Business

Jeff Bezos launched his Amazon empire in a rented garage and held team meetings at a local Barnes & Noble. Now his ‘everything store’ is worth $2.4 trillion

Published

5 months ago

July 16, 2025

Jeff Bezos’ trajectory from a rented Bellevue garage to the helm of a $2.4 trillion enterprise is now business legend. In the summer of 1994, Jeff Bezos left a fledgling Wall Street career and moved to Bellevue, Washington, with a vision: to build an online bookstore that could one day sell everything. The first headquarters of Amazon was a modest rented house, and he and his then-wife, MacKenzie, worked side by side, packing books and driving them to the post office. The garage, with its concrete floor and humming servers, became the birthplace of what would soon be known as “the everything store.”

It also gave birth to Bezos’ mentality as Amazon founder, one that he would ingrain some day in his much larger company as “Day 1,” as in, every day of your job should be tackled as if the company was one day old and you were still in the garage. Success or failure could be just around the corner. Bezos worked from his own day one to institutionalize innovation, risk-taking, and data-driven iteration.

But looking beyond the garage mythology and the familiar narrative of entrepreneurial grit, Amazon’s ascent can also be understood as a product of uncanny anticipation of network effects, strategic long-term thinking, and relentless customer obsession. In fact, Bezos at one time wanted to name the company “relentless” and relentless.com still directs back to Amazon, the long river from which it all flows.

Bezos, right, and seller Gregory Nixon, left, deliver a set of antique golf clubs Nixon sold via Amazon.com Auctions to David Robichaud, center—Amazon’s 10 millionth customer—in 1999. Amazon.com was the first electronic commerce store to serve 10 million customers.

Paul Conors—AP Photo

Merchandise sits on a shelving unit at the Amazon.com Phoenix Fulfillment Center in Goodyear, Ariz., on Nov. 16, 2009.

Joshua Lott—Bloomberg/Getty Images

Team meetings at Barnes & Noble

In the early days, resources were scarce, and office space was at a premium. In those months, Bezos and his tiny team often held meetings at a local Barnes & Noble. The irony was not lost on them: the upstart online bookseller strategizing in the aisles of the nation’s largest brick-and-mortar book chain.

In 1996, as Amazon’s profile grew, Barnes & Noble’s founders, the Riggio brothers, took notice. They met with Bezos, expressing admiration but also warning that their own online venture would soon eclipse Amazon. Undeterred, Bezos doubled down on his vision, coining the motto “Get Big Fast” and setting his sights on rapid expansion .

By the time Amazon moved into official office space, Bezos leaned into the scrappiness, using recycled doors as desks for himself and his staff. He wanted to communicate that no resource goes unused or un-recycled. Amazon would be as thrifty as the deals that it gave to its consumers. It was also another way to bring the garage into the office space, another way to stress being relentless.

Bezos poses for a portrait in 1999, around the time Amazon began selling music, DVDs, video games, and gifts in addition to books.

Photo Nomad Ventures, Inc.—Corbis/Getty Images

Bezos unveils the Kindle 2, the latest version of Amazon’s electronic book reader, in 2009. Amazon’s Kindle first launched two years earlier in 2007 as a way to make digital reading a more “appealing” and “comfortable” experience, according to Amazon.

James Leynse—Corbis/Getty Images

The relentless drive to ‘get big fast’

Bezos raised capital from family, friends, and a handful of investors, giving up a significant stake in exchange for the funds needed to scale. The company’s first product was used books, chosen for their universal demand and ease of shipping. But Bezos’ ambitions were always bigger: he envisioned a store that could sell anything to anyone, anywhere .

Unlike many dot-com era founders, Bezos eschewed the lure of quick profits, instead prioritizing scale at the expense of short-term returns. His now-famous “regret minimization framework”—a decision-making process that emphasized acting now to avoid future regret—drove bold risks: forgoing personal profit, convincing early investors to back negative earnings, and building a fulfillment infrastructure whose costs initially seemed irrational. But this disciplined reinvestment cultivated one of the world’s most advanced logistics networks and primed Amazon to dominate not just books, but any commerce vertical it pursued.

An employee packs products into boxes for shipping at Amazon’s fulfillment Center in Fernley, Nev., on Dec. 13, 2005. The Fernley Center expected to process approximately 2 million orders between Thanksgiving and Christmas of that year.

Ken James—Bloomberg/Getty Images

An employee uses a cargo trailer towed by an electric bicycle to deliver Amazon Fresh food orders purchased online by Prime customers in 2024. This electric vehicle system was launched to reduce emissions from Amazon trucks, alleviate traffic in New York City, and speed up delivery times.

Deb Cohn-Orbach—UCG/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

Bezos holds a copy of “Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies” by Douglas Hofstadter—the first book sold online by Amazon.com—as he stands at the company’s headquarters in 2005 next to a table showing only a small sampling of non-book items currently available on Amazon.com including boxing gloves, a heart defibrillator, kitchen and electronics equipment, and clothing items.

Ted S. Warren—AP Photo

The ‘everything store’ emerges

By the late 1990s, Amazon had expanded beyond books, adding music, movies, and eventually a dizzying array of products. The company’s relentless focus on customer experience—fast shipping, low prices, and an ever-expanding selection—set it apart from competitors. Amazon weathered the dot-com crash, outlasted rivals, and continued to innovate, launching services such as Amazon Prime, Kindle, and Amazon Web Services (AWS), reflecting Amazon’s shift from single-product retailer to platform.

By opening the site to third-party sellers and launching AWS, Amazon became not merely a merchant, but an infrastructure for global commerce and cloud computing. AWS, in particular, is a case study in internal capabilities repurposed into external market offerings—a move that helped reshaped the economics of the internet itself. Amazon’s relentless drive turned it into something approaching a utility.

A $2.4 trillion empire

Today, Amazon is a global powerhouse, its reach extending from e-commerce and cloud computing to entertainment and artificial intelligence. As of July 2025, Amazon’s market capitalization stands at a staggering $2.4 trillion, making it the world’s fourth most valuable company .

Amazon’s impact transcends balance sheets, though. It has redefined supply chain expectations, influenced labor markets, and raised pressing questions around antitrust. Critics argue that the same mechanisms that fueled its rise—aggressive reinvestment, platform dominance, and data leverage—have also created structural dependencies with profound implications for competition, privacy, and labor.

Amazon’s true moat may be neither retail nor cloud computing per se—but its ability to seamlessly integrate physical and digital services into a single, adaptive operating system. It is working under Bezos’ successor Andy Jassy to add AI-driven services to the portfolio. It is relentless.

For this story, Fortune used generative AI to help with an initial draft. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.

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Business

Nvidia’s CEO says AI adoption will be gradual, but we still may all end up making robot clothing

Published

52 minutes ago

December 6, 2025

Jace Porter

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang doesn’t foresee a sudden spike of AI-related layoffs, but that doesn’t mean the technology won’t drastically change the job market—or even create new roles like robot tailors.

The jobs that will be the most resistant to AI’s creeping effect will be those that consist of more than just routine tasks, Huang said during an interview with podcast host Joe Rogan this week.

“If your job is just to chop vegetables, Cuisinart’s gonna replace you,” Huang said.

On the other hand, some jobs, such as radiologists, may be safe because their role isn’t just about taking scans, but rather interpreting those images to diagnose people.

“The image studying is simply a task in service of diagnosing the disease,” he said.

Huang allowed that some jobs will indeed go away, although he stopped short of using the drastic language from others like Geoffrey Hinton a.k.a. “the Godfather of AI” and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, both of whom have previously predicted massive unemployment thanks to the improvement of AI tools.

Yet, the potential, AI-dominated job market Huang imagines may also add some new jobs, he theorized. This includes the possibility that there will be a newfound demand for technicians to help build and maintain future AI assistants, Huang said, but also other industries that are harder to imagine.

“You’re gonna have robot apparel, so a whole industry of—isn’t that right? Because I want my robot to look different than your robot,” Huang said. “So you’re gonna have a whole apparel industry for robots.”

The idea of AI-powered robots dominating jobs once held by humans may sound like science fiction, and yet some of the world’s most important tech companies are already trying to make it a reality.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has made the company’s Optimus robot a central tenet of its future business strategy. Just last month, Musk predicted money will no longer exist in the future and work will be optional within the next 10 to 20 years thanks to a fully fledged robotic workforce.

AI is also advancing so rapidly that it already has the potential to replace millions of jobs. AI can adequately complete work equating to about 12% of U.S. jobs, according to a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) report from last month. This represents about 151 million workers representing more than $1 trillion in pay, which is on the hook thanks to potential AI disruption, according to the study.

Even Huang’s potentially new job of AI robot clothesmaker may not last. When asked by Rogan whether robots could eventually make apparel for other robots, Huang replied: “Eventually. And then there’ll be something else.”

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Business

The ‘Mister Rogers’ of Corporate America shows Gen Z how to handle toxic bosses

Published

2 hours ago

December 6, 2025

Jace Porter

After two decades of climbing the corporate ladder at companies ranging from ABC, ESPN, and Charter Communications (commonly known as Spectrum), Timm Chiusano quit it all to become a content creator.

He wasn’t just walking away from high titles, but a high salary, too. In his peak years, Chiusano made $600,000 to $800,000 annually. But in June of 2024, after giving a 12-week notice, he “responsibility fired himself” from his corporate job as VP of production and creative services at Charter.

He did it all to help others navigate the challenges of a workplace, and appreciate the most mundane parts of life on TikTok.

@timmchiusano

most people are posting their 2024 recaps; these are a few of my favorite moments from the year that was, but i need to start reintroducing myself too i dont have a college degree, no one in my life knew that until i was 35 when i eventually got my foot in the door in my early 20’s after a few years of substitute teaching and part time jobs, i thought for sure i had found the career path of my dreams in live sports production i didn’t think i had a chance of surviving that first college football season but i busted my ass, stuck around and got promoted 5 times in 5 years then i met a girl in Las Vegas, got married in 7 months, and freaked out about my career that had me travelling 36 weeks a year i had to find a more stable “desk job”, i was scared shitless that i was pigeonholed and the travel would eventually destroy my marriage i crafted a narative for espn arguing they needed me on their marketing team because of my unique perspective coming from the production side i got rejected, but kept trying and a year i got that job the 7 years with espn were incredible, but also exhausting and raised all kinds of questions about corporate america, toxic situations, and capitalism in general why was i borderline heart attack stressed so often when i could see that my ideas were literally generating 2,000 times the money that i was getting paid? in 2012 i had a kid and in 2013 i got the biggest job of my career to reinvent how to produce 20,000 commercials a year for small business it took 12 rounds of interviews, a drug test i somehow passed, and a background check that finally made me tell my wife of 8 years that i didnt have a college degree they brought me in the thursday before my first day and told me what i told grace in that clip the next decade was an insane blur; i saw everything one would ever see in their career from the perspective of an executive at a fortune 100 i started making tiktoks, kinda blacked out at some point in 2019 and responsibly fired myself in 2024 to see what i might be capable of on my own with all the skills i picked up along my career journey now the mission is pay what i know forward, and see if i can become the mr rogers of corporate america cc: @grace beverley @Ryan Holiday @Subway Oracle

♬ original sound – timm chiusano

What started as short-video vlogs on just about anything in 2020 (reviews on protein bars, sushi, and sneakers) later transitioned to videos on growing up, and dealing with life’s challenges, like coming to terms when you have a toxic boss. Today, his platform on TikTok has over 1 million followers.

With the help of going viral from his “loop” format where videos end and seamlessly circle back to the beginning, he began making more videos as a side-hustle on top of his day-to-day tasks in the office.

“How can I get people to be smarter and more comfortable about their careers in ways that are gonna help on a day-to-day basis?” Chiusano told Fortune.

Today, he could go by many titles: former vice president at a Fortune 100 company, motivational speaker, dad, content creator, or as he labels himself, the Mister Rogers of Corporate America.

Just as the late public television icon helped kids navigate the complexities of childhood, Chiusano wants to help young adults think about how to approach their careers and their potential to make an impact.

“Mister Rogers is the greatest of all time in his space. I will never get to that level of impact. But it’s an easy way to describe what I’m trying to do, and it consistently gives me a goal to strive for,” he said. “There are some parallels here with the quirkiness.”

Firing himself after 25 years in the corporate world

Even with years in corporate, Chiusano doesn’t resemble the look of a typical buttoned-up executive. Today, he has more of a relaxed Brooklyn dad attire, with a sleeve of tattoos and a confidence to blend in with any trendy middle aged man in Soho. During our interview, he showed off one of the first tattoos he got: two businessmen shaking hands, a reference to Radiohead’s OK Computer album.

“This is a dope ass Monday in your 40s,” began one of his videos.

It consisted of Chiusano doing everyday things such as eating leftovers, going to the gym, training for the NYC marathon, taking out the trash, dropping his daughter off at school, a rehearsal for a Ted Talk, eating lunch with his wife, and brand deal meetings. Though the content sounds pretty normal, that’s the point.

“The reason why I fired myself in the first place was to be here,” he says in the video while picking his daughter up from school.

Today, Chiusano spends his days making content on navigating workplace culture, public speaking, brand deals, brand partnerships, executive coaching, writing a book, and the most important job: being a dad to his 13-year-old daughter Evelyn.

“I’m basically flat [in salary] to where I was, and this is everything I could ever want in the world,” he said. “The ability to send my kid to the school she’s been going to, eat sushi takeout almost as much as I’d like, and do nice things for my wife.”

In fact, when sitting inside one of his favorite New York City spots, Lure Fishbar, he keeps getting stopped by regulars who know him by name. He points out that one of his favorite interviews he filmed here was with legendary filmmaker Ken Burns.

Advice to Gen Z

In a time where Gen Z has been steering to more unconventional paths, like content creation or skill trades rather than just a 9-to-5 office job, Chiusano opens up a lens to what life looks like when deciding to be present rather than always looking for what’s next—a mistake he said he made in his 20s.

Instead, he wants to teach the younger generation to build skills for as long as you can, but “if you are unhappy, that’s a very different conversation.”

“I think some people will make themselves more unhappy because they feel like that’s what’s expected of a situation,” he said.

“I would love to be able to empower your generation more, to be like somebody’s gonna have to be the head of HR at that super random company to put cool standards and practices in place for better work-life balance for the employees.”

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Business

Mark Zuckerberg says the ‘most important thing’ he built at Harvard was a prank website

Published

3 hours ago

December 6, 2025

Jace Porter

For Mark Zuckerberg, the most significant creation from his two years at Harvard University wasn’t the precursor to a global social network, but a prank website that nearly got him expelled.

The Meta CEO said in a 2017 commencement address at his alma mater that the controversial site, Facemash, was “the most important thing I built in my time here” for one simple reason: it led him to his wife, Priscilla Chan.

“Without Facemash I wouldn’t have met Priscilla, and she’s the most important person in my life,” Zuckerberg said during the speech.

In 2003, Zuckerberg, then a sophomore, created Facemash by hacking into Harvard’s online student directories and using the photos to create a site where users could rank students’ attractiveness. The site went viral, but it was quickly shut down by the university. Zuckerberg was called before Harvard’s Administrative Board, facing accusations of breaching security, violating copyrights, and infringing on individual privacy.

“Everyone thought I was going to get kicked out,” Zuckerberg recalled in his speech. “My parents came to help me pack. My friends threw me a going-away party.”

It was at this party, thrown by friends who believed his expulsion was imminent, where he met Chan, another Harvard undergraduate. “We met in line for the bathroom in the Pfoho Belltower, and in what must be one of the all time romantic lines, I said: ‘I’m going to get kicked out in three days, so we need to go on a date quickly,’” Zuckerberg said.

Chan, who described her now-husband to The New Yorker as “this nerdy guy who was just a little bit out there,” went on the date with him. Zuckerberg did not get expelled from Harvard after all, but he did famously drop out the following year to focus on building Facebook.

While the 2010 film The Social Network portrayed Facemash as a critical stepping stone to the creation of Facebook, Zuckerberg himself has downplayed its technical or conceptual importance.

“And, you know, that movie made it seem like Facemash was so important to creating Facebook. It wasn’t,” he said during his commencement speech. But he did confirm that the series of events it set in motion—the administrative hearing, the “going-away” party, the line for the bathroom—ultimately connected him with the mother of his three children.

Chan, for her part, went on to graduate from Harvard in 2007, taught science, and then attended medical school at the University of California, San Francisco, becoming a pediatrician.

She and Zuckerberg got married in 2012, and in 2015, they co-founded the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a philanthropic organization focused on leveraging technology to address major world challenges in health, education, and science. Chan serves as co-CEO of the initiative, which has pledged to give away 99% of the couple’s shares in Meta Platforms to fund its work.

You can watch the entirety of Zuckerberg’s Harvard commencement speech below: