Amazon
Same company, different decade, same logic.
Latest filing on file · 2025-12-31
Overview
Business model and origins
The web would grow at 2,300% per year — Bezos calculated this in 1994. He made a list of the 20 most mail-order-friendly products and picked books: 3 million titles in print versus 150,000 in the largest physical store.
Origin
Jeff Bezos was a VP at D.E. Shaw when he read the Mosaic browser usage statistics in 1994. He drove from New York to Seattle with his wife MacKenzie, writing the Amazon business plan in the passenger seat. He chose Seattle for the tech talent pool (Microsoft), the proximity to a large Ingram book warehouse in Oregon, and Washington State's small population (minimizing sales tax exposure). The first book sold was 'Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies' by Douglas Hofstadter. Bezos IPO'd Amazon in 1997 at $18/share — the analysts called it 'Amazon.bomb'; the thesis was that Barnes & Noble would crush an online bookseller. By 2000 Amazon had survived the dot-com crash by holding more cash than it burned. By 2006 it launched AWS, which became a larger business than the retail operation.