The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

Behold the Apex Predator

"The Everything Store" was such an engaging and fascinating read, I inhaled it in less than 36 hours. (For the sake of my sleep and work schedule, I'm glad books like this don't come along too often.) As I write this review, Amazon just announced a partnership with the US Postal Service to start delivering on Sundays for Prime members in key cities. This backs up the best description I have heard of Amazon and its founder -- which, amusingly, comes from the blog of ex-Amazon employee Eugene Wei, someone who was not interviewed in this book. "Amazon has boundless ambition," Wei writes. "It wants to eat global retail... there are very few people in technology and business who are what I'd call apex predators. Jeff [Bezos] is one of them, the most patient and intelligent one I've met in my life. An apex predator doesn't wake up one day and decide it is done hunting." Stock valuation aside -- you either believe or you don't, and as of this writing Bezos is clearly having a messianic moment -- "The Everything Store" is an excellent chronicle of Amazon's rise. In the book -- and I don't mean this as a criticism -- Bezos comes off as the lead character in an Ayn Rand novel. A real world John Galt or Hank Rearden, with an e-commerce twist. The immigrant step-father who taught him the value of hard work... the maternal grandfather who instilled a deep do-it-yourself attitude... the flashes of extraordinary competitiveness from an early age... the burning desire to conquer space... it all coalesces into a sense of destiny (though, of course, a good portion of this could be narrative hindsight). Steve Jobs was the last great business figure, the hero entrepreneur of our time. I think that, reputationally, Bezos will ultimately surpass Jobs -- leave him in the dust, really -- because while, what Bezos is doing is unsexy, the fundamental nature of "hard problems" that Amazon approaches and solves (on its way to eating global retail) is adding to the free market knowledge base...