This 1999 Interview Of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos Shows The Humble Beginning Of A $600 Billion Giant
From an office between cheap restaurants and erotic stores to a multibillion dollar corporation.
Amazon is a bastion of the tech industry, regularly demonstrating the power an e-commerce giant can wield just because it provides a service of convenience.
Of course, despite now being valued at close to $600 billion dollars, the company actually had some very humble beginnings.
A clip from the news segment ¡®60 Minutes¡¯ has emerged, from the year 1999. In it, correspondent Bob Simon talks to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos who was just the head of a fledgling startup selling books at the time.
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First off, just looking at the street Amazon¡¯ office was located on in Seattle will tell you just how small the company was back then. It was housed in an older building, smushed between a ¡°pawn shop, porno parlour, wig store, and a down-market teriyaki joint.¡± Today, Amazon¡¯s head office is spread across 8.1 million square feet in 33 buildings across Seattle, not to mention the warehouses and branch offices in other countries
Yet, as much as Amazon has changed, Bezos has probably changed even more. The video shows Bezos¡¯s office with its famous ¡°door desk¡±, basically a door mounted on pieces of wood. At the time, Bezos said it was ¡°a symbol of spending money on things that matter to customers, and not spending money on things that don¡¯t.
A screengrab from the video, showing Amazon's old office space in 1999
Now, Bezos has just become the first billionaire since 1999 crack the $100 billion threshold, and occasionally enjoys the power fantasy of piloting a giant mech.
Still, it was this tiny startup and its humble beginnings that managed to first kill hundreds of bookstores across America, and then take over the online retail space in a huge way. And who knows, we might see an Amazon even more different by 2029.
