Author: Paul Ratner / Source: Big Think
- Jeff Bezos had a clear vision for Amazon.com from the start.
- He saw the innovative potential of the online marketplace.
- Bezos explains why books, in particular, make for a perfect item to sell on the internet.
A number of the billionaires of today made their money by having the foresight while the web was still in its infancy.
None were more successful that Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com and now the richest man in the world (at least until his divorce goes through).In a 1997 interview, the year when he first became a millionaire by raising $54 million from Amazon’s IPO, Bezos relates the story of how he came up with the idea for the online juggernaut. He was in New York City in 1994, working for a qualitative hedge fund, when he came across the “startling” statistic that “web usage was growing at 2,300 percent a year”. This inspired him to look for a business plan that would “make sense in the context of that growth.”
After making a list of 20 different products to sell online, he picked books as the best one to orient the business around. Why books? Because unlike other products, there are “more items in the book category than any other category by far.”
“Attention is the scare commodity of the late 20th century,” says Bezos.
He compared books to music, the number two best item for the web. Bezos pointed out that at any given time there were 200,000 CDs “active” worldwide…
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