Jeff Bezos – March 1998, earliest long speech

Good evening and welcome to the annual A.B. Dick lecture on entrepreneurship at Lake Forest College. Lake Forest College, 32 miles north of Chicago, was established in 1857 as a private co-educational liberal arts college. Lake Forest College engages our eleven hundred and fifty students in the breadth of the liberal arts and the depth of the traditional disciplines. Lake Forest College draws its students from 43 states and 44 foreign countries.

Faculty at Lake Forest College know their students by name and encourage students to read critically, reason analytically, and above all to think for themselves. The Alfred Blake DIC endowment recognizes the long-standing connection between the Dick family, Lake Forest College, and our community, and it is a particular pleasure to note that members of the Dick family are in attendance this evening.

Our distinguished speaker this evening validates three key words that are hallmarks of contemporary culture, and they are risk, strategy, and technology. Jeffrey P. Bezos likes to tell his story this way: he has always been interested in anything that can be revolutionized by computers. Upon learning about the dramatic increase in the use of the Internet, he focused on creating a new way to retail the worldwide web. Unique ability to deliver incredible amounts of information quickly. From this came a well-calculated business strategy that culminated in the founding of Seattle-based Amazon.com.

Just four years ago, it is also important to share the observation offered by a correspondent writing for The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Bezos, they wrote, has quietly built a fast-growing business where the world's mightiest merchants mainly have racked up failures. Amazon.com has pinpointed one of the few products that people really want to buy online—eBooks. Jeff Bezos is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate, class of 1986, of Princeton University. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree summa cum laude, with majors in electrical engineering and computer science.

Now, just before we begin, I wish to warmly acknowledge the presence this evening of Jeff Bezos's aunt and uncle, Nonie and David Brock, members of Lake Forest College class of 1966. The fact is that they had something to do with attracting him to our campus this evening. [Applause]

And it is with great pleasure that Lake Forest College welcomes, as this year's A.B. Dick lecturer on entrepreneurship, the founder and CEO of Amazon.com, Jeffrey P. Bezos, who will discuss building Earth's biggest bookstore. Welcome! [Applause]

Well, thank you. It's a great pleasure to be here. Thank you for the very nice introduction. The same Wall Street Journal correspondent that you mentioned said so many nice things in that article that I actually forgave him for also noting, in the very same article, that I have thinning hair, receding hairline. So there you have it.

I actually can't resist, at any gathering like this, even though it's anecdotal and there's a huge bias in the crowd of people who come, but how many people here have been to Amazon.com? Raise your hands. Does anybody bought anything at Amazon.com? Yeah? Okay, that’s not bad. Thank you. We really appreciate that! After the lecture, I invite those people to come to me and get a handshake of thanks, and also I’d love to hear how we can improve the customer experience for you.

I can tell you a little bit about Amazon.com, a little bit of the story of sort of how it came to be. The company was conceived in the spring of 1994. I came across a startling fact: in the spring of '94, web usage was growing at 2,300 percent a year. I have to keep in mind that human beings aren't good at understanding exponential growth; it’s just not something we see in our everyday life. But things don’t grow this fast outside of petri dishes—it just doesn’t happen.

And when I saw this, I said, "Okay, what’s a business plan that might make sense in the context of that growth?" I made a list of 20 different products that you might be able to sell online. I was looking for the first best product, and I chose eBooks for lots of different reasons, but one primary reason and that is that...