Jeff Bezos recalls wild first question Amazon investors asked him that would never happen today
Bezos has described the investor meetings as the 'hardest of his life'
Jeff Bezos has opened up about the questions he received while trying to secure investors for Amazon.
Although the online retail store is now a monumental success, reportedly making over $2 billion every single day, at one point it was simply an online book store in need of investment.
Bezos has since described the meetings he had with investors as the 'hardest' of his life, explaining he offered 20 percent of Amazon for $5 million. Out of 60 meetings, 40 said no.
"I had to take 60 meetings. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, basically," he said at the New York DealBook Summit.
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Incredibly, one of the questions that Bezos received from sceptical investors was something that seems unimaginable today.
They asked him: "What is the internet?"
“The first question was, 'What’s the internet? Everybody wanted to know what the internet was'," Bezos explained.
Bezos also spoke about how critical the early investment in the company was to its success, adding: “I would always tell people I thought there was a 70 percent chance they would lose their investment.
“... The whole enterprise could have been extinguished then.”
The company was founded in 1994, having started out in Bezos’ one-floor office near Seattle.
One early employee, Joshua Burgin, has previously spoken about what it was like to be one of the company's first 100 employees.
Joshua decided to answer a job ad printed in the University of Washington newspaper, before heading for an interview.
Joshua shared on Medium: “I interviewed with the Jeff Bezos in Amazon’s single floor office (yes, we all fit on one floor! No, I don’t think he remembers me).”
Burgin got the job and ended up staying with the company for over three years.
Having left in 2000, Joshua went on to spend 14 years doing various other projects before coming back to work in Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2014, where he continues to work.
Bezos has previously shared the criteria he looks for when interviewing candidates.
“When I interview people, I ask them to give me an example of something they’ve invented,” Bezos said.
“You want to select people who like to invent their way out of boxes and don’t necessarily immediately go to either/or - ‘we can do A or B’."
He explained that it doesn't even have to be about answering with a correct answer, but responding with the right question.
“The right question is, ‘How can we do A and B? What invention do we need to be able to do both?’ So that’s a lot about selection," he added.
Topics: Amazon, Jeff Bezos, Technology, News
Lucy Devine