bài học mạnh mẽ về hành vi độc quyền hung hãn có thể phá hỏng cả một công ty.

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Đây không phải là những giấc mơ gây sửng sốt. Chúng gần như chắc chắn xảy ra. Thật dễ dàng để đưa ra dự đoán – Jeff Bezos sẽ làm những gì ông vẫn luôn làm. Ông sẽ cố gắng để thay đổi nhanh hơn, làm việc chăm chỉ hơn với các nhân viên, đặt cược táo bạo hơn và theo đuổi sự sáng tạo cả lớn lẫn nhỏ, tất cả chỉ nhằm vươn tới tầm nhìn lớn của bản thân đối với Amazon – nó không chỉ là cửa hàng triệu đồ mà cuối cùng nó là một công ty có tất cả mọi thứ.

Có lẽ Amazon là công ty hấp dẫn nhất từng tồn tại và nó chỉ mới bắt đầu. Nó vừa là nhà truyền bá, vừa là lính đánh thuê và xuyên suốt lịch sử kinh doanh cùng việc làm của con người, luôn luôn có một sự kết hợp hiệu quả. “Chúng tôi không chỉ có duy nhất một lợi thế lớn”, ông từng nói với một đối thủ cũ là nhà xuất bản Tim O’Reilly, sau khi họ tranh luận về việc Amazon đang bảo vệ phương pháp điều chỉnh một cú nhắp chuột có bằng sáng chế từ các đối thủ như Barnes & Noble. “Vì vậy chúng tôi phải dệt một sợi dây với nhiều lợi thế nhỏ.”

Amazon vẫn dệt sợi dây ấy. Đó là tương lai của công ty để tiếp tục phát triển, chứng minh cho sự khắt khe của nhà sáng lập và tầm nhìn của ông. Và công ty sẽ tiếp tục mở rộng cho đến khi hoặc Jeff Bezos không còn trong công ty hoặc không có ai theo cách của ông nữa.

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Table of Contents

- Prologue

- PART I

- CHAPTER 1
- CHAPTER 2
- CHAPTER 3
- CHAPTER 4

- PART II

- CHAPTER 5
- CHAPTER 6
- CHAPTER 7
- CHAPTER 8

- PART III

- CHAPTER 9
- CHAPTER 10
- CHAPTER 11

- Epilogue
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
- Notes
- Chú thích

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