Despite tough year, Amazon's Bezos keeps his chin up

How Amazon "got big fast"

So what does get big fast mean?
It means make the most of what are usually narrow market windows.

So if you look at the original business plan for the company, we never got to the level of sales we have today. Even after five years, I think we maybe got to $100 million in sales. And that was a very optimistic business plan; very few companies ever get to $100 million in sales. We're 26 times that size today.

In the first 30 days after we opened the store, we shipped products to 45 different countries and all 50 states. At that time we realized that we were really on to something that customers want. How can we make it better? How can we invest in the customer experience? What kinds of extensions can we do? Can we do this in other countries? Should we advertise this business? In our first year we didn't spend a dollar on paid advertising.

How have the companies Amazon invested in deviated from that strategy?
I don't want to criticize their strategies, because at different points along the way you have to take gambles.

In our case we could afford to spend very little on marketing up-front because when we started, the Web was a very small place. It was very easy to be noticed if you had any kind of an interesting experience whatsoever.

Bezos does Jean-Luc Picard

You start a company in 1999 or 1998, where the Web is a very big place, maybe you have to spend a lot of money even in your first year to try and rise above the noise. There's a certain risk associated with that strategy and sometimes it's going to work and sometimes it isn't.

Pets.com is now dead, Living.com is now dead, Homegrocer has been absorbed. Is there some point at which you play Capt. Jean-Luc Picard, of the Starship Enterprise, and say, "this far and no further? We're not going to let Drugstore.com fail. We're not going to let an eZiba.com fail," or something along those lines?
No because the universe is not at stake. I mean we're not up against the Borg collective here.

We can do a lot to help our partners, but we cannot ultimately make them successful. We will do everything that we reasonably can, but to take the position that we would be a bottomless source of funds for a partner, would be a very bad business decision and very bad policy. And actually none of our partners would expect us to do that.

Now if the Borg ever do invade, we will draw the line! (laughs)

Where do you see Amazon five, 10, 15 years from now?
In that kind of time frame, you can only talk in terms of mission. And the mission is earth's most customer-centric company.

We have a very precise definition for what customer-centric means. It means listen, invent and personalize.

Listen is the most traditional meaning. So if you don't listen to your customers, you will fail.

Invent is all about innovation. It's not the customer's job to invent for themselves.

Bezos on his future at Amazon

Where some companies go wrong is they only listen. Even if they do a good job of listening, it's not enough because you have to do things your customers would never think to ask. That's where invention comes in.

Finally, personalization, which is unique to the Internet because that is the idea that if we have 25 million customers, we should have 25 million stores. That's a necessary constraint on our goal of universal selection: building a place where people can find anything they might want to buy online.

How much of a part of that future vision are you going to be? Where do you see yourself five, 10, 15 years down the road?
I'll try to be a part of this as long as these guys will let me, number one. (laughs) And number two, as long as I'm helping. And number three, as long as the rate of change is very rapid, because I am at heart a change junky.

So far the rate of change is accelerating: there is more change per unit time than there was five years ago. There's more than there was four years ago, three years ago, two years ago, one year ago.

Under what kind of circumstances would you see yourself stepping down, resigning?
It would primarily be if the rate of change were too slow.

You know, I'm very invested in this company in every way imaginable. I mean obviously I have a big equity stake in the company, but I also have a big emotional stake in the company. I care a lot about it.

And I'm not the only one. There are literally thousands of people in the company who care a lot about it.

And if I ever thought that somebody could do a better job, I would immediately start trying to recruit them! (laughs) Because I really, really want it to work.

Undoubtedly, one of the advantages that I have in doing a good job is that I do care so much and that I've been doing it for so long. So even if I didn't want to learn a lot about e-commerce I would have, and I actually did.