It was 2017, just a few months after Forbes named Amazon owner Jeff Bezos as the richest man in the world to start circulating a rumor at the company's headquarters.
That Bill Gates that is, the second richest man on Earth, wanted to go out for dinner with Jeff. It was clear that the boss had succeeded with the above.
Amazon is now the second largest private employer in the United States, behind only the Walmart supermarket chain, and one of the world's leading companies in terms of turnover and capitalization. But also innovation.
Except that all the flashes are focused on Bezos and everything he does in this world. Even in not always his proper make-up. What's wrong? How Bezos did not do all this alone, everything else.
The very story of the tech giant is so intertwined you see Ian Freed, one of those invisible Silicon Valley heroes known exclusively to a handful of people.
In that audience he is, of course, a metro, a great master of technology, a person of universal prestige and respect for the sanctuaries of the technology industry. But she is also a true Amazon pioneer of the early days, who took her by the hand and gave her her technological triumphs.
From that early Kindle to the Fire Phone, Fire TV, Alexa and Echo! Whatever it is today Amazon that is, beyond the online store. And it was once again his own failure with the Fire Phone that gave birth to Amazon's greatest ambitions for artificial intelligence and smart home applications.
At one point Freed envisioned a feature that would allow you, using your voice alone, to ask your cell phone to play a song. Jeff laughed, but did not say no. He never said no, since he knew what his right hand could do.
Shortly afterwards, Freed presented him with the experimental prototype that would become the basis for Alexa and Echo! Nobody was laughing now. Bezos even gave him complete freedom and money to develop the technology in Amazon labs, instead of turning to a third company, as had been done with the Fire Phone.
The triumph was the least colossal: Alexa is now in the tens of millions of homes around the world and is the great milestone of Amazon's expansion into the cutting-edge tech industry. At the same time, Freed's system turned her into one of the biggest players in the artificial intelligence market.
And that was just one of his personal successes. If we want to refer to the older ones, they helped Amazon to dominate and finally monopolize the market of e-books, but also streaming devices. Amazon Fire TV now controls the market from second place.
Freed's passion for research and his dedication to Amazon gave birth to ideas and devices that changed the world. And he left then pulling for more. But why does he remain so deafeningly unknown?
His LinkedIn profile is simple and humble: "Co-founder and CEO of Bamboo Learning, former Amazon device vice president." The only thing that tells us about him in the foremost professional social media is that he has experience "30 years in mobile devices, software, internet, technology and telecommunications".
Even an internet search reveals how little is known to a person about the right machine for generating ideas and practical applications. Although it was the technological brain in the heart of Amazon!
So Ian Freed got a job at the e-commerce giant in 2004, when Amazon was just that, the largest online retail store. Bezos was particularly pleased as an electronic grocer and enjoyed his success. How could he think that with Ian by his side he would become the richest man in the world?
Freed knew well, from his Harvard studies, the power of the internet as a siphon that sweeps everything. In the Harvard it was now said as a joke that a student Ian Freed had followed in the footsteps of a strange e-mail address and ended up talking directly to the Minister of Telecommunications of Indonesia!
After graduating, he built computer networks for Russian giants and then scribbled policies for the World Bank and the United States Agency for International Development. But he constantly felt that no matter what organization he consulted, none of them took full advantage of the enormous potential of the internet.
And so he left his well-paid consulting positions and moved to the West Coast of America, where he later emerged as an expert in streaming software. So he went to Amazon, as the director of the fledgling mobile applications industry, an activity that showed its commercial dynamics.
And he was completely different from the others. As Bezos himself has said, he stopped him in the corridors and asked him questions. Something unthinkable for an employee! Everyone knew Jeff was asking questions.
Of course, he saw something different in the guy he had hired and about a year later turned him into his personal technology consultant. Ian was now free to enter and leave his office and Bezos introduced him to his vision for Amazon, taking him to every meeting with his executives. Ian also liked Bezos' love of innovation and speed of decision. It was clear that they had found each other.
"Amazon's corporate ethics are designed to prevent bureaucracy," he confessed in one of his rare interviews. Rarely not because he did not want to speak to the press, but rarely because he was rarely asked for his opinion.
Freed quickly became a lever of innovation and was the one who oversaw the creation of Amazon's first technologically advanced product, the Kindle! The team he formed quickly expanded and ideas were now raining down. Within a short time, it delivered a device of exceptional simplicity and elegance.
The Kindle was launched in 2007 and sold out in less than 6 hours. And of course it became one of the most popular gadgets of its time. With success in his pocket, Bezos asked him to oversee another technological activity that Amazon had begun to undertake, the creation of the company's first smartphone.
This he did for the next 4 years, locked himself in the laboratory and supervised a team that came to employ a few thousand nomads. Bezos gave him complete freedom in the budget and rumors say that he spent around 100 million dollars.
Only when the Amazon Fire Phone hit the market in 2014 was it going to experience failure. Catastrophic failure, alas! Which Freed generously charged, but he had a way of offsetting it. When he had presented you can see his innovative software phone to Bezos, had shown him this feature of voice recognition.
The cell phone could hear and understand when you asked him to play a song. “Can I request any piece? Even '' Hotel California? '' ", Bezos asked him and before Ian could answer, Fire Phone started playing the classic Eagles song.
A few days after the commercial failure, Bezos called him to his office and asked him to develop an application that responds to voice commands, "like Star Trek". "We are already doing it," replied the technical director, who had seconded 200 employees to deal exclusively with it.
With a budget of $ 50 million, Freed developed a piece of software and turned to an independent company for further information. And so what he got was not exactly his vision. What did he do; He hired speech therapists, philologists and artificial intelligence specialists to make the system understand people as they spoke English, with any accent.
Alexa he finally named it, as he wanted a word well known, but not so common as to be confused with other things. So four months after the catastrophic launch of the Fire Phone, Freed happily unveiled the Echo, a speaker that responded to the human cry to tell you the weather, to compile your shopping list, to remind you to take the food out of the oven and of course play the "Hotel California". We call it a digital assistant now.
Its starting price was $ 199. Today you can buy it for half the money. And 50 million households have it in their homes. After the presentation of the Echo, Bezos called Freed to his office and told him (Jeff himself revealed) about the post they had just read and informed that the failure of the Fire Phone had cost Amazon about $ 170 million. :
"You can not, even for a minute, feel bad about the Fire Phone. Promise me that you will not miss a single minute of sleep for this ". Until 2015, Freed was vice president and Amazon a huge technology company. Only it did not stop there…
One day Freed rushed to Bezos' office before his secretary could inform him: "What would you say if we made a streaming device that you can put on a TV?". A device that you can talk to again, as he told Jeff it is difficult to write on the remote control that you want to see "a Gene Hackman movie from the 1970s."
The Amazon device, he told him, would be completely different from all the existing TV streaming hardware out there. But she told him something else, that if Amazon started selling streaming devices, then it would start getting data on what people see.
And if she had such information in her hands, then she could make her own movies and series and go down to another place, to the unknown field that the Netflix proving that it was extremely profitable. But something else told him: that if he finally made a streaming channel and offered the service for free to Amazon Prime members, where customers pay $ 99 a year to have the products delivered within 2 days, then more people would subscribe to Prime .
And with more customers at Prime, Amazon would be better able to negotiate with delivery companies, lowering costs and making more with each purchase from its core business, the online store. It was the complete proposal that Bezos could not say no to!
Amazon Fire TV finally announced the device which is today the second most popular streaming software on TV receivers worldwide. Amazon Studios the production company that actually started making content for the Amazon streaming channel, now known Amazon Prime Video, which as of 2017 had exceeded 100 million subscribers…
Despite the fact that it flourished and flourished in the colossus, in 2017 it got tired of all that. "It was difficult," he said dryly in an interview with the New Yorker about Amazon's obsession with growing and evolving. Comparing it with the business counterpart of the imperialist!
Today, Ian Freed, despite his 15 years at Amazon, is known for the company he co-founded, Bamboo Learning, which he is developing in stark contrast to the stormy pace that Amazon once made. This is a startup with vocal learning for underprivileged students out there, especially children who have a skin color other than white.
He continues to work with his former company, as he recently taught at Amazon Echo how to interact with young and old when it comes to music theory.
Alexa now knows how to answer music questions, as Ian created the Bamboo Music service and planned to include it. And he can really teach children (for free) in a fun way about notes, harmonies and chords, while recognizing the sounds that every musical instrument out there makes.
Freed is doing another job now. He hired a young teacher with experience in learning strategies (Irina Fine) and set up Bamboo Learning, holding the position of CEO.
For the time being, Bamboo Learning is "a very thin organization", as he recently said, a company with 5 employees. We recently learned that Ian is hiring people to teach technological skills to African-Americans.
He is now working with a charity Seattle for the technological literacy of disadvantaged youth in schools in poor suburbs. And he recruits all his old acquaintances.
And it does so because it believes that Amazon's network of connections will attract more volunteers to its cause. When not dealing with kids, he advises young entrepreneurs with promising startups.
And he does not intend to demobilize, as he still has a lot to give, even from another place…