We’d also heard from our VC connections that Bezos planned to use a good chunk of the $54 million raised during his company’s 1997 IPO to finance an aggressive acquisition of smaller companies. That’s normal—most companies looking to enter a new business arena do what’s called a “make-or-buy analysis,” in which they consider the cost, timing, and difficulty of starting a new business from scratch, then evaluate whether it would be cheaper, faster, and better to simply buy another company that’s already doing it. With that in mind, it didn’t take us long to figure out why Jeff and Joy wanted to
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