IN 1994, Mr. Bezos was a 30-year-old hedge fund analyst with a degree in computer science and electrical engineering from Princeton when he came up with the idea for an online bookseller. He originally planned to call it Cadabra but later realized that it sounded too much like "cadaver." Ultimately, he settled on Amazon, in part because he thought it would convey the vast breadth of books he intended to sell.At the conference in Aspen, the moderator of Mr. Bezos's panel introduced him with a bit of Internet lore about how Mr. Bezos had written Amazon's business plan on a laptop computer in the passenger seat of a 1988 Chevy Blazer as his wife, MacKenzie, drove them across the country.
Reality is a bit less colorful. The couple actually flew from New York to Fort Worth, where they picked up the Blazer - and a $300,000 check - from Mr. Bezos's father, a former engineer at ExxonMobil. And while Ms. Bezos did most of the driving on their way to Bellevue, Wash., where they started their business, she said her husband took turns at the wheel.
The business plan that Mr. Bezos wrote on the road called for Amazon to turn a profit long before it did. But, as he points out, the plan anticipated a far more modest company. In no small part because of Amazon's early success, the Internet quickly evolved into a footrace to place first dibs on as many new online markets as an enterprise could.
Mr. Bezos's reaction to that rush goes a long way toward defining his management style, and toward illustrating what analysts love and hate about it.
"Brands are a bit like quick-drying cement," Mr. Bezos said last week, "so it became very important to get into new categories beyond books reasonably quickly." Inside Amazon, the mantra was "get big fast," and it was everywhere, even on T-shirts. The race to own e-commerce was on.
Amazon's strategy seemed to work beautifully in those first years. In June 1998, for example, the company said it would start selling music, and within months it was the Internet's top music retailer. Amazon seemed so rich with potential that $10,000 invested in its May 1997 initial public offering was worth more than $350,000 by the end of 1998, just 19 months later.
But that surge came without profits, and Amazon's success appeared to prove that the primary difference between dot-com survivors and many flameouts was the amount of cash they managed to raise before the stock-market bubble burst in 2000. At the time, Amazon was burning cash almost as fast as its investors could shovel it in.
Read furthermore -> A Retail Revolution Turns 10 (5)