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

expansion. She had an unconventional background. Ahyperintelligent but alienated child from San Mateo, California, she had run away from home when she was a sophomore in high school and worked as a grocery-store clerk in Fresno. She entered Cal State, Fresno, at age seventeen, graduated in two years, and then took the exam to become a certified public accountant at age nineteen, notching the second-highest score in the nation without studying. She later earned a joint business and law degree from Harvard. When Bezos found her, she was the thirty-three-year-old chief financial officer for a Silicon Valley digital-audio company called Digidesign.
    Over the next few years, Covey remained so intensely focused on executing Bezos’s “get big fast” imperative that everything else in her life became background noise. One morning she parked her car in the office garage and was so distracted that she inadvertently left it running—all day. That evening, she couldn’t find her car keys, concluded she had lost them, and went home without her car. The security guard in the garage called her a few hours later and told her that she might want to come back to the office to retrieve her still-idling vehicle.
    Covey began working on an IPO a month after joining the company. Amazon did not urgently require the capital of a public offering—it had yet to begin launching new product categories, and its ninety-three-thousand-square-foot warehouse in South Seattle was serving the company’s needs. But Bezos believed a public offering could be a global branding event that solidified Amazon in customers’ minds. In these days, Bezos took every opportunity to appear in public and tell the story of Amazon.com. (Always Amazon.com, never Amazon; he was as insistent on that as David Shaw had been on the space between the D. and the E. in his company’s name.) Another reason Bezos pushed to go public was that competition was looming online in the form of the reigning giant of the bookselling business, Barnes & Noble.
    The chain store was run by Len Riggio, a tough-as-nails Bronx-born businessman with a taste for expensive suits and for fine art, which he lavishly hung on the walls of his lower Manhattan office. Over twodecades, Barnes & Noble had revolutionized bookselling. It introduced discount prices on new releases and, with archrival Borders, spread the concept of the book superstore, driving many mall shops and independents out of business. As a result, between 1991 and 1997, the market share of independent bookstores in the United States dropped from 33 to 17 percent, according to the American Booksellers Association, whose membership dropped from 4,500 to 3,300 stores in that time.
    Now Barnes & Noble was faced with what must have seemed like a pipsqueak upstart. Amazon had a measly $16 million in sales in 1996; Barnes & Noble notched $2 billion in sales that same year. Still, after the Wall Street Journal article in 1996, Riggio called Bezos and told him he wanted to come to Seattle with his brother Stephen to talk about a deal. Inexperienced at the time in these kinds of discussions, Bezos called investor and board member Tom Alberg and asked him to accompany him to dinner with the Riggios. Beforehand, they decided on a strategy of caution and flattery.
    The foursome had a steak dinner at Seattle’s famous Dahlia Lounge, on Fourth Avenue near the Columbia Building, an iconic Seattle restaurant with a memorable neon sign of a chef holding a strung-up fish. The Riggios wore suits and came on strong. They told Bezos and Alberg that they were going to launch a website soon and crush Amazon. But they said they admired what Bezos had done and suggested a number of possible collaborations, such as licensing Amazon’s technology or opening a joint website. “They didn’t come right out and offer to buy us. It was not particularly specific,” Alberg says. “It was a pretty friendly dinner. Other than the threats.”
    Afterward, Alberg and