时间轴:

00:00 Jeff Bezos Reflects on Amazon's Early Beginnings and the Decision to Start with Books

02:18 Deciding to Enter the Online Book Selling Business

03:45 The Regret Minimization Framework in Decision Making

06:31 Startup Success Despite Initial Skepticism and Challenges

08:37 The Evolution of Amazon's Customer-Centric Culture

Transcript:

Hello, I am Garth Fagan. I am going tobe speaking to you about choreography!

Almost sevenyears ago now, I started this most incredible journey called Amazon.com.Actually at that time, it wasn’t even called Amazon. It was called Cadabra,Inc. — as in Abracadabra. That was the original name of the company.

And I had phoneda lawyer on the way to Seattle from a cell phone. And he said – what do you doto incorporate the company. He said, what do you want the company to be called,and I said Cadabra. And he said, Cadaver, and I knew that was a bad name. Wechanged it a few months later.

The wake-up callthat led to starting Amazon.com was finding that web usage in the spring of1994 was growing at 2300% a year. And things just do not grow that fast.Outside of, I guess, usually like petri dishes or something. I mean it’s a veryvery unusual growth rate and that you could tell anecdotally even though therewasn’t good research on this at the time, the baseline of web usage wasn’ttrivial.

And so somethingwith a nontrivial baseline growing at 2300% a year is clearly going to beeverywhere tomorrow. And so the question was what kind of business plan wouldmake sense in the context of that growth.

And I wentthrough a whole bunch of different things. I made a list of 20 differentproducts, looking for the first best products to sell online. Came up withbooks for a bunch of reasons but primarily because books are very unusual inone respect and that is that there are more of them than there are products ofthe other category. So there are literally millions of different books in printin any given time.

And computersare good at organizing such large selections of products and you could buildsomething online that literally couldn’t be built any other way. You couldn’thave a physical world bookstore or paper catalog with millions of differentbooks. And the primitive technology that was the web in 1994 clearly requiredthat kind of characteristic for business. It had to be something that couldonly be done in that way. So that’s what led to books.

When I decidedto do this, I first talked to my wife who is sitting here in the audience. Andshe had married a relatively stable goofy but still relatively stable personworking at a Wall Street firm. I worked at a quantitative hedge fund and thiswas a hard decision.

And I waslooking for the right framework in which to make that kind of importantdecision and the right framework I found is the regret minimizationframework and that’s just a nerdy way of saying that you want toproject yourself to age 80. And then think back over your life and if you are81, you want to minimize number of regrets you have throughout that period oftime. I think this is something a lot of people do maybe subconsciously beprobably – very few people probably name at regret minimization frameworkbecause most people are healthier than that.

But it was avery clear way for me to think about making that kind of life decision. And theway it helped was I thought, okay, if I go do this thing and participate inthis thing called the Internet, though I genuinely believe is going to be a bigdeal. And if I fail, am I going to regret having tried and failed? I knew theanswer of that was no.

But I also knewthat if I didn’t try that I would always regret that. I would always wonder andit would haunt me until that mythical day which I actually hope will come. Mywife would try to get me to eat better. One of her heroes is Dr. Wild. So ifyou are in the audience — that your dietary constraints are currently beinginflicted upon me. But I suspect it may help me over the long-term.

And so that washow the decision was made to do this. And there are just literally tons ofstories about the early days of getting Amazon.com set up.

We spent about ayear building the software infrastructure and getting all the vendorrelationships in place and so on and so on. The day before we were ready tolaunch the store in July of 1995, one of the software engineers who werelooking at our little 400 square foot distribution center. And I remember veryclearly this person looked at the 400 square feet, about the size of one cargarage. So it was kind of a toy distribution center and they would buildsoftware systems behind it.

And he said — helooked at this little space, he’s like, “I can’t figure out if this isincredibly optimistic or hopelessly pathetic”. And indeed, we didn’t know.There really was no way to know how customers were going to adopt this kind oftechnology in these very early days. There was a lot of risk involved. In fact,also in the audience today are my parents who were the original funders of Amazon.com.They invested about $300,000 which was roughly — was a reasonably largefraction of their life savings.

And my dad’sfirst question was, “What’s the Internet?” So they were not betting on theconcept or the idea. They were betting on their son.

I told him, Ithought there was a 70% chance they would lose their entire investment. Andthat was an important disclosure because I wanted to be able to go home forThanksgiving dinner no matter what happened. I’m very happy that, thatinvestment has worked out very well for them.