Those equations were called “fitness functions,” and tracking those goals is how Bezos managed his teams. So that summer, Stone writes, Bezos and MacKenzie, who is now his ex-wife, decided to brainstorm on a bunch of new names for the company. The husband-wife duo resigstered several domain names including Awake.com, Browse.com, Bookmall.com which of these companies was first named cadabra inc and Aard.com.
The couple at one time also considered naming their company Relentless.com but they decided against it. Employees would be organized into groups of fewer than 10 people — the perfect number to be satisfied by two pizzas for dinner — and were expected to work autonomously. Those equations were called “fitness functions,” and tracking those goals was how Bezos managed his teams. Originally, it was an online bookstore called Cadabra.
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Anti-satellite weapons have emerged and communication jamming is occurring with increased frequency. It is very early days, and the sky is truly the limit. Holiday season is stressful for the retail industry. Jeff Wilke, who was the operations manager in the early 2000s, had an interesting method to let out frustration. He would encourage his employees who had just accomplished a goal to call him, close their eyes, and yell at the top of their lungs like a primal scream.
- Foreign threats are on the rise, led by Russia and China.
- In the time before Google Search ruled the internet, being at the top of alphabetical lists still mattered.
- Accounting for the companies 3 share splits, all coming before Y2K, the stock closed its first day of trading under $2.
The stock fell 96% during the Dot-com crash, hitting a low of $5 in 2001. There have been cases of positive reviews being written and posted by public relations companies on behalf of their clients90 and instances of writers using pseudonyms to leave negative reviews of their rivals’ works. It was a novel set in the future about an engineer who steals a rare interactive textbook to give to his knowledge-hungry daughter, Fiona. The team that worked on Kindle prototypes thought of that fictitious textbook as the template for the device that they were working on. “Communication is a sign of dysfunction,” Bezos said. “It means people aren’t working together in a close, organic way. We should be trying to figure out a way for teams to communicate less with each other, not more.”
The company started out selling books.
He purchased a $40,000 skeleton of an Ice Age cave bear and displayed it in the lobby of the company’s headquarters. Next to it was a sign that read “Please Don’t Feed The Bear.” It’s still there today. According to Brad Stone’s book “The Everything Store,” “Cadabra” was a reference to “abracadabra,” to suggest using the store would work like magic. The Cadabra name didn’t stick around for long, though.
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In the process, it has transformed this city, recruiting tens of thousands of skilled workers, minting another round of tech millionaires and stamping new towers on the skyline. At the foot of the “Day 1” building, where Bezos has his office, is a trio of enormous glass spheres, just down the street from Seattle’s other symbol of futuristic ambition and industry, the Space Needle. Many employees hated “two-pizza teams,” and especially the stress of the fitness functions.
In the quarter century since, his erstwhile electronic bookstore changed nearly everything about publishing, retail, computing and how to run a company. It has ever-growing fleets of airplanes, drones, trucks and robots; it is moving deeper into entertainment, health care, groceries, advertising, home security, artificial intelligence and more. “This is not only the largest river in the world, it’s many times larger than the next biggest river. It blows all other rivers away,” he said, according to Stone. Employees would be organized into groups of fewer than ten people — the perfect number to be satisfied by two pizzas for dinner — and were expected to work autonomously. Teams had to set strict goals, with equations to measure their success.
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The dominant 20th century system of industrial mass production and consumption is sometimes referred to as Fordism, after Henry Ford and the Ford Motor Company. The team eventually begged Bezos to keep the name Fiona, but he decided on another suggestion, Kindle, because it evoked the idea of starting a fire. The Kindle got its original name from a book called “The Diamond Age” by Neal Stephenson.
