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Eric Siu recounts how Jeff Bezos pushed Amazon to build the Kindle despite board resistance and early losses. Oprah's endorsement in 2008 caused sales to skyrocket, turning the bet into a win.
Eric Siu recounts how Jeff Bezos pushed Amazon to build the Kindle despite board resistance and early losses. Oprah's endorsement in 2008 caused sales to skyrocket, turning the bet into a win.
Have you heard the Kindle and Oprah story before? No. Kindle, when they were starting it back in the day, Amazon didn't have any product. They didn't have any flagship product yet. Jeff Bezos was hardcore about, hey, we need to have like a, like a reader. And people are like, is this product going to be a distraction? Whatever. It's gonna be a waste of time. When they first launched, like it did really well. It sold out pretty quickly. It did okay. It wasn't like crushing it yet, right? It wasn't until Oprah mentioned that the Kindle was her new favorite book, sales skyrocketed. And then And from there, Kindle just took off, right? They started in, I think, 2004 or so. They didn't finish the project until maybe 2007 or 2008. The first year and a half, they would always go into these board meetings and then the CFO would be like, Jeff, like, how much more money do you want to spend on this thing? And Jeff's like, how much money do we have to spend? And so this is when they're like really unprofitable and everyone's making fun of them, right? But like, that's the amount of guts it takes sometimes to bet on something where you have no idea where it's going to go.
