Eric, are you an old-school moneymaker or are you a Internet Cowboy?
It appears that so far the I-cowboys are winning, while the old-school moneymakers might get a shot at Bezos next year.
But, according to Forrester Research they will have to wait until 2003.
>>October 7, 1999
SEATTLE -- Jeff Bezos is snapping a picture of visitors, part of a daily ritual he keeps.
Someday, the snapshots will help Bezos, a happy-go-lucky billionaire, chronicle the fairy tale that is unfolding around him.
These days, Bezos' life is one long Kodak moment -- and he is not the only one noticing.
Magazines and newspapers around the world are focusing their cameras on Bezos, the 35-year-old founder and chief executive of Internet retailer Amazon.com. Industry watchers call him a new world pioneer who oversees the rise of one of the Web's largest book, music and video sellers. Among techies, Bezos joins the ranks of those with first-name recognition -- Bill (Gates), Paul (Allen) and now Jeff.
Bezos, a self-described goofball, has become a billionaire seven times over while heading a company that has lost millions of dollars and is proudly committed to losing millions more.
Despite this money-burning strategy, Wall Street investors flock to his company, vesting Amazon.com with twice the value of Sears, a long-profitable icon of American retailing.
Sure, the Internet made billionaires of Yahoo! founders Jerry Yang and David Filo. Marc Andreessen, previously of Netscape, became the boy wonder of the Web with his Internet browsing software.
But Bezos has emerged as the Internet's ultimate cult figure, one whose personal wealth and celebrity climbs higher even as the company's losses deepen.
Everyone wants to be The Next Jeff Bezos. Everyone wants to build The Next Amazon.com. Bezos not only lives the Internet fairy tale -- he created it.
Bezos cannot hold still or stop giggling during a photo shoot despite months of practice as the vaunted cover boy.
Instead, he is collapsing into his trademark laughter, heard nationwide during a "60 Minutes II" interview, repeated on CNBC and even recognized by a bystander walking near Bezos on a New York City street. His laugh is a whole-body noise that his mother says "starts at his little toe and works its way up."
And why not? Who in the world has more reason to laugh than Jeff Bezos?
Bezos has become the king of dot-commerce while maintaining the humor of the court jester.
"He's a combination of a technological visionary, a steely-eyed businessman, but also he's sort of a goofball," said David Risher, senior vice president of Amazon.com. "For five minutes he's blowing you away with this powerful vision, eyes locked on you. And then he'll say something totally goofy and you say, 'Is this guy for real?' "
The boy from Texas has posed for magazines, from BusinessWeek to Vanity Fair. Fortune magazine named him the second richest man younger than 40. Bezos has been called the "most innovative e-commerce (retail) executive -- the single smartest person in online retailing" by Industry Standard magazine, which follows the Internet economy.
This is a man who has become such a figure of popular culture that a desk he fashioned out of a door in Amazon.com's earliest days fetched bids as high as $30,100 from people wanting to buy it off the Amazon.com auctions site. The winner was his mother.
Amazon.com was not always the king of the World Wide Web and did not always have a castle for an office building.
Rather, the company was born in Bezos' Bellevue, Wash., garage in 1994, opening its virtual bookstore a year later with fewer than a dozen employees.
Bezos the chief executive doubled as Bezos the warehouse worker. Meanwhile, he courted investors and hand-picked top executives to join the fledgling company.
Meteoric expansion
Amazon.com grew at a strong clip, becoming the top bookseller on the Internet, and in 1997 it issued a well-received public offering.
But the little upstart would not stand alone for long and even was referred to by one analyst as Amazon.toast. Others, including the giant bookstore chain Barnes & Noble, soon would recognize the threat from cyberspace.
Competitors have yet to draw a bead on Bezos and Amazon.com. The company's ability to steal customers and devastate traditional retailers has even coined a new verb: "to be Amazoned." It is always in the passive voice.
Soon, more kinds of stores would learn about being Amazoned. In 1998, Amazon.com added compact discs to its offerings. The move signaled the beginning of a meteoric expansion that has yet to end.
In the past year, the company has added videos, toys, consumer electronics, free Internet-based greeting cards and an auctions site, allowing sellers to connect with buyers. It either bought or invested in other Internet companies, extending its reach to pet accessories, prescription drugs and home-delivered groceries.
In four years, the company gained more than 4,000 employees, seven warehouses around the country and took over the Seattle landmark, Pacific Medical Center building.
With such immense growth, Amazon.com would come under the scrutiny of those who see the Internet retailer as either a wealth of potential or a load of hype. And in the middle stands Bezos, cast as either the visionary of a new economy or the hatcher of a giant Ponzi scheme.
Losses started mounting in the tens and hundreds of millions. Bezos preached a religion of sacrificing profits in the short term to invest in the Internet's expansive opportunities now.
In television interviews, in calls to industry analysts, in speeches to his shareholders, Bezos can mesmerize his audience with eloquent talk of a bright future for Amazon.com to dominate cyberspace if it just plants its flag now. What is good for customers will bring cash to shareholders. One of these years.
That strategy has become the crux of a holy war in the business world, a clash between the old-school moneymakers and the Internet cowboys. You either believe in Jeff Bezos or you don't.
Lifestyle changes
What would you do with a billion dollars?
Actually, try about $7.5 billion, the value of Bezos' stock holdings near the end of September.
But blips in the daily share price barely matter anymore to Bezos' overall wealth. It is that immense.
But his life has not changed immensely despite the Wall Street windfall.
>b>Bezos and his wife did buy a dream five-bedroom house in Medina, Wash. Sometimes, to save travel time, he charters a plane and flies to his destination. He spends his money generously, hiring a van in New York City to drop off friends and family at a hotel when rain makes walking messy and taxis vanish. He does not scrutinize the prices on a menu anymore.
Bezos retired his beat-up Honda for a new car. But the car is a Volvo, hardly the fantasy drive that some would choose if told they were worth several billion dollars.
There is Time, industry watchers like to say, and then there is Internet Time.
On the Internet, "storefronts" go up in a day. Numbers of customers grow exponentially month after month. And companies like Amazon.com go from being an experiment in new-world retailing to being the new American icon.
Time may prove to be Bezos' biggest challenge. Bezos the chief executive will need to maintain Amazon.com's momentum while keeping impatient, profit-hungry investors at bay.
The trick, too, is for Bezos the billionaire to grow into a role that carries public expectations as well as privilege. He has not done much philanthropic giving yet, but his wealth is still fairly new, and Bezos said he plans to select his charities carefully.
In general, the public and the media have treated Bezos kindly in his first year as a billionaire, said Jonathan Weber, editor in chief of Industry Standard. But that might not last.
"These things tend to go in cycles," Weber said. "I think that while (Bezos is) a hero today, that status tends to be somewhat transient. His future fame and the degree to which he is admired will have to do with how Amazon does as a business.
"And furthermore how he personally deals with the fame and fortune he now has."<< |
