That’s why it’s price rewinding to the summer season of 1994, when Bezos left a fledgling Wall Road profession and moved to Bellevue, Wash., with a imaginative and prescient: to construct an internet bookstore that might someday promote all the things. The primary headquarters of Amazon was a modest rented home, and he and his then-wife, MacKenzie Scott, labored facet by facet, packing books and driving them to the submit workplace. The storage, with its concrete flooring and buzzing servers, grew to become the birthplace of what would quickly be often known as “the everything store.”
It additionally gave start to Bezos’ mentality as Amazon’s founder, one which he would later embed in his a lot bigger firm as “Day 1,” as in, every single day of your job ought to be tackled as if the corporate was someday outdated and also you had been nonetheless within the storage. Success or failure may very well be simply across the nook. Bezos labored from his personal day one to institutionalize innovation, risk-taking, and data-driven iteration.
However wanting past the storage mythology and the acquainted narrative of entrepreneurial grit, Amazon’s ascent may also be understood as a product of uncanny anticipation of community results, strategic long-term considering, and relentless buyer obsession. In actual fact, Bezos at one time needed to call the corporate “relentless” and relentless.com nonetheless directs again to Amazon, the lengthy river from which all of it flows.
Bezos, proper, and vendor Gregory Nixon, left, ship a set of vintage golf golf equipment Nixon offered through Amazon.com Auctions to David Robichaud, heart—Amazon’s 10 millionth buyer—in 1999. Amazon.com was the primary digital commerce retailer to serve 10 million clients.
Paul Conors—AP Photograph
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Barnes & Noble conferences: the scrappy early days of Amazon
Within the early days, assets had been scarce, and workplace house was at a premium. In these months, Bezos and his tiny staff usually held conferences at an area Barnes & Noble. The irony was not misplaced on them: the upstart on-line bookseller strategizing within the aisles of the nation’s largest brick-and-mortar e book chain.
In 1996, as Amazon’s profile grew, Barnes & Noble’s founders, the Riggio brothers, took discover. They met with Bezos, expressing admiration but in addition warning their very own on-line enterprise would quickly eclipse Amazon. Undeterred, Bezos doubled down on his imaginative and prescient, coining the motto “Get Big Fast” and setting his sights on fast enlargement.
By the point Amazon moved into official workplace house, Bezos leaned into the scrappiness, utilizing recycled doorways as desks for himself and his employees. He needed to speak that no useful resource goes unused or un-recycled. Amazon could be as thrifty because the offers that it gave to its shoppers. It was additionally one other solution to carry the storage into the workplace house, one other solution to stress being relentless.
Photograph Nomad Ventures, Inc.—Corbis/Getty Photos
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‘Get Big Fast’: Amazon’s aggressive progress technique within the Nineteen Nineties
Bezos raised capital from household, associates, and a handful of buyers, giving up a big stake in alternate for the funds wanted to scale. The corporate’s first product was used books, chosen for his or her common demand and ease of transport. However Bezos’ ambitions had been all the time larger: He envisioned a retailer that might promote something to anybody, wherever.
Not like many dot-com period founders, Bezos eschewed the lure of fast income, as an alternative prioritizing scale on the expense of short-term returns. His now-famous “regret minimization framework”—a decision-making course of that emphasised appearing now to keep away from future remorse—drove daring dangers: forgoing private revenue, convincing early buyers to again adverse earnings, and constructing a success infrastructure whose prices initially appeared irrational. However this disciplined reinvestment cultivated one of many world’s most superior logistics networks and primed Amazon to dominate not simply books, however any commerce vertical it pursued.
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Ted S. Warren—AP Photograph
From on-line bookstore to international e-commerce big
By the late Nineteen Nineties, Amazon had expanded past books, including music, films, and ultimately a dizzying array of merchandise. The corporate’s relentless concentrate on buyer expertise—quick transport, low costs, and an ever-expanding choice—set it other than rivals. Amazon weathered the dot-com crash, outlasted rivals, and continued to innovate, launching providers comparable to Amazon Prime, Kindle, and Amazon Net Providers (AWS), reflecting Amazon’s shift from single-product retailer to platform.
By opening the location to third-party sellers and launching AWS, Amazon grew to become not merely a service provider, however an infrastructure for international commerce and cloud computing. AWS, particularly, is a case research in inner capabilities repurposed into exterior market choices—a transfer that helped reshaped the economics of the web itself. Amazon’s relentless drive turned it into one thing approaching a utility.
Amazon’s $2.2 trillion empire and market dominance
At this time, Amazon is a world powerhouse, its attain extending from e-commerce and cloud computing to leisure and synthetic intelligence. As of July 2025, Amazon’s market capitalization stands at a staggering $2.2 trillion, making it the world’s fifth most useful firm.
Amazon’s affect transcends steadiness sheets, although. It has redefined provide chain expectations, influenced labor markets, and raised urgent questions round antitrust. Critics argue that the identical mechanisms that fueled its rise—aggressive reinvestment, platform dominance, and knowledge leverage—have additionally created structural dependencies with profound implications for competitors, privateness, and labor.
Amazon’s true moat could also be neither retail nor cloud computing per se—however its capacity to seamlessly combine bodily and digital providers right into a single, adaptive working system. It’s working below Bezos’ successor Andy Jassy so as to add AI-driven providers to the portfolio. It’s relentless.
For this story, Fortune used generative AI to assist with an preliminary draft. An editor verified the accuracy of the data earlier than publishing.
A model of this story was printed on Fortune.com on July 16, 2025.
