Kind of tangential, but is Bezos a programmer type? I thought he came from banking or the big 4. I’m curious if the “malloc for the internet” bit is verbatim.
I had thought the same about his background, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos looks like he was technical at college and the first couple of years (or less) of his career.
> He graduated from Princeton University in 1986 with degrees in electrical engineering and computer science.
and
> After Bezos graduated from Princeton in 1986,... He first worked at Fitel, a fintech telecommunications start-up, where he was tasked with building a network for international trade.[28] Bezos was promoted to head of development and director of customer service thereafter.[29] He transitioned into the banking industry when he became a product manager at Bankers Trust; he worked there from 1988 ...
He got degrees in computer science and electrical engineering from Princeton. I have no idea how competent he is, but I think you can assume at least equal to the average college grad SDE.
He said once in a "fireside chat" with his brother that if Amazon went all to shit and never took off, he would probably be a perfectly happy software engineer somewhere.
I don't think Jeff is a programmer, but I think he is very smart and his success shows that he can understand and create businesses around lots of different types of concepts and ideas. I imagine in reality there is some amount of collaboration that happens before Bezos spouts off something like "create a malloc for the internet", but in any case, it's very strong for his brand of leadership that the lore states it came straight from him.
