Word: sayed
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...When he called and said he wanted to sell books on the Internet, we said, 'The Internet? What's that?'" remembers Mike Bezos, who initially questioned his son's sanity when he heard him say he was quitting his cushy job to start a company that would probably fail. But this was Jeff, after all, and his parents trusted him and believed in him every moment of his life. In the end, "we talked about it for two minutes," says Jackie Bezos. They ponied up $300,000, a huge chunk of the money they had saved for retirement. "We didn...
...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...
...expectations pervade a company that's growing so fast that entire meetings revolve around how to phone-screen the countless job supplicants; recently more than 400 people applied for four openings. "I had five interviews with five people on two different days, and this was for a temp job," says an ex-employee. Amazon detractors are easy to find. The company, like any growing society, has developed a caste system that embitters some in the lower orders. "I hated working there," says the ex-employee. "I was totally underutilized. My bosses were bad managers who just happened to sign...
...urged them to work things out amicably between themselves. But if eBayers really had to gripe, he decided, they should do it publicly on the site. "I wanted to reinforce the notion that if you're going to bring a complaint about someone, do it out in the open," says Omidyar. "You can't come running to Daddy." He had one other proviso: if traders are going to complain about people they don't like, they should be willing to say something nice about people they...
eBay--and the online-auction phenomenon it has spawned--is redrawing America's business landscape. There's scarcely a company in America that won't be affected by the new rules of commercial engagement. "Every week someone will come up to you and say this has changed my business entirely, and you can fill in the blank for what business," says eBay vice president of marketing and business development Steve Westly. "A guy came up to me at the National Auctioneers Association and said, 'I'm in the bull-semen business, and eBay's completely changed the access I have...