Amazon

“The best business to be in is a business where you can help customers more and more over time.” — Jeff Bezos, looking back on accidental discoveries The Story Begins Here’s a funny story. One day in 2006, Amazon employees were sitting in a meeting. They weren’t talking about selling books or toys or Prime. They were talking about something technical and a little boring: computer servers. What are servers? Imagine them as giant super-computers that run websites, store information, and handle millions of people visiting at the same time. ...

“We are not really an internet company. We are a customer company that uses the internet.” — Jeff Bezos A Bold Question In the early 2000s, Amazon was super successful at selling books. Every year, millions of them sold. More and more customers kept coming. Business was great. You’d think: just keep selling books, right? But then Bezos asked a bold question: “What if we sold everything?” CDs, DVDs, toys, clothes, sports equipment, kitchen stuff—basically anything you could imagine. It sounds crazy. Amazon was good at books. Books are flat. They don’t break easily. They’re easy to pack. But bicycles? Birthday candles? A thousand different shoe sizes? Each product has different storage needs, different packaging challenges, different shipping problems. This was like learning a whole new business from scratch. ...

“I want to build something that will last a thousand years.” — A 30-year-old named Jeff Bezos, before he quit his job to sell books on the internet The Story Begins Imagine you’re walking through a garage in Seattle, Washington, on a cold morning in 1994. The year is important, because back then, most people didn’t know what the internet even was. But inside this little garage, an energetic young man named Jeff Bezos was doing something that nobody else was doing. He wasn’t an inventor who created a new product. He wasn’t a chef opening a fancy restaurant. He was… selling books. Books from a garage. Books on the internet. And this one idea would change the world forever. ...