“I emailed the very first customers of our online book store, about a thousand of them randomly selected, and asked them what they would like us to sell more.
A very long shopping list came back to me… ”, said Jeff Bezos in a 2016 interview on American television.
This anecdote dating from 1998, archetype of story-telling with which American start-ups surround themselves, forged the legend of a gifted visionary lent to the creator of Amazon, the giant with 1 million employees worldwide and 1,000 billion $ market capitalization.
At 58, the second richest man in the world announced Tuesday handing over to his protégé Andy Jessy and is therefore withdrawing after 27 years of building and diversifying the e-commerce giant.
Cadabra before Amazon
A few years before this in-house survey, the first brick of his future empire, Jeff Preston Bezos was still working in finance on Wall Street after graduating with honors in computer science and electrical engineering from the prestigious Princeton University.
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“I realized at the time that Internet use was increasing by 2,300% per year.
I had never heard of such rapid growth and the idea of building a virtual book store with millions of references - something unimaginable in the physical world - seemed very exciting to me, ”the tycoon recalled in 2010. .
At 30 years old and an already well-launched investor career, Jeff Bezos resigned, moved to Washington State (west coast) and on July 5, 1994 founded Cadabra, the first name of the young shoot that would become Amazon.
The official story is that he ships the first books himself from the local post office and develops his start-up and ordering and delivery software from ... his garage, like other digital giants in their early days. such as Google, Hewlett-Packard or Apple.
Revenge of a Gifted
Another parallel with the giant with the bitten apple, Jeff Bezos - is, like his late boss Steve Jobs, an adopted child who would have drawn in his childhood the strength to undertake.
Born in 1964 in Albuquerque (New Mexico) to a young alcoholic father and a teenage mother, Jeffrey Jorgensen at the age of 4 took the name of the new husband, Miguel Bezos, a barely English-speaking Cuban immigrant.
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"It is difficult to know with certainty if the circumstances of his birth helped create this fruitful mix for an entrepreneur between intelligence, ambition and the constant need to prove himself" wrote Brad Stone in a biography published in 2013 ("The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon ”).
“But two other tech icons, Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison (Oracle) were also adopted and this experience seems to have given them additional motivation to succeed”.
It was a success at the end of the 90s when a higher connection speed and the first search engines changed the face of the Internet and Amazon, which became THE store that never closed.
The IPO in 1997 in fact provided the liquidity to absorb all the smaller competitors.
A bubble burst survivor
Sweeping everything in its path, the Amazon model was already starting to accumulate criticism at the time, especially from booksellers who suffered from price competition.
The bursting of the Internet bubble in 2000 ended up cleaning up the competition but seriously hampered the accounts of the “web hypermarket” which was on the verge of bankruptcy.
In 2002, Amazon had to lay off and close distribution centers in its network, which was already well established in the United States and was in the process of internationalization.
Jeff Bezos and his personal guard learn from this crisis and the Seattle business diversifies.
"They succeeded in retaining their investors and attracting new ones by passing for a solid company while the other boats had been wrecked", recalls Julien Pillot, professor and researcher in Economics at Inseec.
How? 'Or' What ?
Amazon invested heavily in 2003 in data centers and servers.
"It is a bet of Bezos which made them take the lead" analyzes the expert in digital economy.
“They preempted the emerging market of cloud and dematerialized services by creating (Editor's note: under the leadership of the future successor to Bezos) their own infrastructures such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and by using their technological advantage in the exploitation of data ”.
The birth of a mastodon
Amazon finally reached profitability in 2007 and embarked on the acquisition of nuggets, the production of its own devices or the constitution of a complete logistics chain with a fleet of planes and trucks.
More recently, the multinational has spent its gigantic “cash flow” in audiovisual production, media and eSports.
Rarely has a behemoth been so modeled on the personality of its founder and his sometimes questionable obsessions.
"Amazon is shaped in its image with an operation that leaves no room for approximation and a management based on the commands issued by a boss guru", underlines Benoît Berthelot, author of "The world according to Amazon".
“Jeff Bezos invented all the e-commerce standards such as 48-hour delivery, free returns or order scoring, but his love of efficiency has also led him to set up very calibrated processes and automated management of human resources such as delivery men or employees, ”continues this journalist from Capital magazine, who conducted a long investigation.
“So much so that factories are run by algorithms and employees are tracked by GPS to see who is less efficient.
There is also a strong anti-union corporate culture, ”he assures us.
Become an unstoppable bulldozer, Amazon and its subsidiaries have once again invested in the future: artificial intelligence or space tourism with Blue Origin.
Space, a "childhood dream", to which the future Chairman will devote his time and his extraterrestrial fortune.