Bezos' Amazon: Mercenary or missionary, or both?

Chip Bayers | Special for USA TODAY

NEW YORK — No industry indulges its earnest side more than the tech sector. From Apple's "A Computer for the Rest of Us" to Google's "Don't Be Evil," the message from tech companies is that the higher purpose of their cause must come before the quest for wealth.

In Silicon Valley, these are more than just management principles. It is religious dogma honed during the Internet era, with the Valley's biggest financiers serving the role of high priests spreading the gospel.

"Be a missionary, not a mercenary," the venerable venture capitalist John Doerr has long urged entrepreneurs. Citing principles laid down by his colleague Randy Komisar in The Monk and the Riddle, a brief (170-page) Zen-inspired parable about finding spiritual fulfillment in a business plan, Doerr sees missionary companies as those with, among other things, "passion," "big ideas" and a "lust to make meaning."

Mercenary companies, on the other hand, are "paranoid," "obsessed with the competition," and have managers who are "bosses of wolf packs" rather than "mentors" and "coaches of teams."

Yet, one of the hottest new business books of the fall (it made its debut at No. 13 on the Times' combined digital and print non-fiction list) is an inside look at what now might be the least earnest, most predatory technology company in the world: Amazon, one of Doerr's great investment triumphs.

Not that anyone from Amazon, including and especially its founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, would admit to violating the creed described by Doerr, his now-former board member.

As BusinessWeek writer Brad Stone details in The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, Bezos has built the most mercenary of enterprises — squeezing partners, undercutting competitors, degrading employees — while insisting repeatedly to both internal and external audiences that Amazon fits Doerr's definition of the missionary business.

Which doesn't necessarily make Bezos a liar, at least in his own mind. For one thing, there's no PR value in declaring yourself a mercenary.

But beyond that, one of the great paradoxes in the tale of Amazon is that its founder remains an utterly earnest missionary about the things he hopes his ruthless business practices will enable him to accomplish.

Stone appropriately mocks the anodyne "Jeffisms" that Bezos and his most loyal lieutenants ("the Jeff Bots") use to obscure and frustrate attempts to gain insight into Amazon's business practices and future plans.

One of the surest ways to get Bezos to drop the Jeffisms and reveal his earnest core is to get him off the subject of Amazon and ask him — as I first did in late 1998 when I began working on one of the first national magazine profiles of him — about humanity's future in space. It's then that you see a facet of Bezos' personality unchanged from what his closest friends saw in his youth.

Back then, Bezos hadn't yet begun work on Blue Origins, the private space company he operates in his non-Amazon hours, or on any of the other outside businesses he now owns via his personal investment fund Bezos Expeditions (the latest of these being The Washington Post).

Yet, even then his former high school girlfriend could say, in what seemed like a joke at the time, that she thought Bezos' real goal with Amazon was to amass enough money to build a space station. Her father would tell me about Bezos' belief as a teenager that "the future of mankind is not on this planet."

Odd? Megalomaniacal? Perhaps. But for many in the technology world, what's worse is that it's heretical. Using the proceeds of his company to finance his true passions violates a core tenet of the catechism preached by the likes of Doerr and Komisar.

Every company, of course, will contain at least elements of both the mercenary and the missionary in its practices . But you can't understand Silicon Valley without understanding the critical mass of earnest believers in tilting toward the missionary, which long predates Komisar's attempt to codify it.

Some of the most ardent devotees, for example, were pioneers of the open source movement which gave us the Apache Web server, Linux operating system and Firefox browser.

It helps inspire twentysomethings working endless hours for below-market wages at start-ups when their potential options wealth is still a distant dream. At the margins, it motivates customers — such as the Apple fanatics who have been the most earnest missionaries for the company's products.

All this is eminently and deservedly mockable. Still, it's telling that, near the end of Stone's tale, we learn that Bezos has recently begun to recognize the way his company has strayed from the true path of tech enlightenment.

In a plaintive memo to his senior staff entitled "Amazon.love," his fundamental question about Amazon was, as Stone puts it, "Could it be loved and not feared?" The earnest billionaire, it seems, now wants to reposition his company from the mercenary to the missionary. Not exactly a Road to Damascus moment, but one that the high priests of the Valley would approve.

Chip Bayers is a N.Y.-based journalist covering technology and business. He has been an editor at Adweek, Newser and Wired Digital, and was previously a staff writer for Wired Magazine.