who are you I’m Jeff Bezos and what are
you what is 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 but I came
across the startling statistic that 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 to saw
online making a list like 20 different
products that you might be able to sell
and books were great that’s 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 and more than three
million different books worldwide active
imprints in any given time across all
languages want 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 a more traditional
method you probably should do them using
the more traditional method
what kind of inventory do you keep 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 have work 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’s 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 in some of
them we can’t but we find them if we can
and then we should be to our
you have 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 best-selling 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
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 capture mind share what was your
secret how did you do that 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
capturing attention attention is the
scarce commodity of the late 20th
century and one of the ways that you can
do that and it’s the way that we did it
was by doing something new and
innovative for the first time that
actually has real value for the customer
that’s a hard thing to do
but if you do do that then newspapers
will write about you what you’re doing
customers will tell other customers and
you’ll get a huge word-of-mouth fan out
and that can really drive and accelerate
businesses and that’s what happened with
us in the first year of opening Amazon
that come to the public we didn’t do any
paid advertising and all of our growth
was fueled by word-of-mouth and media
exposure and I saw little ants at the
bottom of the column of the New York
Times that was our very first
advertising we don’t do that anymore but
the very 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 it’s 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 apparently I don’t know you
know the problem with that kind of
advertising is it’s extremely difficult
put a different URL for every that’s the
problem is that 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 it’s
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 it generates per ad
dollars spent on that creative in that
venue that is sort of marketers you know
Nirvana in a certain sense well it’s an
exciting place to be on the web right
now oh it absolutely is something 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 and 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 gonna find out that
I think a millennia from now people are
gonna look back and say wow the late
20th century was really a great time to
be alive on this planet so this is a new
series on my channel that I’m testing
called early starts where I look at the
earliest videos of some of the most
successful entrepreneurs in the world
and hopefully by seeing how they started
it gives you a little more motivation
confidence courage to say I’m not that
different from that person I could do it
too I love to know what you think if
this series should continue who you want
to see next let me know put in the
comments below and if you want more Jeff
Bezos check out the most recent top 10
rules video made on him the link is
right there next to me I think you’ll
enjoy it continue to believe and I’ll
see you there
the number one thing that has made us
successful by far is
obsessive-compulsive focus on the customer
you what is 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 but I came
across the startling statistic that 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 to saw
online making a list like 20 different
products that you might be able to sell
and books were great that’s 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 and more than three
million different books worldwide active
imprints in any given time across all
languages want 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 a more traditional
method you probably should do them using
the more traditional method
what kind of inventory do you keep 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 have work 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’s 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 in some of
them we can’t but we find them if we can
and then we should be to our
you have 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 best-selling 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
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 capture mind share what was your
secret how did you do that 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
capturing attention attention is the
scarce commodity of the late 20th
century and one of the ways that you can
do that and it’s the way that we did it
was by doing something new and
innovative for the first time that
actually has real value for the customer
that’s a hard thing to do
but if you do do that then newspapers
will write about you what you’re doing
customers will tell other customers and
you’ll get a huge word-of-mouth fan out
and that can really drive and accelerate
businesses and that’s what happened with
us in the first year of opening Amazon
that come to the public we didn’t do any
paid advertising and all of our growth
was fueled by word-of-mouth and media
exposure and I saw little ants at the
bottom of the column of the New York
Times that was our very first
advertising we don’t do that anymore but
the very 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 it’s 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 apparently I don’t know you
know the problem with that kind of
advertising is it’s extremely difficult
put a different URL for every that’s the
problem is that 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 it’s
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 it generates per ad
dollars spent on that creative in that
venue that is sort of marketers you know
Nirvana in a certain sense well it’s an
exciting place to be on the web right
now oh it absolutely is something 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 and 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 gonna find out that
I think a millennia from now people are
gonna look back and say wow the late
20th century was really a great time to
be alive on this planet so this is a new
series on my channel that I’m testing
called early starts where I look at the
earliest videos of some of the most
successful entrepreneurs in the world
and hopefully by seeing how they started
it gives you a little more motivation
confidence courage to say I’m not that
different from that person I could do it
too I love to know what you think if
this series should continue who you want
to see next let me know put in the
comments below and if you want more Jeff
Bezos check out the most recent top 10
rules video made on him the link is
right there next to me I think you’ll
enjoy it continue to believe and I’ll
see you there
the number one thing that has made us
successful by far is
obsessive-compulsive focus on the customer
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