Bezos combined a grandiose vision with the sketchiest understanding of how that vision would be achieved. The name “Amazon” is inspired by the fact that the River Amazon “blows all other rivers away”;8 he wanted his company to be the “everything store,” the largest retailer on the planet, capable of swiftly supplying any consumer with any product they could imagine. And yet despite these big dreams, when the company opened for business selling books in 1995—by which time Microsoft still hadn’t launched its Internet Explorer browser—Bezos was utterly unprepared for the demand.
