THE STOREKEEPER COMPANY Amazon.com, Founder and CEO NET WORTH $7 billion AGE 35 EMAILjeff@amazon.com BIO If 1999 was the Year of E-commerce --and it was, oh, it was!--then the guy who
built Amazon.com must be the year's prime mover. Fearless multibillionaire leader
of the Web's biggest store, Bezos designed a company that adds customers so fast
that it doesn't have time to make money. In the process, he has made life
miserable for anyone else trying to sell goods online. Having staked out the book
market, to the horror of off-line leader Barnes & Noble, Amazon has spent the
past year using its giant customer base--and its one-click ordering system,
Amway-like affiliate network and here-everyone-knows-your-name customer service--to expand Microsoft-like into nearly everyone else's business. Music and
video competitors CDNow and N2K had to merge to fight off Amazon's challenge (and
later recombined with Columbia House). A summer move into toys and electronics
helps explain why the virtual company has been building a bricks-and-mortar
network of 800,000-sq.-ft. warehouses across the country. The company's
infrastructure is optimized for 10 times as many sales as it does today.
Where Bezos doesn't build, he buys. His millions of customers make a powerful
currency in negotiating deals for partial control of such e-commerce start-ups as
Drugstore.com and Pets.com.
Once a Wall Street whiz who cooked up financial models for D.E. Shaw, Bezos set
off for Seattle in 1994, writing the business plan for Amazon.com on the fly. He
has been rewriting the book on e-commerce ever since.
BEST LINE "In many ways, we're a one-trick pony. It's just a good trick."
FORWARD TILT While he builds bricks-and-mortar warehouses, Bezos has an eye on
the all-digital future, introducing downloadable movies and music unavailable
elsewhere. The real future of his company may lie in the hot start-ups that Bezos
has been scooping up--such outfits as Accept.com, whose software will let
consumers pay each other directly on the Net, and Alexa Internet, which tracks
Web-surfing patterns to predict consumer behavior.
