In honor of JEFF BEZOS being the first person worth $200 BILLION, we pulled out this interview of him from 1997.  He talks about reading a “startling statistic” that web usage was growing by “23-hundred percent” a year.

So he started Amazon and chose books because there are over three million in print at any given time.  He was basically opening a store that had three million items.

That was perfect for the Internet because the books did NOT need to be in stock.  Someone would place an order, then Amazon would find it and ship it.  Obviously, it was a good business model.

The end of the clip is also great because he gets super geeky about the future.  He says, quote, “What’s really incredible about this is it’s Day One.  This is the very beginning.  This is the Kitty Hawk stage of electronic commerce.”