Amazon.Com: Get Big Fast - Hardcover

Spector, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0066620414 ISBN 13: 9780066620411

Publisher: Harperbusiness, 2000

Synopsis

In Amazon.com Jeff Bezos built something the world had never seen. He created the most recognized brand name on the Internet and became one of the richest men in the world. He was recently named Time magazine's Person of the Year and was crowned "the king of cybercommerce."

Yet for all the success and all the media exposure, the inside story of Amazon.com has never really been told. In this revealing, unauthorized account of Amazon's astounding rise, Robert Spector, journalist and bestselling author, gives us the fastpaced, behind-the-scenes true story of the company's creation, its tumultuous present, and its uncertain future.

By talking to friends, confidants, early employees, rivals, publishing executives, stock analysts, and venture capitalists, Spector goes beyond the "official story"-the glib, polished, media-savvy statements that Bezos feeds to the press-and presents in unprecedented detail the real facts of the company's beginnings, innovations, business practices, and strategies, and its vision of the future. Further, he explains what the Amazon story means for conventional business, e-commerce, and ultimately the consumer.

Bezos's first employers tell how the experience he gained at their firms prepared him for creating Amazon.com. Early investors reveal the details of Bezos's initial pitch for money. Former company insiders divulge how painstakingly Amazon.com's internal systems were put together.

And the story becomes more compelling all the time as Amazon finds itself under attack by the formerly Internetchallenged behemoth retailers, by online startups trying to eat Bezos's lunch, and by impatient investors waiting for the company to turn a profit. (Amazon lost an incredible $720 million in 1999.)

Amazon.com's emergence as an e-commerce powerhouse has set off tremors around the world, jolting the "bricks and mortar" retailing giants, and forever changing the way everyone does business. But has Jeff Bezos finally run out of time? Will his great achievement be remembered as a footnote to the opening era of the Internet age? Or will this wily, overachieving self-described nerd triumph once again and surprise fans and foes alike?

About this title

Product Description

Amazon.Com - Get Big Fast : Inside the Revolutionary Business Model That Changed the World

Review

It could all have been so different. In the summer of 1994, as Jeff Bezos drove towards Seattle with just the bare bones of a business idea, he made a call to attorney Todd Tarbert about incorporating his planned venture in the state of Washington. Naturally, Tarbert wanted to know the new company's name.

"Cadabra, Inc.," Bezos said over the cell phone. "Like Abracadabra."

To which Tarbert replied "Did you say Cadaver?"

Six years on and Amazon.com is alive and well, buoyed by a business model which has made it e-commerce's foremost player and every Internet pundit's favourite case study. Still, with only the initial landrush over, it seems a strange time for a business history. Amazon.com's forward strategy is no secret. "Our US books business was profitable in the month of December [1998]", Bezos explained at the annual shareholders meeting in May 1999. "I believe that if we had been better able to organise ourselves, we shouldn't have had that business be profitable...A rational set of shareholders would penalise the management team of a company for being unable to better figure out how to allocate the capital in order to invest more aggressively in this critical category formation time". Not surprisingly, then, The Amazon.com--Get Big Fast is no official study but whatever its status, Spector's enthusiastic narration and genuine, but not uncritical, passion for his subject makes it work. He writes with a journalistic zip on Bezos's personal history, his company's inception and early growth through IPO and expansion from books into other retail categories to becoming the e-commerce leader of today. Well-chosen anecdotes add to the romance, such as Bezos instructing his Manhattan removal firm to "head west" until he could call them with a decision on where he would be moving to set up his business. Spector assesses Amazon.com's relationship with traditional retailers and publishers ("The publishing industry, in the midst of a two-year downturn in sales and an avalanche of returned books, began noticing that Amazon.com was becoming one of their largest customers, and possibly the solution to their doldrums".). He tries to get inside company culture and casts an appraising eye over the business plan as well as outlining the challenges which the business has faced and overcome in its short history.

The Amazon.com--Get Big Fast is that rare thing, a business book and a page-turner. Though by no means the first or last word on the subject, Spector's account has all the drama of the business revolution it describes. Now, whatever did happen to Cadaver.com? --Iain Campbell

Edition details

• Publisher: Harperbusiness
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0066620414
• ISBN 13: 9780066620411
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 263