The Everything Store

The Everything Store

Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

Brad Stone

Name Game

The hunt for words that stick

During that time, the name Cadabra lived on, serving as a temporary placeholder. But in late October of 1994, Bezos pored through the A section of the dictionary and had an epiphany when he reached the word Amazon. Earth’s largest river; Earth’s largest bookstore. ... “This is not only the largest river in the world, it’s many times larger than the next biggest river. It blows all other rivers away,” Bezos said.
Father Wound

Absent fathers forged titan ambition through unmet longing.

Regret, that formidable adversary Jeff Bezos worked so hard to outrun, hangs heavily over the life of his biological father.
Legibility Tax

Standardization enables scale but destroys local knowledge.

“Communication is a sign of dysfunction. It means people aren’t working together in a close, organic way. We should be trying to figure out a way for teams to communicate less with each other, not more.”