Within a few months of opening its first India office in July 2004, Amazon moved to the top floor of a three-storied building overlooking the Bangalore Race Course. Standing on the terrace of the third floor, employees could bet on horse races. That office was the most luxurious space the company’s new engineers had ever worked in. Everyone had large desks, comfortable chairs, powerful computers, lounge sofas and shower rooms. There were video games and a ping-pong table. But the clincher was the bar, always well stocked and frequently used. In the early years there were many parties, too, often thrown by Anand Rao, Amazon India’s second-ever employee and facilitator-in-chief of various vices. At one such party in 2005, nearly all employees who attended were pushed into the pool on the premises of O2, a rooftop bar on the uptown Residency Road. Even Bharat Vijay wasn’t spared (although Amit, ever the proper Amazonian, didn’t attend). Phones were damaged, wallets lost, clothes were discarded. Some people walked home in their underwear. Later, Amazon was forced to pay tens of thousands of rupees as recompense to O2.
But more than anything else, employees remembered their time at Amazon for the absorbing assignments and the distinct work culture. Finding the best engineers was just the start; Yahoo India and Trilogy had hired the best engineering minds, too, in their day. What set Amazon India apart was the unusual way in which they made their employees work with each other. It was this corporate culture that almost permanently moulded the mindset of the many people who worked for the company in its early years.
Amazon in India essentially operated like a startup filled with aggressively smart people who were given abundant cash to create innovative technological products. Their employees weren’t engaged in lowly back-office work; they didn’t have to kowtow (yet) to faceless superiors in the US. Instead, two newly put together teams, working independently of each other, had been charged with creating two exciting and complex products: a search engine and a payments system. These teams were further divided into smaller groups of five to six people. In Amazon parlance, the smaller groups were called ‘two pizza’ teams. A meal of two pizzas had to be sufficient for a team to be labelled thus. The Amazon engineers worked within the framework of the company’s processes, but apart from these fundamental strictures, they were unfettered and could function with little concern for organizational hierarchy, work hours, dress code or personal hygiene. The youngest engineers, college graduates like Ajay Bhutani, who had reacted with puzzlement on being told of a company that sells books online, were encouraged to challenge Jeff Bots and Tech Geniuses. There were even awards to be won for being unconventional. ‘The Emperor Has No Clothes’ award, for instance, would be conferred on individuals for pointing out fundamental flaws in products.
Amazon thus created an environment that pushed its meticulously chosen employees to battle each other over ideas, so that the ones which emerged out of the process would have been comprehensively thought through and fought for passionately.
Work at Amazon was informally organized according to a set of what it called ‘leadership principles’. These weren’t fluffy ideals; rather every employee was required to memorize and abide by these prescriptive directives. These principles urged one to ‘think big’, show ‘bias for action’, and demanded other such peculiar compliances. It was no surprise that the A9 project was deemed The Google Killer by some employees. They were not joking – having a sense of humour wasn’t one of Amazon’s leadership principles.
But the supreme directive was the dogma of customer obsession. At the centre of everything at Amazon, acting like a centrifugal force governing ideas, processes and decisions was this principle: ‘Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.’12
Customer happiness achieved, business expanded prodigiously, this principle then acted as a centripetal force, self-validating and completing the cycle which was repeated every day, every hour within Amazon’s premises.
At the India office, too, Amazon fashioned its Brave New World, making sure the customer obsession principle became a part of its employees’ consciousness. Abhishek Goyal, an early employee, recalls that if someone was late for an internal meeting, they would say, ‘Sorry, my customer obsession is a bit down today.’ Every meeting hosted an empty chair – for the customer. Every single employee had to talk about ‘customers, customers, customers.’ Abhishek later joined Accel Partners, where he would convince his bosses to become the first investors for Flipkart.
It wasn’t surprising that the customer obsession principle was applied with such rigour in India – Jeff Bezos took a personal interest in the two Indian projects and would sometimes even conduct reviews. If one didn’t obsess over customers, it wouldn’t be easy to answer any of Bezos’ questions. The intensity with which this principle was applied deeply affected everyone who worked there, including the few who weren’t greenhorns. N. S. Amarnath (known to his colleagues as Amar), a senior engineer in the payments team, was by far the oldest employee at Amazon India. In his mid-forties, he was nearly fifteen years older than his managers and about two decades older than most of his colleagues. ‘That level of customer obsession ... it was very novel, very profound for us,’ says Amar. ‘At that time, IT services companies were the only other benchmark in India and that kind of customer obsession wasn’t there. They just weren’t used to thinking of it.’
Indeed, this maniacal focus on pleasing customers and other characteristics of Amazon’s corporate culture – thinking big, hiring young people and letting them loose, creating a combative work environment, treating engineers
