Read Online The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Brad Stone
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there so there was never any pressure to go home.”
That fall, the company focused on customizing the site for each visitor, just as Bezos had promised his original investors it would. Its first attempt relied on software developed by a firm called Firefly Network, an offshoot of the MIT Media Lab. The feature, which Amazon called Bookmatch, required customers to rate a few dozen books and then generated recommendations based on their tastes. The system was slow and crashed frequently, and Amazon found that customers were reluctant to go through the extra effort of evaluating books.
So Bezos suggested that the personalization team develop a much simpler system, one that made recommendations based on books that customers had already bought. Eric Benson took about two weeks to construct a preliminary version that grouped together customers who had similar purchasing histories and then found books that appealed to the people in each group. That feature, called Similarities, immediately yielded a noticeable uptick in sales and allowed Amazon to point customers toward books that they might not otherwise have found. Greg Linden, an engineer who worked on the project, recalls Bezos coming into his office, getting down on his hands and knees, and joking, “I’m not worthy.”
Similarities eventually displaced Bookmatch and became the seed that would grow into Amazon’s formidable personalization effort. Bezos believed that this would be one of the insurmountableadvantages of e-commerce over its brick-and-mortar counterparts. “Great merchants have never had the opportunity to understand their customers in a truly individualized way,” he said. “E-commerce is going to make that possible.” 13
As the company and its technologies evolved, one person was having a ridiculously good time: Shel Kaphan. He was forty-three years old and had led the remarkable effort to hack Bezos’s vision into existence, completely buying into the gospel of a bookstore with limitless shelf space that spread knowledge to all corners of the earth. He was the mother hen of the technology systems: during the move to the Pecos Pit building, he put the company’s two servers, dubbed Bert and Ernie, into the back of his Acura Integra and drove them over there himself.
Kaphan had taped a fortune-cookie message to the PC monitor on his desk. It read Let no one cause you to alter your code.
Kaphan and Bezos occasionally took walks around the city to discuss the business and Kaphan’s concerns about technical issues and future plans. On one walk, Kaphan asked Bezos why, now that they had accomplished some of their earliest goals, he was so bent on rapid expansion. “When you are small, someone else that is bigger can always come along and take away what you have,” Bezos told him. “We have to level the playing field in terms of purchasing power with the established booksellers.”
One thing was bothering Kaphan around that time. He had enough experience with technology startups to know that the arrival of venture capitalists usually coincided with an influx of new, high-powered executives. He walked into Bezos’s office that year and wondered aloud, “We’re growing pretty quickly now. Are you going to replace me?”
Bezos didn’t waver. “Shel, the job is yours as long as you want it.”
In early 1997, Mark Breier, a former executive at Cinnabon and one of those new executives Kaphan had anticipated, invited his department to his Bellevue home for a day of meetings. That afternoon, Amazon’s marketing vice president introduced employees to a gamecalled broomball. Breier’s father had been an engineer at IBM in Bethesda and had seen the game played on ice during trips to IBM’s offices in Canada. In Breier’s land-based version, players swatted a kickball on the lawn with brooms and other random implements from his garage.
It seemed like goofy fun, but there was an undercurrent of intense competition. In other words, it perfectly
That fall, the company focused on customizing the site for each visitor, just as Bezos had promised his original investors it would. Its first attempt relied on software developed by a firm called Firefly Network, an offshoot of the MIT Media Lab. The feature, which Amazon called Bookmatch, required customers to rate a few dozen books and then generated recommendations based on their tastes. The system was slow and crashed frequently, and Amazon found that customers were reluctant to go through the extra effort of evaluating books.
So Bezos suggested that the personalization team develop a much simpler system, one that made recommendations based on books that customers had already bought. Eric Benson took about two weeks to construct a preliminary version that grouped together customers who had similar purchasing histories and then found books that appealed to the people in each group. That feature, called Similarities, immediately yielded a noticeable uptick in sales and allowed Amazon to point customers toward books that they might not otherwise have found. Greg Linden, an engineer who worked on the project, recalls Bezos coming into his office, getting down on his hands and knees, and joking, “I’m not worthy.”
Similarities eventually displaced Bookmatch and became the seed that would grow into Amazon’s formidable personalization effort. Bezos believed that this would be one of the insurmountableadvantages of e-commerce over its brick-and-mortar counterparts. “Great merchants have never had the opportunity to understand their customers in a truly individualized way,” he said. “E-commerce is going to make that possible.” 13
As the company and its technologies evolved, one person was having a ridiculously good time: Shel Kaphan. He was forty-three years old and had led the remarkable effort to hack Bezos’s vision into existence, completely buying into the gospel of a bookstore with limitless shelf space that spread knowledge to all corners of the earth. He was the mother hen of the technology systems: during the move to the Pecos Pit building, he put the company’s two servers, dubbed Bert and Ernie, into the back of his Acura Integra and drove them over there himself.
Kaphan had taped a fortune-cookie message to the PC monitor on his desk. It read Let no one cause you to alter your code.
Kaphan and Bezos occasionally took walks around the city to discuss the business and Kaphan’s concerns about technical issues and future plans. On one walk, Kaphan asked Bezos why, now that they had accomplished some of their earliest goals, he was so bent on rapid expansion. “When you are small, someone else that is bigger can always come along and take away what you have,” Bezos told him. “We have to level the playing field in terms of purchasing power with the established booksellers.”
One thing was bothering Kaphan around that time. He had enough experience with technology startups to know that the arrival of venture capitalists usually coincided with an influx of new, high-powered executives. He walked into Bezos’s office that year and wondered aloud, “We’re growing pretty quickly now. Are you going to replace me?”
Bezos didn’t waver. “Shel, the job is yours as long as you want it.”
In early 1997, Mark Breier, a former executive at Cinnabon and one of those new executives Kaphan had anticipated, invited his department to his Bellevue home for a day of meetings. That afternoon, Amazon’s marketing vice president introduced employees to a gamecalled broomball. Breier’s father had been an engineer at IBM in Bethesda and had seen the game played on ice during trips to IBM’s offices in Canada. In Breier’s land-based version, players swatted a kickball on the lawn with brooms and other random implements from his garage.
It seemed like goofy fun, but there was an undercurrent of intense competition. In other words, it perfectly
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