Free The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone

expressed the temperament of Jeff Bezos, who stopped by the meeting and threw himself into the inaugural Amazon broomball contest with gusto. At one point, Andy Jassy, then a new recruit from Harvard, made his first significant impression at the company by inadvertently hitting Bezos in the head with a kayak paddle. Later, Bezos dove after the ball into some hedges and tore his blue oxford shirt.
    Breier’s tenure at Amazon was short and rocky. Bezos wanted to reinvent everything about marketing, suggesting, for example, that they conduct annual reviews of advertising agencies to make them constantly compete for Amazon’s business. Breier explained that the advertising industry didn’t work that way. He lasted about a year. Over the first decade at Amazon, marketing VPs were the equivalent of the doomed drummers in the satirical band Spinal Tap; Bezos plowed through them at a rapid clip, looking for someone with the same low regard for the usual way of doing things that Bezos himself had. Breier’s broomball creation, however, became a regular pastime at Amazon employee picnics and offsite meetings, with employees covering their faces in war paint and Bezos himself getting in on the action.
    As Shel Kaphan had suspected, Breier’s arrival at Amazon was just the beginning of an influx of experienced business executives. With venture capital in the bank, Bezos fixated on taking the company public with an IPO, and he went on a recruiting spree. With the D. E. Shaw noncompete clause finally expiring, he called Jeff Holden and told him to pack his bags. Holden convinced a few other DESCO employees to come with him, though one, Paul Kotas, put his stuff in Holden’s U-Haul and then changed his mind. (Kotas moved to Washington two years later and did become alongtime Amazon executive, though his hesitation would cost him tens of millions of dollars in stock.)
    Bezos began filling out the rest of his senior leadership ranks, building a group that would formally become known as the J Team. Amazon recruited executives from Barnes & Noble and Symantec and two from Microsoft—Joel Spiegel, a vice president of engineering, and David Risher, who would eventually take over as head of retail. Risher was swayed by the Amazon founder’s aggressive vision. “If we get this right, we might be a $1 billion company by 2000,” Bezos told him. Risher personally informed Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates of his defection to the bookseller across the lake. Gates, who underestimated the Internet’s impact for too long, was stunned. “I think he was honestly flabbergasted,” Risher says. “To some extent he was right. It didn’t make any sense.”
    One of Risher’s first tasks was taking over negotiations with crosstown coffee giant Starbucks, which had proposed putting a rack of merchandise from Amazon next to its cash registers in exchange for an ownership stake in the startup. Risher and Bezos visited Starbucks’ CEO Howard Schultz in his SoDo headquarters—across from the Pecos Pit—and Schultz told the pair that Amazon had a big problem and that Starbucks could solve it. “You have no physical presence,” the lanky Starbucks founder said as he brewed coffee for his guests. “That is going to hold you back.”
    Bezos disagreed. He looked right at Schultz and told him, “We are going to take this thing to the moon.” They decided to work on a deal, but it fell apart a few weeks later when Schultz’s executives asked for a 10 percent ownership stake in Amazon and a seat on its board of directors. Bezos had been thinking along the lines of less than 1 percent. Even today, Amazon continues to evaluate the possibility of some kind of retail presence. “We were always willing to consider that there may be an opportunity there,” says Risher.
    Another new arrival was Joy Covey as chief financial officer. Driven and often intimidating to underlings, Covey became an intellectual foil to Bezos and a key architect of Amazon’s early