Amazon, The Tech Behemoth

       Amazon, the company that we all know and love, was not always the big shot that we see it as today. To many people’s surprise Amazon actually has some pretty modest beginnings that can be dated back all the way to the creation of the internet. As people started to use the internet more often with user-friendly systems, entrepreneurs started to flood the online-retailer business in the hopes of making it big. One of these people was Jeff Bezos who left his executive position on wall street to go start his own e-commerce company. Bezos ended up purchasing the domain for relentless.com, but after some more deliberation with peers, he changed the name again to amazon.com, the company that we all know about today. Amazon started off with selling books which made them a fair amount of money, allowing them to go public in 1996 and get listed in the NASDAQ.
After more time growing, and settling few lawsuits with other large companies during the time period, Jeff Bezos finally decided to expand Amazon from a book store, to an everything store. This caused Amazon’s net worth to jump even higher making Jeff Bezos a billionaire and Time’s person of the year, however this would soon end with the dotcom crash. People thought that investing in tech was always a good idea, no matter how much revenue the companies actually made, leading to massive corporations that were really making no money at all. Soon investors came to their senses and started to pull their money out of the overvalued tech industry causing Amazon’s stock price to take a huge hit. Even though Stocks don’t matter much with a company's day to day operations, they are vital for a company's capital and financing, which is something that startup tech companies, like Amazon, really need. Amazon, a long with a few other companies were some of the companies that were able to make it out alive after the dotcom bubble burst.
After the burst, Amazon was seen to be making modest earnings every year, but nothing too special, causing the company to stagnate. This showed that it was time for the company to think of something new to bring their earnings up. The response to this was creating Amazon Prime, which was surprising, because they would now be losing money on every order that was made rather than gain money. They way that Amazon combated this was by then also creating Amazon Web Services. Since servers are so expensive to buy, AWS lets you rent out serves, which is a lot more affordable than buying one. This, coupled with the marketplace that Amazon was able to buy up led to it being one of the biggest companies to this day.

Sources:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_snoVZwQGVs
https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-amazon-history-facts-2017-4
https://www.fundable.com/learn/startup-stories/amazon