Jeff doesn’t focus on margins. He’s more focused on free cash flow—that is, the cash that a company is able to generate after laying out the money required to maintain or expand its asset base. Why? Because he believes the Internet’s potential for growth is gargantuan and still fundamentally unexploited.

But Jeff felt that if we tried to manage digital media as a part of the physical media business, it would never be a priority. The bigger business carried the company after all, and it would always get the most attention. Steve told me that getting digital right was highly important to Jeff, and he wanted Steve to focus on nothing else. Steve wante

In 1995, not long after Amazon opened, Jeff Bezos and his team engaged MPI. In that role, MPI worked with Amazon to make connections within the publishing industry, enabling the new company to better understand how the industry operated and how to get on publishers’ radar as a serious new account.