Word: firmness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...power of electrified commerce. But back in the day when you--frankly, when everyone--was pooh-poohing the idea of online sales, there were a few folks who believed. One of them, on a summer day in 1994, quit his lucrative job at a New York City investment firm, packed up and, with his wife driving, made a now legendary voyage to Seattle to start what he thought would be a good business. By the time he arrived there he had a plan to sell books over the Internet. Investors thought he was crazy...
Thinking up business possibilities, in fact, was Bezos' job at D.E. Shaw, an unusual firm that prides itself on hiring some of the smartest people in the world and then figuring out what kind of work they might profitably do. David Shaw, a former professor of computer science at Columbia University, had been wooed to Wall Street by Morgan Stanley, where he specialized in the arcane field of quantitative analysis--using computers to spot trends in the market. He formed his own company in 1988, initially to carry on that kind of work, but with so much brainpower around...
...long can you build warehouses to the sky and not fill them? Says Scott Sipprelle, founding partner of the investment firm Midtown Research Group: "The chance of a painful failure goes up as they increase the chips on the table. Just look at the metrics. As the company grows in scale, the absolute dollars it's losing are greater and greater: debt is going up, margins are going down and cash burn is increasing...
...customers, and it caught the attention of rivals like Barnes & Noble and Borders Group, which hadn't yet moved online. Barnesandnoble.com would appear a year later--just before Amazon's initial public offering, which went off at a modest $18 a share. Never mind that the celebrated venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers was its biggest institutional investor before the IPO. Wall Streeters were afraid of the threat posed by the giant Barnes & Noble, whose national network of bookstores looked unbeatable, prompting George Colony, president of Forrester Research, a prominent technology-analysis firm, to pronounce the company "Amazon.toast." Other...
...Omidyar had lined up a venture-capital firm (Benchmark Capital, whose initial $6.5 million investment is now worth some $4 billion). eBay hired a marketing consultant to come up with the company's catchy, multicolored logo and confronted (and later defeated) threats from two new auction sites backed by well-funded big companies: Onsale and Auction Universe...