Jeff Bezos 1997 Interview

Source: Chuck Severance Published: December 2013

Source: Chuck Severance
Published: December 2013

Jeff Bezos 1997 Interview

Circulated: June 23, 2020

In June 1997 at the Special Libraries conference in Seattle, WA, Jeff Bezos was interviewed about his company Amazon.com.

Highlights from the five minute video:

• This is Day 1. This is the very beginning. This is the Kitty Hawk stage of electronic commerce.

• Books are incredibly unusual in one respect. There are more items in the book category than any other category by far… when you have that many items, you can build a store online that couldn’t exist any other way.

• Attention is the scarce commodity of the late 20th century.

• Doing something new and innovative for the first time that adds real value for the customer is hard. If you do that, newspapers will write about you. Customers will tell other customers.