by Brad Stone
Bezos also confided his dreams to Nick Hanauer, the early Amazon investor and an unofficial board member during the company’s first five years. “He absolutely thinks he’s going to space,” Hanauer says. “It’s always been one of his goals. It’s why he started working out every morning. He’s been ridiculously disciplined about it.”
In retrospect, it almost seems like Bezos was taunting the media with his top-secret space plans. He clearly couldn’t resist obliquely referencing them. Discussing concerns about the long-term health of the planet with Wired magazine in 1999, he told an interviewer, “I wouldn’t mind helping in some way. I do think we have all our eggs in one basket.”10 He told Fast Company in 2001 that it would be great if the novel Dune, in which humanity has colonized other planets, was “nonfiction.”
In an interview I conducted with Bezos in 2000, I asked him what he was reading. He talked about Robert Zubrin’s books Entering Space: Creating a Spacefaring Civilization and The Case for Mars. At the end of the conversation, I wondered when some brave Silicon Valley entrepreneur would start a private space company (this was two years before PayPal cofounder Elon Musk started his rocket company SpaceX). Bezos’s answer seemed particularly convoluted. “It’s a very hard technical problem and I think it’s very hard to see how you would generate a return in a reasonable amount of time on that investment,” he said. “So the answer to your question is probably yes, there probably is somebody doing it, but it’s not… when you go to venture capital conferences, it never comes up. To say it was a cold topic would be exaggerating how hot it is.”
In 2002, Bezos created a public Wish List of his own on Amazon, available for anyone to see, specifying some of his reading interests. Among the titles were The History of Space Vehicles, by Tim Furniss, and Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe, by Peter Douglas Ward and Donald Brownlee. Then, in February 2003, I attended a TED conference, an annual gathering devoted to technology and design that was held back then in Monterey, California, and I overheard someone talking about a space company in Seattle called Blue. A month later, Bezos and his attorney suffered minor injuries in a helicopter accident near Alpine in West Texas—a few hundred miles from the middle of nowhere. “During… takeoff the tailboom struck a tree, aircraft rolled to side, ended up in a creek partially submerged,” read the official incident report from the Federal Aviation Administration. “The three passengers received injuries and were transported to the local hospital. Degree of injuries believed to be nonthreatening.”
Bezos later told Time magazine that his overarching thought during the accident was What a dumb way to die. It later emerged that he was looking to buy land for a Texas ranch. Bezos wanted to give his kids the same experience he’d had growing up on his grandparents’ ranch in Cotulla.
He was also looking for a good place to build a launchpad.
At the time of the helicopter crash, the world knew nothing of Jeff Bezos’s space-exploration company. But it all seemed to be adding up to something. After the accident, I searched the Washington State corporate database for a company called Blue and found an entry for Blue Operations LLC that had been registered with an address of 1200 Twelfth Avenue South in Seattle—Amazon’s headquarters. The company had a mysteriously vague website advertising job openings for aerospace engineers who had expertise in areas like propulsion and avionics. I was a cub reporter for Newsweek magazine at the time, and the notion that a famous Internet billionaire was secretly building his own spaceship was too enticing to resist.
On a trip to Seattle in March of 2003, I rented a car and, late at night, drove to another address I had found in the Washington State corporate records for Blue, this one located in an industrial zone south of Seattle along the Duwamish Waterway. At that address was a fifty-three-thousand-square-foot warehouse with a blue awning over the front door imprinted with the words Blue Origin in white letters.
Though it was late on a weekend night, the lights were on and a few cars and motorcycles were parked out front. I couldn’t see anything through the covered windows and there was no one outside. The air smelled heavily of river water and processed lumber. I sat in the rental car, just wondering, indulging visions of secret spaceships and billionaire-funded missions to Mars. But I had nothing to go on, and it was intensely frustrating. After an hour, I couldn’t take it anymore. I got out, walked quietly across the street to a trash can, removed an armful of its contents, walked back to the car, and dumped it in the trunk.
A few weeks later, for Newsweek magazine, I wrote the first story about Blue Origin, entitled “Bezos in Space.”11 Aided by an extremely convenient discovery I’d made that night—a sheaf of coffee-stained drafts of a Blue Origin mission statement—I reported that the long-term mission of the firm was to create an enduring human presence in space. The company was building a spaceship called New Shepard, after Alan Shepard, the pioneering Mercury astronaut, which would take tourists into the upper reaches of the atmosphere. The unique designs called for a vertical takeoff and thrusters to control a vertical landing so that the vehicle could be economically reused. The startup was also funding forward-looking research into new propulsion systems, like wave rotors and rockets powered by ground-based lasers.
A few days after my visit to Blue Origin’s warehouse, I e-mailed all these details to Bezos to let him know what would be in the article and to try to elicit a reaction. I’ve since lost the message I sent, but in my breathless quest I must have implied that he had grown impatient with the progress of manned space travel inside NASA. I kept his reply:
Brad, I’m travelling and responding by Blackberry—maybe you’ll get this.
It’s way premature for Blue to say anything or comment on anything because we haven’t done anything worthy of comment. If you’re interested in this topic over the coming years, we’ll keep it in mind for when we have anything worth saying. Some of what you have below is right and some is wrong. I will comment on one thing because you touched a nerve, and I think it’s hurtful to the people of NASA. There should be a counterpoint.
NASA is a national treasure, and it’s total bull that anyone should be frustrated by NASA. The only reason I’m interested in space is because they inspired me when I was five years old. How many government agencies can you think of that inspire five year olds? The work NASA does is technically super-demanding and inherently risky, and they continue to do an outstanding job. The ONLY reason any of these small space companies have a chance of doing ANYTHING is because they get to stand on the shoulders of NASA’s accomplishments and ingenuity.
If you want a specific example: consider that all these companies use extremely sophisticated computer codes for analyzing things like structures, heat flows and aerodynamics, which codes were developed (over many years and meticulously tested against physical reality) by NASA!
Jeff
There was a smattering of media coverage after the Newsweek article but Blue Origin continued to labor in secret. Bezos acquired his Texas ranch using anonymous corporate entities named after historic explorers (enterprises like James Cook LP and Coronado Ventures) to make generous offers to landowners around Van Horn, Texas, not far from where his helicopter had gone down.12 By 2005 he owned 290,000 acres—an area about a third of the size of Rhode Island. He announced his intentions to build a spaceport by walking into the office of a local newspaper, the Van Horn Advocate, and giving an impromptu interview to its bewildered editor.
In a speech at Carnegie Mellon University in 2011, Bezos said that Blue Origin’s goal was to drive down the cost and increase the safety of technology that can get humans into space. The group was “working to lower the cost of space flight to build a future where we humans can explore the solar system firsthand and in person,” he said. “Slow steady progress can erode any challenge over time.”
Progress may be slower than Bezos and his rocket scientists first imagined. In 2011, a Blue Origin test vehicle spun out of control at Mach 1.2 and an altitude of 45,000 feet, leaving
a spectacular fireball in the sky that reminded Van Horn residents of the space shuttle Challenger disaster. “Not the outcome any of us wanted, but we’re signed up for this to be hard,” Bezos wrote in a blog post on the Blue Origin website.13 A year after that, the company successfully tested the spaceship’s crew-capsule escape system. It has received two grants from NASA worth more than $25 million to develop technologies related to human spaceflight. Internet magnate Elon Musk, with SpaceX, and billionaire Richard Branson, the founder of an enterprise called Virgin Galactic, are pursuing some of the same goals.
Bezos does not allow the public or media to tour his space facilities. In 2006, the company moved to larger headquarters in Kent, Washington, twenty miles south of Seattle. Visitors describe a facility studded with Bezos’s space collectibles, like props from Star Trek, rocket parts from various spaceships throughout history, and a real cosmonaut suit from the Soviet Union. Engineers zoom around the 280,000-square-foot facility on Segways. In the atrium of the building, there is a full-scale steampunk model of a Victorian-era spaceship as it might have been described in the fiction of Jules Verne, complete with a cockpit, brass controls, and nineteenth-century furnishings. Visitors can venture inside, sit on the velvet-covered seats, and imagine themselves as intrepid explorers in the time of Captain Nemo and Phileas Fogg. “To an imaginative child, it would look like an artifact,” says Bezos’s friend Danny Hillis.
Like other great entrepreneurs, including Walt Disney, Henry Ford, and Steve Jobs, Bezos was turning imagination into reality, the fancies of his youth into actual physical things. “Space for Jeff is not a year 2000 or a year 2010 opportunity,” says Hillis. “It’s been a dream of humanity’s for centuries and it will continue to be one for centuries. Jeff sees himself and Blue Origin as part of that bigger story. It’s the next step in what Jules Verne was writing about and what the Apollo missions accomplished.”
Bezos did not hesitate to embrace the responsibilities that came with pursuing this passion. Even as Amazon struggled to maintain orbit, he collected new obligations and hired more employees for Blue Origin and then devised clever ways to divide his time among all his responsibilities in the most efficient manner possible. He gave Blue Origin a coat of arms and a Latin motto, Gradatim Ferociter, which translates to “Step by Step, Ferociously.” The phrase accurately captures Amazon’s guiding philosophy as well. Steady progress toward seemingly impossible goals will win the day. Setbacks are temporary. Naysayers are best ignored.
An interviewer once asked Bezos why he was motivated to accomplish so much, considering that he had already amassed an exceedingly large fortune. “I have realized about myself that I’m very motivated by people counting on me,” he answered. “I like to be counted on.”14
CHAPTER 6
Chaos Theory
Jeff Bezos liked to be counted on, but after Amazon reached profitability during the ebb of the dot-com bust in 2002, he discovered that he himself would need to count on someone. For while Amazon had quieted its most vociferous critics, Bezos needed help taming the growing chaos inside his company’s walls.
In every significant way, Amazon was becoming a larger and more complicated business. It had 2,100 employees at the end of 1998, and 9,000 at the end of 2004. And after it survived the worst effects of the dot-com crash, it resumed lurching into new categories, like sporting goods, apparel, and jewelry, and new countries, like Japan and China.
Size bred chaos. All companies hit this critical moment, when their internal structures, like a teenager’s old shoes, suddenly don’t fit anymore. But Amazon went through a severe form of this rite of passage. The larger and more ambitious it got, the more complicated it became structurally and the harder it was to keep everyone coordinated and moving quickly. Bezos wanted to execute several strategies simultaneously, but the company’s various interdependent divisions were wasting too much time coordinating with one other.
In the distribution centers, chaos wasn’t an ethereal thing but tangible, reflected in frequent system outages that could shut down facilities for hours and in omnipresent piles of products that sat on the floor, ignored by workers. During the early years of frenzied growth, new product categories had been plopped onto Amazon’s logistics network with little preparation. Employees remember that when the home and kitchen category was introduced in the fall of 1999, kitchen knives would fly down the conveyor chutes, free of protective packaging. Amazon’s internal logistics software didn’t properly account for new categories, so the computers would ask workers whether a new toy entering the warehouse was a hardcover or a paperback book.
Amazon once tried to conquer chaos by synchronizing its employees’ efforts with broad unifying themes like Get Big Fast and Get Our House in Order. That had gotten everyone paddling in the same direction, but now the company had become too big for that kind of transparent sloganeering.
During these years of its awkward adolescence, Bezos refused to slow down, doubling and tripling his bet on the Internet and on his grand vision for a store that sold everything. To guide his company through this transition, he created an unorthodox organizational structure with a peculiar name. And to quell the turmoil in the distribution centers, he started to rely on a young executive named Jeff Wilke, whose cerebral and occasionally impatient management style mirrored his own. “They fed off each other,” says Bruce Jones, a supply-chain vice president. “Bezos wanted to do it and Wilke knew how to do it. It was a hell of a lot of fun, in a very Machiavellian sort of way.”
Jeff Wilke’s job was to fix the mistakes of his predecessor. Jimmy Wright and his cowboy crew from Walmart had designed Amazon’s nationwide logistics network in the late nineties and were the best in the world at building large-scale retail distribution. But in moving quickly to satisfy Bezos’s open-ended goal to store and ship everything, they had created a system that was expensive, unreliable, and hungry for an emergency influx of employees from Seattle at the end of every year. “It was a mess,” says Bruce Jones. “It was pretty much how Walmart did all their distribution centers, which was great if you had to send out five thousand rolls of toilet paper. But it was not well suited to small orders.”
Wilke was from suburban Pittsburgh, the son of an attorney; his parents divorced when he was twelve. He learned he had a talent for mathematics in the sixth grade when to his surprise he placed second in a regional math tournament. When he was fifteen and visiting his grandparents in Las Vegas, he was enthralled by a casino’s video-poker machine. He went home and replicated it on his first-generation personal computer, called the Timex Sinclair 1000 (internal memory: 2 KB). Wilke got straight As throughout school but his guidance counselor told him not to apply to Princeton University because no one from Keystone Oaks High School had ever been admitted to the Ivy League. He applied anyway and got in.
Wilke graduated summa cum laude from Princeton in 1989, three years after Bezos. He earned an MBA and an MS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s engineering/MBA dual-degree program. Called Leaders for Manufacturing (now it’s Leaders for Global Operations), the program is a novel alliance of MIT’s business school, its engineering school, and partner companies, like Boeing, created to address emerging global competition. Mark Mastandrea, an MIT classmate who would follow him to Amazon, says that Wilke “was one of the smartest people I had ever come across. He got to the answers faster than anyone else.”
Wilke began his career at Andersen Consulting and then joined AlliedSignal, the manufacturing giant, which was later acquired by Honeywell. He quickly climbed the ranks to vice president, reporting directly to CEO Larry Bossidy and running the company’s $200-million-a-year pharmaceutical business. In AlliedSignal’s headquarters in Morristown, New Jersey, Wilke was immersed in the corporate dogma of Six Sigma, a manufacturing and management philosophy that seeks to increase efficiency by identifying and eliminating defects.
Back in 1999, Scott Pitasky, an Amazon recruiter who later became the head of human resources at Microsoft, was put
in charge of finding a replacement for Jimmy Wright. Pitasky had previously worked with Wilke at AlliedSignal, so he thought of his former colleague after concluding that Amazon needed someone who was smart enough to go toe to toe with Jeff Bezos, who delighted in questioning how everything was done.
Pitasky tracked Wilke down on a business trip in Switzerland and pitched him on taking over the critical distribution network at Amazon. He told Wilke that he would have the chance to build a unique distribution network and define a nascent industry, an opportunity that simply didn’t exist at AlliedSignal. Working quickly, Pitasky convinced then COO Joe Galli, visiting his children at the time on the East Coast, to meet Wilke at a hotel restaurant near Dulles International Airport as soon as Wilke returned to the States.
All of thirty-two years old at the time, with a toothy smile and unfashionable eyeglasses, Wilke did not immediately present the picture of a dynamic leader. “He was not a charismatic communicator,” Galli says. “He was an extremely smart and thoughtful supply-chain expert who relied on fact-based analysis and wanted to zero in and do the right thing.” Over dinner that night, and during a separate trip Galli made to visit Wilke and his wife, Liesl, at their home in New Jersey, the pair bonded. Wilke and Galli were both from Pittsburgh and had similar middle-class roots. Ever the salesman, Galli piqued Wilke’s interest in the massive logistics challenges Amazon faced. Wilke then visited Seattle to interview with Bezos and Joy Covey. He joined the company soon after as vice president and general manager of worldwide operations. After his last conversation with Larry Bossidy, who had just announced his retirement from AlliedSignal, the veteran CEO gave him a hug.