In 1994, a 30-year-old named Jeff Bezos was working at hedge fund D.E. Shaw when he had the idea that would become Amazon. Up until that point, the internet was mostly used by the government and academia. Bezos saw an opportunity in e-commerce.

Amazon.com officially debuted in 1995 — founded in Bezos’s Bellevue, Wash., garage — as a bookseller. Within two months, sales reached $20,000, and in May 1997, the company went public at $18 a share.

Amazon’s early financial statements portended a strategy it became well-known for — incurring substantial losses in the pursuit of pleasing the consumer. It took until 2001 for the company to produce a profit.

A lot of the stuff consumers probably take for granted as standard practice for online retail started with Amazon: email verification of orders, product reviews, free shipping. Part of Bezos’s vision is to be “obsessed with the customer” — and consumers, in turn, love Amazon’s prices and all-around convenience.

So far, Amazon has managed to dominate in nearly every sector of retail, and branched out into logistics, music, cloud services, grocery stores — it bought Whole Foods! — and producing Emmy-winning television series. And it doesn’t appear to be stopping there.

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