One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com Part 1

One click : Jeff Bezos and the rise of Amazon.com.

Richard L. Brandt.

To Kim and Leila, for everything.

To Al Zuckerman, for being a great agent.

To Courtney Young, for being a great editor.

And to the memory of Lindy Howe, who always had faith in me.

Chapter 1.

One Click Is Not Enough.

To be Earth's most customer-centric company where people can find and discover anything they want to buy online.

-Amazon.com Mission Statement.

On September 22, 1994, two months after incorporating Amazon.com and ten months before launching the company, Jeff Bezos decided to learn how to sell books. So he took a course on how to start a bookstore, sponsored by the American Booksellers a.s.sociation. Some forty to fifty aspiring booksellers, from young people starting out to retired couples thinking about a second career, attended the four-day course at the Benson Hotel in Portland. They sat through courses on topics such as bookstore financial operations, customer service, and handling inventory. One of the instructors was Richard Howorth, owner of Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi.

Howorth is a fanatic about customer service (which happens to be the only way to compete with Amazon.com and the chain stores to this day). To emphasize the importance of service, he related the story of his most extreme example of taking care of a customer.

One of the store's managers walked into Howorth's upstairs office to tell him a customer had a complaint. Howorth strolled downstairs to find out what the problem was. The customer angrily told him that she had parked her car in front of the store, and dirt from potted plants on the store's balcony had somehow fallen on her car. So Howorth offered to wash her car for her. They climbed into her car and drove to a service station with a car wash. But the service station was closed for repairs. She became more irate. Howorth then suggested they drive to his house, where he collected a bucket, soap, and a hose and washed the car himself.

As she drove him back to the store, her att.i.tude changed. She became downright pleasant. In fact, she came back to the store later that afternoon and bought a bunch of books.

Bezos later told an executive at the American Booksellers a.s.sociation that he was impressed with the story and was determined to make customer service "the cornerstone of Amazon.com." Bezos considered it his most important weapon. "We know that if we can keep our compet.i.tors focused on us, while we stay focused on the customer, that ultimately we'll turn out all right," he has said.

Interestingly, Jeff's idea of customer service is different than that held by Howorth, who says personal, face-to-face service with the customer is what's most important. In the Internet game, customer service is mostly done by unemotional computers. "I'll bet he hasn't washed a customer's car," Howorth says of Bezos, perhaps with just a touch of bitterness.

In fact, for all his professed dedication to serving the customer, Bezos's obsession seems to be restricted to building an incredible Web site and to making sure deliveries arrive when promised. It's hard to even find a customer service number on Amazon.com. Bezos wants everything to be done via email. Amazon's customer service started with Bezos himself answering the emails, and by 1999 was manned by five hundred of these "customer care" representatives packed into cubicles and tied to their telephones and email accounts to answer questions from customers.

The people handling these emails are generally overqualified, underpaid people with no experience in bookselling. From the beginning, disaffected academics were popular because they were well-read and could supposedly help find books on a huge variety of topics. They were paid about $10 to $13 an hour, but with the potential of promotions and stock options dangled before their glazed eyes.

Not everyone found Nirvana in this environment. Richard Howard, for example, has a master's degree in literature but decided to take the entry-level customer care job at Amazon in 1998 with hopes of moving into Editorial, where he could write reviews of books. What he found was a work mill with four "Customer Service Tier 1 E-Mail Representatives" to a cubicle. Supervisors listened in on calls to monitor performance, and rated the workers by how many emails or phone calls they could answer per minute.

Howard chronicled his experience for a Seattle newspaper in an article t.i.tled "How I 'Escaped' from Amazon.cult."

Human interaction was treated almost as a necessary evil. Howard was given a "Blurb Index," a list of hundreds of short, canned answers to cover virtually any question a customer might ask, which he felt were designed to create "a blandly conventional zone of contact between [Amazon's] agents and customers."

When Howard got a call from a customer one day asking how to find a copy of James Michener's Centennial because the customer was interested in Civil Warera fiction, Howard suggested Gore Vidal's Lincoln as a better alternative-just the type of thing a knowledgeable employee in a good bookstore might do. Howard spent three or four minutes on the call, he said, and was reprimanded by his supervisor. After three and a half weeks on the job he was fired for not being productive enough. He took a contract job at Microsoft instead.

What the starry-eyed customer service representatives with visions of huge stock options found when starting their jobs at Amazon was long hours and options for just one hundred Amazon shares, as long as they performed well for three years. The best could answer a dozen emails a minute. Those who dropped below seven were often fired. The Was.h.i.+ngton Post did an expose of this "dark" side of Amazon and quoted one customer service rep as saying, "We're supposed to care deeply about customers, provided we can care deeply about them at an incredible rate of speed."

The customer service reps also had to learn the UNIX software system the company used, and had to take a three-week training course at Amazon to learn how everything worked, including how orders for books were submitted, how they were delivered to the warehouse, how they were shelved, how to match orders to the packed books, and how to choose the best s.h.i.+pping method. The most frequent questions came from people who needed help ordering a book on the site or wanted to know where the book they had ordered was.

But Bezos knew he would never be able to offer the kind of service one gets from a physical store staffed by human helpers. "We're never going to have sofas; we're never going to have lattes," he told BusinessWeek magazine in June 1997. Where Bezos really managed to s.h.i.+ne was in creating a great online experience with very little human interaction with customers. The site had to be simple, fast, and intuitive. It had to offer an unprecedented number of books at the cheapest price possible and deliver them quickly. The whole thing just had to work without problems so that people left the site happy. That seems to be enough for most people. "When we do make a customer unhappy at some point," Bezos was later to explain, "these people come out of the woodwork and say, 'Well, actually that wasn't my experience.' Word-of-mouth is very powerful."

That's especially true on the Internet, where word-of-mouth is viral. On the Internet, says Bezos, "Everybody is a publisher." They blog and they email, and they can turn nasty very quickly. Email, he says, "has some magical ability to turn off the politeness gene in the human being . . . you get these very candid pieces of feedback that tell you exactly how you can improve your service. If I walk into a restaurant and am served a bad meal, I just leave; I never go find the chef and grab him by the collar and say, 'You know, you really shouldn't be cooking.' "

But there have been a few occasions when emails and words spread virally through the Internet were intended to grab Bezos by his virtual collar to yell at him. Bezos has not always antic.i.p.ated what it means to provide great customer service. In the early days, Amazon had a policy of emptying out customers' shopping carts if they remained idle for thirty days. It seemed reasonable at the time to a.s.sume the customer wasn't going to buy the items, an a.s.sumption that turned out to be wrong. One customer sent an angry email saying that he had spent hours filling the online cart with items he wanted, then suddenly found one day that his basket had been emptied without any warning. In his email, he said it was a stupid policy. The programmers went back to the files in the database and recovered the items for him. They also eliminated the thirty-day deletion practice. "It probably was a stupid policy," Bezos was later to admit in a speech.

Sometimes the company was not able to live up to its promises. In the early days, the overworked staff might miss the promised s.h.i.+pping dates. In order to make up for it, the s.h.i.+pping costs would be refunded whenever a customer complained.

As Amazon grew, Bezos's dedication to doing what's right for the customer began to slip. He often caught h.e.l.l for it from customers and had to recant. In 1998, reporters discovered that Amazon had started charging publishers $10,000 to feature books on its home page under headings such as "New and Notable" and "Destined for Greatness" with heavy editorial support from Amazon, including a profile of, or interview with, the author.

Bezos reportedly told his staff it was okay to put placement up for bids. "If Publisher X gives us a better deal [on a new t.i.tle] than Publisher Y," said Bezos, "and we predict that the customer is going to like both of these books equally but there's only a slot to show one, let's show the one where we make more money."

So what's the big deal? After all, bookstores have long accepted payola to give prime real estate in their stores to new t.i.tles. But this was Amazon, the company about which Bezos has boasted, "We may be the most customer-obsessed company to ever occupy planet Earth." This was the company that was supposed to always put customers first, offering the best t.i.tles to suit their tastes. Who's to say that the customer would "like both of these books equally" when it comes to a choice between one that will make the company extra money and one that won't? That slope is as slippery as an eel in oil.

After the practice hit the press and customers started complaining to Amazon in a barrage of emails, Bezos decided that full disclosure was the best policy. Amazon started posting notices next to prominently placed books when publishers paid for the placement. When that decision was announced, Bezos was sure to point out that Amazon was the only bookseller that made this disclosure. He also promised to refund any books customers had bought on the basis of these recommendations.

Also in 1999, customers began realizing just how much information Amazon was collecting about their book purchases, tastes, and foibles. It came to light after Amazon bought a small online service called PlanetAll, which would cross-reference book sales with people's zip codes and email addresses. Amazon used the information to recommend books to people who the service determined would have similar tastes and interests. Bezos had to do a partial about-face on this one as well, offering a way for buyers to opt out of the data-sharing program. Today, n.o.body seems to mind-or think about-the fact that Amazon recommends books based on data from others with "similar tastes." The privacy debate has s.h.i.+fted to Google and Facebook, although those companies are probably no bigger offenders than Amazon.

From the beginning, it was very important to Bezos to make people think he did belong on the Internet selling things, so he had to make sure he would impress them. The company might send a hardcover book at the paperback price when the softcover version the customer ordered was out of stock. Also, two years after launching, Bezos created an out-of-print division to search for orphan books. Customers were amazed that they could find such books at Amazon, but nowhere else.

Bezos wants to use technology to provide great service to customers. That philosophy resulted in what is perhaps Amazon's most famous-and infamous-patented software program, known as "1-Click ordering."

The 1-Click software was written mostly by a programmer named Peri Hartman, who joined Amazon in 1997. Hartman was given the task of working on the software that would be the interface to the customers, including the ordering system they would use to buy books.

Hartman recalls that, one day over lunch with Bezos and Shel Kaphan, the head of software development, Bezos told them, "We need something to make the ordering system frictionless. We need to make it so the customer can order products with the least amount of effort. They should be able to click on one thing, and it's done."

A simple idea on simplicity, and Hartman took it literally. He set to work creating a program that would require just one click to order a product. (His name appeared first on the patent application, which became patent number US5960411.) The patent filing was t.i.tled, innocuously enough, "Method and system for placing a purchase order via a communications network." More telling was the label in an ill.u.s.trated flow chart in the patent: "Enable Single-Action Ordering."

In fact, it is a simple idea. The nineteen-page patent filing is made up mostly of flow chart diagrams that show the sequence of events that enable buyers to place an order with a single click: Retrieve the buyers' identification and payment methods when they first place an order, enter it into the system, and the next time they look up a book, they'll see a 1-Click ordering b.u.t.ton on the buyers' pages.

Sound like a no-brainer? That's what Amazon's compet.i.tors thought. Many people in technology hate this type of broad patent, known as a "process patent" since it mainly describes the process of doing something that is, well, patently obvious-in this case, reducing to one the number of clicks needed to make a purchase.

That is, however, the kind of attention to detail that has helped make Amazon.com a success. Jeff Bezos will do anything he can think of to make the process of using Amazon.com easier. The genius is that Bezos thought of it first. He knew that doing anything online had to be simple in an age when people were becoming overwhelmed by complicated computers, software, and Internet technology. This, in fact, was a principle that Larry Page and Sergey Brin adopted a couple years later when creating Google. But few compet.i.tors have had the sense to follow this rule. Even today, most Web sites seem to be confusing mora.s.ses of text, graphics, videos, flas.h.i.+ng ads, and a tangled string of links. Amazon.com doesn't match the simplicity of Google's famously spare site, but it is well designed and easy to navigate.

"His general philosophy was to be friendly to customers," recalls Hartman. "The focus should be on the customer, not on the Web site. It's pretty obvious that a simple Web site is easier to use than one with of a bunch of fancy gadgets. He was adamant about that."

His goal was not just to make browsing for books easy, but an enjoyable experience. "People don't just buy books because they need books," he has said. "There are products like that. Pharmaceuticals are that way. n.o.body enjoys browsing the Preparation H counter. But people will gladly spend hours in a bookstore, so you have to make the shopping experience fun and engaging."

It didn't require a free online latte to make customers appreciate Amazon.com. In the late 1990s there was so much room for improvement in Web site design that any incremental advancement was like getting an extra bottle of oxygen on a trek to the top of Mount Everest. "To be nine times bigger than your nearest compet.i.tor," Jeff explained to The Was.h.i.+ngton Post in 1998, "you actually only have to be 10 percent better." Three years after the site was launched, he said that the majority of his customers came to the site, not because of advertising, but because of positive word-of-mouth.

From the beginning of his company to the present day, Bezos has been fanatical about squeezing out every incremental percentage point of usefulness in Amazon.com. They're often simple things like the 1-Click feature and, later, a one-click b.u.t.ton to designate a gift and have it wrapped. He won't wash a customer's car (there are too many customers for Amazon to provide individual attention), but he's happy to implement new policies if they will help all customers. When one elderly woman sent an email to the company saying she loved ordering books from the site but had to wait for her nephew to come over and tear into the difficult-to-open packaging, Bezos had the packaging redesigned to make it easier to open.

These customer services are often met with resistance. When the site launched, he started allowing customers to review books on the site, positive or negative. People thought he was crazy for allowing negative reviews. It's not exactly something to help sell books, at least not in the short run. But because bad reviews were allowed as well as good, customers learned they could rely on Amazon.com to point them to books that wouldn't disappoint them-at least to a certain extent. Friends and family of authors often help out with reviews on Amazon to help kick-start sales. Negative reviews are usually genuine, unless posted by an author with a competing t.i.tle.

Very early on, Bezos started adding best-seller lists on Amazon. By 1998, Amazon customers could see where books ranked on any of two thousand different lists. One of Bezos's favorite stories is that of a book called Endurance, by Alfred Lansing. It's a real-life adventure tale about polar explorer Ernest Shackleton, whose s.h.i.+p was crushed by an ice floe. He and his twenty-eight men all survived after a six-month trek hiking out of Antarctica. It was originally published in 1956. In 1998, it ended up as one of the top one hundred best-selling books on Amazon. Its popularity, he said, was "strictly fed by these customer reviews." (Today, a paperback version published in 1999 is still being sold on the site, ranking within the top two thousand best sellers on the site, as well as number one in history books about polar regions and number one among travel books about Antarctica.) And, of course, discounts are a big reason for the company's success. By 1998 he was discounting four hundred thousand best-selling t.i.tles and his customer base had grown to 3.1 million people using the site. But he does not use discounts alone to attract customers. By collecting data on which books customers bought and comparing that to books bought by customers with similar tastes, Amazon's computers can recommend books that others may not have found otherwise.

Bezos believes that he can keep improving that technology to outdo recommendations in the best bookstores. In a speech in 1998, he described it as a steadily improving technology:So what we think we can do is use advanced technology, like collaborative filtering and other things, to accelerate that discovery process. So that, if today you have a 1-in-1,000 chance when you go in a bookstore of stumbling on something that blows you away, we want to use technology to get to know you as an individual and then make that a 1-in-300 chance. Then a 1-in-100 chance. And then work a few more years on it and make it a 1-in-50 chance and so on and so on. That will create huge value for people. Great merchants have never had the opportunity to understand their customers in a truly individualized way. E-commerce is going to make that possible.

Another feature, added in October 2001, is "Look Inside the Book." Not all publishers or authors like the idea of letting people read some of the book before buying it. Even worse, two years later he added "Search Inside the Book," allowing people to pick out only the topics they're interested in without paying a cent. It's a great research tool for college students, but doesn't bring in revenues for either the publishers or Amazon.com. It does, however, create enormous goodwill and brings people back to the site. Some of them end up buying that book or others on the site.

The 1-Click patent, however, created the most controversy, one that lasted for more than a decade. The reason is that anyone else trying to sell anything online is prohibited from adding a one-click purchasing option-unless they want to pay a royalty to Amazon. The patent was written broadly enough that compet.i.tors were prevented not only from imitating the code, but from adding a single-click feature at all, regardless of how they made it happen. There are simply not very many ways to add the feature, and none of the approaches are unique enough to avoid violating the patent.

This kind of patent might be compared to filing a patent for a plastic toy that locks out any compet.i.tor who might want to make, say, "a disk with a curved edge, which can be thrown long distances by tossing and spinning it." Even the inventor of the Frisbee flying disk, Walter Frederick Morrison, improved on the Frisbie pie pans that were first used for that purpose by describing a specific shape to the curved rim. That shape, called the "Morrison Slope," improved distance and accuracy of the thrown disk. Morrison still managed to make about a million dollars in royalties from his design despite many compet.i.tors.

The 1-Click patent was granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office in September 1999. After it was granted, it attracted enormous derision from those creating retail sites on the Internet, as well as advocates of patent reform. Patents are supposed to be granted only for "non-obvious" inventions. How much thinking does it take to figure out how to cut the ordering process to a single click? Legal experts began referring to it as the "notorious" patent. An article in one law journal described it as "probably the most memorable example of an unoriginal software-patent." Technology book publisher and open-source advocate Tim O'Reilly described that patent as "one more example of an intellectual property milieu gone mad." In an open letter to Bezos, published online, he said that the patent "fails to meet even the most rudimentary tests for novelty and non-obviousness to an expert in the field" and would stifle creativity on the Internet. He asked people to sign a pet.i.tion to get Bezos to give up the patent.

The legal battle was slow and furious, and wasn't resolved until 2009. In the meantime, Barnes & n.o.ble tried to get around the patent. Amazon owned 1-Click? Well, B&N decided two clicks were almost as good as one. In May 1998 it introduced its own fast checkout system, called "Express Lane," which simply added a second click: After customers clicked on the express purchase b.u.t.ton, a second b.u.t.ton popped up asking the buyer to click again to confirm the purchase.

Jeff Bezos was not amused-or taken in by the tactic. Three months after his patent was granted, he sued B&N for patent infringement. "We spent thousands of hours to develop our 1-Click process," he said in a press release, "and the reason we have a patent system in this country is to encourage people to take these kinds of risks and make these kinds of investments for customers."

Barnes & n.o.ble fired back with its own press release, insisting that the suit was a "desperate attempt to retaliate for our growing market share" in online bookselling. It didn't specify exactly how fast that share of market was growing. (By 2010, Barnes & n.o.ble was suffering, while Amazon.com is as strong as ever.) In response to Amazon.com's lawsuit against Barnes & n.o.ble, the Free Software Foundation, an advocacy group that promotes open-source software and is staunchly against software patents, called for a boycott against Amazon.com. That didn't work either.

In December 1999, a district court in Was.h.i.+ngton State upheld Amazon's patent, issuing a preliminary injunction preventing Barnes & n.o.ble from using Express Lane. The appeal took several years. Finally, in 2002, Barnes & n.o.ble settled the suit with Amazon.com. Although terms were not disclosed, Barnes & n.o.ble was finally able to put its fast purchase method on its site.

Apple Computer took the easy route. In 2000, it licensed the 1-Click patent from Amazon.com, and put the capability on its iTunes store.

Ironically, even Bezos himself now argues against trivial patents. Influenced by O'Reilly, he has traveled with the technology publisher to Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., to argue that patent rules should be tightened. The two men even cofounded a Boston company called BountyQuest, which offered rewards for evidence of "prior art," or doc.u.ments that prove that someone else thought of the idea first for a disputed patent. One of the patents for which it offered a reward was the 1-Click patent. It's part of the enigma that is Jeff Bezos: Preach restraint, but if you can get away with something that improves customer service and the company's compet.i.tive edge, do it regardless of who complains. (To be sure, BountyQuest also noted that its service could also be used to validate patents when no prior art was discovered.) BountyQuest paid out money to three prior art submissions in an attempt to invalidate the 1-Click patent, but none of them proved strong enough to challenge the Amazon patent. BountyQuest later closed down without any significant successes.

The strongest challenge, raised several years after BountyQuest folded, came from a New Zealand actor named Peter Calveley (who was one of the actors hired to act out motions that were filmed and used to create computer-animated creatures for The Lord of the Rings movies). Calveley decided, just on a lark, to look for prior art to challenge the 1-Click patent. He found it, from a defunct online e-commerce company called Digicash. Armed with that information, the patent office ordered a reexamination of the 1-Click patent in May 2006.

That attempt failed as well. Finally, in March 2010, the patent office upheld the 1-Click patent for good-or, at least, until the patent expires-a stroke of exceptional luck for Bezos. The patent office will often rescind a patent if it seems that the patent is obvious or too broad. This time it didn't. Perhaps it depends on which individual in the patent office is doing the review. Some people feel that getting the patent upheld was like winning a c.r.a.p shoot.

Bezos is still trying to enhance his luck with newer and wilder ideas. One-Click, it seems, is a step, not an end point. In June 2008, Amazon.com filed for a new patent with a Microsoft Kinectlike feature for making purchases with body movements. Antic.i.p.ating computers and other devices that can track a user's movements, the new Amazon patent is t.i.tled "Movement recognition as input mechanism." Forget keypads and mice, you may soon be able to make a purchase simply by nodding your head at your computer, Kindle, or cell phone. Industry wags have dubbed it the "1-Nod patent."

It doesn't stop there, of course. You may be able to indicate such requests as how many copies of an item to order by holding up fingers, or create a pa.s.sword from specific motions. The patent application gives an example: "The user could set a pa.s.sword to three nods up and down, followed by a smile and two eyebrow raises."

This patent lists Bezos himself as the sole inventor. This ill.u.s.trates two of the most important principles of an entrepreneur. Always put the customer first, even if it appears to require a decision that would decrease revenues. It's a winning strategy in the long run. And in order to get an advantage from those decisions, think of the future, not the present. Even if that future still seems to be years off. Just thinking of the idea may bring about that future more quickly. Your compet.i.tors may hate you for it, but customers will be impressed-or at least get a good laugh.

Innovations and new patents at Amazon will never cease. In December 2010, word leaked out about a new patent, for a system that enables people who get gifts through Amazon to return them even before they arrive in the mail. If Aunt Mildred has a habit of sending unwanted gifts, the patent says, the site will include an option to "convert all gifts from Aunt Mildred." (Yes, the patent includes the name of the presumably fict.i.tious relative.) It allows the receiver to track when the well-meaning relative buys a gift for him and change it to something more desirable before it s.h.i.+ps. Gift recipients can also apply other rules selected from the "Gift Conversion Rules Wizard," such as, "No clothes with wool," or "Convert any gift from Aunt Mildred to a gift certificate, but only after checking with me." The patent lists Bezos as the inventor.

Of course, those who dictate what const.i.tutes proper etiquette believe such a system is in appallingly bad taste. "This idea totally misses the spirit of gift giving," sniffs Anna Post, the great-great-granddaughter of etiquette maven Emily Post and spokeswoman for the Emily Post Inst.i.tute. Bezos thinks it will improve gift-giving, whether or not the giver is offended. "In some cases, concern that the gift recipient may not like a particular gift may cause the person sending the gift to be more cautious in gift selection," the patent notes.

But the idea is not only something that could please the fussy recipient, it can save Amazon millions of dollars. When a gift is returned, Amazon warehouse workers have to unpack and reshelve the old gifts and wrap, pack, and s.h.i.+p the new ones. And it does fit in with Bezos's desire to stay ahead with unusual innovation, a desire that has generally served the company very well.

Of course, a keen intellect, a drive to succeed, and an innate stubbornness to the point of absurdity helps. These are all signs of a born entrepreneur.

Chapter 2.

Portrait of the Entrepreneur as a Young Man.

Work hard, have fun, make history.

-Amazon company slogan.

Jeffrey Preston Bezos was four years old when he first arrived at his grandfather's cattle ranch in Cotulla, Texas. The Lazy G is a sprawling twenty-five-thousand-acre spread in the southwest part of the state; an unspoiled habitat of mesquite and oak trees, the home of whitetail deer (popular among local hunters), wild turkeys, doves, quail, feral hogs, and sheep.

Jeff's family's Texas roots date back to the nineteenth century, when his ancestor Colonel Robert Hall left his home in Tennessee for San Antonio. Colonel Hall was an imposing man, six feet four inches tall, and in his later years had taken to wearing a colorful outfit st.i.tched together from dozens of different types of animal pelts. "When he walked down the streets of San Antonio, the crowds would part," said Jackie Bezos, Jeff's mother. It was her great-grandfather, Bernard Vesper, who acquired the Lazy G.

Jeff's maternal grandfather, Lawrence Preston Gise, was imposing in his own way, a just-retired rocket scientist who was ready to trade in his missile research for the simple and demanding life at the ranch. (He's married to Mattie Louise Strait, who is related to country singer George Strait.) He then wanted to share that life with his grandson. From that time on, Jeff spent every summer at the ranch until he was sixteen years old. The Lazy G became a second home to the boy.

Over the years, Jeff learned to clean stalls, to brand and castrate cattle, to install plumbing, and to handle other ranch-hand tasks. One day, his grandfather towed in a dilapidated D6 Caterpillar bulldozer with a stripped transmission. Fixing it would be tough: He would have to remove a five-hundred-pound gear from the engine. No problem; he simply built himself a small crane. Jeff helped. To Bezos, fixing tractors and castrating cattle was "what I considered to be an idyllic childhood."

Years later, after becoming a hugely successful entrepreneur, Bezos said that his experience on the ranch helped sow the seeds of his entrepreneurial drive.

"One of the things that you learn in a rural area like that is self-reliance," he said. "People do everything themselves. That kind of self-reliance is something you can learn, and my grandfather was a huge role model for me: If something is broken, let's fix it. To get something new done you have to be stubborn and focused, to the point that others might find unreasonable."

His mother echoed that sentiment. "You become really self-sufficient when you work with the land," she said. "One of the things [Jeff] learned is that there really aren't any problems without solutions. Obstacles are only obstacles if you think they're obstacles. Otherwise, they're opportunities."

There's little doubt that genetics also played a role in his success. Bezos idolized his grandfather, his first mentor and role model. Preston Gise-"Pops" to Jeff-had worked on s.p.a.ce technology and missile defense systems at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a research unit of the U.S. Defense Department. DARPA also happens to be the organization that created ARPAnet, the mysterious computer network that was later to evolve into the ubiquitous Internet. In 1964, the year Jeff was born, Pops Gise became manager of the Atomic Energy Commission's western region, supervising twenty-six thousand employees at the Sandia, Los Alamos, and Lawrence Livermore laboratories. When he retired, he traded his demanding work designing missiles and nuclear technology for the even more demanding life of a gentleman rancher.

Virtually nothing is known about Bezos's biological father, even by Jeff himself. Jeff was born Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen on January 12, 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His mother, Jacklyn (Jackie) Gise Jorgensen, an attractive, square-jawed brunette, was a seventeen-year-old recent bride working at a local bank. But his teenage father divorced his mother and left the family when Jeff was about was eighteen months old. His absent biological father faded into a nonent.i.ty in Jeff's life. "I've never been curious about him," Bezos has said. "The only time it comes up is in the doctor's office when I'm asked for my medical history. I put down that I just don't know. My real father is the guy who raised me."

Fortunately, his mother was much more successful in love the second time around. She might thank Fidel Castro for that. When Castro came to power in 1959, his regime frightened many Cuban parents into sending their children to the United States. Miguel (Mike) Bezos (the last name being a variation of "besos," the Spanish word for "kisses") was one of those children. In 1962, at age fifteen, he was flown to Miami by the Catholic Welfare Bureau as part of a rescue mission called Operation Peter Pan. He arrived with nothing but the clothes he was wearing and an extra s.h.i.+rt and pair of pants, and was shuffled off to a Catholic mission in Delaware with fifteen other young refugees.

If life was difficult in an orphanage, alone and far from home, Mike Bezos didn't show it. He thrived in his new country. He mastered English quickly, graduated from high school, and headed to New Mexico to study engineering at the University of Albuquerque. He also took a job at a local bank, where he met Jackie, who was, at that time, still pregnant with Jeff. Mike married Jackie when Jeff was about four years old. Mike adopted Jeff, giving him his name and becoming his true father. Jeff's sister, Christina, was born in 1969, and his brother, Mark, a year later. Jeff didn't learn that he and his siblings had different fathers until he was ten years old.

Mike Bezos also showed strong drive and determination. He got his degree and became a petroleum engineer at Exxon. The family followed where several job promotions took him: Houston; Pensacola, Florida; Miami. Despite repeated moves, they were a very close extended family.

Pops Gise's stubbornness was inherited by Jeff. When Jeff was three years old, his mother still had him sleeping in a crib. At that age, he could no longer abide that. "I want a real bed," he announced to his mother. As a young mother concerned about her child's safety, she said no. They argued, but she refused to give in-until the day she walked into his bedroom to find him dismantling his crib with a screwdriver, and decided he was old enough for a real bed after all.

Jeff was born with a mind capable of tenacious focus. At the Montessori elementary school he attended, he would get so absorbed in whatever task lay before him that his teachers had to pick up his chair with him in it to move him to a different task at a different table. The doggedness of a future entrepreneur was bred into his brain.

His mother and grandfather indulged his early interest in technology and tinkering with electronic gadgets and kits. "I think single-handedly we kept many Radio Shacks in business," she would later recall. Jeff spent hours in his garage rebuilding Heathkit radios, tinkering with robots, and building experimental devices. He wrapped an umbrella spine in aluminum foil for a solar cooking experiment, and even tried to build a hovercraft from an ancient Hoover vacuum. A kid who valued his privacy, he rigged up an electric alarm to warn him if his younger siblings were trying to enter his room.

Perhaps because he was influenced by his time at the Lazy G, his first career aspiration, at about age six, was to be an archaeologist. He's been known to say, "I would like to point out this was before Indiana Jones."

The family moved to Houston about the time Jeff started kindergarten. A few years later his parents enrolled him in the Vanguard program, a magnet program for gifted children, at River Oaks Elementary School. Attending this school for bright kids required a twenty-mile commute each way. The school now boasts about the fact that Jeff Bezos is an alumnus (along with journalist Linda Ellerbee and John Gray, the author of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus).

And yes, he was a bookworm. Or perhaps he was showing his hypercompet.i.tive personality at a very young age when, in the fourth grade, he got excited by a contest at school to see who could read the most Newbery Awardwinning books in a year. He plowed through thirty of them (one of his favorites was A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle) but still didn't win. Kids in that school read a lot of books.

The school also gave him his first taste of computing. A company in Houston supplied his school with a computer terminal (there were no personal computers in those days) and loaned the school excess time in the company's mainframe. The terminal was connected to the mainframe by an acoustic phone modem with a cradle that held the phone handset in order to establish the connection. The setup came with a stack of manuals, but no one at the school knew how to use it. Jeff and a couple other students stayed after cla.s.s to go through the manuals and figure out how to program it, but that novelty only lasted about a week. Then they discovered that the mainframe contained a primitive Star Trek game. From then on, all they used the computer for was playing Star Trek, each taking on a role of one of the characters of the TV program. Like all his other nerdy friends, he considered the choice role in the game to be that of Mr. Spock. Captain Kirk was the backup choice. If Jeff couldn't get either of those roles, he preferred to take on the persona of the stars.h.i.+p's computer.