Thread by @ShaanVP

Jeff Bezo's Amazon Run:
- 27 years
- $1.68 Trillion company
- 800k people employed

Crazy run.

And 6 funny stories about the early days of Amazon

#1 - The original name wasn't Amazon. Jeff wanted to name it "Cadabra" (as in, abra cadabra, like magic)

His lawyer said the name sounded too much like Cadaver (aka a corpse) for ppl to share.

His 2nd pick was Relentless (relentless.com still re-directs to Amazon)

#2 - The company almost died because of inventory.

The whole point of an internet book store was to carry WAY more books than you can find in a book store.

But the book distributors minimum order was 10 books.

They couldn't afford to buy 10 of every book..

But they were 'relentless' and found a loophole. The distributor required you to ORDER 10 books. Not GET 10 books.

So they would order 1 of the book they wanted...and 9 copies of an obscure out-of-stock book about Lichens that they'd never get charged for.

#3 - The company started in his garage, and they used to pack every order on their knees on the floor. One day Jeff turned to his coworker and said "we should get knee pads!" ... and his coworker said: "or packing tables". They bought tables and productivity tripled.

^that reminds me of a story I heard about @moizali when he was starting Native Deodorant.

Friend: "Moiz do you even know anything about deodorant?"

Moiz: "no, I don't. But I'm going to start this company, and in 12 months I'll know everything there is to know about deodorant"

#4 - Amazon wanted to compete with Google, so they launched A9.com. They wanted real pics with search results. On a $100k budget, they flew photographers to 20 cities, rented cars, and took pics. A9 died, but google eventually built Street View off that idea.

#5 - Some ideas just work, right away. First book sold is "Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies" to a friend.

* 2 months later - $20k/week sales
* 6 mo - $511k revenue, 2k daily visitors
* 2 years - $15M revenue, IPO

$10k invested in the IPO is worth $12M+ today

#6 - This is what the homepage looked like back in 1995. "if you're not embarrassed by v1 of your product, you launched too late"