Ex-Amazon Manager Gets Funding to Help Retailers Battle His Former Employer

Guru Hariharan spent half-a-decade at Amazon.com, but says he had little face-to-face contact with the man he considers his idol, CEO Jeff Bezos. A former junior engineer who rose up the company ranks before departing in 2009, Hariharan only ever talked to Bezos once in his five-and-a-half year Amazon career, answering questions for him and his senior executives during a three-hour annual review. "If you think about labor as the most painful thing in life, that surpassed it probably," says Hariharan, who remembers spending several weeks preparing a six-page document on the successes of Amazon Webstore.