Twenty years ago, most of the world still thought of Jeff Bezos as "the book guy."
It’s hard to wrap your head around that now. Today, he’s the guy with the 400-foot yacht and the rocket ships, but in 2006, the narrative was way different. Wall Street was actually kind of annoyed with him. They wanted profits, and Bezos? He was busy lighting money on fire to build things that didn't seem to make any sense.
If you look back at jeff bezos 20 years ago, you’ll see a man who was quietly pivoting from being a retailer to building the actual plumbing of the internet. Honestly, 2006 was the year the "Everything Store" evolved into the "Everything Company," and almost nobody noticed it happening in real-time.
The Year the Cloud Was Born (And Nobody Cared)
In March 2006, Amazon launched something called S3. Short for Simple Storage Service.
It sounds boring, right? It was. At the time, it was just a way for developers to store data on Amazon’s servers for a few cents. Then, a few months later, they dropped EC2, which let people rent computing power. This was the birth of Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Wall Street hated it.
Analysts were basically like, "Why is a bookstore trying to rent out server space?" Amazon's stock actually took a massive hit that year. In July 2006, the stock price tumbled because Bezos was spending so much on "technology and content" that profits were shrinking. People thought he had lost his mind.
They didn't realize he was building a money-printing machine. Today, AWS is the reason Amazon can afford to do basically everything else. It was a massive gamble that paid off, but back then, it just looked like a weird side project.
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Blue Origin and the "Goddard" Launch
While he was busy reinventing the internet, Bezos was also playing with rockets in the Texas desert.
A lot of people think the space race started recently, but jeff bezos 20 years ago was already testing hardware. In November 2006, Blue Origin launched its first test vehicle, called Goddard. It wasn't exactly a Moon landing. It reached an altitude of about 285 feet.
Yeah, you read that right. Feet. Not miles.
It was a tiny hop. But it proved he was serious about vertical takeoff and landing. While Elon Musk was struggling to get SpaceX’s Falcon 1 to reach orbit (it had its first failed launch in 2006, too), Bezos was taking the "slow is smooth, smooth is fast" approach. He even wrote a rare blog post about it, saying they were working "methodically."
He wasn't in a rush. He had the Amazon money to back him up.
Amazon Prime’s "Awkward Teenage Years"
You’ve probably had Prime for so long you can't remember life without it. But in 2006, Prime was only a year old.
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It cost $79. People thought it was a scam or a mistake. "Why would I pay $79 upfront just for shipping?" was the common refrain. Bezos knew that once you paid that fee, you’d feel "guilty" if you didn't buy everything from Amazon to get your money's worth.
It worked.
Membership more than doubled in 2006. To make it even more attractive, he launched Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA) that same year. Suddenly, small businesses could store their stuff in Amazon’s warehouses and have it delivered via Prime. This was the moment Amazon stopped being a store and started being a logistics platform.
He also launched something called "Amazon Unbox" in 2006. It was a clunky video download service that worked with TiVo. It was terrible, honestly. But it was the literal DNA of what would become Prime Video.
What the 2006 Shareholder Letter Revealed
If you want to understand the brain of Bezos, you have to read his 2006 letter to shareholders. He talked about "planting seeds."
He used this metaphor of "well-rooted young trees" versus "tiny seeds." He admitted that new businesses—like the cloud or international expansion in China—wouldn't be meaningful to the company’s bottom line for three to seven years.
He was asking for patience.
Most CEOs have to worry about the next 90 days. Bezos was looking at the next decade. He told investors that if they wanted quick wins, they should probably buy a different stock. That kind of transparency is rare. It’s also why he was able to survive the 2006 stock dip—he had already warned everyone that he was going to spend their money on "seeds."
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Life Lessons from 2006 Bezos
Looking at the moves made by jeff bezos 20 years ago, there are a few things we can actually use in our own lives or businesses:
- Ignore the "Huh?" factor: When you do something new, people will be confused. If AWS hadn't been met with skepticism, it probably wouldn't have been a true innovation.
- Bet on the plumbing: Everyone wants to build the "app," but Bezos built the infrastructure. Being the person who provides the tools is often more profitable than being the person using them.
- Accept the 7-year rule: Bezos famously said that if you're willing to wait seven years, you're competing against almost no one, because most people want results in two years.
- Frugality vs. Investment: He still used those famous "door desks" (desks made out of literal doors) even when the company was worth billions. He didn't care about looking cool; he cared about where the capital was going.
If you're trying to build something long-term, take a page out of the 2006 playbook. Start by identifying the "seeds" in your own career or business that might not pay off this year, but could be "billion-dollar trees" in a decade. Focus on one high-leverage project—like learning a complex skill or building a proprietary system—that others are too impatient to touch.