Amazon was a bookstore with no stores, and it planned to keep losing money in order to grow. It sold books through a website, shipped them from a warehouse in Seattle, and claimed a catalog of more than a million titles. Few people bought anything online yet, and many doubted they ever would. Amazon went public in May 1997 with an offering that was modest by later standards. It called itself Earth's Biggest Bookstore.

Leaving the Hedge Fund

Jeff Bezos left a hedge fund job in New York in 1994 and drove west to start the company. He chose books because there were millions of titles, too many for any shop to stock. The bet was that the web's unlimited shelf would beat physical stores on selection. Customers would reward low prices and convenience. Bezos told investors to expect a long wait for profits.

The Kindle and the Cloud

Amazon priced its offering at $18 a share in May 1997. It added music and video, then almost everything else. It opened its site to other sellers and survived the dot-com crash. It launched Prime, the Kindle, and Amazon Web Services, which turned its own computing systems into a business. Amazon remains a public company today, one of the largest in the world, trading on the Nasdaq as AMZN.

Cover: On the Nile, Eugène Fromentin. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a great river (the Amazon).