The Genius of Amazon: How Jeff Bezos and Online Shopping Changed the World
INTRODUCTION In 2020 Jeff Bezos became the first person with a net worth of 200 billion Jeff Bezos was searching for inspiration It was 1994 and he had just launched Cadabra an online bookstore The name came from the magician’s term abracadabra But Bezos didn’t love the name He paged through a dictionary starting with the letter A to look for something better Soon a name jumped out at him Amazon 4
The Amazon River in South America is Earth’s largest river It carries much more water than any other river more than the Mississippi the Nile and the Yangtze Rivers combined Bezos thought the name was perfect He envisioned the world’s largest online bookstore with a river of books flowing out to customers around the globe He would call his new company Amazon The Amazon River is about 4,000 miles 6,437 km long 5
Wall Street is home to the New York Stock Exchange and several banks CHAPTER 1 THE BEGINNING In the early 1990s Bezos worked on Wall Street the financial district in New York City He specialized in stock trading business investments and other financial dealings The internet was brand-new then but Bezos believed it would revolutionize business In the spring of 1994 he quit his Wall Street job and launched his own online bookstore Cadabra 6
Bezos and his wife MacKenzie packed up their belongings and drove west They chose Seattle Washington as the new home for the company To fund his new bookstore Bezos used money from his own savings business loans and contributions from his parents He set up an office in his garage and built desks out of wooden doors Then he got to work on Cadabra He hired programmer Shel Kaphan to build the company website His wife was the company accountant On November 1 1994 Bezos renamed the business Amazon CASH FLOW More money came from an investment of over 200,000 from his parents This allowed Bezos to rent an office and a warehouse near downtown Seattle and move the business out of his garage He hired more staff and created systems for shipping books and processing customer payments Bezos giving a presentation in 2005 The Amazon website opened to the public on July 16 1995 Customers loved it Physical bookstores had room for only a few thousand titles on their shelves But Amazon offered more than one million titles 7
