The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone Page A

that hiring only the best and brightest was key toAmazon’s success. For years he interviewed all potential hires himself and asked them for their SAT scores. “Every time we hire someone, he or she should raise the bar for the next hire, so that the overall talent pool is always improving,” he said, a recurring Jeffism. That approach caused plenty of friction. As Amazon grew, it badly needed additional manpower, and early employees eagerly recommended their friends, many of whom were as accomplished as they were. Bezos interrogated the applicants, lobbing the kind of improbable questions that were once asked at D. E. Shaw, like “How many gas stations are in the United States?” It was a test to measure the quality of a candidate’s thinking; Bezos wasn’t looking for the correct answer, only for the individual to demonstrate creativity by coming up with a sound way to derive a possible solution. And if the potential employees made the mistake of talking about wanting a harmonious balance between work and home life, Bezos rejected them.
    Paul Davis was incredulous. Amazon at the time was offering about sixty thousand a year in salary, stock options of questionable value, a meager health plan with a high deductible, and an increasingly frenetic work pace. “We would look at him and ask, How do you think you’re ever going to attract anyone with that kind of background to a company that has no revenue and that is not projected to have any kind of revenue?” Davis said. “I don’t see what the selling point is here!”
    Little by little, the CEO with the piercing laugh, thinning hair, and twitchy demeanor revealed his true self to his employees. He was unusually confident, more stubborn than they had originally thought, and he strangely and presumptuously assumed that they would all work tirelessly and perform constant heroics. He seemed to keep his ambitions and plans very close to the vest, not revealing much even to Kaphan.
    When his goals did slip out, they were improbably grandiose. Though the startup’s focus was clearly on books, Davis recalls Bezos saying he wanted to build “the next Sears,” a lasting company that was a major force in retail. Lovejoy, a kayaking enthusiast,remembers Bezos telling him that he envisioned a day when the site would sell not only books about kayaks but kayaks themselves, subscriptions to kayaking magazines, and reservations for kayaking trips—everything related to the sport.
    “I thought he was a little bit crazy,” says Lovejoy. “At the time we offered 1.5 million books. Only about 1.2 million of those you could actually order. The database came from Baker and Taylor and we had about forty books in the warehouse.”
    Bezos was also proving himself to be something of a spoilsport. That year the engineers rigged a database command, rwerich, to track the number of daily purchases as well as orders throughout the lifetime of the company. They obsessively watched those numbers grow—it was one of their pleasures amid the typically frenetic days. Bezos eventually told them to stop doing it, in part because it was putting too much strain on the servers. And when Amazon had its first five-thousand-dollar-order day and Lovejoy wanted to throw a party, Bezos rejected the idea. “There are a lot of milestones coming and that’s not the way I want to run things,” he said.
    By early 1996, the young company was outgrowing its space in the Color Tile building. Employees were jammed into three small rooms, four door-desks in each, and the basement warehouse was overflowing with books. Kaphan, Davis, and Bezos piled into a car and went looking for a larger office in industrial areas around Lake Washington. Bezos emerged from every building to proclaim the space too small, Davis recalls. He wanted to accommodate whatever came for the company down the road.
    That March, Amazon finally moved to a larger building with a more spacious warehouse a few blocks away. The new office was