Speaker unverified: belief

Transcript context

…At this point, we were still in the era of Amazon.com was only a bookstore. When Jeff was putting together kind of the pitch deck for that $60 million round and showing around, was there any inkling that it was going to be more than books at this point? Did they start to foreshadow those other categories? Jeff in those early years was very focused on books. I mean, he declined to even talk about other things for the first 2 or 3 years. I think that was including through the IPOs, I remember. Partly it was “let’s do books well, and books is big.” But other people were starting to ask and talk about, “Well, what about other products? ” I suspect Jeff was thinking about that, but it was good I think in the beginning, just let’s get this one right. I can’t remember when but it was probably ’98 or so that really launched music and started to launch some other things. And movies. So at the end of ’96, just on $16 million in revenue, Amazon hires Joy Covey as CFO who plays a central role in The Everything Store. The company makes the decision and the board makes the decision that they wanted to prepare for an IPO and go public in 1997 which – So at this point, we are two years into the life of Amazon as a company, one year into it being a publicly available website. You’ve talked a little bit about the financial markets being open. But how did those discussions – I mean, the board was you, John Doerr, and Jeff. Did Jeff come to you and say, “Hey, I think we’re ready to go public?”…

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