Read Online The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Brad Stone
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twenty-three-year-old warehouse temp with tattoos of Chinese characters on his forearms, began working at Amazon, and he would stay with the company in various roles for fourteen years. He started his typical day at four thirty in the morning, biked to work and let in the deliveryman from Ingram at six thirty, and usually stayed past midnight, packing furiously and answering customer e-mails before drinking a few beers in the warehouse and biking back home. “The dominant image in my mind is just… running. And scads of cardboard and packing material flying,” he says.
Smith worked so tirelessly over one span of eight months that he forgot about his light blue Peugeot station wagon that he’d parked near his apartment in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. The fate of the car would later be revealed in the piles of mail that stacked up inside his front door. When he finally opened the mail in that pile, Smith found, in succession, several parking tickets, a notice that the car had been towed, a few warnings from the towing company, and finally a letter informing him that the vehicle had been sold at auction for seven hundred dollars. He still owed eighteen hundreddollars on his car loan, and the incident dinged his credit rating. He doesn’t recall caring much at the time.
“Life just stopped,” Smith says. “You were stuck in amber. But inside that amber was frenetic activity that no one else could see.”
Eric and Susan Benson didn’t come to Amazon alone every day—they brought their dog Rufus, a Welsh corgi. Because the two would be working such long hours, Bezos had promised they could always bring Rufus to the office. That was no problem in the SoDo buildings, but then Amazon moved yet again, late in the summer of 1996, to a building downtown, and the company had to write Rufus into the lease with the new landlord. The dog, an amiable presence who liked to park himself in meetings and occasionally suffered gastric distress from being overfed by employees, became the startup’s mascot. 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. (Bezos, it seems, has a nostalgic streak; one building is called Fiona, the code name of the original Kindle, and another is Obidos, which is what Shel Kaphan dubbed the company’s original computer infrastructure, after a town in Brazil where the tributaries of the Amazon River converge.)
Amazon was now nearing a hundred and fifty full-time employees, less than a third of whom were in the warehouse. A few months later, the warehouse also moved, to a larger, ninety-three-thousand-square-foot facility on Dawson Street in South Seattle (another current Amazon building: Dawson). The new downtown digs weren’t exactly high-class. Amazon took over the Columbia Building on Second Avenue in a seedy downtown neighborhood full of strip joints that was two blocks from touristy Pike Place Market. On the day the company moved in, a homeless man who’d been sleeping near the front door showed employees how to use their new key cards to gain access to the lobby.
The building itself was across the street from a needle-exchange program and methadone clinic and a wig store that attracted thetransvestite trade. Kay Dangaard, a New Zealander who had moved through careers as a reporter and an advertising executive, joined the company as its first publicist, and from her office in the new building, she could stare out the window across the alley and into the apartment of a prostitute who practiced her trade early every evening under a flickering, low-wattage lamp.
Parking was scarce and expensive. Nicholas Lovejoy suggested to Bezos that the company subsidize bus passes for employees, but Bezos scoffed at the idea. “He didn’t want employees to leave work to catch the bus,” Lovejoy says. “He wanted them to have their cars
Smith worked so tirelessly over one span of eight months that he forgot about his light blue Peugeot station wagon that he’d parked near his apartment in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. The fate of the car would later be revealed in the piles of mail that stacked up inside his front door. When he finally opened the mail in that pile, Smith found, in succession, several parking tickets, a notice that the car had been towed, a few warnings from the towing company, and finally a letter informing him that the vehicle had been sold at auction for seven hundred dollars. He still owed eighteen hundreddollars on his car loan, and the incident dinged his credit rating. He doesn’t recall caring much at the time.
“Life just stopped,” Smith says. “You were stuck in amber. But inside that amber was frenetic activity that no one else could see.”
Eric and Susan Benson didn’t come to Amazon alone every day—they brought their dog Rufus, a Welsh corgi. Because the two would be working such long hours, Bezos had promised they could always bring Rufus to the office. That was no problem in the SoDo buildings, but then Amazon moved yet again, late in the summer of 1996, to a building downtown, and the company had to write Rufus into the lease with the new landlord. The dog, an amiable presence who liked to park himself in meetings and occasionally suffered gastric distress from being overfed by employees, became the startup’s mascot. 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. (Bezos, it seems, has a nostalgic streak; one building is called Fiona, the code name of the original Kindle, and another is Obidos, which is what Shel Kaphan dubbed the company’s original computer infrastructure, after a town in Brazil where the tributaries of the Amazon River converge.)
Amazon was now nearing a hundred and fifty full-time employees, less than a third of whom were in the warehouse. A few months later, the warehouse also moved, to a larger, ninety-three-thousand-square-foot facility on Dawson Street in South Seattle (another current Amazon building: Dawson). The new downtown digs weren’t exactly high-class. Amazon took over the Columbia Building on Second Avenue in a seedy downtown neighborhood full of strip joints that was two blocks from touristy Pike Place Market. On the day the company moved in, a homeless man who’d been sleeping near the front door showed employees how to use their new key cards to gain access to the lobby.
The building itself was across the street from a needle-exchange program and methadone clinic and a wig store that attracted thetransvestite trade. Kay Dangaard, a New Zealander who had moved through careers as a reporter and an advertising executive, joined the company as its first publicist, and from her office in the new building, she could stare out the window across the alley and into the apartment of a prostitute who practiced her trade early every evening under a flickering, low-wattage lamp.
Parking was scarce and expensive. Nicholas Lovejoy suggested to Bezos that the company subsidize bus passes for employees, but Bezos scoffed at the idea. “He didn’t want employees to leave work to catch the bus,” Lovejoy says. “He wanted them to have their cars
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