On Dec. 14, 2009, customers ordered over 9.5 million items worldwide on Amazon, which is a record-breaking 110 items per second. How large a machine do you need to process and ship this kind of volume? How efficiently do you need operate it? And what kind of people do you need to keep it going? The author, a former Technology leader from Amazon.com writing under a pen name, gives us a vivid, sometime brutal inside scoop on Amazon.com's giant machinery, describing its cold and calculating culture in detail. The story begins in Silicon Valley where we go through author's experiences in the fast moving world of a Hi-Tech start up. Soon thereafter, the author's start-up is acquired and he finds himself looking for a job. He finds one in Seattle, a medley of lush green hills surrounded by snow capped mountains and sparking blue waters. Amazon.com--an Internet company based in Seattle which has taken the stock markets by storm, and has been transforming itself from an online retailer to an eCommerce platform, led by a CEO who leads this transformation but is not afraid to act goofy. It begins as a story of a technologist leaving behind his beloved Silicon Valley for Seattle. It unfolds into a moving story capturing Seattle's beauty, its interesting people and culture; and the inside scoop on the dot-com world - both the excitement and joy of innovation, and also the dark side of a culture driven by metrics, including "Cruelty curve", a quota for letting go of a certain number of people every year, based on their relative performance rated on a curve with a certain percentage - 10% - targeted to the chopping block. CONFESSIONS OF A FOREIGN BORN AUTHOR I must confess that, English is my third language, and even though I have employed three professional, native English editors at a cost of thousands of dollars, it is obvious-—even to me—that this book is written by a Foreign-born author. Foreign-born or not, I believe I have a talent for storytelling, and I have converted a dull topic—the transformation of Amazon from a retail website to a marketplace—into an interesting, humorous and lively story. This is more of a little book than a big one. Being a technologist and an executive, I am trained to be concise in my writing. The printed version of this 2nd edition is about 180 pages on an 8-by-5.25-inch paper size with a font size 11. This may be too little for a few readers, too much for others, and just right for the rest. So, If you are looking for a 1,000-page treatise on Amazon that can be used as an example of perfect grammar in the High school English grammar class, then this book may not be the right book for you. Stop right here and get a refund! Now a book about Amazon can be pretty dry, so I have tried to add some humor. In my attempt to make this book funny, a few facts may have been stretched. The challenge with humor is that not everyone gets all the the jokes. For example, I tried to make fun of the Amazon employee slogan by changing it from “Work hard. Have fun. Make history,” to “Work really hard, have some fun.” That attempt at adding humor resulted in disapproval by a current Amazon employee, who noted in his review that I did not even get the slogan right! Oh, well! In general, If something sounds really strange or weird, that just means I am trying to be funny. To respect the privacy of the people involved in this story, their names have been changed — with one exception. Trust me, there really is a guy named Jeff Bezos who works at Amazon. Finally, I quote this passage from 21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com, written by Mike Daisey, a fellow Amazon alumnus–turned author: “Some facts were injured in the telling of this story. The truth, however, remains unharmed.” That applies to this book as well. All in all, I am proud of this book! [signed] Kalpanik S. Note: Portions of this book have been previously published under title "Seattle Adventures".