I am reading The Everything Store by Brad Stone, the definitive biography of both Jeff Bezos and Amazon.com
You can’t separate the two.
Stone has done a masterful job of portraying Bezos and what makes him so successful.
More than anything else (and there is a lot of else), Bezos has from the beginning an uncanny ability to look at new technologies (in this case, the arrival of the Internet) and see the potential long before anyone else. In this case, online transactions.
But his genius goes far further.
Leaving an extremely high-paying job on Wall Street, and a successful career at an early age, Bezos sets out to be one of the first Internet entrepreneurs in the then-new field of online commerce.
I am old enough to remember when the very idea of online commerce was a dirty word, and early adapters to the web were aghast that anyone would even consider ‘commercializing’ the Internet. But Bezos immediately saw that you could bypass all the overhead costs of running a store, from building to employees to electricity and heat, and deliver the product directly from the manufacturer to the consumer.
That online bypass made it possible for Bezos to cut the prices, saving the consumers a fortune.
What he did not have was a product, so he set out to find what kinds of products might work best for the web. He settled on a list of 20 possibilities, books being one of them.
After a fairly lengthy process, Bezos settled on books. They were, after all, absolutely the same no matter where you bought them, and they didn’t spoil in the shipping.
Having no prior experience at all in either online commerce (who did?) or the book business (unlike giants like Barnes and Noble and Borders), Bezos launched his online concept by self financing and a loan from his parents, in his garage.
Many investors were reluctant to invest in Amazon.com. They reasoned that if it did not work, Bezos would lose their investment. If it DID work, then the bookstore giants would simply create their own online sites and bury Bezos. After all, they had the brand, the following, the books in inventory and the experience.
But Bezos understood what most people could not- that the big bookstores simply could not bring themselves to embrace the notion of an online store. First, it was not in their DNA. Second, as they drew closer to it, they also were repulsed by it, fearful that it would cannibalize their existing business. Third, even when they did, reluctantly, realize that they would have to construct their own site, they still committed the vast majority of their resources and their best people to their old school brick and mortar operation.
Bezos, on the other hand, was 100% (perhaps 110% … perhaps 195%) committed to his vision – with no distractions.
In the end, of course, Bezos was proven right.
And today, Amazon.com no only sells books, but pretty much anything else you can imagine.
Bezos did not ‘see’ the future, he invented it.
But what made it work more than anything else was the natural, institutional reluctance of those who should have been his greatest competitors to embrace the future.
This lesson is not limited to books, nor to Amazon.com
Copyright Michael Rosenblum 2014
