Jeff Bezos: \"Amazon.bomb\" and the years of losses

Jeff Bezos left a well-paid job at an investment fund in New York, in 1994, to open a bookstore on the internet, in a garage near Seattle. Amazon began selling in July 1995. Many people thought it wouldn't last.

The no

In May 1999, the financial magazine Barron's ran a cover story titled "Amazon.bomb". The piece looked at the company's mounting losses and its high share price and dismissed as foolish the idea that Bezos had created a new business model: he was, it argued, just another middleman.

The numbers gave the skeptics arguments. Amazon spent years in the red. In the dot-com crash, from 2000 on, the shares plunged and many similar companies closed. The first full year in the black only came in 2003, eight years after sales began: net income of 35 million dollars, after a loss of 149 million in 2002.

What they did

Amazon survived the crash and became one of the largest companies in the world, in e-commerce and in cloud computing.

What matters here is the way Bezos treated failure, including his own. In 2014, the company launched a phone, the Fire Phone, which failed and led to a write-down of about 170 million dollars. Asked about it by The Washington Post, in 2016, he replied: "If you think that's a big failure, we're working on much bigger failures right now. And I am not kidding." And he explained that, as a company grows, the size of its mistakes must grow with it, or it won't be inventing at a scale that makes a difference.

What this has to do with Bairo

Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez doesn't talk about financial results or share prices, and neither does this page. The parallel is another: the willingness to be called a mistake before being proven right.

He says he heard "that's not possible" when he went looking for partners for the agribusiness platform, and that the banks refused to integrate the solution. Instead of stopping, he focused on building his own technology, leaving the regulated part to those authorized to operate it: artificial intelligence, financial messaging in the ISO 20022 standard, blockchain and tokenization of real assets. It's in The frequency of silence.

CEASA Bank, born from that work, is a financial platform for agribusiness that runs on the infrastructure of an authorized institution. Nothing here is an offer, a recommendation or a promise of results.

Read also: No is the foundation of yes · Ecosystem

Sources

• InfoWorld, "Amazon records first profitable year in its history" (2003): https://www.infoworld.com/article/2212961/amazon-records-first-profitable-year-in-its-history-2.html
• TheWrap, "Bezos Unearths 1999 Barron's Report Saying Amazon Will 'Bomb'": https://www.thewrap.com/jeff-bezos-barrons/
• Forbes, "Revisiting Amazon Dot Bomb – 16 Years Later": https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2015/09/24/revisiting-amazon-dot-bomb-16-years-later/
• GeekWire, interview with Marty Baron of The Washington Post (2016): https://www.geekwire.com/2016/amazons-jeff-bezos-fire-phone-working-much-bigger-failures-right-now/
• Britannica, Amazon.com: https://www.britannica.com/money/Amazoncom