Word: amazon
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Lots of hands shoot up during the Q.&A. period. "Bloomberg says Amazon is going to fall flat on its face," asserts one person. Bezos dismisses the comment. "We have a ton of doubters, and the fact of the matter is, we don't try to convince them," he says, pointing out that he will start making a profit when the "cone of opportunity" begins to narrow--that is, when there's no room left for more competitors to enter. The questions go on for 15 minutes. What does your house look like? (It's lovely, and we are amazingly...
...AMAZON'S SOURCE...
...parents trusted him and believed in him every moment of his life. In the end, "we talked about it for two minutes," says Jackie Bezos. They ponied up $300,000, a huge chunk of the money they had saved for retirement. "We didn't invest in Amazon," says his mother, "we invested in Jeff." The ROJ--return on Jeff--was substantial. Today, as 6% owners of the company, they're billionaires...
...lawyer who specialized in start-ups. What do you plan to call your company, the lawyer asked. Bezos liked the sound of Abracadabra, but the word was a little long. "So I said, 'Cadabra,'" he recalls. "Cadaver?" repeated the lawyer. A few weeks later, Bezos changed the name to Amazon Inc., after the seemingly endless South American river...
...this was where a potbellied stove had been ripped out to make more room. To save money, Bezos went to Home Depot and bought three wooden doors. Using angle brackets and 2-by-4s, he hammered together three desks, at a cost of $60 each. (That frugality continues at Amazon to this day; every employee sits behind a door desk.) MacKenzie agreed to work with the crew a few days a week, helping out with accounting and interviewing--the latter chore often conducted, cheekily, in a nearby Barnes & Noble...