Jeff Bezos on raising Amazon’s seed round: “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done”

To raise the first million dollars of seed capital for Amazon. So I sold 20% of the company at a $5 million valuation. I sold 20% of the company for a million dollars to 22 angel investors. 50, roughly $50,000 each. And I had to take 60 meetings, so whatever, you know, roughly 40 of them said no. And, and a little 20, 20, 22 or so said yes. And it was the hardest thing I've ever done. Basically this was 1995ish 1995. And the first question was, what's the Internet? Everybody wanted to know what the Internet was. And by the way, the 40 no's were hard earned nos. Like they weren't just no, they were me. Multiple meetings, working really hard, trying to get people to write that $50,000 check and the whole enterprise could have been extinguished then. And I do remember in those meetings I would always tell people I thought there was a 70% chance they would lose their investment. And in retrospect, I think that might have been a little naive, but I thought, but I think it was true. In fact, if anything, I think I was giving myself better than the odds, better than the real odds.