0.14 Revelation  (Page 11/12)

Wowed, I explored the site, found a telephone number, called it up, and arranged to interview Jeff Bezos, the company founder. I walked down to Amazon’s offices, which were in a crumbling light-industrial zone south of the Kingdome, directly across from the mammoth old Sears Roebuck store—an old-economy landmark that had been closed, sold, and converted into Starbucks’ corporate headquarters.

It was not easy to find Amazon, which was on the second floor above a store selling tile. The door opening onto the staircase leading to Amazon was crooked, warped, and adorned with the company name in stick-on letters. The staircase was narrow, the stairs themselves worn nearly all the way through. Making my way up, I felt like a junkie calling on a dealer.

Amazon occupied a warren of small offices that looked across at the Sears/Starbucks building. The furniture was second-hand—the only new touches in the place were a few desktop personal computers and a cluster of programmers and Sun Microsystem servers off in one corner. Bezos emerged from a tiny office and greeted me with tremendous enthusiasm. He was a small, unprepossessing man, only 31 years old, with the happiest facial expression I’ve ever seen, and he had a disconcerting habit of punctuating his stories with a booming laugh that left me feeling uneasy at first, then increasingly nervous—I kept steeling myself for the next explosion, and found it harder and harder to concentrate on my questions.

“It was clear a couple of years ago that interactive retailing was coming,” Bezos said. “I mean, people have been predicting that for 10 or 12 years. But only now, and only for some types of products, are there enough people on line for interactive retailing to make some business sense. And even at that, looking at it now, I decided that books was the only feasible product to sell this way. You look at the demographics of people on line, and the demographics of people who buy books, and the demographics line up very nicely.”

After getting his computer science degree from Princeton, Bezos had gone to work first for Bankers Trust, then D.E. Shaw, building and maintaining computer networks for investors. In 1993, “always interested in the juxtaposition of computers and anything,” he spent a few months researching the Internet, put together a business plan, rounded up investors, moved to Seattle and set up his business in the summer of 1994, officially opening on line in July 1995. Bezos built his store by acquiring connections with the electronic inventories of the nation’s seven largest book wholesalers, all the formats of which are incompatible with all the others. He then wrote translation software that made all the databases readable by his computer system, and wrote more software to make the resulting “inventory” accessible by his customers.

The business was at once ingenious and simple: A customer found the book he or she wanted on Amazon’s site and ordered it. Amazon in turn ordered it from the wholesaler who had it in stock, having it shipped overnight to the company’s Seattle address, where it would be unpacked, combined with other books from other wholesalers in the same customer’s order, repackaged, and shipped that day to wherever the customer wanted.