Amazon on My Mind
It is said that when Jeff Bezos was taking his now-famous cross-country trip to move to Seattle, he wrote the business plan for his new business idea. That idea was to build the world’s biggest bookstore using this new concept that was gaining traction in 1994, the Worldwide Web. The internet and its packetization of information across large and remote data networks had been building in the defense and academic worlds for several decades and the scientists in the U.K. had come up with this network which they called the Worldwide Web in 1989. Then in 1991, the first website, per se, was published on the www as a directory of web resources. Netscape, the first ubiquitous web browser, began life as Mosaic and was invented by Marc Andreessen in 1993, only to be quickly eclipsed by Microsoft Internet Explorer, Google, Chrome, Safari, Firefox and all that jazz. But it was Jeff Bezos’ vision of the future of e-commerce with regard to books that took root just as this explosion of internet connectivity and commercialization was rocketing forward.
As a quick aside, the early career of Jeff Bezos, who studied computer science at Princeton and graduated in 1986 included a two-year banking stint at Bankers Trust. Bankers Trust was considered at the time to be among the most innovative banks in the world. When Bezos joined Bankers Trust in 1998, I was a member of the founding partnership group of 40 officers of the global banking franchise (founded in 1903), which was turned into a “partnership” in 1987. In 1988 I was responsible for what had been the Latin America Merchant Banking Group, and which that year I had turned into the Emerging Markets Group. It was, quite literally, the first unit at any bank called Emerging Markets, as the brand new moniker to designate all the parts of the world that were not part of the developed capital markets that spanned from London to New York to Tokyo and Hong Kong. These parts of the world were the “emerging” economies of the world, which sounded much more positive than the LDC (Less Developed Country) name they had previously enjoyed. I had come up with the name compliments of a small fund at the World Bank that I had noticed, which had the name Emerging Markets Fund. I should note for moviegoers who watched Melanie Griffin tell her pal Joan Cusack as they disembarked the Staten Island Ferry in Working Girl in 1988, that her Emerging Markets Class was on her schedule that day and that referred to what Wall Street in those days considered emerging, which were small capitalization stocks and NOT the equities of Brazil and Sierra Leone. Anyway, in 1988, Jeff Bezos went to work in the Bankers Trust Employee Benefits business, where he stayed for two years, when I transitioned to run that and other related businesses.
By the time I settled into my asset management role, where Bezos had been a product manager, and after “solving” the Emerging Markets problem (actually, not so much solving it as turning it into a highly profitable profit center rather than the deadweight liability it had represented when I took it over in 1985), Jeff Bezos had moved on to become the youngest SVP at another newly burgeoning company called D.E. Shaw, which was something called a “hedge fund”. So while I was innovating my way through the banking world at the highest levels, Bezos was skipping through industries and leapfrogging from computer science to financial innovation, to investing innovation when he did what rational mainstream people generally don’t do, he left a lucrative job at D.E. Shaw and drove west young man to Seattle. It was on that trip that he came up with the name for his new online bookstore. He chose the name Amazon because it was an early word he stumbled on in the dictionary (I guess people like Bezos can get their inspiration anywhere, even in Websters). It struck him that he wanted to build the greatest stream of book-selling the world had ever known, much like the Amazon was the greatest river on earth with its powerful jungle basin and its flow of life-giving water to an entire continent, the source of most of the earth’s oxygen via its massive fibrous plant life, the same fiber from which books are made.
In 1994 Bezos wanted to sell more books than anyone, but he may not have yet realized that books would go first electronic and then to audiobooks the way they have. Of course, he was on the leading edge of ebooks with Kindle (that “crazy” idea that an e-commerce company could get into selling hardware) and then bought his way into audiobooks by buying that small start-up called Audible. His innovations went on from e-commerce to initiate this vast and truly ubiquitous technology now known as cloud computing, in which all the great tech giants like Dell and IBM have chased to compete. If you are thinking that I am somewhat in awe of Jeff Bezos, you would be right. I know Donald Trump hates Jeff Bezos, but let’s ignore that bit of trivia (I believe eventually Donald trump will be a footnote of setback in history while Jeff Bezos will go down in history as one of the great Edison-like commercial inventors of all time). Some dislike his wielding of his political voice by giving financial life to the Washington Post. Some who operate on the Amazon e-commerce platform curse Bezos daily as they pay off huge amounts of their margins to Amazon and have to knuckle-under to their strict consumer-oriented mandate (not so much to protect consumers, but rather to protect the image of the platform). In any case, Amazon may actually be at a point now where it has more impact on our world than the real Amazon, that little stream in Brazil, has.
In 1988 I traveled thirteen times to Brazil in my Emerging Markets work. Brazil was a big deal in those markets. It had replaced Argentina as the market of the future in Latin America. It was the B in BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) that was the new mantra of the future of the world’s commerce. I travelled up to the Amazon basin from Sao Paolo, the commercial center of Brazil and Rio de Janeiro, the political and cultural center of Brazil several times that year. The country’s capital was in Brasilia, by intent to bring people into the jungle. But I also went for a weekend in Manaus, the “headwaters” of the great river, where the Rio Negro combines with the red Amazon in a colorful blending of waters. Manaus was the center of the rubber trade which Bomel at the end of the Nineteenth Century and early Twentieth. It is the scene of a great Opera House modeled after La Scala in Milan. It is an anachronism and a great example of man’s silly attempts to overtake nature (the opera house is in constant decay from the tropics).
Nature is once again overtaking man in the Amazon. This time it isn’t rubber and it isn’t overwhelming sovereign debt, it is about a global pandemic, a tiny virus. The Coronavirus has blossomed along the river, as reported in today’s Washington Post (the irony and humidity is so thick you can cut it with a knife). This great natural wonder, which inspired an e-commerce boom of massive proportions is now proving that man (who thought summer heat and remoteness would defeat this pandemic) is mere flotsam and jetsam to the natural world. I just hope my old colleague Jeff Bezos is putting his mind and money (as is Bill Gates, his fellow Seattlean) into a new river of life for the human race against the next great challenge for humanity.