amazon.com - Get Big Fast : Inside the Revolutionary Business Model That Changed the World [Hardcover]

Robert Spector (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 4, 2000

In Amazon.com Jeff Bezos built something the world had never seen. He created the most recognized brand name on the Internet and became one of the richest men in the world. He was recently named Time magazine's Person of the Year and was crowned "the king of cybercommerce."

Yet for all the success and all the media exposure, the inside story of Amazon.com has never really been told. In this revealing, unauthorized account of Amazon's astounding rise, Robert Spector, journalist and bestselling author, gives us the fastpaced, behind-the-scenes true story of the company's creation, its tumultuous present, and its uncertain future.

By talking to friends, confidants, early employees, rivals, publishing executives, stock analysts, and venture capitalists, Spector goes beyond the "official story"-the glib, polished, media-savvy statements that Bezos feeds to the press-and presents in unprecedented detail the real facts of the company's beginnings, innovations, business practices, and strategies, and its vision of the future. Further, he explains what the Amazon story means for conventional business, e-commerce, and ultimately the consumer.

Bezos's first employers tell how the experience he gained at their firms prepared him for creating Amazon.com. Early investors reveal the details of Bezos's initial pitch for money. Former company insiders divulge how painstakingly Amazon.com's internal systems were put together.

And the story becomes more compelling all the time as Amazon finds itself under attack by the formerly Internetchallenged behemoth retailers, by online startups trying to eat Bezos's lunch, and by impatient investors waiting for the company to turn a profit. (Amazon lost an incredible $720 million in 1999.)

Amazon.com's emergence as an e-commerce powerhouse has set off tremors around the world, jolting the "bricks and mortar" retailing giants, and forever changing the way everyone does business. But has Jeff Bezos finally run out of time? Will his great achievement be remembered as a footnote to the opening era of the Internet age? Or will this wily, overachieving self-described nerd triumph once again and surprise fans and foes alike?

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The tale of Amazon.com is well known to anyone who follows the stock market, the book business, the Internet explosion--heck, it's hard to imagine not knowing at least a piece of this extraordinary story. But few, it would seem, know the entire story, and it's these gaps that Robert Spector's Amazon.com: Get Big Fast attempts to fill (or at least the information available in early 2000, when the book was published). For example, those who know about Amazon.com's paradigm-shifting influence on the book business may not know it wasn't even the first online book retailer, or the second or the third. (It was preceded by clbooks.com, books.com, and wordsworth.com, the last of which beat Amazon.com to the Internet by almost two years.) Those who've heard quirky stories about Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos--for example, that he built his own desk out of a door, and that his mother bought the desk at an online charity auction in 1999 for $30,100--may not know that he was a studious overachiever from an early age. As a 12-year-old in Houston, he was even profiled in a book on gifted education in Texas. And those who marvel at the company's multibillion-dollar stock valuation may not know that it was broke and nearly out of business in the summer of '95.

Put it all together and you have a book that should be interesting to many different readers. As a pure business read, it certainly provides a blow-by-blow account of an important company's critical decisions. And anyone looking for a brief history of e-commerce will see how one idea--Bezos's realization in 1994 that Web usage was growing 2,300 percent a year--set the entire online retailing phenomenon in motion. If nothing else, that last fact should propel parents to pay very careful attention to their kids' math scores. Had Bezos, a summa cum laude Princeton grad in computer science, not realized the implications of exponential growth ... well, let's just say you wouldn't be reading this review right now. --Lou Schuler

From Publishers Weekly

Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos declined to be interviewed for this book, relates Spector, a journalist who has written for USA Today and UPI. But Bezos had nothing to fear. Spector has taken an extremely benign look at the so-called e-commerce success story, beginning with Bezos's career as an investment banker, passing through Amazon.com's early days in a dingy warehouse, the search for investor dollars, the company's transformation from a virtual to a physical entity, skirmishes in the marketplaces and the courts and, finally, the improbable expansion into other products (besides books) and countries. Sometimes chronological, sometimes topical, this comprehensive overview is filled with interesting trivia (e.g., the company initially protected itself against credit card theft by walking a floppy disk from one PC to another instead of transmitting information over the Net). Unfortunately, Spector writes with a glibness that leaves the reader wondering exactly what he means: "Setting about to run a corporate culture from the ground up, Bezos focused on hiring the absolute best people he could find." In other cases, he starts down a promising road but never brings us to the end; for example, he writes that "in reality, in the quest to get big fast, the seemingly mild-mannered Bezos is a fierce, take-no-prisoners competitor," and proceeds to fuzzily document how Amazon gets closer to the consumer. Those looking for a quick primer on the growth of one of the world's most famous dot-coms will find this useful. Readers looking for a journalistically penetrating account, readers will be better served by the business press. (Apr)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: HarperBusiness; 1st edition (April 4, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0066620414
• ISBN-13: 978-0066620411
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (50 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #540,961 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good background reading but not enough on the detail, April 6, 2000

By 

P H Fisher (UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: amazon.com - Get Big Fast : Inside the Revolutionary Business Model That Changed the World (Hardcover)

This book is a good introduction to Amazon and some of the basic philosophy behind the company. For those interested in establishing an e-commerce company it makes helpful reading, especially if our current knowledge of the technology is limited. Unfortunately the author did not interview Jeff Bezos and therefore much of the information was already in the public domain.

My criticism of the book is two fold. First there appears to be little or no information on the problems of establishing the technology and learning how to offer a customer centric service. As a long time customer of Amazon I for one have seen dramatic improvements in the customer service model; for instance allowing customers to consolidate orders and requesting part vs. full shipment are changes made after the first few years of trading. I think that a detailed analysis of these kinds of issues would have been really helpful.

Second the author appears to accept the business model that Amazon have developed - huge losses aimed at long-term market position without question. I would have liked a little bit more on the view expressed by Barnes and Noble that they don't want to win a hollow victory - owing the market and the losses.

25 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fair, accurate portrayal of early years and excitement, April 5, 2000

By 

Glenn Fleishman - See all my reviews

This review is from: amazon.com - Get Big Fast : Inside the Revolutionary Business Model That Changed the World (Hardcover)

Robert Spector has written a very fair and interesting account of how Jeff Bezos recruited and motivated a crack team of enormously talented, hardworking individuals into working vast amounts of time in creating something really new that benefitted consumers and transformed the book industry - and helped create the new economy. Spector's book is not money or number focused, which is a relief. There's been an infinite amount of that kind of reporting. His book is about the culture and the thrill of reinventing the world. The outcome of this new economy is still up in the air. But there's no doubt that Amazon.com started the revolution and contains to be the flag bearer for it. (A disclaimer: I was an early and brief - and happy - employee at Amazon.com, and I can vouch for Spector having captured the mood and excitement of the place during my time there.)

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Short on Analysis, but Good Primer on Amazon's History., August 5, 2004

By 

mirasreviews (McLean, VA USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: amazon.com - Get Big Fast : Inside the Revolutionary Business Model That Changed the World (Hardcover)

"Get Big Fast" is the story of Amazon.com's inception and rise to e-commerce supremacy, as told by business reporter Robert Spector. This book seems to be intended for students of business or perhaps budding entrepreneurs. It offers very little analysis, but Spector gives us the facts -or at least some of them- of how the Internet's first store came to be its biggest. This is a Who did What When and Why of Amazon's first five and a half years, 1994-2000. The story starts before that, though. The first three chapters follow Amazon founder and president Jeff Bezos from his youth in Texas, through a successful career in the vicinity of Wall Street, to Seattle, where Amazon would be born. The remaining eight chapters trace Amazon's growth from the Bezos' garage, to makeshift offices and crowded warehouses, to Amazon's current residence in the lovely PacMed Tower, from 4 employees to 7600 on three continents. There is a list of "Takeaways" at the end of each chapter, which reiterate the chapter's major points and Amazon's strategy during that time. Since Jeff Bezos, et al created new technology as they were building a multi-billion dollar business, "Get Big Fast" discusses the creation of Amazon's web site and it's features, in addition to logistics, finances, and personalities. Since I spend a lot of time on this web site, I would have liked a more in-depth history of its features, but given that Robert Spector is a business writer and not a software developer, his slant is understandable. More analysis of Amazon's decisions in the context of retail sales would also have been welcome. But the fact that Amazon was a pioneer business model that many hailed as proof positive of the New Economy does make comparisons to other businesses tricky. As I write this, Amazon.com is nearly twice as old as when Robert Spector wrote his book. But much less has changed in the interim years than in the first five. "Get Big Fast" is a solid primer on Amazon.com's inception and growth, and therefore a foundational piece of e-commerce history.