Watch what Jeff Bezos had to say in 1999 about Amazon's future!

I was out jogging recently and the back of local mail truck was open as the mail carrier was bringing in mail and the entire back of the truck was a wall of amazon.com box did you ever envision that it would get to this point no I'm the most surprised person on the planet so I you know four years ago I think if anybody had predicted what would happen they would have needed to have been immediately institutionalized so it is surprising over the last two years we've gone from having a million customers to over ten million but now it's over twelve million customers and we definitely didn't predict it we're and we're very grateful for it the big question that I have coming to your beautiful building here and meeting some of your very organized and very polite staff members is how do you keep it all organized I don't you have something like 4200 employees in only four years yeah we do have over 4,000 employees and it has grown very quickly but we have the hardest-working most talented most passionate most customer focused group of people that certainly I've ever had the pleasure of working with and I think that might exist anywhere and that is that is I think how it all works it's always about the quality of the people and I heard you once say that you told your staff members to be afraid of the customers right does that mean well I asked everybody around here to wake up terrified every morning their sheets drenched in sweat but to be very precise about what it is they're afraid of and they shouldn't be afraid of our competitors they should be afraid of our customers because it's the customers those are the folks we have a relationship with those are the folks who send us money and I believe that our customers are loyal to us right up until the second that somebody else offers some better service so to better qualify that fear it's like a fear of abandonment that's right you know you got to do a good job and you have to you have to earn the loyalty of customers every day if you ever rest on the path to rest on your laurels it may take a little while but the whole thing will go away let's talk about the recent announcement you knew you were going to get bigger than the Amazon and take over the earth well which direction we didn't actually which direction did you decide to go first and why well we picked books as the first best product to sell online because we thought in that category especially four years ago we could create the most value for customers because one of the things customers value is selection and books is an unusual category because there's more selection in that category than our and any others so that was why that started but now as the technology has matured as the audience has grown it's possible to in other categories like toys we have a complete toy store now we have a complete electronic store now even TVs or something 60 inch televisions I didn't think people would buy them online but they do can I have a prediction from you where do you think we'll be in 10 years well it's it's very hard to give concrete predictions but what I do know is that we are at the very beginning not just amazon.com but the entire industry of e-commerce and online shopping and this is the Kittyhawk era 10 years from now we will know 50 times as much as we know today it's incredibly exciting how does it make you feel to think that someday kids in school will read about your name like we read about Alexander Graham Bell well I like to think that amazon.com still has the opportunity to be a footnote in the history of e-commerce we can you know as far as we've come we can buy by not focusing obsessively on the customer we can still lose our whole opportunity to to make that little bit of history but I think it's very useful to keep focused on the fact that we haven't built an important and lasting company yet we're on our way and if we don't it'll be shame on us because in the position we're in we should be able to do that thank you so much for meeting us here - thank you sure thank you

Channel: CNET Highlights

Views: 43,484

Keywords: event, 2019, livestream, Jeff Bezos, Amazon, Amazon.com, dot com, young Jeff Bezos, the future of amazon, 1999

Id: qxn0KaV9vNo

Length: 4min 8sec (248 seconds)

Published: Tue May 26 2020