Hammering Man, a 48-foot tall, seven-inch thick, black silhouette sculpture, stands resolutely, left leg in front of right leg, near the decorative marble-arched entrance to the Seattle Art Museum, the site of the annual shareholders’ meeting of Amazon.com. The date is May 20, 1999. Covered in jet black automotive paint, the 13-ton, fabricated steel figure, created by artist Jonathan Borofsky as a tribute to American workers, gets its name from the sculpted hammer that is an extension of a silent motorized left hand. The left arm moves four times per minute from over the statue’s head down to a 75-degree angle where it meets the motionless right arm, which holds a flat object that is "hammered."Hammering Man’s life in Seattle has not been without incident. In 1991, as it was elevated from a flatbed truck by a crane, the lifting strap snapped when it was a foot off the ground and the 26,000-pound piece crashed to the pavement, its feet gashing two gigantic footprints in the sidewalk at First Avenue and Seneca Street. "It was like reality," an onlooker told the Seattle Times. "Life doesn’t always go smoothly and sometimes you fall down." After a year of repairs, Hammering Man returned to Seattle, this time without incident; but it’s been a target for political statements and whimsy ever since. A group of guerrilla performance artists once fastened a 700-pound steel ball-and-chain to the right leg; on one dark Christmas night, some mischievous elves used a weather balloon to drop a red and white Santa’s cap (the size of a ship’s sail) atop his head.
On this sunny May morning,the crowd of some 350 eager shareholders mill about the lobby of the Robert Venturi–designed Seattle Art Museum, sipping freshly brewed Starbucks coffee and munching on tiny bagels with cream cheese, waiting in anticipation to hear from their own Hammering Man, Jeffrey P. Bezos—part business genius, part class cutup—who has methodically and resolutely pounded out a new business model for the Internet Age. And like Hammering Man, Bezos has been the target of admiration and envy ("Why him—and not you?" asked Wired) as well as scorn ("Amazon.toast," derided Internet pundit George Colony in 1997; "Amazon.bomb," proclaimed Barron’s in 1999). But this is a day for affection. Some shareholders are positively giddy with anticipation at the prospect of seeing and hearing from the man who has helped to make them money—in some cases, lots of money.
For the most part, the Amazon.com shareholders look very much like the kind of people one sees at any annual meeting—lots of retired people with white hair and plenty of time to look after their interests; a thirtysomething dad from Allentown, Pennsylvania, explaining the procedure of the meeting to his nine-year-old son, who proudly wears a Seattle Mariners baseball cap. But this being Seattle, there is also in attendance a tattooed, body-pierced, purple-haired Gen-X former Amazon.com employee, who’s made more money than he ever dreamed of, thanks to the oft-split stock that’s risen 5,600 percent (yes, 5,600 percent) in the mere two years since the company went public on May 15, 1997. Also wending his way through the crowd is the legendary L. John Doerr, the highly visible partner in the venture capital company Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, dressed professorially in blue blazer, gray slacks, striped shirt, no tie. The wily, wiry Doerr is a director of the company and personally holds 1,011,561 shares, worth on this particular day about $131 million. And over there is another member of the board, the similarly dressed Scott Cook, cofounder of Intuit, Inc., a leading personal finance, tax, and accounting software and web services company. (He’s also a director of Amazon.com’s auction rival, eBay, Inc.). Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future, who knows both Cook and Bezos, observes that, "Scott and Jeff are very similar people in terms of the methodicalness of their strategy," and considers each man an "extraordinarily thoughtful strategist."
And it’s strategy the investors want to hear as, precisely at the scheduled hour of 10 a.m., they quickly file into the gray-walled auditorium of the museum. An anticipatory buzz is in the air. From out of the multitude, down one of the aisles, springs Bezos, who bounds up the stairs of the tiny stage dressed very much like John Doerr—dark blazer and pants, and a white shirt, open at the collar, sans tie. Looking like your favorite high school science teacher who’s trying to quickly bring the student assembly to order, Bezos good-naturedly directs the last few stragglers to unoccupied seats: "There are a few seats down here," he points out, then gliding across the stage, "and a couple more over here."
After quickly dispensing with the formal part of the meeting—the procedural review, introduction of directors, voting on proposals, etc.—Bezos, planted behind a lectern, prepares to talk to the shareholders about the state of their company, and the progress they’ve made in the year since the last shareholders’ meeting. They all know that over the past 12 months, Jeff Bezos and Amazon.com have been all over the media—features on PBS’s NewsHour and CBS’s 60 Minutes II; cover stories in Business Week, Fortune, Forbes, Wired, and the New York Times Magazine—which has crowned Amazon.com the poster child of the Internet and Bezos a pioneer of the new economy. In the past year, "Amazon" entered the business lexicon as a verb when the Wall Street Journal wrote about established offline companies facing the threat of being "amazoned," i.e., "forfeiting business to an Internet newcomer." Forbes proclaimed that "Youbet.com wants to be the Amazon.com of horse racing." Fortune (which is particularly fond of the analogy) called Babycenter.com "the Amazon of cyberbabies" and Sportsite.com (which sells Zambonis) the "Amazon.com of icemakers on wheels," and asked, "Who’ll be the Amazon.com of the $1 Trillion Car Biz?" Finally, Fortune columnist Stewart Alsop wondered, "Is There an Amazon.com for Every Industry?" (With its significant minority investments in drugstore.com, HomeGrocer.com, Pets.com, and Gear.com, Bezos seems to think so.)
