When he spoke, I noticed that unlike me, Jeff [Bezos] didn’t gesture with his hands. Instead, he used his head for emphasis, lifting his chin up for questions, dropping it down suddenly for emphasis. Twisting his head at a 45-degree angle meant he was curious. At thirty-four, his demeanor still retained a strong dose of “gee whiz” enthusiasm, but all the childlike delight in the world couldn’t mask the analytical and ambitious brain constantly at work behind his unblinking eyes.

As I started to bring Jeff up to speed about Netflix, detailing the efforts we’d made to get the site off the ground, he peppered me with questions. How could I know that I had every DVD? How could I forecast expected turns? What did I expect the ratio of sales to rentals to be? But it was clear to me that what he was most excited about were the stories about launch day — particularly, the story of that ringing bell.

“That’s fantastic!” he exclaimed, so excited that he almost moved his hands. “We had the exact same thing! A bell that rang every time an order came in. I had to stop everyone from rushing over to the computer screens to see if they knew the customers.”

We traded beta names: he laughed at Kibble and told me that Amazon had originally called itself Cadabra, which he had thought evoked the sense of magic that online shopping could produce. “The problem is that Cadabra sounds a little too much like cadaver,” Bezos said, barking out a laugh.

Although Amazon was still relatively small in 1998, they already had over 600 employees and were doing more than $150 million in revenue. They were a real company now, with real pressures, but as Jeff and I chatted about our launch days, I could see in his face and hear in his voice that in many ways he missed those simpler, more exciting times.

Reed, on the other hand, was obviously bored. Forget “regret minimization framework” — Reed has never been someone who dwells, at all, on the past, so these stories of early struggles and frenetic launch days were of little interest to him. His placid stare had turned stony, and he was impatiently jogging his leg up and down. He wanted, I knew, to direct the conversation to the topics at hand: what Netflix was doing, how it could potentially fit with what Amazon was doing, and how some kind of “arrangement” could be a win-win situation for both parties.

I was just finishing bringing Jeff and Joy through my professional résumé, and was about to brief them on Christina, Te, and other key members of our team, when Reed decided he’d had enough.

“We don’t need to go through all this,” he said, exasperated. “What does this have to do with Netflix and Amazon and possible ways we can work together?”