You’re transported back to 1994 with all your current knowledge and $50,000. Your goal is to create the world’s biggest online shopping company.
How do you go about it?
As a further thought experiment, if you travelled back to 1960 with all your current knowledge and the goal of becoming the richest person on earth, what businesses would you start?
I would start by sending the T800 after Bezos.
Amazon had people who were gonna back it while it lost money for years. As far as I know they were a pioneer in this. There is no “out compete” when your competitors are losing money on purpose lol
Why would you start a business when you have the benefit of knowing the future of the stock market? Buy Amazon early and often and live life.
look ,if you go back in time just invest in bitcoin don’t bother with anything else.
Start a Web Services company and get as much market share as possible before AWS is even a thing. Let them sell a bunch of drop shipped crap from China, I’m good on that side of the business.
How would you use the 50k to raise the millions needed just to get that started?
That’s actually a really good point.
Bezos was brilliant in that he identified a market that was real cheap to break into, and his goal was to expand it from there.
Use the mail system and sell cheap stuff people don’t really want to go to the store for.
Most people interested in books don’t really care if they’re going to Borders or Barnes and Noble, cause they hear of a good book from friends or internet reviews. Books are cheap, and readers just want to buy one that other people with similar interests recommend.
However, he originally intended to stick with retail-type or grocery-type business I personally think.
AWS was created on accident in many ways. They built out their infrastructure internally to support hot times of year, like Christmas, etc.
But then it’s all wasted most the year. So someone had a brilliant idea to sell access to that surplus hardware capacity off-season.
Thus the cloud was born.
I don’t think it was Andy Jassy exclusively responsible for that idea, more likely it came from a few folks at once. Bezos is also credited. But that’s why Mr. Jassy is Amazon CEO today.
AWS was created on accident in many ways. They built out their infrastructure internally to support hot times of year, like Christmas, etc.
Now imagine going back knowing this. What if you could create a service where you sell your own server hosting services too them. Stop AWS from ever happening. Can’t compete if that side of their business doesn’t exist. Can’t guarantee that they’d actually buy from you but… still it’s an interesting thought. You know ahead of time that all these business will need that service. So start selling it to them.
I think there were already server hosting services back then, and the lack of offer is not the reason why they went with their own.
Yeah I think it might be a scale issue.
Like you need lots of servers in lots of locations. One consistent interface.
Also I suppose the Amazon software engineers built tools for themselves and probably re-used some of it in the cloud products.
If I recall the very first offering was S3 and EC2 where you’d just get yourself on-demand storage and virtual machines.
Then they built out all this other stuff on top, like Lambda. They’ve been adding services ever since.
There were loads of web services companies before AWS. Loads and loads and loads.
I would have just befriended Bezos and become an early investor, then invest into bitcoin at inception and help the world convert to bitcoin and get off the inferior fiat currencies.
If you went back with tens of millions, you could buy a board seat with Sears and not let their management loot the place.
Well, he go a loan from his parents for $250,000, so it would be hard to compete with him.
Why do all that work? $50,000 even at $1 a Bitcoin. You would be close to 2 billion right now. 3 Billion if you sold at the last peak.
Easy I would shoot Jeff bezos and take over the company.
Move to Seattle and beat up bezzos every time I see him. Get progressively more brutal and tell him I’ll stop if he gets out of business and gives all his money to charity. Follow up every 5 years or so with a beat down for good measure and tell him this is for in case he thinks I’ve forgotten and thinks he can go back into business. Also make him work at borders.
I wouldn’t.
If I had that money with that knowledge, I’d find Bezos and invest all of it for as much equity as possible.
Then just sit back and reap the rewards without the work.
Even if I knew what Amazon would become and had some cash to start, I would also know that I’d be going up against one of the most fierce entrepreneurs of this time.
I think even in this situation, almost no one would beat him.
I’d want to know if I executed his entire playbook, including poaching his key big hires at every stage, would it ruin him … The dilution of key employees alone could really kill momentum. People like to think they’re replaceable but lose a few key people at a few key times and watch things crumble. On the other hand, Amazon itself feels almost inevitable, like if it wasn’t bezos/Amazon the market forces would have spoke something similar into being regardless
A fun/creepy part is imagining bezos’s moment of awareness that I have the time machine, then him coming for me and doing who knows what with it lol.
That is actually a dumb move what ya do is become investor number 3-10 or any that had no major impact on the timeline. Getting too early might affect bezos negatively. I mean didn’t t he start in a garage with little to no money. Imaging ya come in and give him 50k out of nowhere. Be real easy to accidentally grow too fast and he fails due to getting cocky or something 🐱
fiercelucky entrepreneursWith my luck the extra available capital would encourage Bezos to do something that would eventually destroy Amazon, or prevent it from becoming what it is today.
Eh, investing that much is going to affect the results. With more money (for a lower percentage) Bezos wouldn’t get certain people on the board for Amazon, and you wouldn’t have the same company. It’d miss connections and guidance that now allows some disaster.
Instead I’d start investing with knowledge of the future. Short Apple then buy when it’s lowest before Jobs returns. Invest heavily in web companies, then short them in 1998 for 2002. Invest heavily in the few exceptions at this point, Google, Amazon, etc. In the early 2000s start a mining operation early on. Do not sell all the bitcoin immediately, but do not try to corner the market. Keep selling every so much to keep the market going as much as usual. When it drops buy more, when it goes higher than you bought it start selling until it drops. Short everything in 2007, focus on buying real-estate post-collapse, and keep it going.
Now if you really want to use knowledge you have, get some patents out for some key tech, and offer it at good prices for tech. Invest and gain ownership of the right tech, and then offer it to the right person at the right time almost for free, with the hope that they’ll make it more successful. Do small things, invent things that are useful, but really focus on ownership. If you start with sufficient amount of money you should be able to do a very aggressive short for the dot-com bust, and get a lot of money on that.
This has a huge moral cost too. You have to allow 9/11 to happen, otherwise everything could change. So maybe being rich is kind of dumb, given the insane raw power you have. But I guess you could throw it and play enough to be mostly a billionaire by the mid-2000s after having prevented 9/11, this means that the Iraq war would be different and you’d have to plan carefully to survive a changed financial crisis.
This guy time-travels
After 9/11 short airline stocks
To use the words of John Oliver, “This guy fukkz!”
What about if your input takes enough equity from him that he no longer has the drive to build Amazon?
It’s like saying what you would do if you could go back and play basketball ball against Jordan.
In 1960, I set out to become the wealthiest person on Earth and I put all my money into AI technology.
OP asks how you create the biggest online shopping experience and everyone replies with ‘invest in Bitcoin’.
🤡s
Musk rat your way into Amazon and buy 51% of the shares.