Back to the Future

Bob Simon’s 1999 60 minutes interview with Jeff Bezos is a fascinating, inspirational and very informative throwback video of Amazon’s early days. It also showcases (slightly) part of what made Amazon special: their item-to-item collaborative filtering algorithm paired with the apriori association learning algorithm which they used in their recommendation engine. This is something we pretty much take for granted today but a revolutionary concept at the time.

Some of my favorite moments from the video.

Bezos talking about how he decided to leave Wall Street: “It’ll sound geeky to you but it was a regret minimization framework.” Seriously, dude? Total geek.

Bob asking the question I definitely would have asked if I was riding in that car with “Billionaire” Jeff Bezos: “What’s with the Honda?”

Funny but good question for Bezos: “... you collect half a Gigabyte, whatever that is, of information about your customers everyday, that is about 350 floppy disks worth of data. What do you do with that information?” Ha! Good question for Alexa.

A moment of Zen (as Jon Stewart would say): Bob states, in shocking disbelief, “A couple of geeks, who sketched out some software could destroy Sears Roebuck?” and Bruce responds, “That’s the beauty of technology. And the microprocessor. We’ve never seen anything like it.” Today, Sears is shuttering stores and Amazon is planning to build its second headquarters.

There are a lot of lessons in this video. A good video for budding entrepreneurs and aspiring data scientists.