Book Review: “The Everything Store”

Amazon’s Hiring Practices

• “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,’ he said.”
• “If the potential employees made the mistake of talking about wanting a harmonious balances between work and home life, Bezos rejected them.”
• “Bar raisers at Amazon--the program still exists today--are designated employees who have proven themselves to be intuitive recruiters of talent...At least one anointed bar raiser would participate in every interview process and would have the power to veto a candidate who did not meet the goal of raising the company’s overall hiring bar. Even the hiring manager was unable to override a bar raiser’s veto.”

Characteristics of Jeff Bezos

• Continuous Learner: “He went to school on everybody. I don’t think there was anybody Jeff knew that he didn’t walk away from with whatever lessons he could.” -Halsey Minor
• Hard-Working: “Bezos seemed to love the idea of the nonstop workday; he kept a rolled-up sleeping bag in his office and some egg-crate foam on his windowsill in case he needed to bunk down for the night.”
• Calm and Confident: “Through it all (failed acquisitions, multi-million dollar losses, failed investments in other companies), Bezos never showed anxiety or appeared to worry about the wild swings in public sentiment.” “I have never seen anyone so calm in the eye of a storm. Ice water runs through his veins.” -Mark Britto
• Customer-Obsessed: “There are two kinds of retailers: there are those folks who work to figure how to charge more, and there are companies that work to figure how to charge less, and we are going to be the second, full-stop.” -Jeff Bezos
• Technically-Minded: “Bezos had dreams of becoming an inventor like Thomas Edison, so his mother patiently shuttled him back and forth and back again to a local Radio Shack to buy parts for a succession of gadgets: homemade robots, hovercrafts, a solar-powered cooker, and devices to keep his siblings out of his room.”
• Competitive: “Bezos’s high-school friends say he was ridiculously competitive. He collected awards for best science student at his school for three years and best math student for two, and he won a statewide science fair for an entry concerning the effects of a zero-gravity environment on the housefly. At some point, he announced to his classmates his intention to become the valedictorian of his 680-student class, and he crammed his schedule with honors courses to bolster his rank. ‘The race [for the rest of the students] then became to be number two,’ says Josh Weinstein. ‘Jeff decided he wanted it and he worked harder than anybody else.’”
• Brilliant: “He had this unbelievable ability to be incredibly intelligent about things he had nothing to do with, and he was totally ruthless about communicating it.” -Bruce Jones, former Amazon VP
• Clear and Consistent: “Jeff is very clear and simple about his goals, and the way he articulates them makes it easy for others, because it’s consistent.” -Danny Hillis, friend of Bezos

Bezos’s Vision

• “There is so much stuff that has yet to be invented. There’s so much new that’s going to happen. People don’t have any idea yet how impactful the Internet is going to be that this is still Day 1 in such a big way.” -Jeff Bezos
• “We still powered through (various e-reader setbacks) because Jeff is not deterred by short-term setbacks.” -Jeff Wilke, regarding Jeff Bezos
• “You have to start somewhere. You climb the top of the first tiny hill and from there you see the next hill.” -Jeff Bezos