M

y first visit to Amazon’s mothership seems a little too perfect. It’s hot but not too hot, breezy but not too breezy. I'm standing on Seventh Avenue, and to my left there’s a big construction project, with workers in hard hats banging out what look like three giant melting-glass gum balls — the tallest climbing 90 feet in the air. These “Spheres,” which will become a nature complex, are Amazon’s new, flashy stamp on the urban Denny Triangle neighborhood.

To my right, at the entrance to the Day 1 headquarters, lanyard-toting employees zip in and out of the Amazon Go bodega, a test store that lets people buy stuff without ever having to stop at a cashier. In between, dozens of Amazonians sit with their corgis and doodles on a patch of bright green turf or enjoy lunch on nearby concrete steps.

But this cheery picture — Amazon is growing! Amazon is innovative! Amazon loves your dog! — isn’t meant for outsiders like me. I bump up against the company’s fabled secretiveness when I try to chat up one guy about Amazon Go as he crosses the street. I don’t even mention I’m a reporter before he bolts. Two days later, as I’m snapping pictures of Amazon signs in different building lobbies, a receptionist asks if I plan to use the photos as part of an “exposé” on how much Amazon spends on its signage. I say no ... but that sign

did

look expensive.



Allan Lindsay

Back at the Day 1 conference room before my meeting with Zorn, Allan Lindsay, vice president of software for the Alexa Engine, walks in to greet me. The unshaven, 13-year Amazon veteran is dressed in jeans, worn black loafers and an early Alexa T-shirt with “Talk to me” printed on the front. He looks as if he’s just emerged from a factory floor where he’d been crafting Echo devices with a welding mask and torch.

Lindsay tells me about the earliest days of Alexa and Echo, when Amazon’s secretiveness kicked in to keep the Echo under wraps until its launch nearly three years ago. “It’s probably the best-kept secret we’ve ever had,” he says. “I think we surprised everyone.”

He’d been running technology and engineering for Amazon’s Prime program when Greg Hart — who’d just finished a tour of duty as Bezos’ technical adviser -- approached him. It was 2011, and Hart wanted to know if Lindsay would join a new “Jeff initiative” as the engineering and science lead. Hart couldn’t tell him anything about the project, just that it was with the devices team. Intrigued by the top-secret mission, Lindsay agreed, becoming one of the Echo group’s earliest hires.

Lindsay discovered what he was working on his first day at the job. “He described to me something that’s very much like the Echo,” he says, “which is a voice-controlled computer in your home that you interface with using your voice. You talk to it, and it talks back to you.”

“What was your immediate reaction?” I ask.

“That’s cool. OMG,” he remembers, laughing. “There are some gnarly problems in here. Can we even do it?”

They quickly added more than 30 people to the Alexa team, codenamed “Project Doppler.” Within three months, they’d fashioned rudimentary demos. In less than a year, they’d created a prototype of the cylindrical device.

“One-hundred percent of the people I hired before November 2014, when we went public, were hired without knowing what they were coming to work on,” Lindsay says. He mentions convincing speech scientists who'd spent 20 years at Microsoft Research to switch teams, getting them to take a leap of faith partly because of the allure of a secretive project.

