“We were just struggling to make it work on a whole host of

To everyone’s surprise, they all got swept up in a swift current. The first week after the official launch, they took $12,000 in orders and shipped $846 worth of books, according to Eric Dillon, one of Amazon’s original investors. The next week they took $14,000 in orders and shipped $7,000 worth of books. So they were behind from the get-go and

Then one of his deputies, a finance vice president named Greg Greeley, mentioned how airlines had segmented their customers into two groups—business people and recreational travelers—by reducing ticket prices for those customers who were willing to stay at their destination through a Saturday night. Greeley suggested doing the equivalent at Amazon.

One recurring trouble spot that year was the fulfillment center in McDonough, Georgia, a working-class city thirty miles south of Atlanta. In the heat of the tumultuous holiday season, McDonough—the source of the infamous Jigglypuff crisis of 1999—was regularly falling behind schedule. Its general manager, a once and future Walmart executive named

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

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.”

Inside Amazon, the pain endured over the previous seven years was paying off. Prime, the two-day shipping service, was an engine spinning the company’s flywheel ever faster. Amazon customers who joined Prime doubled, on average, their spending on the site, according to a person familiar with the company’s internal finances at the time.

Bezos, by now a multimillionaire, often made a deliberate show of getting his card punched or handing his free-drink credit to a colleague waiting in line next to him. Around that time, he also started traveling via a private plane, which he subleased from a local businessman. But whenever he flew with colleagues, he invariably declared, “The

“point of view is worth 80 IQ points”—a reminder that looking at things in new ways can enhance one’s understanding. “He went to school on everybody,” Minor says. “I don’t think there was anybody Jeff knew that he didn’t walk away from with whatever lessons he could.”