Inside the Mind of Jeff Bezos

Page 2 of "Inside The Mind Of Jeff Bezos"

Pizza Teams and Terabytes

Amazon's headquarters look much more prosperous and mature than they did in the late 1990s, when Bezos was fighting the "dot-toast" prediction. Back then the company was on Seattle's skid row. Its old brick building shared a dismal block with a needle exchange and a defunct pawnshop. Bezos flaunted his frugality. He got plenty of flattering press for living in a small downtown apartment and driving a Honda even though his startup had already gone public and he was worth $500 million on paper.

Now Amazon has become a shining city on a hill. As you drive into Seattle, you can look up at its current HQ, a sprawling, ornate, 1920s art deco structure that stands alone atop a leafy ridge. From this high lookout, Amazon's employees enjoy views of Puget Sound and the port, the downtown skyline, the two new stadiums built with the help of Microsoft money, the green hills of Seattle's residential neighborhoods, and the calm blue surface of Lake Washington, where Bezos lives on the Medina waterfront near Bill Gates's enormous $100 million house. Bezos, now worth $5 billion, has shed the modest lifestyle for the mogul lifestyle. Last year his lawyers successfully fought the town's effort to limit house sizes and expansions there, saying that it might restrict his plans. Bezos also owns three linked apartments in the Century, the landmark art deco tower on Manhattan's Central Park West, which he bought from Sony Music mogul Tommy Mottola for $7.7 million.

Bezos's minions are careful to point out symbols of the company's continued frugality despite the pleasantness of the surroundings. The building was a mostly vacant Veterans Administration hospital before Bezos converted it. And all the desks are still modeled after the one Bezos built for himself in the early days (and still uses): a cheap wooden door as the top, connected by metal brackets to sawed-off two-by-fours as the legs. Bezos believes in "conserving money for things that matter," he explains. "If you look at this building, you can open the windows and get fresh air and natural light. Those things actually matter to people. Having a mahogany credenza does not." He laughs powerfully. "There are no mahogany credenzas here. There's no art on the walls. The building is shaped like a T so it has lots of windows. As buildings get bigger, naturally they have more interior volume than they have surface area. That's an unavoidable consequence of geometry!" This is incredibly funny to Bezos. What could be funnier than math? "If you shape a building like a T, or if all the pieces are narrow, you keep the surface area high. That's a great thing about this building."

Amazon still hangs whiteboards in the elevators, as it did back in the skid-row days, when the barely postcollegiate employees were so overcaffeinated and hyperactive that they amused themselves by scribbling away between floors. But Amazon's people are getting older and finally growing up. A large room adjacent to the company cafe, which used to be where employees went to play an array of arcade-style video-game consoles, is now a storage space for old PCs. On Take Your Children to Work Day, the office was filled with kids. Bezos himself, the famed boy wonder, turned 40 this year, and he has two sons, ages 2 and 4, with his wife, MacKenzie. She's a fiction writer; HarperCollins will publish her first book next year. A family friend describes Jeff and MacKenzie as "very playful people," and not just with their sons: The highlight of their wedding reception was outdoor playtime for adults, complete with water balloons.

Bezos dresses in a uniform of blue jeans and a pale-blue button-down shirt. He looks the same at 40 as he did at 30: as bald as a retiree and as thin as a teenager. The laugh seems even larger now than in Amazon's early days, as though he amplified it, consciously or not, in response to the press he got for it. Bezos's personality is "turned up a notch" in public, but it's still authentic, according to Risher, who spent six years at Amazon, the last three as senior vice president for marketing, and currently teaches business at the University of Washington.

If Bezos's personality is decidedly noncorporate, so are some of his ideas about how to run a large organization. One of Bezos's more memorable behind-the-scenes moments came during an off-site retreat, says Risher. "People were saying that groups needed to communicate more. Jeff got up and said, 'No, communication is terrible!' " The pronouncement shocked his managers. But Bezos pursued his idea of a decentralized, disentangled company where small groups can innovate and test their visions independently of everyone else. He came up with the notion of the "two-pizza team": If you can't feed a team with two pizzas, it's too large. That limits a task force to five to seven people, depending on their appetites.