Company

“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. ...

What if you could step inside the internet — walk around in it, meet your friends there, and build anything you can imagine? What If You Could Step Inside the Screen You look at screens every day. Phones, tablets, computers — we swipe our fingers around, look at photos, watch videos, and chat with friends. But have you ever thought: what if one day, instead of just looking at a screen, you could walk right into it? ...

Facebook connected your college friends. Then it connected the whole world — and changed how we share, shop, and even think. When Phones Became Everything Back in 2010, people used Facebook on their computers. But iPhones and Android phones were getting more and more popular, and people started spending more time on their phones. Here was the problem — Facebook’s website was really hard to use on a phone. The text was tiny. The buttons were impossible to tap. Photos took forever to load. ...

What if one college student built a website in his dorm room — and it connected the entire world? The Idea in the Dorm Room In 2003, Mark Zuckerberg was a sophomore at Harvard University. He was a computer science student who loved building things. Not with wood or metal — with code. He’d been programming since middle school, and by the time he got to Harvard, he could build a website faster than most people could write an essay. ...

What happens when the world’s biggest software company falls behind — and then reinvents itself in ways nobody saw coming? The Day the iPhone Changed Everything On January 9, 2007, Steve Jobs walked onto a stage and pulled a small glass rectangle out of his pocket. It was the iPhone. And it changed everything — not just for Apple, but for Microsoft. Almost overnight, the world went mobile. People stopped sitting at desks to use computers. They carried the internet in their pockets. And Microsoft? They had no answer. ...

What if using a computer was as easy as pointing at what you want and clicking? One idea turned Microsoft from successful into unstoppable. The Problem with MS-DOS By the mid-1980s, MS-DOS was everywhere. Almost every personal computer in the world ran on it. Microsoft was growing fast and making lots of money. But MS-DOS had a big problem: it was ugly and confusing. To do anything, you had to type commands — long strings of letters and symbols that you had to memorize. Want to see what files you have? Type DIR. Want to copy a file? You had to type a whole line of code-like stuff. One wrong letter and the computer just ignored you. ...

What if two teenagers promised they could build something nobody had ever built — and then stayed up for weeks to make it real? The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Asking Questions Bill Gates was the kind of kid who wanted to know everything. While other kids in Seattle played outside, young Bill sat in his room reading the encyclopedia — from A all the way to Z. Not just one article. The entire set. When his family played board games after dinner, Bill would study the rules until he found the smartest strategy. When he didn’t understand something, he’d ask question after question until he figured it out. ...

From a chatbot that types to an AI that can see, hear, and talk — OpenAI is building the future, one invention at a time. And the biggest question isn’t what AI can do. It’s what YOU will do with it. AI That Can See and Hear For most of history, talking to a computer meant typing on a keyboard. But OpenAI imagined something different: what if you could just talk to AI, like talking to a friend? ...