Joy Covey believes that from the beginning, Bezos planned to expand beyond books, but he was looking for the right moment to do it. “He always had a large appetite,” she says. “It was just a question of staging the opportunities at the right time.” So that spring, Jassy researched music, Kilar looked into the home-video market, a former Harvard classmate named Victoria Pickett examined shrink-wrapped software, and the list went on. At a management offsite at the Westin Hotel, the MBAs presented their findings. Amazon executives chose music as the first expansion target, and DVDs as the second.
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1998
