Amazon’s humble history: Jeff Bezos used a rented garage as an office and held team meetings at a local Barnes & Noble

Main Idea: Jeff Bezos started Amazon in a rented Bellevue garage and, through a scrappy focus on growth and customers, built it into a trillion-dollar company that now leads the Fortune 500.

Key Points:

• Bezos and MacKenzie Scott worked out of a small rented house, packing books and making trips to the post office in Amazon’s early days.
• When the team needed space, they sometimes held meetings at Barnes & Noble and later used recycled doors as desks.
• Bezos pushed ideas like “Day 1,” “Get Big Fast,” and “regret minimization” to encourage constant risk-taking and long-term thinking.
• Amazon grew from an online bookstore into a major company in retail, cloud computing, and AI, while also facing criticism over antitrust, labor, and privacy issues.