Word: failings
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Bezos figured that the average Net start-up had a 1 in 10 chance of success; he gave himself a 30% chance. "That's actually a very liberating expectation, expecting to fail," he says. That's exactly what he told his first investors--family and friends: "I think there's a 70% chance you're going to lose all your money, so don't invest unless you can afford to lose...
...that may be ephemeral and fraudulent about the dotcom revolution. Now Bezos has named a date one year hence that will be the time they find out whether they're going to make it or not. A chance, after all those 16-hr. workdays, for the company actually to fail...
...When he called and said he wanted to sell books on the Internet, we said, 'The Internet? What's that?'" remembers Mike Bezos, who initially questioned his son's sanity when he heard him say he was quitting his cushy job to start a company that would probably fail. But this was Jeff, after all, and his 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...
Amazon trains an elite group of gift wrappers to "make it look like Mom's." Each worker processes 30 packages an hour (those who fail are reassigned to other jobs). For its busiest season yet, Amazon's warehouses are stocked with 4.4 million yards of ribbon and 7.8 million sq. ft. of wrapping paper--which if laid flat would more than cover Disneyland...
...obvious: that we live in a chance universe, that coincidence and mishap play a larger role in our destinies than we like to think. In Magnolia he intertwines four disparate (but equally glum) stories of people living in California's San Fernando Valley and shows how they touch--or fail to touch--one another in the course of a single, very long...