Amazon War Story #1: Jeff Bezos

The week before, Steve had reply-all'd an internal rant about Google's lack of platforms to his entire public Google+ following. Nothing bad happened at Google — everyone laughed, all the way up — but the post went viral, and Steve, having spent six and a half years pointedly not bagging on his former employer, felt he owed Amazon some balance. The first of the promised balancing stories is on the subject of presenting to Jeff Bezos. The piece gave the industry one of its enduring Bezos images: a hyper-intelligent alien with a general's view of the industry battlefield, who hasn't had to dress himself in the morning for years and is so good at sight-reading presentations he becomes bored and annoyed at the pace of your brain. The working guide that goes with it: write prose, not slides (PowerPoint is banned). Write it for a world-leading expert. Then delete every third paragraph, so his giant brain has gaps to fill in. Go in knowing he will blindside you, because he always does — Steve had forgotten Data Mining on a list of generalist-engineer techniques — and when he does, laugh, say "yup, you got me, I'm a dork," and keep going. That is the only response his alien intelligence rewards.

It shows Steve at his most generous toward a former employer and pairs with the Platforms Rant it apologises for and with Notes from the Mystery Machine Bus, where the same cultural-anthropologist instinct turns from a single executive to the engineering cultures Steve has lived inside.