Back in the day when I was at SmugMug, Amazon was desperate for companies to try out its unlikely foray into cloud computing,. It seemed insane to analysts for a retailer to do. They were calling for Jeff Bezos to exit the company.
A young guy, Andy Jassy, who was put in charge of the unlikely venture, visited SmugMug and we cooked him his favorite meal of fried chicken. After a year of trying, Amazon convinced us that their data centers were better than ours so we sold off all our hardware and now they host everything for both SmugMug and Flickr. We love them but I always thought they were ruthless competitors.
Now this:
Do you think company personalities change when they get big, or are ruthless people the most likely to make big companies?