BBC Money Programme: ‘Will Internet Shopping Ever Take Off?’

Around this recording

The recordings either side of it, in order.

All 70 recordings of Jeff Bezos →

1. 1996

   Newsweek On Air: ‘Books via the Internet’

   The earliest known broadcast interview with Bezos: a segment on buying books over the internet in Newsweek’s weekly radio magazine, recorded less than a year after Amazon.com opened. He is billed simply as ‘founder, Amazon.com’.

2. 1996

   Computer Chronicles: ‘Online Shopping’

   A 1996 episode of the long-running PBS technology show surveys early e-commerce sites — Amazon, Onsale, CyberCash, NetRadio, VeriSign and Cybergold — with a young Bezos among the guests, walking through how Amazon.com works. It is among the earliest video of Bezos on television.

3. 1997

   ‘This is Day 1’ — the 1997 interview

   The most widely shared early Bezos footage: a short camcorder interview in which the 33-year-old founder explains why he chose books (‘more items in the book category than any other category, by far’), cites the 2,300 percent annual growth of web usage that made him quit his job, and calls the moment ‘the Kitty Hawk stage of electronic commerce’.

4. 1997

   BBC Money Programme: ‘Will Internet Shopping Ever Take Off?’

   A BBC business-programme report asking whether online shopping is viable, with Bezos interviewed about Amazon alongside Daryl Mattocks of Cambridge’s Internet Bookshop and a bakery taking orders online. Early British television exposure for Amazon, a year before Amazon.co.uk existed.

5. 1999

   ‘Nerd of the Amazon’ — 60 Minutes II profile

   Bob Simon’s 13-minute profile of the 35-year-old ‘nerd’ running Earth’s biggest bookstore: Bezos at his door desk, driving his Honda, explaining the ‘regret minimization framework’ that made him leave Wall Street, and insisting that Amazon could still ‘lose it all’.

6. 1999

   Charlie Rose: Bezos and Peter Neupert on e-commerce

   Bezos’s first appearance on Charlie Rose, paired with Peter Neupert, the Microsoft veteran running the Amazon-backed drugstore.com, to discuss the explosion of electronic commerce. Rose presses both on whether internet retailers will ever make money.

7. 1999

   Charlie Rose: Bezos and Jerry Yang on internet strategy

   Amazon’s Bezos and Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, the two faces of the consumer internet in 1999, discuss their companies’ strategies with Rose, followed by Clayton Christensen explaining the ‘innovator’s dilemma’ that both are exploiting.

8. 1999

   ABC7 Chicago ‘Newsviews’ interview

   A rare local-television sit-down from 1999 in which Chicago anchor Alan Krashesky quizzes Bezos about Amazon.com, then still thought of by many viewers as a bookstore, and about the economics of selling online.

9. 1999

   CNBC interview on Amazon’s plans

   A 1999 CNBC interview in which Bezos says Amazon’s focus is ‘great customer service’, describes the distribution-center build-out and admits ‘what we’re trying to do is very complicated’ with no guarantee of success — ‘scale is important to us and we’re going to go after that kind of scale’.

10. 2000

    Charlie Rose: the customer-centric model and the future of online retail

    A full hour with Rose in the first summer of the crash, in which Bezos defends Amazon’s customer-centric model and spending while its stock collapses.