What the early Amazon investors saw

Peeling back the curtains behind one of the greatest investments of all time

• Potential investors in early Amazon would have been easily dissuaded by their sky-high valuations

• Yet some prescient investors managed to look past the noise and discovered one of the best performing investments in contemporary stock market history

• What did they see? We’ll explore it here.

There are few investment success stories which capture the collective imagination as much as Amazon. Once billed as a nondescript online bookstore, it quickly stole the spotlight in the business community by performing the corporate equivalent of blitzkreig and penetrating new verticals with blinding speed - general e-commerce, Prime, cloud, tech hardware, logistics, groceries, pharmaceuticals, video… you name it, there’s an Amazon subsidiary for that. Now at the peak of society, Bezos’ mantras of ‘customer obsession’ and ‘your margin is my opportunity’ have become buzzwords in the business zeitgeist.

Just as Amazon’s meteoric share price performance made Bezos excessively wealthy, it has also made cou…