Before we begin the show today, a quick note about KiwiCo.com slash explain that's

kiwiicio.com slash explained. It's a website where you get the chance to try your first

month of KiwiCo projects out for free. Those are the educational projects you've heard about

on this show before, surely. They're great for the young person, you know, the older person,

you know, the middle age person, you know, what is age even? Check out KiwiCo.com slash

explained. So it's the mid 90s Jeff Faizos is working at a hedge fund, I believe in New York,

and he hears this statistic that usage of the worldwide web is growing by something like 23

hundred percent per year. He's blown away. How can I capitalize on that? How can I get in on that

growth? And so he starts thinking, well, what could I sell on the worldwide web? And I picked

books as the first best product of saw online, which are making a list of like 20 different

products that you might be able to sell. And books were great as the first best because books

are incredibly unusual in one respect. And that is that there are more items in the book category

and there are items than any other category by far. By 1998 it started expanding,

gradually and carefully to other categories. So it started with selling music CDs and by 1999

it was selling home improvement products and computer software and video games. And starting in

2000 the Amazon logo actually had an an arrow that points from the A in Amazon to the Z in Amazon

implying that they would eventually be selling everything from A to Z. In 2007 it launched the

Kindle. One of the great things about electronic books is they don't go out of stock. It's easy

to forget how revolutionary that was at the time. And this is way before iPads. It was the year

that the iPhone came out but smartphones hadn't fully caught on yet. And Amazon has in the year

since expanded into a very large and fast growing hardware business. Of course as we now know,

it sells online media, streaming services. The crease is quite hot, so hot. It has Amazon Web

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