Jeff Bezos In 1999 On Amazon's Plans Before The Dotcom Crash

I don't care if we're a pure internet game. What matters to me is whether we provide the best customer service. Internet Shminternet Given the decades of wisdom that have been accumulated among investors in the business world, it sounds like you're saying that you're making a big speculative bet if they're investing in your company's stock. Well, I think the stocks of all the Internet companies you know are incredibly volatile... But even in the long term. I think in the long term. That it is very easy to predict that there will be many successful companies born from the Internet.

They will have very large market limits, etc. I also think that today it is very difficult to predict who those companies will be. So you know you can make bets on these things and I think Amazon.com, if we don't, if we're not one of those important, long-lasting companies born of the Internet, we'll have no one to blame but ourselves and we'll be extremely disappointed. from ourselves. But there are no guarantees. It's very, very difficult to predict. If we step back and look at the companies created by the P.C. In the 1980 revolution, it would not have been predicted who the five winners would be, who the five biggest winners would be.

In fact, there have been many winners. So this space is a little bit different and the brand name may need to mean more and then there are some incremental returns, maybe more. But I think if you can focus obsessively enough on customer experience, selection, ease of use, low prices, you'll have more information to make purchasing decisions. If you can give customers all that plus great customer service, with our toys and electronics we have a 30-day return policy. If you can do all that, then I think you have a good chance. And that's what we're trying to do.

In reality, you are no longer a purely Internet company. I mean you now have millions of square feet of real estate. You have a growing inventory of items that you keep in stock. Now you have thousands and thousands of employees. We have more than 3,000 employees and more than four million square feet of distribution center space. And those are things that I'm very proud of because with that distribution center space and half a dozen distribution centers around the country it allows us to bring the product closer to customers so that we can ship it to customers in a very timely manner, which that improves customer service levels.

That's what it's about. If there's one thing that characterizes Amazon.com for its obsessive attention to the customer experience, it's from start to finish. And that's what those distribution centers mean. But you are not a pure Internet game. It is not like this. I don't care if we are a pure internet play, what I care about is that we provide the best customer service. Internet Shminternet. You just know that it doesn't matter. Well, but your investors care about whether they're investing in a company that... No, they should invest in a company that obsesses over long-term customer experience.

There is never misalignment between the interests of clients and the interests of shareholders. Well, that's the same argument someone at WalMart would also make. I dont see why not. I think they should make that argument. So it is a correct argument. OK. So you'll open up as many square feet of physical space as you have to hire as many employees as necessary... To serve customers. Absolutely. And we will do it as fast as we can. That is a very expensive proposition. It does not compare to opening an equivalent network of retail stores. So if you open a bunch of chain stores.

Look, when we open a distribution center, we're opening places that can have space where we can pay 30 cents per square foot for a lease instead of paying seven dollars per square foot that you might pay in a high-traffic commercial area. So when you compare those things, they are not the same. You can't compare a large retail chain with half a dozen distribution centers. You just don't know it's bad math. Either way, whatever side of the argument you believe, you're doing what I think. There is only one side that is obsessed with customers. But that's what it seems to me.

Both with the speed of your growth in terms of the number of online stores you are opening, the different businesses you are entering, the number of distribution centers and the opening of new employees that you are hiring, you are doing a Here's what of an intense bet that has two aspects. One where I can manage this many different businesses well. And two, you can make money by selling large volumes of products and, essentially, very low profit margins. I think I totally agree with the first one in particular, which is that there's no guarantee that Amazon.com can be a successful company.

What we are trying to do is very complicated. There is a huge execution risk involved. We have a terribly complicated business. We're growing, you know, historically very quickly. We are opening new product categories and expanding into new geographies. We have completely new business models with things like auctions. We now believe this is the less risky of the two approaches because scale is important in this business. And it also takes scale to offer the lowest prices and best customer service to people. So scale is important to us and we're going to look for that kind of scale.

But it does mean that the execution challenges are enormous. That's why you'll find a group of people in Seattle and around the world working very hard to ensure that we serve customers at the level they are accustomed to. And then even improve that. Isn't it to some extent, with all due respect, corporate arrogance to assume that you can go into these businesses that you have no experience in and practically overnight go into a wide variety of different businesses and become the best at it? they? companies and the market leader in those companies. There are other companies that have been running this type of business for decades, if not longer.

I do not think. So when we started selling books four years ago, everyone said: look, you're just computer scientists, you don't know anything about selling books. And that was true. But what we really cared about were the customers and now we know a lot about books and when we started selling music people said the same thing but we hired the right people. So we don't do this in a vacuum. We go out and hire the best industry experts in each of these categories. The same goes for electronics in toys. So, you know, we take this very seriously, we take customer engagement very seriously and we're not going to release something or announce something before it's ready.