The Story of Amazon.com

The Story of Amazon.com — page 5
b u i l t f o r s u c c e s s 6 p a g e the story of amazon com chapter one T he moving van filled with all of Jeff Bezos’s be longings had left New York City on a summer morning in 1994 and driven westward for almost 24 hours before Bezos called to designate a final desti nation Bezos had left his job as senior vice president at a prominent New York investment company to start a business of his own but he wasn’t quite sure where A day after giving up the Manhattan apartment he shared with his wife Mackenzie he made his decision He called the movers loaded a battered 1988 Chevrolet Blazer and headed to Seattle Washington While Mackenzie drove Bezos spent the time it took to cross the country working on a rough business plan for the Internet-based bookstore he had spent months researching He saw enormous potential for growth in the Internet and the World Wide Web which had only begun to be used by the general public in the fall of 1993 By the spring of 1994 hundreds of thousands of people were al ready using the Web and usage was growing at an incredible rate of 2,300 per cent per year Things don’t grow that fast outside of petri dishes Bezos said At that rate he believed that the Internet could be invisible today and ubiquitous everywhere tomorrow Settling in Seattle