The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

"The Everything Store" was such an engaging and fascinating read, I inhaled it in less than 36 hours. (For the sake of my sleep and work schedule, I'm glad books like this don't come along too often.) As I write this review, Amazon just announced a partnership with the US Postal Service to start delivering on Sundays for Prime members in key cities. This backs up the best description I have heard of Amazon and its founder -- which, amusingly, comes from the blog of ex-Amazon employee Eugene Wei, someone who was not interviewed in this book. "Amazon has boundless ambition," Wei writes. "It wants to eat global retail... there are very few people in technology and business who are what I'd call apex predators. Jeff [Bezos] is one of them, the most patient and intelligent one I've met in my life. An apex predator doesn't wake up one day and decide it is done hunting." Stock valuation aside -- you either believe or you don't, and as of this writing Bezos is clearly having a messianic moment -- "The Everything Store" is an excellent chronicle of Amazon's rise. In the book -- and I don't mean this as a criticism -- Bezos comes off as the lead character in an Ayn Rand novel. A real world John Galt or Hank Rearden, with an e-commerce twist. The immigrant step-father who taught him the value of hard work... the maternal grandfather who instilled a deep do-it-yourself attitude... the flashes of extraordinary competitiveness from an early age... the burning desire to conquer space... it all coalesces into a sense of destiny (though, of course, a good portion of this could be narrative hindsight). Steve Jobs was the last great business figure, the hero entrepreneur of our time. I think that, reputationally, Bezos will ultimately surpass Jobs -- leave him in the dust, really -- because while, what Bezos is doing is unsexy, the fundamental nature of "hard problems" that Amazon approaches and solves (on its way to eating global retail) is adding to the free market knowledge base at a tremendous evolutionary rate. One of the most intriguing and powerful things about Amazon, in my opinion, is the sheer logistical prowess of what they do behind the scenes. The coordination of supply chains, manpower, algorithmic decision making, and countless other unseen problems they have had to solve on the way to delivering "everything" in a two-day shipping window is off-the-charts impressive. To a certain degree Apple accomplished a similar behind-the-scenes feat, in that Apple's masterful ability to implement and coordinate global supply chains made it the most profitable company in the world for a time. But Apple's breathtaking profit margins always had a slightly ephemeral feel to them. You knew that someone (like Samsung or Google's Android) would eventually come along and take a bite of the Apple so to speak... whereas with Bezos' strategy, staking out the hard, grinding, low-nutrient territory of thin margins, the next competitor is going to have to get bloody in the toughest octagon of all (logistics and scale). As Bezos likes to say, "Your margin is my opportunity," which should scare the hell out of any large retailer, perhaps save Wal-Mart (and maybe even Wal-Mart too). Those who doubt Amazon's business model (myself among them in the past) have been prone to use the "switch flip" criticism, e.g. bullish investors assume Amazon will one day be able to "flip a switch" and become profitable. But I agree with Eugene Wei that this is an overly simplistic characterization of a more subtle process. In reality, Amazon is less like a company with one switch to flip and more like one with tens of thousands of individual switches, each of which can be incrementally adjusted to swing from loss to profit when the time is right. This seems far less fantastical when you picture thousands upon thousands of instances where, say, a 2% margin mark-up creates profit where previously there was break-even, and/or a simple slowdown in the prodigious rate of ongoing capital expenditure spending lets more cash flow spill over into the profit column. As for the prodigious capital expenditures, Amazon's most recent quarterly revenue figure, as of this writing, was roughly $17 billion. Bezos no doubt foresees the day when that quarterly number will hit $100 billion. On the way there, it only makes sense for him to exploit every inch of leeway he can get from Wall Street -- in terms of taking all the money and opportunity he can for long-term investment -- with the goal of scaling up the infrastructure to serve and support an order-of-magnitude larger sales base. If investors get loopy with their valuation assessments in the meantime, so be it. The vision is the thing for Bezos... just as it has always been. But getting back to "The Everything Store," my favorite thing about this book was the brutally honest nature of the flaws and the messiness of Amazon's evolution (and the evolution of Bezos himself) in the first 5-10 years or so of the company's existence. Through an excellent weave of facts, narrative anecdotes and storytelling, you get a clear picture of how Amazon surged out of the gate in the late 1990s, and then almost choked to death on hundreds of millions of dollars worth of bad acquisitions it made with "bubble money." Many dumb mistakes were made, some deservedly fatal... but Amazon survived them all, and managed to learn from them too. The evolution of Bezos as a CEO is fully apparent as well. While those who ponder Bezos today are likely to assume he stepped on the world's stage as a wise genius fully formed, in actuality he picked up many of his strong core beliefs along the course of Amazon's existence, learning through intense study of rivals and mentors from afar, like D.E. Shaw (early on) and Sam Walton and Jim Sinegal of Costco. The book is really a gift for entrepeneurs and business builders of the new generation -- like myself, ahem cough cough -- in the manner it lays bare the luck, the guts, and the serious mistakes that are inevitably made on the way to forming a world-class enterprise. The other thing that really came through is the sheer ruthlessness of Bezos. (No doubt this is what got Mackenzie Bezos riled up -- what spouse wants to see their husband portrayed as a tyrant?) But as the book points out, there is a reason why so many of the great builders in tech -- Gates, Ellison, Jobs and so on -- all had that same ruthless character to them. Building and scaling a world-dominating business is hard. As in really, really hard. When you are trying do something on that kind of scale, with that level of competitiveness, you are not just fighting against cut-throat competitors. You are also fighting against entropy and mediocrity, that pull of ordinary results, ordinary outcome (as opposed to extraordinary) that holds back every ambitious endeavor in the same manner the NASA shuttle is held back by gravity. It takes something special to get off the launching pad, let alone into orbit. The fact that Bezos can be extremely ruthless, even cold-blooded, in pursuit of his vision, will not gain extra points with much of his audience. (No doubt a reason Amazon itself wants to tone that side down.) But investors should be glad for this trait, and it's a trait that benefits capitalism on the whole too. When a strong player legitimately uses skill and efficiency to best a weaker player in the marketplace, costs are lowered as such that customers benefit, and other businesses can learn from the strong player's pioneering example. The final chapters of the book showed Amazon at its most ruthless by far. I had no idea the level of wargame strategy that had occurred in the purchase of Zappos. The Quidsi (diapers.com) acquisition was simultaneously even more brilliant and brutal. You do not, not, not want to be in head-to-head competition with Amazon. It is here where I stop and whisper a small prayer of thanks to the free market gods that my own career path does not involve selling commodity-type retail products. I had reason to examine my own motives as to why I enjoyed this book so much. I am a trader, not a retailer. While I have plans to lead and scale a business to large (perhaps even very large) size, it has nothing to do with traditional retail really. So why was this book so fascinating? Perhaps for the sheer cultural value of what Bezos represents and what he has accomplished. Here is a guy who started out smart, talented and exceptionally bold, and had the chutzpah to act on a wildly ambitious vision and see it through every step of the way. Learning and stumbling as he went, sometimes screwing up royally, but always pulling in the errors and coming back from the brink... having laid the architecture more than a dozen years ago to sustain a vision ten times bigger (or maybe even 100 times). The broader inspirational lesson from the Amazon story, I think, is the reaffirmation of what's possible when motivated dreamers decide to work harder, work smarter, and break traditional molds all at the same time. You really can execute on a compelling vision. You really can get a team together and, with the help of that team, accomplish a hundred or a thousand times more than you ever could running solo. You really can practice patience and boldness -- no coincidence "bold" is one of Bezos' favorite words -- and in so doing apply an Art-of-War like strategic nous to flanking and beating your rivals. Big and exciting things can be done in this world.

So, I just finished reading "The Everything Store" by Brad Stone. I am not a fan of elaborate and long-winded reviews about whether a book is worth reading or not. I'll make it easy for you - this one is. It's a good read as a business book, as a tech book, and it is helpful if you're interested in Seattle history. I'll go into more detail below if you're reading what the "self absorbed internet troll" Robby Delaware thinks.* If you're like most people who peruse reviews, I hope this helps. I was contemplating writing a too-cool-for-school review that mentioned the time I thought I ran into Bezos in Ballard on the sidewalk in back of the BofA building. But I didn't. ... Now for some of my self absorbed ramblings. This isn't what I liked about the book, more about what I found surprising. The author himself acknowledges that this is one of the first complete histories of the company, and I would wager that there will be an afterword to future releases of this book. I've been looking forward to the release this book for some time. I downloaded it as soon as it was released for Kindle. I began reading this book in a sort of unusual way. I began reading it by kind of keeping a mental checklist in my own mind. I was curious if the author, who has covered Amazon for a long time, would omit certain things. The book is clearly biased towards Amazon and Bezos - which isn't surprising and doesn't diminish the appeal of the book. Still, I couldn't help but think that portions of the book were clearly written by someone who wasn't familiar with Seattle culture and by someone who didn't quite view events the same way that many other people did. I took notes while reading the book, and here's a list of things that I found surprising about the book while I was reading it: I was very surprised that a number of relatively small controversies since 2008 didn't make it into this book. I believe that the absence of these stories is unfortunate, and won't help those seeking a full understanding of the company. Amazon, since the rise of social media, has become the source of a number of controversies that I like to call "Twitter worthy." Many of you may recall stories like Amazon Japan selling whale meat, or a pedophile self-publishing an e-book how-to guide, or the remote removal of Orwell books from Kindle readers for DRM reasons, or the deranking of Gay and Lesbian literature. While these stories in an of themselves aren't the kind of stories that are likely to make it on the front page of a newspaper like the Wall Street Journal, these stories will be remembered. One of the only times I ever saw a DRM issue discussed on television was a segment I watched on a cable news show in 2009 about the kid in Minnesota whose Orwell books (and notes) were remotely removed. Why are these stories important, and why do they matter for Amazon? It's simple, because Amazon has grown so large and so global, obscure controversies become easier to understand and even easier to pin on a single retailer. Plus, you've got to feed the twitter beast. Remember the gay/lesbian deranking scandal in 2009? Didn't a hacker do it? Didn't the hacker claim that pulling the urls of gay/lesbian themed books was very easy, and that used an automated script to flag each one as adult? Didn't the hacker claim that he did it for very specific political reasons, and that if you're going to do something like that for political reasons - it's only natural to target Amazon? You see what I'm getting at. There's always been little stories like this - but in an age of twitter and Drudge the smallest story about a holocaust themed board game that one, solitary, third party seller offered can blow up in a spectacular manner. That was the controversies - I was also a little dismayed by how little space was given to Amazon's overall role in the life of Seattle, and I was shocked by how little of a role the Nisqually earthquake played in the narrative of the story. Why is the Nisqually earthquake important? Well, first off, the book claims the earthquake measure 6.9 on the richter scale. I don't believe that's correct - it measured 6.8. Why quibble over something so minor? I believe, strongly, that when future writers look back at the history of Seattle and Amazon's role in city life, the Ash Wednesday earthquake will play a much larger role than anyone who didn't experience it can imagine. That earthquake, which wasn't even that large, trashed a lot of Seattle's commercial real estate. It wasn't just Amazon's PacMed building - there are still boarded up buildings in the city of Seattle today. It is my belief that Paul Allen's South Lake Union project (which had been resounding defeated by Seattle voters during the "commons" debate years earlier) would not have proceeded if it had not been for that earthquake. Which company has dived head first into the transformation of South Lake Union? You guessed it, Amazon. I used to hanging out in the late 90s in South Lake Union. You know who occupied South Lake Union in the late 90s? Dudes who lived in vans, that's who. I went back to that same exact area in 2011 and the place was virtually unrecognizable. This isn't Apple building a UFO shaped HQ in a California suburb that already resembles a golf course combined with the set of "Logan's Run." The project to transform South Lake Union is like Robert Moses on ten lattes - a massive transformation of an urban environment - with Amazon at the center. I could go on about this. About how the book neglected to mention the 1999 WTO conference, when newspaper columnists berated that the "black clad" protestors were "raging against the dot-coms in their own backyard as much as they were against global trade." Or I could mention the recent Seattle Times series from the Blethen family that snootily noted that Bezos is the least engaged civic leader in a city that hosts the majority of America's richest people. But, I won't. You get the picture. I don't think the book covered Amazon's tangled relationship with the city that well. Two other small points - and then I'll stop yakking. The book mentioned Pelago (where I spent seven months as a contract tester) as having been engaged in a mobile search project. I don't think that description is entirely correct. Yes, search was important, and yes, i'd heard that somehow people had or hadn't been asked by Google to come aboard. Still, I remember being told (even as a lowly contract tester) several times - "you might have heard this start-up is about location, email notifications, and tying coupons and deals together. It's not about that. You're not getting it." What's the old saying that was used during the Clinton impeachment trial? "When they say it's not about the sex, it's about the sex!" Pelago might had a lot of energy focused on mobile search - but it was basically an attempt to be a location-based Groupon before Groupon. It's infrastructure fit so well with what Groupon wanted to do that it (surprise!) folded into Groupon. Why did the book make so little mention of the relationship between Groupon and Amazon? Seattle tech blogs like GeekWire are regularly filled with stories of Groupon poaching Amazon executives. Both the rise of Groupon and their quirky and endearing first CEO wouldn't have been possible without Amazon and the existence of Bezos. Wall Street wouldn't have allowed it. One final point before I get off my soapbox. The very end of the book mentions a woman who worked for seven months at Amazon trying to get the company to embrace social media more broadly. Talk about understatement of the year. I've been continually amazed at the haphazard and lazy approach of both Amazon and Apple to social shopping. If Bezos isn't a big fan of music (grabbing assorted cds off a shelf without even looking to see what they are) I'm going to guess he doesn't use or see much need in using social media for shopping - which is a shame, since the Kindle is such a perfect platform for doing this. The @Author program was a great idea - but with zero follow up. The twitter feed hasn't been updated since February. The purchase of Goodreads looks like buying your way out of the problem. Anyways, I could write more. Amazon's a fascinating company, that I have a variety of opinions about. Purchase this book. You won't regret it. *You have to refer to yourself in the third person to be truly self absorbed.

"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." (p. 72) So commented an Amazon engineer in the late 1990s. I really like this book. Best corporate biography I ever have read. (Okay it beats Lee Iacocca's autobiography that I read in 1986.) Biographer Brad Stone, a veteran financial journalist and longtime observer of Amazon, conducted 300 interviews for this book -- a staggering sweep of research. It shows. His knowledge of Amazon culture comes across with an insider's familiarity but an outsider's objectivity. The narrative goes deep in places, and yet it bounces along, carried by personal quotes and anecdotes. It's darn interesting. The story is about Bezos the person and Amazon the business. It's rife with Bezo's uncanny vision, with allusions to how he got that way. Problems at Amazon come through too -- it's not all glory. Some problems are strategic in terms of product buying and selling, finances, and technical execution; and other problems concern Amazon's disquieting treatment of employees, suppliers, and smaller rivals in markets where Amazon wields major power. The story frequently gets personal looking at Jeff Bezos, but mercifully, the author stops just short of sensationalism or blind hero-worship or a masked publicity stunt for Amazon. The Everything Book is none of those things. Brad Stone's narrative admires Amazon's innovation and behemoth power build-up. He spends a lot of time on the first few years of the world wide web's emergence as a popular place to play, communicate, and shop. The narrative pauses briefly along the way at iconic cultural artifacts like Netscape's IPO in 1995. The book revivifies my days dialing up on my PC modem and using Netscape to browse Amazon and many other websites. Someday, that memory will be the stuff of a museum-goer's revelry or curiosity. The book strikes up that nostalgia right now, and that adds to the fun in the early chapters. The Amazon story launches in the mid-1990s when it was a family affair run by Bezos the now ex-financier and his wife, MacKenzie, out of a garage in Bellevue, Washington. Bezos "wanted to build he next Sears,'a lasting company that was a major force in retail." (p. 75). Would anyone now snicker at that? This is no ordinary garage hobby -- never was. We get a feel for the ground-level entrepreneurship too, where Bezos figured out how to elbow into a bookselling marketplace that was highly institutionalized, with relatively low profit margins. Ground-level entrepreneurship turns into "Jeff against the world," a cultural theme at Amazon, one executive reported years later. (p. 116) In an early example, Bezos risked industry resistance when he insisted on publishing customer reviews, whether favorable or unfavorable. Stone writes, "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..." (p. 24-25) "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." (p. 38) Stone displays the Amazon culture as bursting with creative tension and customer obsession that produces. Sometimes Amazon also missed, just narrowly, financial overreach and spinout. Do you remember the news stories in the late 90s about Amazon having not turned a profit after 16 quarters or something like that, despite a high volume of activity? And all the talk about Bezos insisting on playing a long game, buying and holding "waterfront property" on the internet, so that somebody else wouldn't get there first, while Amazon's business developed? This book shows all the expansionary fervor of those years, including a trove of corporate acquisitions and investments like Pets.com and Drugstore.com. Crucially, there came a turning point in 1999: "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." (p. 91) Amazon turned in its first profitable quarter in late 2001, seven years after its founding. While the accountants and Jeff fretted at the top over the financial pace, the reader of Stone's book gets a feel for the factory floor too -- an exciting whoosh of making history, and also, grueling work weeks: "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." (p. 46) Twice in the initial chapters, we hear about "Save Santa" campaigns involving the abandonment of what was left of personal and family life, in order to compensate for explosive holiday sales volume and staff under-capacity. So if you ever wondered how your order "click" got your goods shipped so quickly in the holiday crush: "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." (p. 94-95) If that sounds hard on employees, the Everything Store says yes, it is. "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." (p. 201) Another through-line is that, like the better-known Steve Jobs at Apple, Jeff Bezos had a passion for the customer experience and would tolerate nothing less from his subordinate managers: "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 was gone about ten months later. "(p. 113) Stone's book shows that I have been sheltered from all that in my place as a happy customer. I'll be more sympathetic next time Amazon delivers their customarily fine service. While I find it disconcerting to hear grueling tales of woe inside Amazon's walls, the fact remains that as a customer, I have been an Amazon enthusiast. That makes this book all the more interesting for me. I have never worked at Amazon, nor invested there, nor do I know anyone who did. But I have appreciated Amazon for more than a decade. When Rupert Murdoch bought the Wall Street Journal, I fretted; but when Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, I thought hmmm, this could get interesting. That's how I felt as the book unfolded, and I was not disappointed. Further, the Audible.com version is perfectly performed. I recommended it to a business associate already on day one, when I was only a few chapters in. Speaking of day one, I quite enjoyed Stone's recitation on the door to Jeff Bezos's office: "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" (p. 9)

The Everything Store is a well written book by Brad Stone that describes the growth of Amazon through its trials and tribulations under the disciplined genius of Jeff Bezos. Mr. Bezos established his uncompromising and firm strategic business plan to harness the internet as the vehicle to revolutionize business, with focus on delivering the highest value to the consumer. The book describes the brilliant tactics used to accomplish his business strategic plan and the hurdles he faced, but successfully overcame, in order to accomplish his business plan. The book is a tremendous lesson in ability to stay focussed on objectives while remaining flexible and creative, and adaptable to challenges and change. Jeff Bezos demonstrates the single mindedness of purpose that is a lesson to all those who set their goal to accomplish great things. Without question Brad Stones book on Amazon is one of the most informative and interesting books Ive read in years. I highly recommended the book. After major inroads into the book business through price cutting, automating service and reducing delivery costs and times, Amazon challenged historical manufacturers and retailers of a number of hard manufactured goods, including the North American higher margin business of jewelry, brand name tools, etc. bringing to the customer new opportunities to obtain quality products at reduced costs in a timely fashion. Jeff Benzos chose a strategy of selling large volumes at lower prices, facilitating market growth, and increased market share with positive cash flow cycles leading to market domination; which, in turn, provided strong negotiating position for facilitating Amazons further expansion and growth . Adding attractive new products at every opportunity. The book introduces the great challenge of the future-how internet retailers are going to deal with state policy initiatives to rebuild their defunct treasuries, by taxing goods and services sold in their states via the internet from outside their states. The potential impacts of state taxes on internet sales risks creating a nightmare of complexity through huge variation in state tax rates and strangling the innovation of internet marketing that has provided lower inflation and increased consumer satisfaction. Such taxation risks stifling mom and pop internet sites.While Amazon has some strategic tools such as establishing FC s in states introducing state taxes on their business as a short term solution, there may be a need to develop simpler and less expensive long term strategies to deal with state initiatives on taxation. Will this challenge Amazon staff to dig deep for new philosophical and strategic approaches to dealing with state and fed political power?. Will Amazon's control of markets or financial power provide them with the leverage to influence gvt tax authority and governments often unaccountable power?. What will be the impacts of government future tax policies on low capitalized internet businesses, historically the raw material of future growth of the digital paradigm. Stone's book invites thought as much as it provides interesting historical facts about Amazon. One thing is certain, if it is creativity, adaptability, negotiating skills, strategic business planning, or innovation, history has demonstrated that Amazon has the organization, staff skills and leadership to face the challenges whatever they may involve. The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon is a book that reads well, and provides new knowledge on business strategy in every chapter. A wonderfully entertaining read.

This is a well written business biography that includes many details about Amazon's growth. Brad Stone describes Jeff Bezos as a guy who just knew, from the very start, that he could do something that changed the way Americans bought things, and not just books. Bezos started on Wall Street as an investment banker, but he had the heart of an entreprenuer and knew when to jump at that astonishing innovation, the internet. Given the subject this book was destined to be a hit. Stone describes the way that many Amazon innovations came about including customer reviews, author and book rankings and fast shipping. He describes the early days of ordering and the painful growth that companies go through when they need more experienced talent, and must choose between the old employees who made them succeed and new employees who can help them grow. Bezos realized early on that he had a massive distribution challenge. To meet that challenge he hired the masters of distribultion...at Walmart. Its not always a pretty story, but its one that many business students will recognise--despite Bezos invention of a brand new business. I enjoyed this book as a business biography, but not as much as I expected to. What's missing is the magic, the crazy stories, the sheer fun of innovation. Amazon started in the book business, not home goods or auto parts but you wouldn't know it to read much of this book. Stone doesn't seem to have found many people with good stories to tell. Stone misses what made Amazon such a revelation and why the other websites could not compete. Amazon created not just a big bookstore, but a real online community bookstore. For the first time people who loved book shopping more than anything could do it from home. In 1998 Amazon was my home page. Why? I just loved browsing. I could not believe that I could do it from home. Millions of people, just like me, did the same thing. It seemed incredible, still does, that I could browse a website the way I browse in a bookstore. Not only that, I could have conversations with other booklovers about the books. Maybe Bezos loved that too. I have no idea because The Everything Store boils that kind of thing down to "caring about customers" and an "obsession with customer service." Its a shame. There was a lot more to Amazon's growth than customer service (fast delivery and a generous return policy) and good distribution, though those things were important. There was also the joy of being able to access thousand and thousands of books--and talk about them. For those addicted to the New York Times Book section Amazon was an undreamed of luxury. And once there was Kindle, the joy of being able to download sample after sample, to find the perfect book, just made everything better. Yes, I've bought all kinds of things through Amazon, clothing, appliances, cookware, even household goods for my child in college, but Amazon will always be a bookstore to me first. This is a good book, no question. But something tells me that the really great Jeff Bezos book, has yet to be written.

As a young boy I was fascinated by a bug; a water strider that was able to walk on water, was difficult to capture, and had strident ambitions to skitter to every remote corner of the ponds near my tiny home town. It seems to me, after reading Brad Stone's fascinating book "the everything store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon," that Bezos is the real life embodiment of that extraordinary creature. Stone has done his research. He has read innumerable books on discount retailing, human engineering, management principles, and similar subjects in his preparation for writing the book. He has included Jeff's own reading list at the end of the book, a diverse collection of subjects Bezos claims is integral to understanding Amazon's unorthodox ethic. With Bezos's approval, Stone has also interviewed many current and past employees of Amazon as well as innumerable Bezos friends and family members. The author's notes authenticate the sources for his material. According to Stone, Bezos maintains that he learns more from novels than nonfiction and, indeed, his direction of Amazon efforts seems unreal. His insistence on doing things his way despite advice and convention that would indicate he is on the wrong track seems to be the very essence of Amazon's success. He is stubborn, prickly, and sometimes bluntly rude but after the dust settles he stands undeniably as the top dog and correct in his direction. Amazon has emerged, through an undeniably rough odyssey, as the largest retail entity in history using innovative technology that seems to dwarf other companies' capabilities. The work environment at Amazon is not for the weak. Turnover is monumental. Bezos demands more than his executives can handle and is not generous with his praise or rewards. Where other companies offer generous employees perks such as lucrative stock and bonus programs, babysitting, employee gyms, free food, and free perking, Amazon has countered with anemic stock programs, explosive internal culture, a miserly parking program, no free food, lower pay, and tortuous working hours. Bezos turns a blind eye to the continuous turnover, knowing they always have a huge employment pool with people clamoring for jobs. Bezos fits into the mold of other famously irascible CEOs. He, along with Jobs, Gates, Ballmer, and Grove have all thrown monumental tantrums including spontaneous firing of employees, throwing phones and chairs, and screaming at under performing executives. Product managers suffer through constant micromanagement by Bezos, facing the possibility of being on the receiving end of one of his explosions. In the end, because of his creative genius and record of making the right choices, Amazon has created many millionaires among those who stuck it out. This book is an amazing look at the culture and inside workings of a notoriously secretive company. It features great insight into the dictums and principles of a company operating in rogue fashion that defies conventional practices and theories about manufacturing, personnel relations, and accounting. The single most dominating and cultural edict mandated by Jeff Bezos is that the customer is always right, above anything else that is practiced within the company. Based upon Amazon's success, it apparently works. Back to the bug. The water strider exists in a crowded community but yearns for freedom of movement. When things get too congested it reduces the crowd by either skimming to a new location or by cannibalization. I'm still amazed by the similarity to Jeff Bezos. Schuyler T Wallace Author of TIN LIZARD TALES

Brad Stone’s book “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon” is both a partial biography about the CEO and Founder Jeff Bezos, as well as, a historical narrative of the company and its rise to be the globally dominant company that Amazon is today. The book begins with a short prologue that speaks of an inquisitive and bright young boy who was put into a special program for children that were very intellectually gifted, and how that boy became the founder of one of the largest e-commerce/ technology giants of our age. The book begins with Bezos’ early years at D.E. Shaw, before he left to pursue his entrepreneurial goals to create a store that sold everything and could be done via the recently established Internet. The story continues on through the early ideas and formation of Amazon, the survival of the company in dot-com collapse due to Bezos’ brilliant innovation, and ends in 2012 with the introduction of the Kindle Fire. From beginning to end, this book kept me glued to my seat wanting to read more and for someone one who does not consider themselves to be a reader I was absolutely engaged in this book from cover to cover. The author made the book easy to read, and at a pace that explained in great detail the key players and events in Amazon and Bezos’ history, without being so fast that the reader felt like they may have missed something. I personally did not dislike anything about the book which was an great read, although I cannot say the same about some of the events that unfolded in part because of Bezos’ drive an unrelenting want to be the best at what he does. This book was read as part of an assignment for an entrepreneur course (, but when given a chance to I am taking at the University of Baltimore. I was originally assigned another book for this project but when I was given to switch books to read this, I jumped on the chance and was extremely glad that I did. As a regular Amazon customer and a Prime subscriber I have always been fascinated by Amazon. This book has a wealth of knowledge and insight into what makes a leader and company great. It illustrates the drive and passion that an entrepreneurs must have in order to succeed, with a never die attitude and the vision to look long-term. This book was brilliantly laid out, and whether you like Bezos’ or Amazon, by the end of this book you will come to see how a simple idea can turn into a multi-billion dollar a year company.

Brad Stone did a lot of research and the result is a glimpse into the history of one of the world's most exciting companies. More than 300 interviews with current and past employees -- myself included -- netted an intriguing collection of stories. More significantly, his book communicates an important set of business principles and a taste of the difficult decisions Jeff Bezos made along the way. I'm currently retired, but spent 10 years working alongside Jeff and the incredible team he assembled, so I have first-hand knowledge of much of the period the book covers. While I found it rather interesting, lots of stories are missing or just inaccurate. Brad painted a one-dimensional picture of Jeff as a ruthless capitalist. He completely missed his warmth, his humor, and his empathy -- all qualities abundantly present in the man. One of my favorite things about Jeff is his laugh. But Brad's quote from me implies exactly the opposite: "You can't misunderstand it," says Rick Dalzell, Amazon's former chief information officer, who says Bezos often wields his laugh when others fail to meet his lofty standards. "It's disarming and punishing. He's punishing you." Nothing could be farther from the truth. In actuality, Jeff's laugh is spontaneous, sincere, warm and endearing. It diffuses stressful situations. Clearly, Brad misunderstood me. The story of Jeff and Amazon is a fascinating one and deserves to be told in all its complexity. Even with the details this book contains, there's a whole lot more that's been left out, making this an incomplete and somewhat unbalanced telling of Jeff's and Amazon's story.