new day.
In retrospect it seems so foolish—many will read this and wonder how grown men and women could get so worked up over a website that sells books. It seems impossible that we could have believed that it would change the world, but the evidence was all around us: the television coverage, the magazine and newspaper articles our trainers showed us in endless succession. Immersed day after day in the language of success we became heated and insistent to everyone who asked, letting people know that the digital revolution was happening right now. Quick, get on board before it’s too late!
There was the Old World and the New World, and a war was coming in which Amazon would play a vital role, vanquishing bad, brick-and-mortar corporations. We began to believe that by supporting Amazon.com we would be helping to crush chains and monopolies and faceless bureaucracies. We were hopelessly naïve.
Overwhelmingly white, pale, doughy, and directionless before arriving at Amazon.com, we now talked incessantly about what books we were reading, and in the process discovered that our new colleagues were very well read, well spoken, highly educated. There were anime lovers, film critics of obscure Japanese horror pictures, scholars of Middle English literature, botanists. Pick your flavor of obscurity. We didn’t know it at the time because we were all too well read, but we had another common denominator: we all wanted desperately to believe in something.
“Jean-Michele?”
“Yes?” We were in bed.
“I was wondering if you wanted to go to the Amazon picnic this weekend.”
Jean-Michele cleared her throat, stalling for time. “Ah … you want to go to the Amazon company picnic?”
“It’ll be really cool—they’re going to have thirty different kegs, with a different microbrew in each one, and the Velcro wall thing, and Jeff will be in a dunking tank along with David Risher.”
She counted out her points on her hands: “One, you never like to go to company picnics—no one does. Two, we’re supposed to be performing at a fundraiser. Three—who the hell is David Risher?”
“He’s a vice president of operations.” As soon as I said it, I knew I was way out of my league.
“You want to meet a vice president?”
“Well, I wouldn’t mind. I mean, he’s a person, too—you shouldn’t judge him so narrowly because of his success. Success is something we create.”
“Michael, you aren’t even hired yet. You’re still a trainee.”
“I know.”
“You want to go to a picnic with a company that hasn’t hired you?”
“Yes.” My voice was small.
Jean-Michele sighed and turned on her side. I wonder what I sounded like, there in the dark making my small confession. “We can talk about it in the morning,” she said. But we never did.
That I was actually able to believe in something created in me an uneasy mixture of pride and embarrassment. I think a lot of people my age feel similarly. We grew up immersed in irony—most of my life feels like someone else’s movie unfurling scene by scene as I watch. I wanted to take control of the camera and finally do something that would matter. The degree in aesthetics probably didn’t help, either.
All this detachment had made me hungry for the fruit of earnestness. I wanted to pick up an apple and know it was an apple and not some abstracted, twice-removed notion of an apple. I wanted an end to endless doubt and ironic equivocation. I wanted to feel as if I was entirely alive, making a difference, which is a blasphemy in the modern world—no one gets to be alive at their job. Looking back, I realize I would have been a perfect candidate for the Peace Corps, the Boy Scouts, or a fundamentalist branch of the Kiwanis Club if Amazon hadn’t found me first.
I can’t tell you how exciting, how stirring it was to be in the thick of something so deadly earnest, to be given permission to invest myself in a group. These people, my coworkers, were serious about Amazon, serious about our work, and everything was on the line. I’d never been in a group of hardworking people who all believed in the same thing—I had grown up Catholic. This was communism, but you got rich doing it, and that made it OK.
And that was the hook, you see: just as the disaffected intellectuals of ages past took their grievances and their angst to the Communist party, so now we took ours to capitalism. Whether you’re talking Lenin or McDonald’s the fever remains the same; if a leader can find the language needed to awaken people’s zeal, he or she can receive blind devotion in return. You cannot buy that with money; although the lure of unrealized stock served as the spark for Amazon, it wasn’t the essence. The essence was Jeff.
From beginning to end Amazon.com has always been a one-man operation. A one-Jeff operation. We may have been coached morning, noon, and night to believe that each and every one of us was equal, but the moment you met Jeff you realized that it simply wasn’t true. He was a god, the still point around which the Amazonian world revolved—always has been, always will be, amen. Religions have their popes and prophets, and we had Jeff.
For a god, he was a plain guy. Of medium height and slight build, he resembled nothing so much as a bright and studious elf—Santa’s second lieutenant. He had wispy brown hair, looked his thirtyish age, and was almost invariably dressed in a blue shirt, khaki pants, and nice shoes. In a sense it had become his uniform, and then by imitation the uniform of the dot-com movement.
Jeff’s luminous brown eyes, huge and dewy, can hardly be confined to his face. They gesture. They leap out. They beckon. It is not an act—he is brilliant, deeply charismatic, and totally genuine. He is gentle, a rare trait in humans, particularly CEOs. You would trust him with your children; when you got home he would have taught them how to sequence DNA and how the kitchen sink disposal really works. I have never had a kinder or more human employer before or since—Jeff is amazingly dedicated to connecting with everyone in his company.
Workers at Amazon passed tantalizing details about Jeff back and forth like trading cards:
• Jeff grew up in Cuba and escaped to America as a young man. (False)
• Jeff repaired windmills as a teenager. (True)
• Jeff spent some of his childhood in a bubble due to an autoimmune deficiency. (False)
• Jeff used to brand, vaccinate, and castrate cattle. (True)
• Jeff started his own school for gifted middle-school children while in high school. (True)
• Jeff trained himself to have photographic recall. (False)
• Jeff loves The Lord of the Rings and Dune. (True)
• Jeff is worth billions but rents an apartment and drives a Toyota hatchback. (True)
• Jeff worked in investment banking before starting Amazon.com. (True)
• Jeff only sleeps three hours a night. (False)
• Jeff still responds to email at his public address: [email protected]. (True)
The last fact is the one that made the greatest impression on me early in my training. It tasted so wonderful in my mouth, like when as a child I thought that Santa hung out at the Pole all day reading our letters and taking notes. I asked a coworker about the email thing in the break room between sessions.
“Hey, msmith.” His surname was Smith, but shortly after arriving at Amazon we started referring to everyone by their login—the abbreviated version of their name used to log into the network. I was mdaisey, he was msmith. Pronounced emsmith. Some names worked, some names didn’t, but it could be addictive—if you started doing it for some you found yourself doing it for lots of people. It totally took over my speech patterns.
“Yeah?”