The “lost” Jeff Bezos 1997 interview just about a year after starting Amazon.
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 5 окт 2024
- Interviewer: “Who are you?”
“I’m Jeff Bezos”
Interviewer: “What’s your claim to fame?”
“ha, ha, ha, I am the founder of Amazon dot com”
This was filmed in June 1997 at the Special Libraries (SLA) conference by Richard Wiggans of Dr. Chuck Films. It is no longer “lost”.
My Speech to Text fast transcript:
"who are you I'm Jeff Bezos and what was your claim to fame and the
founder of amazon.com where did you get
an idea for amazon.com well three years
ago I was in New York City working for a
quantitative hedge fund when I came
across the startling statistic the web
usage was growing at 2,300 percent a
year so I decided I would try and find a
business plan that made sense in the
context of that growth and I picked
books as the first best product of saw
online which making a list like 20
different products that you might be
able to sell and books were great as the
first best because books are incredibly
unusual in one respect that is that
there are more items in the book
category and there are items than any
other category by far music is number
two they're about two hundred thousand
active music CDs at any given time but
in the book space they're more than
three million different books worldwide
active and printed any given time across
all languages what more than one and a
half million in English alone so when
you have that many items it literally
build a store online that couldn't exist
any other way that's important right now
because the web is still an infant
technology basically right now if you
can do things using more traditional
method you probably should do them using
the
traditional method what kind of
inventory do you
we inventory the best-selling books at
any given time we're inventory in our
own warehouse only a couple of thousand
titles and then we have we do almost in
time inventory for another 400,000
titles or so we get those from a network
of electronic we order electronically
from a network of wholesalers and
distributors we order those today
they're on our loading dock the next
morning then for another 1.1 million
titles we get those directly from 20,000
different publishers and those can take
a couple of weeks to get and then the
there are a million out of print books
in our catalog we have a callow two and
a half million books all together those
million out of print books some of them
we can get some of them we can't but we
find them if we can and then we ship in
to our customers who kind of a search on
those what's almost in time inventory
almost in time inventory is the phrase
we use to describe a whole selection of
books that we offer it's basically the
things that are you know below mm
best-selling book up to the 400,000
bestseller book those are titles that we
can get from a network of more than a
dozen different wholesalers so if a
customer orders a book from us today
we order that book from our wholesalers
today
that book shows up on our loading dock
the next morning and then we can ship it
to the customer they say one of the
toughest things to do in the Internet is
to tap from mind share what was your
secret how did you move it yeah even
more generally I agree with you that you
know capturing mind share on the
Internet is extremely difficult even
more generally it's the late 20th
century not just the internet you know
…{word count edit}...
advertising we don't do that anymore but
at the very beginning we did little tiny
ads at the bottom of the front page of
the New York Times I thought that was
very clever of sort of using a URL as a
macro because I read expand we're a
bookstore click here right that's a
great way to think of it and it worked
very well I've been a baron I don't know
you know the problem with that kind of
advertising is it's extremely difficult
to track
putting up an URL for every that's the
problems you want people to start to
learn your URL so you don't want to
actually use a different one and it's
very easy one of the great things about
online ads we do advertising today and
maybe 40 different different websites we
do banner ads and that advertising is
very easy to track in terms of knowing
how effective it is so we know for each
piece of creative in each venue not only
how many click throughs we get but how
many sell-through is we get how many
dollars of revenue generates per ad
dollars spent on that creative in that
venue that is a sort of a marketers you
know Nirvana certain sense well it's an
exciting place to be on the web right
now oh it absolutely is I mean it's just
incredible this is what's really
incredible about this is that this is
day one this is the very beginning this
is the Kittyhawk stage of electronic
commerce we're moving forward in so many
different areas lots of different
companies are as well in the late 20th
century it's just a great time to be
alive you know we're going to find out
that I think a millennia from now people
are going to look back and say wow the
late 20th century was really a great
time to be alive on this planet"
![[Limbus Company - PV] Chapter.7 - Oblivion](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/VUpkXPkvoxU/mqdefault.jpg)
It's little wonder why Bezos was so successful after listening to him for two minutes. Even in '95 he understands the impact internet and computer technology will have on commerce and uses statistical data to start growing a business. People act like success is some kind of conspiracy, when in reality it is those who are intelligent and driven who understand both society, and, where it is heading, who will come out on top.
And money... intelligence and money or sadly, money then intelligence
Wow. He talks about internet commerce like he's a time traveler
it's from 1997 allready, it's the middle of the bubble, many people those days were talking like him, he doesn't sound like a visionary to me. Even I as a young kid in 1994 could see where the internet was going when I first heard about the world wide web and the possibilities it opened up toward the greater public. It really wasn't far fetched, especially if you have the data that showed it like he had as someone who was constantly working with financial economic figures.
What made him successful was that he walks over certain things like it's nothing were others would have stopped due to moral dilemma's. he is vicious and that makes his company a success.
i was thinking the same. "infant" carries the implication that it WILL grow up and it WILL mature.
"day1", "late twentieth century", he changed "we're going to find out" to "i think" . hard to deprogram your brain to talk as if you dont already know what has happened
In 1997 my uncle, who had worked for over 40 years at Sears, told me to invest in Amazon. I sure wish I had acted on his advice.
That is how a visionary thinks. I was an early customer and I remember i was amazed how great was to find almost any book i was looking for without having to go through the bookstores. Amazon was really adding a lot of value, that is definitely the key for a successful business. He had that clear then and he has that clear now.
I prefer "farseeing" - and that does not apply to a monopolist - so like Jobs a "visionary"
he was marketing "attention" as he described it.
"Attention is the scarcest commodity of the late 20th century"
Today it's become almost mythical, like Phlogiston and Vibranium.
What a line!
That little 5'7 guy knew what he was doing in e-commerce back when even dial-up internet was still a luxury to have
Oh boy! He knew his stats.
The lady and guy who walked passed him in the background paid zero attention to the man who would go on and become the richest person in the world 20 years later. Makes me wonder who I come across with these days lol
i was thinking that too LOL
Hi, Its you 20 years in the future. You turned out pretty normal, like most of us.
I thought about that as well
This video should end with "And then he made $100,000,000" with the Curb Your Enthusiasm music playing.
100,000,000,000**
Bezos mentioned amazon's catalog includes 1m out of print books. The effort to build a universal selection finally paid off
he's veryy happy to answer those questions. It's like asking an idealist what he wants to go to space with and how much he'd like to spend.
I'm the guy honking the horn in the background. Beep beep attention and adding value, two successful business keystones, the timelessness of this video is engaging.
Excellent glimpse behind the curtain; it's pretty clear why Amazon succeeded while so many other internet businesses fizzled.
fascinating video Brian Roemmele. I smashed that thumbs up on your video. Continue to keep up the awesome work.
He's so smart and clear-sighted. Really an admirable fellow. He's had great success, and I hope he is amazingly happy. :)
If you work in analytics / statistics you will always know what the gap in business is in the future.
Quant!
Recorded horizontally😀👍
5:52 this digital rain is 2 years earlier than Matrix.
"no ads----it expands"--jef
I was doing web design in 1991. I believe this was the same year that Bill GAtes said the internet would never amount to anything. I had that on my wall at work for a long time as a joke. He was a little late to the game but amazing. I just remember he had a PHP snippet that would remember your name when you came back to the site. My next door cubicle worker just thought that was amazing. I was still at the time trying to get access to the server because as a designer I had to give the files to the server company to update and they would FTP them up. I still do web design but use Joomla and Wordpress and visual editor addons. WebFlow is cool. Yes, I was at work the day the Internet went public. All of the engineers quit on the same day at UW-Madison. I remember asking where everyone went. Our server was the one that John Carmack uploaded Castle Wolfenstein to. I think we had five servers in the entire world at the time. I argued with so many people that the web was a big thing and that video would go through the internet and on and on.
So what he’s just done is apply the Star Principle. This is to find a fast growing market and set up a business to dominate it. Amazon is the internet’s quintessential Star Principle business
Identify value! #Genius!
That is not how you spell possible at the end. Is it?
it's important to fill a size 13" neck shirt
Gates and Buffett embraced who they are...Bezos seems to be trying on a new persona and doesn't want anyone to remember him as a nerd (recently he dressed as a cowboy for some kind of photo spread) it's kinda sad with all that $ and he still was ashamed of being a nerd
He started Amazon in 1994, not 1996. This interview occured three years after he founded Amazon.
He founded Cababra in 1994. Amazon wasn’t until 1996.
6:20. Possiable??
Is he related to Reince Priebus?
that this is
day one is the very beginning of this
is the Kittyhawk stage of electronic
commerce...
fast forward today
day one of AI, LLM, NLP what a great time to be alive
this is great
Big part of Bezos success relies from #CDNOW and its WebOps, clients, networks and platform; #Amazon would not be what it is today without CDNOW, period.
He said, :dodoo"
Did you ever think that you would be this rich?
possiable? Maybee?
Amazing!
How u made it
wow!
I'd rather youtube some Bob Dylan Rolling Thunder Revue footy
Know I know why.
Haha 3:44 he says doodoo jk good video!
Please tell me secret about Jeff bezos
do do
Jeff is a bid of a weirdo I don’t care what anyone says.
Also, he was in the right place at the right time is was a BIG reason why he became so successful.
BAKED. CCP