Could you elaborate on what it could become part? And what was Jeff Bezos like as a thinker and programmer, is he really as brilliant as some people say he is ? What in your opinion was his greatest strength aside from timing and access to capital.
But ... his greatest strength is understanding that he's not smart enough, and the important thing is to hire people who are better than you to do the things that need to be done, so that you have time for thinking about what needs to be done.
It was nice to work for a guy with a BS in CS, someone who understood aspects of the sorts of problems that myself and the other founding programmer faced in the early days. We could talk about scaling issues, or database design issues, and Jeff had more than your typical "boss" understanding of what we meant.
But we were both much better programmers than Jeff would ever be. On the other hand, he's demonstrably much better at building and running a massive corporation, and much more willing to make decisions that many of us (I hope) would stumble over.
What Amazon became was a massive corporation that didn't care much about employee burnout, didn't care much about its treatment of employees at all, and relentlessly focused people on their lives as consumers, when most of us spend more of our lives as employees and citizens. Amazon has been amazing for us all as consumers, but it's almost certainly a net negative when viewed through the lens of employees (within and outside the company) and citizens.
These folks (who are "smarter than") usually have offers from everywhere in the valley, and without prestige or big salary, I'm curious to know if the conversion is primarily a vision or a 'reality distortion field' like story? Or was there any burden of proof for Jeff on progress towards the vision?
Edit: just saw you said Jeff knew the vision at the start, how did he prove he was the one to do it early on (founder-startup fit)?
Also, keep in mind, Jeff came from a hedge fund, having worked/analyzed the (then) internet and consumer market - so it seems he had more than a hunch of its potential.
And the fact that he was a tech guy (before banking), probably meant he could easily talk their language - in technical terms.
I remember that not long after we "opened the doors" to the public, we had a visit from some reps from either Ingram or Baker & Taylor, the US's two biggest book distributors (I forget which). Part of the reason Jeff had picked Seattle was that it was within the 1 day delivery radius for both companies. These guys came over to see what we were doing and they were completely flabbergasted. They could not believe that a few people in a small commercial building in Seattle had built what we had already done by that point. They had no idea of the technologies involved, they had no grasp of the vision. But we never had to convince companies like this - we just ordered books from them, as their customers, and then sold them to ours.
In the early days, there were just two of us programmers, and we began to sense that there was a backlog of programming tasks that we just didn't have the time to get to. We proposed the Jeff that we hire a third programmer. He wanted someone with a PhD in CS from one of the top 5 CS schools. We said "Jeff, we're a tiny startup in Seattle (remember, this is 1994, Seattle was different), we're never going to hire people like that". He insisted. We interviewed several of those people - they weren't interested (as we predicted). We bugged him and bugged him and eventually he relented and let us hire a less qualified, less stellar guy, just to get some tasks done.
In retrospect, Jeff had been exactly right. We should have held out for another A+ programmer, with the skills and vision to drive forward whatever tasks they were given (or self-identified). Instead we hired a capable, skilled person who needed a lot of hand-holding and encouragement (not to worry, I think he did pretty well for himself).
Jeff knew we had made a mistake (albeit not a very big one), and asserted very affirmatively that the company would not do that again. When we started hiring editors, he wanted people with "multiple years experience at a major national publication". The two of us founding programmers didn't try to talk him down from that, and eventually he was able to recruit such people. I don't know how he convinced them to join Amazon, even to this day.
Also, recall that in 1994, "the valley" wasn't what it later became. The people amazon was hiring in the 1995-1998 period weren't looking to the valley for alternative employment, for the most part.