Video2001

Academy of Achievement interview

The fullest early account of Bezos’s life in his own words: growing up with his grandfather on the Cotulla ranch, Princeton, D. E. Shaw, the ‘regret minimization framework’ that made him leave Wall Street, the drive west, the garage and the Cadabra/‘cadaver’ name mix-up, and surviving the dot-com crash.

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Around this recording

The recordings either side of it, in order.

All 70 recordings of Jeff Bezos →

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.
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’.
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.
2000
KING 5 ‘Evening Magazine’ profile
A short hometown television profile shot when Amazon occupied the art-deco Pacific Tower on Beacon Hill.
2000
‘Vision for Amazon’ — 50-minute interview
A nearly hour-long 2000 interview in which Bezos lays out Amazon’s mission and long-term ambitions at the moment the dot-com bubble was deflating. The uploader does not identify the original broadcaster; it may be a program or conference recording.
2001
Newsweek On Air: ‘The Amazon Mystery’
A radio interview from April 2001 — the nadir of Amazon’s stock and reputation — in which Bezos, billed as ‘Chairman of the Board, Amazon.com’, is questioned alongside technology writer Steven Levy about whether the company can survive and reach profitability.
2001
Academy of Achievement interview
The fullest early account of Bezos’s life in his own words: growing up with his grandfather on the Cotulla ranch, Princeton, D. E. Shaw, the ‘regret minimization framework’ that made him leave Wall Street, the drive west, the garage and the Cadabra/‘cadaver’ name mix-up, and surviving the dot-com crash.
2001
Charlie Rose: the founding of Amazon and the company today
Bezos returns to Rose a year into the crash to retell the founding story and argue that Amazon is a real business, not a bubble artifact, as it pushes toward its promised first profit.
2002
TechTV interview clips
Two short interview clips with Bezos from the cable channel TechTV, preserved in a 2013 dump of G4TV.com’s video archive, in which he discusses the future of Amazon. The original air date is not recorded.
2002
MIT talk: ‘Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company — Differentiating with Technology’
A technical talk given in the first weeks of Amazon’s turn to profitability: Bezos recounts the company’s first 30 days, the original home page and why he chose Seattle, then explains personalization, A/B testing and fulfillment optimization, and introduces the original Amazon Web Services program (the 2002 product-data API) with a demo by its manager Robert Frederick, before taking audience questions on pricing experiments, competitors and shipping costs.
2003
TED2003: ‘The electricity metaphor for the web’s future’
Bezos argues that the dot-com boom and bust was not a gold rush that is over but the equivalent of the early electricity industry: the ‘appliances’ that will make the web useful have barely been invented.
2006
EmTech keynote: ‘We build muck so you don’t have to’
Bezos’s first big public pitch for Amazon Web Services: after laying out Amazon’s scale — 59 million active customers, 35 product categories, 1.08 million seller accounts, 10.2 million square feet of fulfillment space and about $2 billion invested in its technology — he argues that the web has removed shelf space as the barrier for software entrepreneurs and that the new barrier is the back-end ‘muck’ that eats 70 percent of developers’ time, which Amazon will now rent out as S3, EC2 and Mechanical Turk.
2007
Charlie Rose: the Kindle
Hours after unveiling the Kindle, Bezos sits with Rose for a full hour to explain why Amazon built hardware, how the wireless store works, and why he thinks the book is the last analog bastion worth digitizing. The interview became the long-form companion to the launch.