Amazon after 20 years: It’s still Day 1

Twenty years ago, Amazon.com opened as an online book store run out of a garage near Seattle. At the time, it wasn’t uncommon to hear someone ask, “what’s the Internet?” Yet in just our first month, customers placed orders from all 50 states and 45 countries.

In the years since we sold our first book to a customer named Mr. Wainwright (who now has a building named after him at our urban headquarters in downtown Seattle), we’ve grown from a company with just a few employees into a global business with more than 165,000. We’ve also expanded from one set of customers to four: consumers, content creators like authors and filmmakers, sellers, and developers and organizations using the Amazon Web Services Cloud. Through it all, we’ve been guided by four principles – customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking.

{mosads}Today we’re celebrating our 20^th anniversary here in D.C. with a fly-in of a diverse group of employees and customers to the nation’s capital. People like Vy Nguyen, who represents our more than two million seller customers. Vy is a small business owner and first-generation immigrant. As a boy, he and his family fled Vietnam with a boatload of other refugees, and Vy’s father eventually started his own business in Los Angeles. The business struggled during the recession and Vy’s father was considering layoffs, then Vy helped rebuild it using Amazon’s Marketplace and Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) platforms.

Marketplace and FBA let small businesses sell right alongside Amazon on our product detail pages and tap into our international logistics and customer service networks, and they helped Vy and his father thrive. Marketplace was pretty controversial when it launched 15 years ago—people internally and externally said Amazon was crazy to open up our prime real estate to others—but the many stories like Vy’s show that it’s been a true win-win. Today over 40% of the products sold on Amazon are from third party sellers.

Vy is joined by Teresa Carlson, VP of worldwide public sector for AWS – Amazon’s cloud computing service that provides mission-critical compute power to organizations of all sizes, from startups to Netflix to NASA. AWS is now nine years old and the pace of innovation is accelerating – the team launched 160 significant new features and services for our enterprise customers in 2012, 280 in 2013 and 516 in 2014.

Our content creator customers are represented by Joe Lewis, head of comedy for our Amazon Studios business – the part of Amazon that’s created original programming like Transparent and allows aspiring filmmakers get their movies and shows made without traditional gatekeepers. We think great stories deserve to be told, and you can also see that in our self-publishing platforms Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) and CreateSpace, which let authors publish electronic or physical books with just a few clicks. There are now hundreds of thousands of authors and filmmakers using these platforms around the world and we love seeing what they create.

The group is rounded out by Matt Krough, Al Ondreka and Matt Harney – leaders in our fulfillment network who serve customers around the world every day by making sure that the huge fulfillment centers they manage in Indiana and Kentucky can ship anything customers order quickly and efficiently. And each day they use skills they learned while serving in America’s Armed Forces. At Amazon we’ve worked hard to create programs for our military veterans and we’re proud of our Amazon Warriors program, which has earned us recognition as a top employer for veterans and military spouses.

Vy, Teresa, Joe, Matt, Al and Matt will be meeting with their congressional representatives and others, and will also be taking time to visit and make a donation to the local Fisher House – an organization that Amazon proudly supports nationally that provides free temporary lodging to veterans and military families receiving treatment at military medical centers. We’re also donating Amazon Echos to the D.C. Fisher House. Echo is one of our newest devices and is a new category of product designed entirely around your voice. Just ask for information, news, weather, traffic, sports scores, and much more.

It’s still very much Day 1 for Amazon and the internet – there’s so much left to be invented and the pace is still accelerating. We look forward to working with policymakers today and in years to come to develop policies that encourage innovation and allow us to continue inventing for each of our customer sets.

Huseman is Amazon director of U.S. public policy.