Word: liking
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...down to the nubs and endlessly tinkered with stuff. When he was six, his sister Christina was born; a year later, his brother Mark arrived. When the siblings were old enough to get into Jeff's bedroom, he rigged a buzzer to his door that would go off like a burglar alarm. Later, in what his family has come to think of as the "solar-cooker era"--named after a solar microwave he concocted out of an umbrella and aluminum foil--the garage became his laboratory...
...Amazon landed on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. The story did two things: it introduced Amazon to a whole new stream of customers, and it caught the attention of rivals like Barnes & Noble and Borders Group, which hadn't yet moved online. Barnesandnoble.com would appear a year later--just before Amazon's initial public offering, which went off at a modest $18 a share. Never mind that the celebrated venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers was its biggest institutional investor before the IPO. Wall Streeters were afraid of the threat posed by the giant Barnes & Noble...
...having tried to build an online business and failed. "In fact, I'd have been proud of that, proud of myself for having taken that risk and tried to participate in that thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be such a big deal. It was like the wild, wild West, a new frontier. And I knew that if I didn't try this, I would regret it. And that would be inescapable...
...surprised him how little he knew. "No plan survives its first encounter with reality," he says. One night, while Bezos was on his knees complaining about how sore he was from packing, he said to a co-worker, "You know what we need? Kneepads!" The employee looked at him like he was an idiot. "What we need," the co-worker said evenly, "is packing tables...
...says the trick to solving some of the world's problems is to think, Amazon-like, in the long term. "Say you want to solve world hunger. If you think in terms of a five-year time frame, you get really depressed; it's an intractable problem. But if you say, well, let's see how we could solve this in 100 years--it's a problem because you'll be dead by then, but the solution becomes more tractable...