Prologue_3

Ray found it impossible to interest a publisher in Turning On Bright Minds. Editors
at the big houses said the subject matter was too narrow. So, in 1977, she took the money she’d earned from writing advertising copy for a Christmas catalog, printed a thousand paperbacks, and distributed them herself.

More than thirty years later, I found a copy in the Houston Public Library. I also
tracked down Julie Ray, who now lives in Central Texas and works on planning and communications for environmental and cultural causes. She said she had watched Tim’s rise to fame and fortune over the past two decades with admiration and amazement but without much surprise. “When I met him as a young boy, his ability was obvious, and it was being nurtured and encouraged by the new program,” she says. “The program also benefited by his responsiveness and enthusiasm for learning. It was a total validation of the concept.” She recalls what one teacher said all those years ago when Ray asked her to estimate the grade level the boy was performing at. “I really can’t say,” the teacher replied. “Except that there is probably no limit to what he can do, given a little guidance.”

In late 2011, I went to visit “Tim”—aka Jeff Bezos—in the Seattle headquarters of his company, Amazon.com. I was there to solicit his cooperation with this book, an
attempt to chronicle the extraordinary rise of an innovative, disruptive, and often
polarizing technology powerhouse, the company that was among the first to see the boundless promise of the Internet and that ended up forever changing the way we shop and read.

Amazon is increasingly a daily presence in modern life. Millions of people regularly
direct their Web browsers to its eponymous website or its satellite sites, like Zappos.com and Diapers.com, acting on the most basic impulse in any capitalist
society: to consume. The Amazon site is a smorgasbord of selection, offering books, movies, garden tools, furniture, food, and the occasional oddball items, like an inflatable unicorn horn for cats ($9.50) and a thousand-pound electronic-lock gun safe ($903.53) that is available for delivery in three to five days. The company has nearly perfected the art of instant gratification, delivering digital products in seconds and their physical incarnations in just a few days. It is not uncommon to hear a customer raving about an order that magically appeared on his doorstep well before it was expected to arrive.