“The high-tech community was getting a lesson in the dynamics of network effects—products or services become increasingly valuable as more people use them. In online marketplaces, the network effect was pervasive; sellers stuck around for access to a critical mass of buyers, and vice versa. In the auctions category, eBay already had an insurmountable advantage. Amazon’s executives remember this significant failure as painful but strangely uplifting. “Those days in the nineties were the most intense, fun time I ever had at the company,” Blackburn says. “We had an insanely talented group of people trying to figure out how to launch a superior auctions site. In the end the network effect mattered. You could say we were naïve, but we built a great product.”