The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

Within Amazon there is a term used to describe the top executives who get to implement Jeff Bezos’s best ideas: Jeff Bots.

Managers in departments of fifty people or more are required to “top-grade” their subordinates along a curve and must dismiss the least effective performers.

“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.”

Three senior executives recall meeting privately in a conference room that year to write a list of all of Bezos’s successes and failures on a whiteboard. The latter column included Auctions, zShops, the investments in other dot-coms, and most of Amazon’s acquisitions. It was far longer than the first column, which at that time appeared to be limite

There was a superstitious belief that his paw tap on the keyboard was required to launch a new feature, and even today, though Rufus is long gone, there’s a building named for him on Amazon’s Seattle campus.

Hsieh felt strongly that everyone, even senior executives, should take below-market compensation to work there because of the great internal culture the company offered.

These teams would be independently set loose on Amazon’s biggest problems. They would likely compete with one another for resources and sometimes duplicate their efforts, replicating the Darwinian realities of surviving in nature.

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

But when Warren Jenson asked Bezos if he should put the flywheel in his presentations to analysts, Bezos asked him not to. For now, he considered it the secret sauce.

“recognized that a general manager was a difficult job and he made you feel you were in a lifelong club,”