In the summer of 1998, Netflix was still pretty small, and wasn't making much money. That's when a call came from Amazon.
The street we were walking on looked like a movie set of skid row. There was trash on the sidewalk, broken glass in the window casements.
“There it is,” Reed said, pointing to a rundown four-story brick building. He seemed less certain now. Leaning in toward one of the tall windows, I could just see into the dimly lit lobby. On the wall, behind a faded wood desk, was a large sign reading Amazon.com . AMZN 2.23% Amazon was only a few years old, but Bezos had already decided his site wouldn’t just be a bookstore. It was going to be an everything store. And we knew that music and video were going to be his next two targets.
As Covey led us back into the warren of cubicles that made up the Amazon offices, it was hard for me to believe that this was the company inventing e-commerce. The carpeting was stained. There were multiple people per cubicle, desks under the stairs, desks pushed to the edges of hallways. Almost every horizontal surface was covered: by books, gaping Amazon boxes, printouts, coffee cups, plates and pizza boxes. It made the Netflix offices seem like the executive suite at IBM.
After introductions, we filed into a corner of the building with a bigger table. This table, too, was made from recycled doors. I could clearly see where the holes that used to hold the doorknobs had been patched.“It’s a deliberate message,” he explained. “It’s a way of saying that we spend money on things that affect our customers, not on things that don’t.”Bezos was notoriously frugal.
We traded beta names: he laughed at Kibble, the name we had used before Netflix’s launch, and told me that Amazon had originally called itself Cadabra. “The problem is that Cadabra sounds a little too much like cadaver,” Bezos said, barking out a laugh. “We don’t need to go through all this,” he said, exasperated. “What does this have to do with Netflix and Amazon and possible ways we can work together?”“Reed,” I said after a few seconds. “It’s obvious that Amazon is considering using Netflix to jump-start their entry into video. Our people would be a huge part of any possible acquisition.”
But for Reed, it wasn’t enough. He owned the other 70% of the company, but he’d also invested $2 million in it. And he was fresh off the sale of Pure Atria, the company formed out of his first software venture. He was already an “eight-figure guy.” A high-eight-figure guy.
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