Blodget: Amazon always had this cult feeling from the outside. There was certainly an atmosphere of secrecy: unlike Yahoo and some of the other Internet companies, they wouldn’t tell the Street anything. Things were developed and suddenly sprung on you. Well, according to your book, it felt the same way inside the company. There would be Project X, and you would find out about it accidentally the day before launch.

Marcus: Exactly.

Blodget: But it comes out in an interesting way in your book. You seldom use the word we—as in, “We fifty-odd employees built this incredible company.” You talk about these events as though they’re just happening around you. To what extent is that a literary device—and to what extent was there really a kind of inner cabal at the company, from which almost everybody else was excluded?

Marcus: Two things. One, I made up my mind to do the book from memory. Having taken up that formal challenge, I was forced to have a fairly myopic (or let’s just say narrow) focus.

But I think it’s also an accurate reflection of what it was like at Amazon. As I said before, we at the bookstore tended to feel resentful, because even though we were still generating more than half the revenue, and essentially paying for the early-stage businesses like wine, tools, or cell phones, we were left to fend for ourselves. We weren’t told about things. You overheard conversations in the elevator, or you took something out of the fax machine you weren’t supposed to take, or you saw it in the newspaper—another popular channel for intra-company communications. There was an undeniable element of secrecy, of cloak-and-dagger behavior, in the corporate culture.

Blodget: I think that was one of the reasons there was such a backlash in the press against Jeff Bezos. In just five years, he went from having started the company in his garage to being the Man of the Year in Time. Then, a year and half after that, he was just excoriated by the very same journalists and pundits. The company was going to go out of business! It was all over!

It’s been interesting to watch how Jeff has dealt with that. Clearly this is a maturation process for him, now that he’s a world-famous entrepreneur and CEO. But as you point out so effectively in the book, it’s very difficult to make the transition from a garage-style business to a global corporation, where you’re offending half your employees every time you make a move.

Marcus: Yes, that was a tough hurdle to jump over. As for Jeff, he may have had his moments of sitting bolt upright at three in the morning, covered with perspiration, but he always seemed very convinced of what he was doing. And he remained quite accessible, even after becoming a billionaire: he didn’t have the billionaire’s static field of repulsion. And let’s face it, he’s done okay. The company is here to stay, I think, and it’s his creation.

Blodget: Absolutely. The company is ten years old, and I think we’re really looking at the equivalent of Wal-Mart in 1970, in terms of the trajectory from here. And all of this early stuff will be forgotten—which is why I think this book is not only a great read, but very important from a historical point of view.

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