The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

Amazon.com started off delivering books through the mail. But its visionary founder, Jeff Bezos, wasn’t content with being a bookseller. He wanted Amazon to become the everything store, offering limitless selection and seductive convenience at disruptively low prices. To do so, he developed a corporate culture of relentless ambition and secrecy that’s never been cracked. Until now. Brad Stone enjoyed unprecedented access to current and former Amazon employees and Bezos family members, giving readers the first in-depth, fly-on-the-wall account of life at Amazon. Compared to tech’s other elite innovators–Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg–Bezos is a private man. But he stands out for his restless pursuit of new markets, leading Amazon into risky new ventures like the Kindle and cloud computing, and transforming retail in the same way Henry Ford revolutionized manufacturing.

Speaker Details

Brad Stone is a senior writer for Bloomberg Businessweek. Over the last few years, he’s authored over a dozen cover stories on companies such as Apple, Google, Amazon, Yahoo, Twitter, Facebook and the Chinese search firm Baidu. When he’s not attempting to deconstruct the high-tech firms charting our future, he has written about beleaguered domestic airlines, weaponized drone warplanes, the retail giant Costo, and traced the deceptions of an international con-artist and alleged murderer. Brad joined Businessweek from the New York Times, where he had been a reporter since 2006. He covered Internet trends, as well as Silicon Valley’s biggest companies from the newspaper’s San Francisco bureau. In addition to writing for the paper, he wrote a weekly column, Ping, and was a founding writer of the paper’s technology blog, Bits. From 1998 to 2006, Brad served as the Silicon Valley Correspondent for Newsweek magazine, writing for the technology and business sections of the magazine and authoring a regular online column.

Brad is also the author of one previous work of non-fiction, Gearheads: the Turbulent Rise of Robotic Sports. The book was a BookSense 76 pick and the San Francisco Chronicle selected it as one of the best books of 2003. It covers the emergence of what was then the new breed of robot hobbyists and hardware hackers.

Brad graduated from Columbia University in 1993 and is originally from Cleveland, Ohio. He is currently attempting to teach his young twin daughters to root for the Browns, Indians and Cavaliers. He has a dog named Loki, a Schnoodle, which is a cross between a Schnauzer and a Poodle. It is a manly breed.

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Brad Stone
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