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Jeff Bezos, Jack Ma, and the Quest to Kill eBay
Author’s note
I thought this was a pretty good essay, even on re-reading it eight years later. I felt it was important to get down for the historical record. And it follows a long-horizon story, of Jeff trying to sell used stuff somehow, that highlights how different Jeff was from Larry and Sergey. Google would kill anything that failed on the first try, whereas Jeff would keep pounding away at his ideas, changing their shape, until he found what actually worked.
AI Notes
Steve was a few weeks into Amazon, December 1998, when he began hearing about a project so secret its team had forked the retail site's codebase to work on it, and this essay, written twenty years later, is him finally telling the story. It runs half memoir, half strategy lecture with numbered Life Lessons. The memoir half carries the good specifics: a hundred-person office above a bar where a dog got to press the launch buttons, a mascot named Mr. Tooth so completely forgotten that even Steve needed the Wayback Machine to find a picture of him, and the UW classmate everyone pitied in 1995 for taking a job at an internet bookstore. She was employee #11.
Steve disclaims his own reliability before the argument even starts: he is working from twenty-year-old memories, wasn't in the room for the China half at all, and says plainly not to read the post as a historical record. (The author note above says he wrote it for the record. Both are true in their way.) The strategy half rewards the reader anyway, because it works out its mechanism in the open — why copying a challenger's every feature, normally a self-destructive reflex, becomes armor for a company sitting on a network effect, and why that armor still has a gap. TaoBao found eBay's gap with a single feature eBay could not afford to match, and the market Alibaba ended up winning was several innovation rounds away from the one it set out to enter.
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Written the same year, from the same desk. Both essays argue that proximity and customer focus, not cleverness, determine who wins a market. Grab beating Uber in Southeast Asia is the live version of the lesson Steve draws from Bezos and Ma.
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Steve's other long Amazon-from-the-inside story, set in the same Columbia building, with the same cast in the wings. Read together they are the two halves of his 1998 — one about Amazon getting something spectacularly right, the other about getting something spectacularly wrong.