Word: firsts
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Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
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...government decided to get out of the Internet business and allow private companies to step in and develop it. Bezos recalls, "I'm sitting there thinking we can be a complete first mover in e-commerce." He researched mail-order companies, figuring that things that sold well by mail would do well online. He made a list of the Top 20 mail-order products and looked for where he could create "the most value for customers." Value, in his equation, would be something customers craved: selection, say, or convenience or low prices. "Unless you could create something with a huge...
Bezos realized he desperately wanted to start his own online bookstore. First he talked it over with MacKenzie. She too had graduated from Princeton, but six years after him; they met at Shaw, where she worked as a researcher. An English-literature major at the university, she had been novelist Toni Morrison's assistant and now had begun a novel of her own. MacKenzie was all for the adventure...
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...
...most important person Bezos hired was probably the first: Shel Kaphan, a brilliant programmer in Santa Clara, Calif., and veteran of a dozen start-ups, many of them, in fact, failures. Bezos persuaded him, over the course of a few months, to join his company in Seattle...
...June 1995 a rudimentary website had been created on a hidden site www.amazon.com:99 now defunct), and 300 friends and family members were sworn to secrecy and invited to crash-test it. "The first time I saw the site, I said to myself, 'Wow, this is it,'" recalls Shaw. It was simple, functional and wonderful. Kaphan's code was incredibly elegant and streamlined, allowing pages to be delivered without delay...