The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

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).

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.

style—leadership by example, augmented with a healthy dose of impatience—that was positively Bezosian in character.

“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 insisted that Amazon had to have a customer-friendly thirty-day-return policy, but it had no processes in place to handle returns;

“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,”

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.”

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.

“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.”