The Amazon Empire - How it All Began

From a company people laughingly called 'Amazon-toast', Amazon.com has survived every test of viability and gone from strength to strength. It is one of a handful of online marketing trailblazers who has survived as a stalwart of online shopping. Out of the other World Wide Web pioneers, eBay, Yahoo and Google, Amazon's founder, Jeff Bezos is the only one still at the helm and running his company as Chief Executive officer. Amazon reached an operating income of $1,406 billion in 2010.

So, how does one man have the vision and determination to start such a giant of a company? One of Amazon's key internal cultures' that Jeff Bezos put into place is to primarily be a customer-orientated company - something like "the customer is always right". By focusing on the end user, the customer, they work backwards from there and tailor everything to satisfy that customer, at the same time recognizing that customers are only a part of the entire package that makes for a successful company. In reading about how they select employees, Amazon only looks for people who they could one day admire and learn from.

In 1994, Jeff Bezos had an idea of selling books on the internet. He started off in his garage at home. He received an investment of $40 000 from someone who believed in his vision. With a shaky start and a very boring, nondescript website, Amazon went into business under the name of "Cadabra", which a lot of people mistakenly thought of as "Cadaver". The name was promptly changed to Amazon with the thinking that "A" as the beginning of the alphabet would bring the name up at the top of any list. The huge Amazon River also played a part inspiring Jeff to bigger visions. The next monetary investment came in the amount of $100 000 which went towards improving the company's public image - the drab, uninspiring website.

Bezos was aware he had to create something to get people to come back as returning customers, a bookstore simply was not enough. The inspiration of asking customers to write a review of the books they had read became a winner. Amazon began to be more than just an online shop - it had something to which its customers could contribute and feel important. In 1997, the company turned over $15,7 million in revenue - not bad for only being in business for 4 years. At the same time they introduced Amazon promotional codes, which provided a true incentive for people to purchase online as opposed to the tradition offline methods. 1997 was also the year Amazon went public, and the start of them widening their product base by adding software, electronics, video games, toys and so on. The prophets of doom came out in their thousands saying the company was growing too quickly - they were proved wrong when results came out in 1999 heralding over a billion dollars in sales. The rest, as they say, is history!

From his early working day's Jeff was defined as someone who would go far in life. One of the earliest quotes about him was, "he is going to make someone a lot of money someday". How right they were! When he was senior vice-president at DE Shaw on Wall Street and surfing the internet one day, Jeff found out an astounding nugget of information: the internet was growing around a rate of 2,300% per year. He immediately realized that online business was going to be the next step. From such a basic thought to the empire Amazon is today - who would have thought it was possible in the early 1990's?

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