“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.”

To his surprise, his former D. E. Shaw colleague didn’t want to hire him full-time.

Driven and often intimidating to underlings, Covey became an intellectual foil to Bezos and a key architect of Amazon’s early expansion.

“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,”

Amazon had battled and mastered chaos; eBay was engulfed by it.

different levels in McDonough,” he says. “We were struggling to recruit the right leaders, and struggling to get enough people to work there.”

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.

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.

Bezos had now accomplished many of his early goals, like turning Amazon into the primary storefront on the Web.