Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

by Mike Isaac

The executives at the companies Gurley covered saw it too. As Amazon worked on its initial public offering to the stock markets in 1997, Jeff Bezos and his team of executives didn’t pick one of the two high-profile investment banking firms—Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs—to lead its IPO. Instead, Bezos’s firm picked Deutsche Bank, a less prominent but still excellent firm, to take Amazon public. It was the combo of Deutsche Bank’s star banker and his lead analyst that sealed the deal: Frank Quattrone and Bill Gurley. The duo wowed Bezos and his board with their knowledge of the online bookseller and its underlying business. Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs had the glitzy name, but Deutsche Bank had Quattrone and Gurley. Gurley became the go-to analyst on what was then one of the world’s largest online booksellers. Gurley saw, very early on, the opportunity for Amazon to become much, much more than a bookstore.