Jeff Bezos (placeholder)

When I first started at Amazon, my office had doors on both sides. Jeff once walked through my office, saying “I was told this is a shortcut to the restroom.”

Back a few years ago, I was taking some classes down in Edmonds. The one I’m thinking of in particular was on the care and feeding of unix. We were using red hat linux 6.0 or some crufty version that wasn’t so crufty at the time.

Anyway, the prof didn’t require that we buy any books, but he made some suggestions. And he also suggested that we buy them on this new fangled “Internet” think through a few of his friends down south in Seattle at this place called Amazon.com.

And thus was my introduction to O’Reilly and Associates. I soon thereafter bought a book called “Open Sources.” It quickly shaped my outlook on life and shaped the way I viewed software, information and communication. The professor of the class told me that O’Reilly and Amazon got along quite well and that Amazon sold mostly technical books. I thought to myself “self, it might be fun to meet some of the folks at Amazon and maybe even take a job there.”

And that was about as far as I got on that train of thought before I hopped off and got distracted by the shiny bling of 3dfx and internet service providing. During this distraction period of my life, I spent many an hour curled up in a comfy chair reading books published by Tim and friends that I bought from Amazon.

There was a period of weeping and gnashing of teeth when everyone got disillusioned by the whole humanity taking advantage of the VCs that funded development of the intarwebs.

I was happy to note that neither O’Reilly nor Amazon tanked during this period. This seemed like a well planned and well executed failure to fail.

After the fall of civilization, I found myself living in a social nexus called “Fey Abbey.” My fellow resident and the visitors were very supportive, and I learned quite a bit about intentional community, social networking, and the connectness of all things living.

I came up with some ideas about integrating these social networks with computational networks. I never implemented any of them, but shortly after I shared the ideas with the hive mind, sites like “friendster,” “tribe.net,” and “orkut.com” started showing up. Coincidence? Perhaps. Perhaps I had merely “tapped the zeitgeist” as Jeff is wont to say.

Either way, it taught me something about one’s involvement in community and the impact that such involvement triggers.

But back to the story. I kept O’Reilly’s and Amazon.com’s success in mind as I delivered pizzas, sewed my wild oats, and dreamed of returning to the life of high technology.

I mentioned it to one of my confidantes and she said to me “get thee to a computery!” or something not unlike this.

So I did. And shortly thereafter, but after more time than I would have liked at the time, I had an offer to take a contract working for Mr. Bezos and his company.

The contract went well; I learned a lot, and I like to think I imparted much wisdom, but rather than riding it out until the bitter end, I took some time to train with some Europeans on how to make software that lasts much longer than anyone would have expected (and maybe hoped).

I returned to the doors of Amazon.com barely a year later with resume in hand, some ideas that I wanted to implement, and a great deal more experience. The folks with whom I interviewed fought hard to get me on their team, hinting that the team would be getting close attention from senior members of staff.

So here I am, working with a crack team to build the pet projects of “senior members of amazon staff.” It’s challenging work, but it’s work that I’ve been intending to get done for a few years now. If I read him right, I think Jeff has many of the same ideas about software and perhaps the world as do I.

Perhaps I’ll talk to him about it tomorrow night…

I met Jeff at foo camp 06, and felt very privileged to be able to do so. When I was much younger and doing my first startup, Jeff’s management style was something I wanted to emulate, and treating my employees with kindness and trusting them to do good work was something that I’d seen Jeff do with his employees.

Seeing Jeff and his hunger to learn about what people are doing, and his eagerness to share ideas and participate when others might not expect him to has reinforced my respect for him.

When I worked at Amazon the first time, we got these kinda crappy travel mugs as our holiday bonus. The day after we got the mugs, everybody in the elevator was griping about them. I saw Jeff come through the lobby door amd held the elevator door for him. When he got in, everybody in the elevator went silent. Jeff said, “So, I guess you didn’t like the mugs.” No one laughed. Except me. I cracked up. I was still cracking up as I slipped out the elevator door, glad I didn’t have to ride up another floor.

Just one thing.
If Jeff had stayed in NY and had not started Amazon, I would never have come to Seattle and met my wife … so thank you :)

I met Jeff a few times while working at Amazon and the most memorable was on earthquake day (28 Feb 2001 from memory).

After the building was evacuated we needed to get a bunch of stuff from the 11th floor and he asked for volunteers to help him.

Being stupid, I volunteered. The stupid part wasn’t that the building might collapse (although it could have – the 12th and 13th floors had already pooled their resources) but that it meant walking up 11 floors.

I leant that Jeff is fitter than me, that we both look stupid in hard hats and that it is impossible not to admire a guy that leads from the front like that.

The first time I met Bezos directly was in October 2002, when I was a software engineer (working at Amazon) about to begin a new project on which Jeff wanted to discuss technology & business strategy.

Jeff had scheduled a Friday 5PM meeting with two people: me and my direct manager. I was pretty intimidated, as I was just a junior developer and Bezos, well, is the celebrity CEO of Amazon.

Bezos walked in at 5PM and invited us to ride his new Segway. We spent about half hour getting Segway training from Bezos before we actually had the business meeting. It was a great experience and a fantastic icebreaker on his part.

To hear him laugh in person. :)

Besides that, he’s built an amazing company. He has a child-like curiosity.
He’s extremely successful at what he does.

Well.. I did buy a few books from him ;)