Club Speech Read the transcript of Jeff Bezos' speech. Club Q & A Read the Q & A for this event. Related Links Our guide to the best links related to this event. Purchase Tape Buy the audio of this event on tape.

INTRODUCTION

The Time magazine 'Person of the Year' in 1999, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos is not short of courtiers, having been raised to the plinth as the 'King of e-commerce' in a time of remarkable expansion in Internet trade.

This can be seen as just reward for Bezos' remarkable foresight and nerve in the nascent days of e-commerce: in 1994, Bezos quit his Wall Street job to set-up shop on the Internet, having noted the startling statistic that the web was growing at a rate of 2,300 percent a year. Bezos chose to start by selling books, because with more than 3 million in print, books, of all commodities, seemed to him best suited to being searched, organized and sold electronically.

In his speech to the Club in 1998, Bezos worked hard to convey the humble origins of Amazon, reminiscing back to the days when the CEO himself packed books on the floor at night, tellingly revealing that he desired 'a garage start-up legitimacy' for the company. Bezos portrays Amazon's development as a plucky start-up fighting against the big offline retailers such as Barnes and Noble, who came late, but with a huge advertising budget, to online retailing.

Such has been Amazon's rapacious growth, though, that they quickly became the big fish themselves, and have faced growing criticism for their working practices. Yet they continue to dominate online bookselling, to the extent that Borders have given up competing with Amazon online, and have entered into a partnership with them instead.

It is not hard to see why Bezos has been feted as the 'King of E-commerce'. Quite simply, Amazon's mantra of customer satisfaction marked them out in an era when shopping online seemed little safer than being the author of 'The Satanic Verses'. Bezos' speech ranged across the company's strategy, as he explained how his personalization system aims to ensnare users into becoming repeat buyers, by dramatically improving their chances of finding what they want (even if they didn't know it was what they wanted) from a 1,000 to 1 chance in a regular bookstore, to a 50 to 1 chance at Amazon.com.

Interestingly, Bezos fails to even once mention the word profit in his talk from 1998, given at the zenith of dot com hype: quite clearly, Bezos' expansion plans far outweighed any aim for short-range profit, predicating the company's success on long-term strategy. The bellwether e-commerce company, Amazon's strategy and history reveal prescient insights into e-commerce, past, future and present.

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