Sublime

No one at Benchmark was prepared to make a move on Adam,

“He has this fierce determination that blows your mind and was sometimes frightening, and still is.”

To the people of East Tremont, East Tremont was family. In its bricks were generations.

If one of his teammates was dogging it, he busted that teammate’s balls, and if one of his classmates or professors made a comment that seemed specious or incomplete, he said so. Not because he knew more than they did but because the clash of imperfect ideas was the only way for anyone, including himself, to learn and improve.

Even though the small team was going somewhere, they weren’t quite sure of their destination. “Larry didn’t have a plan,” says Hassan. “In research you explore something and see what sticks.”

Though immensely complicated, he was, in a fundamental way, simple, earthy. He believed in staying close to the action—in the fields with the workers, in the dives with the banana cowboys. You drink with a man, you learn what he knows. (“There is no problem you can’t solve if you understand your business from A to Z,” he said later.)

Where else but America could football flourish, America with its millions of fertile acres of corn, soy, and wheat, its lakes of dairy, its year-round gushers of fruits and vegetables, and such meats, that extraordinary pipeline of beef, poultry, seafood, and pork, feedlot gorged, vitamin enriched, and hypodermically immunized, humming factories of

Golf was like that, as cruel as a clubfoot.

Bezos never despaired over the mass exodus. One of his gifts, his colleagues said, was being able to drive and motivate his employees without getting overly attached to them personally.