Jeff Bezos gets laughed at in 1999 because Amazon is unprofitable

Never give up

This is why he is where he is, he saw what it could be and persevered. He had courage in his own convictions and didn't listen to the naysayers . Who's laughing now

He is laughing now

At that time, the conventional wisdom was that a company needed to show immediate profits to be deemed successful. However, Bezos had a different metric for success: customer satisfaction and long-term growth, not immediate profitability. This story serves as a case study in disruptive innovation. Amazon was playing a different game. Instead of going for quick profits, Bezos was building a customer base and investing in infrastructure, including massive warehouses and an online platform that could handle an extensive catalog of products. He was willing to sacrifice short-term gains for a long-term vision that many couldn't yet see.

And look who is laughing now.

Guess we all have our growing days before we become profitable

Jeff Bezos still laughs at himself and thinks he doesn't even know how his company became the most profitable company in the world......😂😂😂

Made possible by a super low interest rate environment. Made possible by a huge surplus of investable capital. Made possible by the largest generation ever born. You can’t do this again for at least 40 years.

Amazon was founded in 1996, just three years prior to this conversation! In the spring of 1998, Bezos considered it imperative to expand Amazon’s brand beyond books to become the Everything Store. Amazon began researching new product categories that have a high number of SKUs (unique products), are underrepresented in physical stores, and can be sent through the mail. In early 1999, after the success in music and movies, Bezos chose to expand to toys and electronics. Toys prove fundamentally different from previous categories. Unlike books and music, no third-party distributors could provide any item and take back unsold inventory. The company was unprofitable at the time, they boasted their “negative operating cycle,” receiving money from customers immediately but paying their distributors every few months. In between, they have the capital to fund expansion. Source & Amazon timeline (read more):