Word: start
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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 fortunate to live there, he replies, pointing out that...
...then a surprising thing happens. The workers in the first four rows start handing up their white hardhats to be signed too. Then a group of workers behind them gets up and encircles Bezos, proffering hats, dollar bills, scraps of paper--anything--for his signature. Welcome to Bezosville, U.S.A...
...first job out of school was at Fitel, a start-up that was building a network to handle international financial trades. He spent about two years there, worked about the same amount of time at Bankers Trust, then got an interview at Shaw...
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...