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Jeff Bezos explains how he came up with idea for Amazon
In 1994, Jeff Bezos came across the statistic that world wide web usage was growing at something like 2,300% a year.
“That was a sort of wakeup call for me that there was something going on,” Jeff explains. “Many people at that point hadn’t heard of the web. They didn’t have Internet access. This was the time of 28 kilobit per second modems and dial-up access, so it was a very different age. But it was clear that there was going to be something there.”
Then he had a big idea:
“I realized that you could make a bookstore on the web that could hold more books than a physical bookstore could ever hold. It could truly have universal selection. And of course, since then we’ve expanded that into other categories and we keep pursuing that notion of ‘Earth’s biggest selection’ at Amazon.”
Jeff continues:
“I’ve always been a big reader, but that wasn’t the reason we chose books. Books were a great first product to sell online because books are very unique in one respect: there are more items in the book category than there are items in any other category. There are millions of books active and in print around the world, and the largest physical book superstores only carry about 100,000-150,000 of those millions of different books. So on the web, you could build something that solved a real problem — people can’t find some of these books that they want to find . . . We basically built Amazon to make it possible for people to find those hard-to-find books.”