From D (as in Dallas) Magazine:
This Internet Millionaire Has a New Deal For You
The breakfast with Jeff Bezos started awkwardly and ended with an indignity that Matt Rutledge didn’t even catch at first. The waitress at Lola, a trendy Seattle restaurant owned by celebrity chef Tom Douglas, didn’t recognize Bezos. But she sensed she should have. When she stumbled over his name, he explained that his father was Cuban, which, in terms of making a positive ID, probably wasn’t as helpful as saying, “I’m the guy who founded Amazon.”Also seated at the table that Monday morning in 2010 were Bezos’ shadow, an up-and-coming Amazon executive who follows Bezos everywhere, watching how the CEO makes decisions; and the corporate development guy who’d put together Amazon’s recent $110 million purchase of Rutledge’s company. Bezos is better at business than he is at small talk. Rutledge would claim he himself has been lucky in the first field and is incompetent in the second. The breakfast unfolded with all the ease and grace of a tango danced by two beginners on painter’s stilts. The development guy did his best to keep things moving while the shadow looked on, learning God knows what.Rutledge, a charmingly awkward man in his early 40s, had met Bezos more than once prior to the acquisition, each time figuring his job had been to answer questions and be liked. Now that the deal had closed, he saw his role differently. He wanted to have a good meeting, sure, but he didn’t feel the need to impress the billionaire. Bezos asked how Rutledge’s day was going, which struck him as surreal. He’d flown to Seattle on a Sunday just to have breakfast with Bezos on Monday. After breakfast, he would return to Dallas. All that time and travel, and Bezos didn’t have an agenda? Rutledge, having agreed to remain an Amazon employee for three years, had hoped that the meeting would usher him into an inner circle. Bezos would give him the secret scroll of incantations and explain how the two men together would rule the world. Instead, Bezos was idly asking how Rutledge’s day was going? Rutledge wanted to answer, “I don’t know, Jeff. You tell me how my day is going so far.”
At length, after a bit of business talk that maybe resembled a cousin of an actual breakfast meeting, Rutledge blurted out a question that had been troubling him: “Why did you buy Woot?”For the uninitiated, the term “woot” is an expression of joy that sprang from online role-playing games, a portmanteau of “wow” and “loot.” Rutledge had bought the web address Woot.com in 2003 for $6,000, and the next year launched a site that sold stuff in a way no one had ever tried. Woot offered only one item per day, usually a gadget but maybe a wheel of cheese, and priced it so low that it oftentimes sold out in a matter of hours. When the items didn’t sell out, Woot put them in a Bag of Crap, a bundle that users bought blindly. Customer service pretty much began and ended with the suggestion that the customer put any unwanted or defective item on eBay.Woot violated nearly every precept of retail. And it was wildly successful. Each weekday just after midnight Central Standard, a new item went up. It was an event. The site attracted a community of geeks who once flooded its discussion forum with 452 comments about a power adapter. At its height, Woot attracted 1 million daily visitors, to whom Rutledge was something of a rock star. By 2008, annual sales had eclipsed $164 million, and Inc. magazine named Woot the fastest-growing private retailer in the country (and the fastest-growing private company in North Texas)....MORE
