Cadabra, Relentless, and the Bookstore That Became Everything
Zusammenfassung
Amazon was originally incorporated as “Cadabra, Inc.” in 1994 — short for “abracadabra.” Jeff Bezos changed it when his lawyer kept hearing “cadaver” over the phone. Bezos also registered the domain “Relentless.com” as an alternative name; it still redirects to Amazon.com. The final name “Amazon” was chosen from a dictionary: the world’s largest river for the world’s largest bookstore. The strategy of starting with books was deliberate — not because Bezos loved books, but because the book market had more titles than any other retail category, making Amazon’s selection advantage most dramatic there.
The Naming Process
Jeff Bezos left D.E. Shaw, the quantitative hedge fund, in 1994 after concluding that the World Wide Web’s growth rate (2,300% per year at the time) implied that anything built on it would be valuable. He drove to Seattle with his wife MacKenzie, writing the business plan in the car.
The company was incorporated in Bellevue, Washington in July 1994 as “Cadabra, Inc.” Bezos liked the magic connotation — a company that made things appear instantly. The name survived until Bezos’s first attorney, Todd Tarbert, mentioned that over the phone, “Cadabra” sounded like “cadaver.” The name changed.
Bezos registered “Relentless.com” around the same time. The name fit his personality — one of his early memos to Amazon employees used the phrase “relentlessly customer-focused” — but it was perceived as aggressive rather than consumer-friendly. He chose “Amazon” instead, reportedly after browsing the dictionary. The Amazon River was the largest in the world; the name started with A, placing it near the top of alphabetical lists.
The Book Market Strategy
Bezos’s choice to start with books was not sentimental. In his 1994 planning documents, he listed the top product categories for an internet retailer and analyzed each on two dimensions: the total number of items in the category, and whether those items were standard enough to be described with text and a few attributes.
Books won on total item count: approximately 3 million books were in print at the time, far more than any physical bookstore could stock. A physical bookstore might carry 50,000–100,000 titles. An online bookstore with warehouse fulfillment could offer all 3 million with no incremental shelf space cost. The “long tail” — the millions of books that sell only occasionally — would be accessible in a way physically impossible in any store.
This analysis prefigured the “everything store” strategy: Bezos intended from the beginning to expand beyond books. The 1997 shareholder letter, written when Amazon was still primarily a bookseller, set out the long-term, “Day 1” philosophy that treated the bookstore as the first step toward a much larger company.
The Growth
Amazon launched in July 1995. In its first month, it shipped books to all 50 US states and 45 countries. The 1997 IPO valued it at $438 million. By 2000, Amazon had expanded to music, movies, electronics, and toys. By 2006, it had launched Amazon Web Services. The story from online bookstore to the world’s most powerful retail and cloud platform is covered in Jeff Bezos and Amazon.