When Jeff Bezos launched Amazon (AMZN) in 1995, there was an already-existing powerful infrastructure in place that was vital to the internet retailer’s success. Without a framework that already had payment technologies and delivery systems, he likely couldn’t have gotten Amazon off the ground, as he explained to Walter Isaacson at Vanity Fair’s New Establishment Summit in San Francisco on Thursday.
And it’s this kind of infrastructure that Bezos is trying to develop with his Blue Origin project: an internet-type platform for space.
Bezos’s space project may seem like a Bond villain obsession at first, similar to billionaire attempts to control mortality, society and government, freedom of the press and other uncontrollable things. However, Bezos painted Blue Origin in a more entrepreneurial light. “What I want to achieve with Blue Origin is to build the heavy lifting infrastructure that allows for the kind of dynamic entrepreneurial explosion of thousands of companies in space that I have witnessed in the past 21 years on the internet,” he told Isaacson.
Connecting that with his own experiences at Amazon, Bezos detailed all the existing platforms the retailer was able to harness to make its vision a reality when it first launched, standing on the shoulders of his technological predecessors, so to speak.
“We were sitting on a bunch of heavy lifting infrastructure,” he said. “For example, there was already a giant logistics network—the US Postal Service, UPS, and Fedex. That would have been hundreds of billions of dollars of capital you would have had to have laid out if you had to build a logistics network. We didn’t have to do that, that heavy lifting was already done. There was already a payment system, we didn’t have to do that, it was called the credit card and it had been initially put in place for travelers.”
In Bezos’s mind, everyone stands on shoulders. “The internet itself was sitting on top of the long distance phone network,” he said. “Again, tens, hundreds of millions of dollars worth of capital.”
Amazon’s big idea, Bezos said, was simply synthesizing all these established platforms together in an inventive way. “That’s one lens through which you can view the founding of Amazon.com.”
But for space, another potential area for expansion, there aren’t any accessible platforms yet, and the barrier for entry has only just come down from the governmental level to the level of extreme tycoon. “On the internet today, two kids in their dorm room can reinvent an industry,” said Bezos. “Two kids in a dorm room can’t do anything interesting in space.”
To address that, Bezos’s idea is to take his “Amazon winnings” and do the heavy lifting for the next big thing—a thing he can’t put into words. “Nobody in 1995 predicted Snapchat. I can’t predict for you what amazing entrepreneurs will do in space, but I know if I can give them low cost access to space some brilliant 22-year-old is going to figure it out.”
Ethan Wolff-Mann is a writer at Yahoo Finance focusing on consumerism, tech, and personal finance. Follow him on Twitter @ewolffmann.
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