Mathias Döpfner:
Jeff, when did you know that Amazon would be successful?
Jeff Bezos:
Well, I knew the books ... Well, oddly enough, I was very well prepared for it to be really long.
I knew the book business would be successful in the first 30 days.
But I was shocked how many books we actually sold.
We were badly prepared.
We only had about ten people in the company at the time.
And most of them were software engineers.
Everyone, including myself and the software engineers, was packing boxes.
We didn't even have packing tables.
We knelt on a concrete floor and packed packages.
At one or two in the morning, I said to one of my fellow software engineers, "You know, Paul, this breaks my knees, we need knee pads." And Paul looked at me and said, "Jeff, we need packing tables." said, "Oh my god, this is such a good idea." The next day I bought packing tables, they doubled our productivity, and they probably saved our backs and knees as well.
Döpfner:
But Amazon also had serious crises.
You almost went bankrupt.
What went wrong