Amazon’s beginnings: Bezos had an office in a rented garage and held a meeting in a bookstore

Jeff Bezos’ trajectory, from a rented garage in Bellevue to running a company valued at US$2.4 trillion, is already a legend in the business world, crowned by Amazon taking over the top of the Fortune 500 list in 2026, ending Walmart’s 13-year reign.

So it’s worth going back to the summer of 1994, when Bezos left a fledgling career on Wall Street and moved to Bellevue, Washington, with a vision: to create an online bookstore that could one day sell everything.

Also read: CEO of Coursera worked with Bezos for 23 years and tells what he learned and uses to this day

Amazon’s first headquarters was a simple rented house, and he and his then-wife, MacKenzie Scott, worked side by side, packing books and taking them to the mail. The garage, with concrete floors and humming servers, became the birthplace of what would soon be known as “the everything store.”

It also gave rise to Bezos’s mindset as the founder of Amazon, which he would later incorporate into the much larger company under the concept of “Day 1”: every workday must be tackled as if the company was just one day old and you were still in the garage.

Success or failure could be right around the corner. Since his own “Day 1,” Bezos has worked to institutionalize innovation, willingness to take risks, and data-driven iteration.

But looking beyond the garage mythology and the familiar narrative of entrepreneurial grit, Amazon’s rise can also be understood as the result of an uncanny ability to anticipate network effects, long-term strategic thinking, and a relentless customer obsession.

Not by chance, Bezos even wanted to name the company “Relentless”, and the address relentless.com even redirects to Amazon — the great river from which all this flows.

Meetings at Barnes & Noble: The impromptu early days of Amazon

In the early days, resources were scarce and office space was a rare commodity. In those months, Bezos and his small team often held meetings at a local Barnes & Noble bookstore. The irony did not go unnoticed: the new online bookstore strategizing between the shelves of the largest physical bookstore chain in the country.

In 1996, as Amazon’s name gained visibility, the founders of Barnes & Noble, the Riggio brothers, noticed the movement.

They met with Bezos, expressing admiration but also warning that his own online initiative would soon overtake Amazon. Undeterred, Bezos doubled down on his vision, coining the motto “grow fast” and aiming for accelerated expansion.

When Amazon finally moved into a formal office, Bezos embraced the makeshift spirit, using repurposed doors as desks for himself and his team. The idea was to make it clear that no resource should be wasted or not reused.

Amazon would only be as cost-effective as the offerings it delivered to consumers. It was also another way of bringing the garage into the office, another way of emphasizing obstinacy.

“Grow up fast”: Amazon’s aggressive expansion strategy in the 1990s

Bezos raised funds from family, friends and a few investors, giving up a significant share of the company in exchange for the capital needed to scale the business.

The first product sold were used books, chosen for their universal demand and ease of shipping. But Bezos’ ambitions were always bigger: he imagined a store capable of selling anything, to anyone, anywhere.

Unlike many founders of the dot-com era, Bezos avoided the appeal of quick profits and prioritized scale, even at the expense of short-term returns.

His now-famous “regret minimization model”—a decision-making process that emphasized acting now to avoid future regrets—pushed bold risks: giving up personal gains, convincing early investors to cover losses, and building a distribution infrastructure whose costs, at first, seemed irrational.

This disciplined reinvestment, however, gave rise to one of the most advanced logistics networks in the world and prepared Amazon to dominate not just books, but any commerce vertical it decided to attack.

From online bookstore to global e-commerce giant

By the end of the 1990s, Amazon had already gone beyond books, incorporating music, films and, later, a dizzying variety of products.

A single-minded focus on the customer experience—fast deliveries, low prices, and an ever-expanding assortment—has set the company apart from competitors.

Amazon weathered the dot-com bust, outlasted its rivals and continued to innovate, launching services such as Amazon Prime, Kindle and Amazon Web Services (AWS), reflecting its transition from a single-product retailer to a platform.

By opening the site to third-party sellers and launching AWS, Amazon went from being just a merchant to becoming an infrastructure for global commerce and cloud computing.

AWS, in particular, is a case study of how internal capabilities have been repurposed as external offerings — a move that has helped redesign the economics of the internet itself.

Amazon’s relentless drive has turned it into something close to an essential service.

Amazon’s $2.2 trillion empire and market dominance

Today, Amazon is a global powerhouse, with operations ranging from e-commerce and cloud computing to entertainment and artificial intelligence. In July 2025, the company’s market value reached an impressive US$2.2 trillion, making it the fifth most valuable company in the world.

Amazon’s impact, however, goes beyond financial statements. It has redefined expectations about supply chains, influenced labor markets and raised urgent questions about antitrust.

Critics argue that the same mechanisms that fueled its rise—aggressive reinvestment, platform dominance, and data-intensive use—have also created structural dependencies, with profound implications for competition, privacy, and labor.

Perhaps Amazon’s true defensive advantage is not specifically in retail or cloud computing, but in its ability to seamlessly integrate physical and digital services into a single adaptive operating system. Under the leadership of Bezos’ successor Andy Jassy, ​​the company is working to add AI-based services to its portfolio. She remains undeterred.