IMO Bezos's main achievement was to get through the dot com bubble by keeping enough investors in so that the company wouldn't collapse. Execution probably played a role, but I think what played a bigger role were his extremely good contacts to wall street and the money owning elite in general. Keeping people convinced that your "books.com" remains a fine investment while the "pets.com"s around you are dying like flies is an achievement IMO.

>Bezos got hundreds of thousands of dollars in money from his parents

still, going from e.g 600k (300k in 94) to trillion dollar company is impressive as hell

how many startups do receive way, way more than that and fail?

There is always the assumption that people failed because they're stupid, and some people succeed because they're genius. This is nonsense. Of course Dr Evil, I mean, Bezos, has a strong work ethic, intelligence, and business drive, but this is not guarantee of anything. He was doing the right thing at the right time, period. He got billions of dollars to apply a business strategy that worked well for the market conditions, but this is not because he is so different from other business people.

Even today, when I buy online from a small business, it's normal to wait 3-5 business days for the order to be processed and a shipping label to be created, 1-2 days for the product to enter shipping system, and 3-5 more days for delivery. I routinely wait 2-3 weeks for popular stuff from decently big websites that are clearly 10000000X smaller than Amazon.

Meanwhile, Amazon hits same day and next day shipping all the time zero issue.

Amazon wasn't the right thing at the right time. It imagined a different type of delivery that no one else today gets anywhere near. Amazon is to delivery what Apple is to hardware. It's different and not repeatable no matter who tries.

I try to support smaller shops all the time, but it's definitely frustrating to wait 2-3 weeks on a delivery that know Amazon will next day to me.

Shout out to local pet foodstore hollywood feed which puts a branded car at each location and does physical deliveries. Y'all beat Amazon with a 30 minute delivery. Can't argue with results.

A small business usually only addresses a very specialized part of the market so they don't really ship that much stuff and thus can't hire that many people to deal with shipping without a huge overhead. However, if you stack thousands of businesses onto a marketplace, and then handle logistics for all of them, now there's much less overhead: the same shipment can combine many different specialized things.

Also fwiw Amazon is by far not a pioneer of fast delivery. Same day delivery has been around in densely poplated places (like in China) years before Amazon even started trialing the service.

Once you've hit around 5-10 sales per day, there is absolutely nothing physically stopping anyone from doing same-day delivery apart from poor inventory management or a simple unwillingness to do so (which is valid; some people can't work every day due to family commitments).

You have provided evidence for the exact same point I'm making, economies of scale. You have a large ecommerce business with a variety of things to sell so you benefit from economies of scale in shipping.

Most small individual sellers have maybe like 50 SKUs which makes it prohibitively expensive to do same day delivery.

Back when we only had a couple of dozen SKUs, it was much easier to get everything out same day. Package them all in the same envelope, stick in a red post box. Done.

Anecdotally, almost all small online businesses I've seen the back end of do not have a dedicated logistics person. When there's only a handful of different kinds of stuff to ship, shipping becomes an extra low-skill task usually given to whoever is free. They also usually do not have a sophisticated inventory management system (because it is not worth it to purchase one), and instead use spreadsheets that are manually managed.

Secondly, sending out stuff same-day is not even close to same-day _delivery_. For that you need to control all aspects of the logistics chain, which only makes sense at Amazon scales. I've encountered many times where I've ordered things, had a label created the same day but then with no progress for a week. After contacting the seller, it turned out the courier only picks up packages from their warehouse once every 3 days, and then takes another couple of days to "ingest" it and do the origin scan.

That's a key point. Amazon isn't an ecomm company. It's a logistics / fulfillment company. It markets, sells and delivers commodities.

It's magic is execution.

Which is a lesson for all of us. That is, average idea...world beating execution.

What makes you think so?

And there is always the possibility that the CEO wasn't the one to make the company successful. A company isn't one person.

This is not the right way to look at it. In a competitive market obviously only a few, or one will survive.

The point is, how many "rags to riches" startup can you think of? The ones with founders who did not have a safety net. The 600k (or 300k in 94) is immaterial, he could have also done it with zero capital. What matters is he was able to take risks because of his family's safety net. He would never be homeless if he failed.

The risks he could take were very different than one who refinanced their home to fund their startup.

If you acknowledge that timing, connections, background and network effects dominate the equation (if Bezos was 2 years late, is there any doubt there’d be a “different” one?), you realize there’s something gross about how wealth is distributed.

Sure we might get a dominating e-store that sells goods, that’s easy to imagine. But that same company also creating the largest cloud provider, being the largest distributor, going international, creating the kindle, now property acquisition, and so on. Yeah I do doubt there’d be another Amazon.

Bezos was 25 years late to Australia, and still nobody put together a business like his during that 2-decade gap.

Kogan had some of the successful elements, but it's nothing like Amazon US.

21 billionaires who grew up poor https://www.businessinsider.com/billionaires-who-came-from-n...

Sam Walton: Born as a Poor Farmer, Died as The Billionaire CEO and Founder of Wal-Mart https://corporatebytes.in/sam-walton-born-poor-farmer-died-b...

That's a bold statement to make and I'm not sure I believe it. Even companies like Sears or Walmart who were better positioned to dominate the space missed the boat.

Like you said, it's never one person who changes the world. It's usually one talented person who has the right connections and gets a lot of luck at just the right time. There's no guarantee that someone else would have made the same choices and gotten the same breaks if Bezos didn't exist.

Amazon exists because of Bezos, but that doesn't mean he did it all by himself.

And yes, Amazon is frighteningly large.

Wal-Mart was already leading that charge. And it shocks me to no end how many people I still encounter complaining about Wal-Mart for destroying their diverse local retail centers and eliminating jobs, while simultaneously receiving notifications on their smartphone from the Ring doorbell alerting Amazon packages being delivered on their front step.

Amazon is basically Wal-Mart 2.0, now with even more consolidation, counterfeit goods, and fewer local jobs.

Bezos isn't coming for the mom and pop shops, he's coming for Wal-Mart. Maybe Home Depot and Lowes are next?

That replacement also drove costs down, and unlocked tremendous amounts of time spent “doing” retail shopping and as a society it’s our job to put that time and those savings to use. It’s also our job , in a moral sense, to make sure displaced industries/people like “retail” also find a new way of being productive.

Let’s not forget the investors that have reaped tons of benefit from this. They too have allocated those funds back to the market either via spend, investment, or tax. Even if the capital is idle, the bank has it which is also giving someone a job.

I'll just say that as we have fewer major players the more those players will lower wages and generally exploit workers. Most people won't enjoy living in that world.

I do believe in capitalism so maybe we disagree on a few things but I’d be curious how you see innovation without some value transfer proportional to that innovation. Amazon and I guess the “problem” is obvious but how do you get one without the other. Genuinely interested in your views.

Shopkeepers have been around for a long time, genociding them may not be wise.

Strictly as an ecological approach, no value judgement. Sparrow killing backfired on paradise builders.

They weren’t always knowledgeable staff with a smile that remembered you and your family. I wish it was the case but I’m afraid it wasn’t.

So, not all shops are gone. How do we reconcile that? Is it that the ones that could not be replaced and/or provided more value than amazon have remained?

... it was "a river of one million books".

That was the slogan when it came out to steamroll books.com (the first mover), an outfit from Ohio that sold books on the Internet and shipped without plastic packaging in 1991.

Jeff Bezos (and Sam Walton) did more to materially improve the lives of poor people than any politician or “advocate”.

Less than 25% of millionaires were born into money. Your defeatist world-view is entirely wrong.

I'm talking about billionaires, and what I contend is most billionaires had parents or family members who were rich which helped them.

- Elon Musk's parents owned an emerald mine in S. Africa

- Bill Gates not only got seed money from his millionaire parents but one of his parents was on the board of IBM and helped him land early Microsoft deals

- Bezos got 300k seed money from his parents

- Zuckerberg, is maybe an exception? His parents were only upper middle class. Enough money for good schools and private CS tutors. Seems plausible that if he was lower middle class he wouldn't have made it to Harvard.

Elon disputes this.

TL;DR: In the 80s, Elon’s father sold a plane for $80k, half in cash, and the rest for 50% of a Zambian emerald mine. He had it for six years and made some good money off it, but probably not a ludicrous amount. One can imagine there being exploitative working conditions in that mine, given the time and place, but I don’t have any real knowledge on the matter.

https://savingjournalism.substack.com/p/i-talked-to-elon-mus...

This is what I could find with a quick search regarding what Elon himself claims. I had a skim and it doesn’t seem to necessarily contradict the article I linked or my summary (perhaps depending on your definition of ”good money”). There probably was an emerald mine, and yeah it probably didn’t yield enough for Musk’s father to have the family set for life or anything like that.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1375212880790913025

and more detailed article: https://savingjournalism.substack.com/p/i-talked-to-elon-mus...

(N.b., I don’t say these things out of some worship for Bezos or Amazon, you can respect and appreciate something without liking it)