Company

Spotify has over 100 million songs. How do you ever find the one song that’s perfect for you? Spotify came up with a clever answer. A Small Problem in a Sea of Songs Imagine walking into a gigantic library with 100 million books. Wow, it has everything! But… where do you even start reading? That’s the exact problem Spotify users face every day. The number of songs on Spotify is ridiculous — even the world’s biggest music fan couldn’t listen to them all in a lifetime. ...

Before Spotify, getting a song wasn’t easy. A teenager in Sweden decided to turn all the music in the world into a library that fits in your pocket. Life Before Streaming Imagine you really love a song. But you can’t just tap a screen and listen. You have to go to a store and buy a physical object that has your song on it. That object might be a big round vinyl record. You have to put it on a spinning machine, and a tiny needle touches it gently to make sound come out. ...

The internet got faster. Red DVD envelopes weren’t the only choice anymore. In 2007, Netflix made a bold decision: movies would stream directly to your home. The Internet Got Faster Remember that beeping sound? In the 1990s, if you wanted to connect to the internet, your computer would make a weird beeping, hissing noise. That was dial-up internet. It was painfully slow. So slow that downloading one movie could take a whole week. ...

“There’s got to be a better way.” — Reed Hastings, after receiving a forty-dollar late fee on a DVD rental In 1997, How Did You Watch a Movie? Picture yourself in 1997. You really want to watch a movie. What do you do? You have to get a ride to a video rental store called Blockbuster. It’s a big building stuffed with thousands of VHS tapes and DVDs. You search the shelves and finally find the movie you want. ...

“The best business to be in is a business where you can help customers more and more over time.” — Jeff Bezos, looking back on accidental discoveries The Story Begins Here’s a funny story. One day in 2006, Amazon employees were sitting in a meeting. They weren’t talking about selling books or toys or Prime. They were talking about something technical and a little boring: computer servers. What are servers? Imagine them as giant super-computers that run websites, store information, and handle millions of people visiting at the same time. ...

“We are not really an internet company. We are a customer company that uses the internet.” — Jeff Bezos A Bold Question In the early 2000s, Amazon was super successful at selling books. Every year, millions of them sold. More and more customers kept coming. Business was great. You’d think: just keep selling books, right? But then Bezos asked a bold question: “What if we sold everything?” CDs, DVDs, toys, clothes, sports equipment, kitchen stuff—basically anything you could imagine. It sounds crazy. Amazon was good at books. Books are flat. They don’t break easily. They’re easy to pack. But bicycles? Birthday candles? A thousand different shoe sizes? Each product has different storage needs, different packaging challenges, different shipping problems. This was like learning a whole new business from scratch. ...

“I want to build something that will last a thousand years.” — A 30-year-old named Jeff Bezos, before he quit his job to sell books on the internet The Story Begins Imagine you’re walking through a garage in Seattle, Washington, on a cold morning in 1994. The year is important, because back then, most people didn’t know what the internet even was. But inside this little garage, an energetic young man named Jeff Bezos was doing something that nobody else was doing. He wasn’t an inventor who created a new product. He wasn’t a chef opening a fancy restaurant. He was… selling books. Books from a garage. Books on the internet. And this one idea would change the world forever. ...

What if you could step inside the internet — walk around in it, meet your friends there, and build anything you can imagine? What If You Could Step Inside the Screen You look at screens every day. Phones, tablets, computers — we swipe our fingers around, look at photos, watch videos, and chat with friends. But have you ever thought: what if one day, instead of just looking at a screen, you could walk right into it? ...

Facebook connected your college friends. Then it connected the whole world — and changed how we share, shop, and even think. When Phones Became Everything Back in 2010, people used Facebook on their computers. But iPhones and Android phones were getting more and more popular, and people started spending more time on their phones. Here was the problem — Facebook’s website was really hard to use on a phone. The text was tiny. The buttons were impossible to tap. Photos took forever to load. ...

What if one college student built a website in his dorm room — and it connected the entire world? The Idea in the Dorm Room In 2003, Mark Zuckerberg was a sophomore at Harvard University. He was a computer science student who loved building things. Not with wood or metal — with code. He’d been programming since middle school, and by the time he got to Harvard, he could build a website faster than most people could write an essay. ...