Sublime

Bezos insisted and said he wanted the same deal terms as other early investors. Shriram said he would try to get it done. He later went back to the Google founders and argued that Bezos’s insight and budding celebrity could help the fledgling firm, and they agreed. Brin and Page flew to Seattle and spent an hour with Bezos at Amazon’s offices talki

Bezos felt that hiring only the best and brightest was key to Amazon’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,”

Wilke promised Bezos that he would reliably generate cost savings each year just by reducing defects and increasing productivity.

At the meeting, Donahoe paid his respects to the e-commerce pioneer. “I am always going to be less cool than you,” he told Bezos. “I have huge admiration for what you’ve done.” Bezos said that he did not view Amazon and eBay as fighting a winner-take-all battle. “Our job is to grow the e-commerce pie and if we do that there is going to be room for

make this new kind of advertising more efficient, Amazon devised one of the Web’s first automated search-ad-buying systems, naming it Urubamba, after a river in Peru, a tributary of the Amazon. But Bezos was wary of helping Google develop tools that it might then extend to Amazon’s rivals. “Treat Google like a mountain. You can climb the mountain,

Jeff doesn’t focus on margins. He’s more focused on free cash flow—that is, the cash that a company is able to generate after laying out the money required to maintain or expand its asset base. Why? Because he believes the Internet’s potential for growth is gargantuan and still fundamentally unexploited.

Jeff Bezos had instituted a culture of succinct and thoughtful memo writing as a way of forcing his company to engage with ideas rather than personalities.