Читать книгу The Amazon Management System - Ram Charan - Страница 26

Before starting Amazon, Jeff Bezos worked at D. E. Shaw and Co., a Wall Street firm famous for its quantitative trading methods. In 1994, founder David Shaw appointed Bezos to lead the effort to study potential business opportunities that could be created by the Internet. The two would spend a few hours brainstorming each week, and Bezos would conduct further study to explore the feasibility of their ideas.

Among those seemingly crazy ideas generated twenty-five years ago, some indeed came true, such as the “concept of a free, advertising-supported email service for consumers – the idea behind Gmail and Yahoo Mail,” “a new kind of financial service that allowed Internet users to trade stocks and bonds online” – the idea behind E-Trade, and last but not the least, “the everything store.”1

When Bezos studied the Internet, a magic number caught his attention: 2300%. Web activity had increased by a factor of roughly 2300% in the past year. Bezos noted, “It’s highly unusual, and that started me thinking, what kind of business plan might make sense in the context of that growth?”2 With this notion in mind, he decided to quit his lucrative, highly promising career on Wall Street and start his own business.

Twenty-five years ago, the Internet was still in its infancy. So where should Bezos start? How to conceptualize a dynamic business model with unlimited growth that had both the high potential to ride this wave of unprecedented growth and the solid feasibility to convert his ambition into reality?