p.7 （子供のころのペゾスの発言）
「この世界って、教えてもらってスイッチさえ入れればいいって感じだよね。でも、それが自分にとってどういう意味を持つのか、考える力をもたなきゃ」
"The way the world is, you know, someone could tell you to press the button. You have to be able to think what you're doing for yourself."
p6
12歳のティムは競争心にあふれてもいて、「たくさん読んだで賞」獲得をめざしてさまざまな本を読んでいるが、毎週10冊以上も読むというちょっと信じられない女の子がクラスにいてその同級生にかなわないと思うといった話をしたらしい。
Tim, twelve, was already competitive. He told Ray he was reading a variety of books to qualify for a special reader’s certificate but compared himself unfavorably to another classmate who claimed, improbably, that she was reading a dozen books a week.
One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com -- books.google.co.jp/books?isbn=1101516232
Richard L. Brandt - 2011 - Business & Economics
... he decided to build one himself. He bought his own mirrors and rigged up motors to reproduce the Infinity Cube. As he explained to Ray, “The way the world is, you know, someone could tell you to press the button.” But, he added, “ You have ...
>>> Tim, twelve, was already competitive. He told Ray he was reading a variety of books to qualify for a special reader’s certificate but compared himself unfavorably to another classmate who claimed, improbably, that she was reading a dozen books a week. Tim also showed Ray a science project he was working on called an infinity cube, a battery-powered contraption with rotating mirrors that created the optical illusion of an endless tunnel. Tim modeled the device after one he had seen in a store. That one cost twenty-two dollars, but “mine was cheaper,” he told Ray. Teachers said that three of Tim’s projects were being entered in a local science competition that drew most of its submissions from students in junior and senior high schools.
......... Tim told Julie Ray that he loved these exercises. “The way the world is, you know, someone could tell you to press the button. You have to be able to think what you’re doing for yourself.”
By design, D. E. Shaw would be a different kind of Wall Street firm.
Shaw recruited not financiers but scientists and mathematicians
ーbig brains with unusual backgrounds, lofty academic credentials,
and more than a touch of social cluelessness.
Amazon at the time was offering about sixty thousand a year in salary, stock options of questionable value,
a meager health plan with a high deductible, and an increasingly frenetic work pace.
Bezos was also proving himself to be something of a spoilsport.
That year the engineers rigged a database command, rwerich, to track the number of daily purchases as well as orders throughout the lifetime of the company.
They obsessively watched those numbers grow—it was one of their pleasures amid the typically frenetic days.
Bezos eventually told them to stop doing it, in part because it was putting too much strain on the servers.
Of course, that meant everyone at Amazon would have to work even harder.
The assumption was that no one would take even a weekend day off.
“Nobody said you couldn’t, but nobody thought you would,” says Susan Benson.
Eric Benson adds, “There were deadlines and death marches.”
Greg Linden, an engineer who worked on the project, recalls Bezos coming into his office, getting down on his hands and knees, and joking, “I’m not worthy.”
Breier’s tenure at Amazon was short and rocky. Bezos wanted to reinvent everything about marketing, suggesting, for example, that they conduct annual reviews of advertising agencies to make them constantly compete for Amazon’s business.
Breier explained that the advertising industry didn’t work that way.
He lasted about a year. Over the first decade at Amazon, marketing VPs were the equivalent of the doomed drummers in the satirical band Spinal Tap;
Bezos plowed through them at a rapid clip, looking for someone with the same low regard for the usual way of doing things that Bezos himself had.
