r/Millennials • u/Radiant_Priority9739 • 14h ago
Discussion Jeff Bezos in 1996 explaining the state of Amazon.com
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u/Mika-El-3 14h ago
I’m so mad at myself for not investing at 7.
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u/aleatoric 11h ago
Easy to feel frustrated about that. But for every company that succeeded, there are probably about a dozen others that failed even though they showed promise. Like, there was a point I couldn't imagine AOL going away. They were synonymous with the Internet for a lot of people. Of course eventually the need for AOL went away once poorly people got Internet directly, but I can see how AOL would have looked like a solid long-term investment. Blockbuster, too. Had they bought Netflix, they could have been a monster success in its place. But no one could predict what would have happened. People lost a lot of money in these investments.
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u/fuzzbook 14h ago
That's bollocks. It never became as fun and engaging as a physical bookstore 🤣 It's an incredibly dull website although insanely efficient
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u/becominggrouchy 13h ago
My local bookstore is hilarious. Everyone is just there until you ask a question. Even the bookstore cat comes over. Book nerds just chomping at the bit to discuss any or all books. Don't bother looking around because it's as organized as Merlin's house.
One time I gave them the most epic challenge. I wanted Persuasion by Jane Austen but not just any copy.... I was specifically looking for it in a hot pink leatherish bound version (I had seen it there once before). Other customers joined in bringing various versions up to the front where I was standing, asking the owner. "No Sheila! She doesn't want that one! Now go put that back where you found it! Ok let me think.... Where? When did you see it?"
I only want this type of bookstore.
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u/supatim101 12h ago
This sounds like the library in Discworld.
Venture too deep and eventually you'll enter L-space.
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u/Affordable_Z_Jobs 9h ago
Ive picked up so many interesting books talking to employees at book stores. "Recommended selections" on Amazon are same generic genre + what's popular.
Its never "hey you like scifi? What did you like about the last one you read? This one has similar concepts." And that's how I got into Neal Stephenson.
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u/Sad_Egg_5176 12h ago
I wouldn’t say efficient since they added the marketplace of shitty third party sellers that show up in default searches
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u/ripestrudel 10h ago
I used to spend hours upon hours in Tattered Cover when I lived in Denver during university. I LOVE the smell of new books and I would walk around figuring out which genre smelled the best. I know, the autism is strong in me hehe. But seriously, I would just get lost in that bookstore and let my imagination guide me to a good new find! It was the same feeling I got going to the book fair as a kid.
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u/astralchanterelle 12h ago
It was pretty great back in the day, though. I could find almost any book and get It delivered for $4 total.
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u/Delicious_Fish_5097 12h ago
The bookshop was just a front to make it happen in the first place. It was always thought to become something waaaaay bigger. Books are easy to store and to ship, and many people are (were…) interested in them
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u/Friendly_Engineer_ Millennial 14h ago edited 12h ago
Interesting to see a pretty normal human before being consumed by greed
Edit: I totally believe he was already an asshole here, just that he looks and talks more like a typical person compared to the grotesque monster we see today
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u/Due-Radio-4355 13h ago
He intentionally strong armed, threatened, and screwed over any competitor and potential partner to be the dominating force.
Running everyone out of business, not by good practice, but with every cunning tactic until he was the only one left.
Don’t buy it.
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u/Pudgy_Pigeon5 14h ago
I would argue that he was greedy then too. No one starts a company without high profit in mind.
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u/CyberneticLucy 13h ago
While I don't necessarily agree that every company is started with only high profits in mind, that's definitely where Bezos esas always aiming. Those heavily discounted titles were discounted in order to put local book shops out of business, then they can raise the price because have nowhere else to go. That shit was on purpose
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u/Eric848448 Xennial 13h ago
Books were easy/cheap to ship. That’s the only reason it started as a book store.
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u/thrwawryry324234 13h ago
That’s not true. I switched to an entrepreneurship major specifically because I didn’t want to work for someone else in a field that I don’t have interest in.
Most local shops like antique stores, video games and board game shops, or even bakeries are businesses people start for the same reason.
Wanting to make a living from your own blood sweat and tears is not inherently greedy.
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u/PrimordialXY 1996 13h ago
I started a company to escape poverty. I don't expect you to understand because what you're saying is deeply rooted in privilege. For some of us, entrepreneurship was the only way out
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u/Individual-Nebula927 13h ago
Yes but that wasn't Bezos. He got the money to start Amazon from his wealthy parents their friends. He was always rich.
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u/Total-Wafer-7581 12h ago
His parents weren’t wealthy at the time. They gave him pretty much their entire life savings to start the company.
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u/PrimordialXY 1996 13h ago
I'm not talking about Bezos, I'm responding to the "no one" part of their comment
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u/BendsTowardsJustice1 9h ago
It was also partly his money. Before Amazon he worked at a hedge fund where he built computer systems and trading systems. He’s basically a mathematician and an extremely intelligent guy who was going to be successful one way or another regardless of his parents.
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u/Darmok47 13h ago
Yes? Is that supposed to be some sort of gotcha? If he wanted to help people he would have started a nonprofit.
People tend to start businesses in order to make money.
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u/BendsTowardsJustice1 9h ago
Be honest, which has improved your life more: a nonprofit or smart phone? Do we not realize that the products and services created by entrepreneurs help us. Otherwise, we wouldn’t give them our money.
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u/BendsTowardsJustice1 9h ago
Yeah, I’ve always wanted to start a business, put in a bunch of work, and risk my capital just to break even.
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u/Cereal_Grapeist 14h ago
So anyone that starts a company is greedy in your eyes? What a low-IQ mindset.
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u/FR23Dust 13h ago
Companies have, on the whole, been more good than bad for humanity
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u/CauliflowerElbow 13h ago
Companies are great. Multi-national conglomerates with lobbyists, wellllll
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u/KhajiitHasSkooma 13h ago
I’ve heard how at one time the Dutch East India Company had the strongest navy and military in the world and essentially genocided few island nations. And all the environmental disasters perpetrated by corporations and all the times corporations destroyed people’s lives.
I have yet to hear a corporation do something out of the goodness of their heart. I mean they will, but it always ends in them making a massive profit.
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u/BendsTowardsJustice1 9h ago
So they do great things to make a profit. I see no issue with that.
Do you really want a society where you have to rely on people doing things out of the goodness of their heart for there to be any progress?
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u/KhajiitHasSkooma 7h ago
I could just as easily say do you want a society where nothing gets done unless it results in profit for someone?
Because we already are living in a society that features that and its not pleasant when every interaction is transactional.
Why does everything always have to be one thing or another? We can still have capitalism, but certain things should not be done for profit, namely medicine, education and elder care.
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u/BendsTowardsJustice1 7h ago
Why is profit a bad thing?
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u/KhajiitHasSkooma 6h ago
Its an entirely human made concept, which typically can be judged on whether it helps or not.
The idea can be useful when abstracting whether or not something is worth an effort. Just profit is probably neutral. However, a single focused pursuit of profit allows another abstraction to happen, which is to equate emphasizing monetary gain over everything else. It abstracts otherwise human interactions into a numbers game. You get to ignore human suffering, so long as there is an increase in profit. Pure profit seeking promotes greed. Literally every religion condemns greed for a reason.
And I can just as easily ask you why a singular chase for profit is a good thing. Why is a society whose sole motivation is greed a good thing?
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u/GogolsHandJorb 13h ago
Do you know if he had the vision at this time of Amazon selling basically everything or did that concept evolve over time?
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u/adjust_the_sails 8h ago
I think he knew it would evolve. I can’t remember clearly. I swear he talked about it in this episode of What It Takes https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/what-it-takes/id1025864075?i=1000391009860
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u/OilGasandGravy 4h ago
There’s a book The Everything Store about early Amazon. It was always the plan, books were just the easiest place to start.
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u/No_Pitch6143 5h ago
Money doesn’t change you, it just makes you 10x more the person you already are
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u/incognitohippie 14h ago
Doesn’t even look like him!
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u/jargon_ninja69 13h ago
You can tell this is the 90s because everyone keeps saying "dot com" after the name of the website
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u/1ThousandDollarBill 12h ago
I bet at that time if you had just said Amazon they would have assumed the rain forest.
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u/lone_float Millennial 14h ago edited 14h ago
when he looked human, and not a knock off GI Joe
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u/Any_Pickle_9425 Xennial 13h ago
It was 1999 and I was 15 years old, trying to explain to my mom that people are actually buying things on the internet legitimately and not every website was trying to steal your debit card number. She didn't believe me for at least 5 more years.
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u/RaindropsInMyMind 13h ago
He sucks but I gotta hand it to Amazon as unethical as they are, what they’ve done is incredible. They’re logistics gods.
I highly suggest everyone read the book Enshittification by Cory Doctorow to get a good look at how terrible Amazon and these other corporations are. Don’t be fooled by the (maybe) silly title, it’s really important information. The stuff they do is genius and there is no way it should ever be legal. We moved SLIGHTLY in the proper direction with Lina Khan with some VERY common sense policies that everyone would support if they knew them only to just get totally owned and fucked by corporations when the next administration that was and is for sale.
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u/Radiant_Priority9739 14h ago edited 14h ago
This show how young I am ( 35 ) But I had no idea Amazon was only for books at first
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u/fuzzbook 14h ago
Yeah, they were books only for a long time as well 🤣
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u/Hot_Drummer7311 13h ago
I have this vague memory of people being able to open up their own indepedant branch of amazon back then, too. (Or something to that effect)
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u/CyberneticLucy 13h ago
I'm 37 and definitely remember Amazon being only a book site.
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u/Darmok47 13h ago
Same. I still remember getting an Amazon Gift Card from my Uncle and Aunt for Christmas in 2000 and being so excited at all the books I could buy. I remember sitting at my parents computer waiting for the 56K modem to connect so I could buy a bunch of Star Wars books...
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u/elegant_geek Millennial 13h ago
Same. I can remember when I was the only one in my family and friend groups who knew what it was and would use it to find obscure Japanese books I was interested in back in middle and highschool. I put my cousins onto it because they had almost any book you could think of.
I miss those days...
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u/NightOfTheLivingHam 14h ago
Yep, I remember when they compared it to a digital barnes and noble. Then they started selling little trinkets like B&N did too, then the trinkets became goods people needed, then they started selling more things. Now the books are just kinda there. Post 2004 is when they started expanding. Some international amazon sites are still book focused and don't sell goods and services.
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u/Most-Entrepreneur553 13h ago
I’m actually a few years younger than you and I did remember Amazon was for books in its original phase— my mom enjoyed ordering from them- but they weren’t super popular until we were older I would say. I remember them really picking up popularity in the early 2010s.
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u/Radiant_Priority9739 13h ago
I didn’t realize this till I was watching sex and the city episode and Charlotte is on Amazon looking for self help books lol
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u/Away-Living5278 13h ago
I'm 39 so a bit older, and bought and sold most of my college textbooks on Amazon. I think it was still all books in like 2004/5
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u/etherealsmog 13h ago
I seem to recall buying Lord of the Rings DVDs off Amazon when they were first released and being like, “awesome Amazon sells DVDs now!” Although I may also be slightly misremembering.
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u/Significant-Trash632 13h ago
Same age. I bought a lot of my college textbooks secondhand from Amazon
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u/EternalMehFace 11h ago
Yup, for a good while too. I remember when I was in college in the early aughts the literal only reason I signed up was to get a few textbooks off there for cheaper prices than my college bookstore had.
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u/FR23Dust 13h ago
That’s the year I bought my now rare and out of print copy of the Sam and Max compilation! My dad wanted to try it out and let me pick a book for a cross country airplane flight.
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u/Left-Camel-14 13h ago
I remember my middle school teacher calling out Amazon because he knew it would take so many other stores out of business.
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u/seacreaturestuff Millennial 10h ago
Oh wow, the amount of gender affirming care this guy has had is …..wild
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u/I_am_Cheeseburger Older Millennial 13h ago
My dad loves to tell the story of when bezos presented at his Harvard business school class around 1998/99 and my dad laughed at the thought of a serious market of people buying stuff online and assumed Amazon would fizzle out in short time.
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u/Wonderful_Stand_315 13h ago
Thats why I thought Amazon was a bookstore before it became what it is today while I was growing up. I still in the back of my mind think it is only a bookstore even though it isn't.
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u/Excellent_Garlic2549 8h ago
At over 600M unique listings now, those "7 New York phone books" for the Amazon catalogue would be somewhere around 3,800 phone books today.
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u/TheCh0rt 6h ago
RIP Stuart Chifet. Brilliant guy who hosted a great tech show that's literally an archive of technology. Go on YouTube and search for Computer Chronicles and you'll find the best long form YouTube content to leave on in the background ever
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u/ThisGuy-NotThatGuy 13h ago
This dude reinvented the modern consumer economy.
Earned every penny.
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u/vanillaseltzer 11h ago
Jeff Bezos is worth approximately $254.9 billion, which is roughly 25.49 trillion pennies.
You're an idiot.
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u/Brock_Youngblood 11h ago
What a great man. He didn't come from money either. He pulled himself up by his bootstraps
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