Jeff Bezos' first 60-minute profile hasn't aged well.
In the 1999 feature segment, preserved on YouTube, the venerable news show pokes fun at his corny tendencies. He wonders if his company can win a war against traditional brick-and-mortar powers and scoffs at his frugality.
In one telling scene, a 35-year-old Bezos sits in a dimly lit office behind a light colored office built from a door supported by two by four. The office is cluttered with piles of papers and books. The carpet is stained and littered. A yellow rubber duck sits atop a massive gray computer screen. To its right, hanging at an angle on the wall, is a white sign with "amazon.com" painted blue.
The video occasionally spreads on social media, usually in sync with news from the ever-growing personal fortune of Bezos or the latest Amazon takeover. Users associate it with inspirational messages for startup hopefuls and self-proclaimed nerds everywhere.
"Remember, everyone starts somewhere!" ”
“This is Jeff Bezos selling books out of his garage. Now he is a multi-billionaire. Never give up!! "
" When you want to quit, remember that Amazon wasn't always a monster company. ”
IMAGES ON “DAVID RYDER / GETTY”
In fact, Amazon was on its way to becoming a giant by the time he was interviewed by CBS' Bob Simon. Amazon had been a publicly traded company for two years, with Bezos holding about $10 billion in stock. The company had moved from a garage in Bellevue, Wash., to its current headquarters in Seattle years before. But Bezos was notoriously thrifty, and doors were cheaper than traditional desks. (Frugality is one of 14 leadership principles listed on Amazon's website.) Today, the company still uses door lecterns and offers miniature versions, signed by Bezos, as awards for innovations in cost reduction. The dilapidated office was more of a useful symbol than financial necessity – a recurring theme in Bezos' leadership style.
This style, characterized by an aggressive and relentless focus on the long term, has not changed.
In the digital age where flash-in-the-pan technology is the norm and innovation is mandatory for survival, Bezos' commitment to consistent, clear and simple guiding principles is perhaps the most rebellious act against conventional business.
The founder of a small online bookstore and one of the internet's four horsemen believes in the dull gray of long-term business, customer focus and sustainability. 'innovation. His actions continue to support these beliefs. That same company, which now has a stock market value of over $700 billion, was built on a set of principles written by a guy who ate an entire box of refrigerated butter cookies every morning and almost named his company MakeItSo. .com, after a Star Trek order. (He actually registered the name "Cadabra Inc." until associates told him it sounded too much like "cadaver.")
Bezos doesn't want the watery rags-to-riches story to persist . Inside The Everything Store:Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon —Perhaps Bezos' most intimate profile yet — author Brad Stone begins the prologue by meeting the no-nonsense CEO, book proposal in hand. Bezos' biggest concern was narrative fallacy, a relatively new term that describes how humans oversimplify complex stories to make them more appealing and manageable.
"When a company comes up with an idea, it is a complicated process," Bezos told Stone. “There is no aha moment.
Of course, the Amazon story is the perfect type of tale that will line the walls of the News Feed for generations to come. But this adventure was only the beginning. In the end, it was an unwavering dedication to a set of beliefs that enabled Bezos to weather the dot-com meltdown and ultimately break into related and clearly unrelated markets, including cloud storage, media, healthcare, space exploration and beyond. Its success in these varied markets makes it a multi-faceted powerhouse, sharing a virtual home with 64 million Amazon Prime users and gaining invaluable insight into their likes and dislikes, fears and guilty pleasures, their political leanings. The world invited Bezos into their home and entrusted their future to him. He's not leaving anytime soon.
"When a company comes up with an idea, it's a complicated process, there's no aha moment. »
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Just as it's now nearly impossible to imagine a world without one-click shopping and same-day delivery, it's even harder to write about Bezos without regurgitating The Amazon Story. They are two halves of a whole. A right and left hand that together form a reality that we never thought possible and that we can no longer imagine living without. This, the slow but steady slide into our daily routine, is Bezos' genius, and it propelled him to the accolade of the richest person in history, a throne that sits under the microscope.
Depending on the decade, Bezos is either a hero or a villain. His first project has been compared to Sears' revolutionary idea of mail-order catalogs. He is revered as the savior of a broken economy, providing jobs for 542,000 people worldwide and growing. He has also been criticized for tax evasion and for entering the media industry not for dreams of journalistic preservation, but to promote his consumer empire and political agenda.
Some of the suspicions hold water. Amazon reportedly paid just 13% of its profits in taxes between 2007 and 2015. The average S&P 500 tax rate was 27%. And increased automation in Amazon's warehouses could eventually lead to thousands of layoffs. But Bezos remains unfettered by the ebb and flow of his sympathy. Just as he refuses to calculate trading success based on quarterly market results, he also refuses to respond to the week's criticism. The 54-year-old has never really cared what people think; he only looks at the data, which almost like a video game with predetermined levels, paved the way to unimaginable success.
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When he was a sixth-grade student in a children's school gifted students from Houston, Bezos charted individual teacher performance throughout the school year based on student surveys. At age 10, he calculated that his grandmother, a smoker, had already shaved off nine years of her life using a puff equation. When he proudly informed her of his results, she burst into tears. Bezos' often obsessive analytical nature was impressive but not always endearing.
Stories of his geeky bravado abound:from dismantling his toddler bed to setting up an alarm system on the door from his room to protect himself against unwanted intrusions from his siblings. When it came to early computers, he was fascinated not just by complexity, but by sheer possibility. In 1990, he harnessed this fascination for a promising career as the youngest vice president of a Wall Street financial firm. His job:leading a team to design and apply complex algorithms to predict fluctuations in the financial markets.
His affinity for numbers was not just useful in the office. Bezos once calculated how many more women he could meet through a local ballroom dancing class than through more traditional means. He was a self-proclaimed professional blind man, often gleaning valuable insights from otherwise missed dates.
"I wanted a woman who could get me out of a Third World prison," Bezos said in a rare candid interview. with his brother, Mark, at the 2017 Business Insider Summit LA. Resourcefulness was his main goal, both in business and in life. Once he met his wife, Mackenzie, at the finance firm in 1992, the couple only dated for three months and were married within six years. The next calculation would change his life.
He called it “the regret minimization framework.” While deciding to start a venture in the risky but fastest growing industry – the internet – he weighed his options from the perspective of his 80-year-old self. The regret of losing a world-changing company, he decided, was far more powerful than quitting a high-paying corporate job in New York. With his new bride and armed with nearly all of his parents' savings, Bezos drove west in a modern gold rush. Amazon.com was born.
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Today, Bezos fits an increasingly common mold of Trekkie turned billionaire turned Trekkie. In 2000, he secretly launched his most significant venture:Blue Origin, a privately funded aerospace manufacturer and space flight services company founded two years before Elon Musk started SpaceX. It wasn't until 2003, when the issue of massive land purchases in Texas arose, that Blue Origin appeared on the public radar.
COURTESY OF BLUE ORIGIN
Now the social leader tweets high-res videos of reusable rocket launches at Blue Origin's test site in West Texas, walks the red carpet with Oscar winners, and hosts lavish annual futurism talks where Patagonian jackets and charcuterie are waiting for you in luxurious Los Angeles hotel rooms. But at first it was all work and no play.
According to Stone, Amazon's Seattle headquarters doesn't have free snacks, free parking or happy hours. Employees pay for the coffee, but as a bonus they can participate in a punch card program – every tenth coffee is free. Bezos has been known to publicly offer his punch cards to employees online. Executives fly by coach and have to pay for their own upgrades.
“Achieve more with less. Constraints breed ingenuity, self-sufficiency and invention,” said Bezos. His quotes became “Jeffisms”.
Granted, Bezos became the icon of efficiency and the “heads down, work hard” mentality, but at a price. For a company built on the gleaming, benevolent mountain of customer service, not much was known about its employees until a 2015 expose of Amazon's work culture was published in The New York Times .
The article described the grueling working conditions, including a warehouse in Arizona without air conditioning where ambulances were parked on call outside the doors as employees “fall” in the heat. Cooling units were then installed.
In the creative and innovation departments, people were encouraged to question and critique each other's ideas, which seems collaborative but often went wrong. resulted in personal attacks, as several former employees explained to Stone. PowerPoint presentations were banned in favor of six-page narratives. Engineers have chastised the idea of explaining a complex spreadsheet or algorithm in narrative form, but Bezos thinks people “can hide between the bullet points.” Explaining an idea in paragraph form stimulates problem-solving and creative thinking, he suggested.
While it's not official company policy, employees have Times that they had to work 60-80 hour workweeks and answer their phones and emails on weekends and holidays.
Perhaps the most damaging aspect of the Times the piece was aimed at Bezos himself. He is known, according to over 100 respondents, to have little patience for sloppy work or ineptitude, even incidental.
“Amazon is the place where top performers feel bad,” Noelle Barnes explained. , who worked in marketing with the company for nine years. Times .
Bezos responded to the allegations with a company-wide letter encouraging employees to read the article and address any ongoing HR issues.
“[The article] asserts that our intentional approach is to create a soulless, dystopian workplace where no fun takes place and no laughter is heard. " he wrote. “Again, I don't recognize this Amazon and I really hope you don't either. As several employees admitted to Stone, Bezos was often right in his harshly delivered criticisms. One employee noted that the CEO “was incredibly smart about things he had nothing to do with.”
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Over the past two decades, Bezos has upheld a set of rules. The notable three are:customer first, innovation always, and long term over short term. But contrary to big business hyperbole, Bezos speaks up consistently. He always encourages customers to email [email protected] if they have a complaint. “Jeffisms” exist because Bezos often reinforces his principles. He may be known as an irritable, demanding, and aggravating leader, but his steady vision and message provide an environment of honesty and consistency rarely seen in most corporate America.
In 2010, Bezos nearly shut down a email marketing team after hearing from a customer who consulted but didn't purchase lubes, then received an embarrassing follow-up email urging them to complete the purchase. These incentive emails were responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue for Amazon. Bezos' unwavering dedication to customer service has allowed Amazon to have an unparalleled relationship with its customer base. It can never be compromised.
Beneath this set of guidelines is a recurring theme that conventionalism is the death of everything:business, wealth, innovation, creativity. The world welcomes Amazon because it is different. To continue to fight conventional thinking, Bezos must strike a delicate balance between adaptation and individualism. Amazon's paradoxical problem is perhaps the most persistent and challenging:People love local mom and pop stores, though they can't always afford to support them on a regular basis. People want the low prices and seemingly endless inventory that a big retailer like Amazon can provide, but they also want to feel good about it.
IMAGES ON “PETER MACDIARMID/GETTY”
When Amazon launched a shopping comparison app, critics were outraged, accusing Amazon of siphoning off customers from local businesses. Bezos sent out a company-wide memo grappling with the issue of corporate perception. In it, he created a list of characteristics detailing why some companies are loved, despite public relations mistakes, while others will always be seen as greedy and careless machines. The list included things like "explorers are cool." And “capturing all the value just for the business is not cool. His conclusion reinforced a commitment to these guiding principles created more than two decades ago.
“It is not enough to be inventive – this pioneering spirit must also manifest and be perceptible to the clientele,” writes -il.
Bezos must therefore be both a missionary and a mercenary. It must take into account the effect of each decision on the consumer, aiming to protect this precious relationship at all costs. But this is not enough. He must also be a confident but not ruthless competitor. He must be determined to grow without annihilating those who stand in his way.
What might be an impossible task for most is one Bezos seems born to tackle.
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In a business world focused on short-term profit and the next shiny thing, Bezos is a pillar of the unchanging philosophy, as stated in his first letter to shareholders in 1997.
“Because of our focus on in the long run, we may make decisions and weigh the trade-offs differently than some companies. Accordingly, we want to share with you our fundamental management and decision-making approach so that you, our shareholders, can confirm that it is consistent with your investment philosophy…
“We are not bold enough to assert that the above is the 'right' investment philosophy, but it is ours, and we would be remiss if we were not clear in the approach we have taken and will continue to take. »
The complete 1997 letter is reprinted and distributed with each New Year's letter. Despite Amazon not posting a profit on paper in 13 of its 21 years and amid growing scrutiny of big tech for unauthorized collection of personal data, its business remains one of the greatest economic forces and attractive investment options.
When will Bezos slow down its expansion in favor of healthy profits and dividends? If the past two decades are any indication, that time is still in the distant future.
In the early days after the garage, Bezos told employees that he not only wanted to sell kayaking books, but that he wanted to sell kayaks, kayak magazine subscriptions and kayak trip reservations. It seems total dominance has always been the goal.
Bezos has adapted this aggressive growth strategy – starting with the customer and working backwards – into each new market. In 2013, he bought a hemorrhaging Washington Post for $250 million. Although he is not involved in copywriting, his trademark influence can be felt in aggressive moves to shorten web page load times and expand subscription efforts. Over the past two years, subscriptions have doubled and nearly halfway through its third profitable year, the Post continues to hire journalists in an industry beset by budget cuts.
“The term gifted was new,” her mother, Jackie, told Stone. "I knew he was precocious and determined and incredibly focused, and you carry on to this and see that hasn't changed. ”
Almost with a foresight of the future, Bezos continues to be in the right place at the right time. As an early investor in Google, he seemed to understand the key players in the digital age. He hired some of the smartest minds in engineering to experiment with artificial intelligence before it was mainstream. This is how Alexa was born. Amazon Echo's AI assistant is now in more than 40% of US homes. At the end of January, a joint press release from Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase announced a partnership entry into the health sector for their American employees. Bezos, it seems, has his hands in every aspect of American life.
A symbolic display of his future direction, Bezos is the largest funder of the Long Now Foundation, a nonprofit organization San Francisco nonprofit that seeks to promote sustainability and “slower/better” thinking about the more common “faster/cheaper” public mindset. A symbol of the organization's mission, a giant clock being built on its property in West Texas, is being built to last 10,000 years. The hand only moves once a year.
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AdVenture Capitalist is a free video game for smartphones. Its first level asks the player to open a lemonade stand. Tap the progress bar to squeeze the lemonade; the faster you click, the more lemonade you sell. With the income, you can buy different upgrades and hire managers to run the lemonade stand while you're away. Do it long enough and you'll have enough money to run a pizzeria, car repair shop and so on until, enough levels, you reach world domination. Fundamentally. But the game doesn't end there. The more you invest in your own growth, the faster you grow. With enough money, you can purchase “Mars Dollars,” which will fuel your progress towards… colonizing Mars.
Sound familiar?
It seems Bezos has always gazed up at the stars. When he was 5 years old, he saw Neil Armstrong walk on the moon with his grandfather, "Pop", a former regional director of the United States Atomic Energy Commission. In high school, along with his then-girlfriend, Ursula “Uschi” Werner, Bezos started a summer camp for fourth, fifth and sixth graders. Six students, including two Bezos siblings, signed up for the 10-day, $150 camp. The DREAM Institute, which relied on a mix of science and literature, taught students about fossil fuels, space colonies, and interstellar travel. After years of talks with Paramount Pictures, Bezos made a cameo in 2016 as a Starfleet alien official in Star Trek Beyond. He even began training every morning to physically prepare for space travel, presumably as a result of the daily cookie diet disappearing.
“You don't choose your passions; your passions choose you,” he told the Summit LA crowd. “How they are formed, you are not completely sure. But I think you sort of soak up some things early on, you just get excited about them. Because you're excited, you pay more attention to them and they grow. Space is like that for me.
In 2015, Bezos and Blue Origin made history with the first test flight of New Shepard , a rocket named after Alan Shepard, the first American in space. On April 29 of the same year, the reusable rocket successfully penetrated the Earth's atmosphere, returned and landed vertically. The historic premiere lends weight to Bezos' plans not only for space exploration, but also for colonization.
COURTESY OF BLUE ORIGIN
His space race competitor, Musk, doesn't was quick to point out on Twitter that breaking the atmosphere is markedly different from a suborbital mission with a successful vertical landing. Bezos » New Shepard won that race a few months later. A second reusable rocket of the same name has since been sent on five successful suborbital missions before retiring.
Although media is rarely allowed at Blue Origin's headquarters in Kent, Washington, visitors describe it as a Walt Disney's childhood dream come true. A life-size model of a Jules Verne-inspired Victorian-era spaceship sits in the building's atrium, with velvet-covered seats and brass controls. The company has a coat of arms and a Latin motto, Gradatim Ferociter , which translates to “step by step, fiercely.” It's a phrase that applies to all facets of Bezos' life and business, but aptly ties in with his greatest passion.
As of 2016, Blue Origin's annual spend is estimated at about $1 billion, funded by the sale of Bezos' Amazon stock. If you spoke to Werner, she would tell you that was always the plan. In 2003, when asked what Bezos – already one of the richest people in the world at the time – could possibly want in life, she joked that he was accumulating enough fortune great for building your own space station.
"I found that I'm very motivated by people who rely on me. »
Bezos has long supported space colonization, not just travel. In part, he thinks it's necessary to save humanity from the effects of big business, ironically enough. He wants to lead the way.
"I found that I'm very motivated by people who rely on me," Bezos told a reporter. "I like to rely on myself."
His aggressively confident and demanding leadership style didn't win him many friends, but it certainly earned him a place in the history books. For Bezos, Amazon is still a startup. In his last letter to shareholders, he wrote, “I work in an Amazon building named Day 1, and when I moved buildings, I took the name with me. I spend time thinking about it.
“Day 2 is a stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by an excruciating and painful decline. Death follow-up. And this that's why it's always Day 1.”
It’s not hard to imagine that Bezos can conquer whatever goal he sets for himself, no matter how small. His childhood best friend, Joshua Weinstein, recalled that when Bezos decided he wanted to be top of his class of 680 students, the other students began to compete for the No. 2 spot. His determination was rarely questioning.
An 18-year-old Bezos ended his farewell speech in what could be described as a self-fulfilling prophecy:“Space is the final frontier. Join me there. »
Related: Jeff Bezos says these are the 5 secrets to success
This article originally appeared in the Fall 2018 issue of LadiesBelle I/O magazine.
