The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

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 grea

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 be

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.

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.

“I don’t know if you guys don’t have high standards or if you just don’t know what you’re doing,”

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.

Within Amazon there is a term used to describe the top executives who get to implement Jeff Bezos’s best ideas: Jeff Bots.

“I thought it would be difficult and disruptive and I was skeptical that it was the right use of our resources,”

Amazon’s chief rivals, Apple and Google, are arguably better positioned in this burgeoning digital world and have considerably greater resources.