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. After breakfast, he would return to Dallas. He’d flown to Seattle on a Sunday just to have breakfast with Bezos on Monday. Bezos asked how Rutledge’s day was going, which struck him as surreal. He wanted to have a good meeting, sure, but he didn’t feel the need to impress the billionaire. Now that the deal had closed, he saw his role differently. 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. The development guy did his best to keep things moving while the shadow looked on, learning God knows what. The breakfast unfolded with all the ease and grace of a tango danced by two beginners on painter’s stilts. Rutledge would claim he himself has been lucky in the first field and is incompetent in the second. Bezos is better at business than he is at small talk. 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.”Īlso 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. The waitress at Lola, a trendy Seattle restaurant owned by celebrity chef Tom Douglas, didn’t recognize Bezos. The breakfast with Jeff Bezos started awkwardly and ended with an indignity that Matt Rutledge didn’t even catch at first.
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