But, you could buy a pizza

Amazon, the world in 1995, and things that are inevitable only in retrospect. Also, 7 other things worth your time.

Darn, missed an anniversary. Not a wedding anniversary, the date for that one is tattooed on my brain.

Instead: the 25th anniversary of the launch of Amazon, which went live for the first time in July 1995.

For that entire first year, the company did only about $500,000 in revenue (all from selling books, of course). But its early revenue growth was insane: $15.7 million in 1996 and $147.8 million in 1997.

Profit was another story. That took until 2001 or 2003, depending on whether you’re talking about a quarter or an entire year.

Anyway, I had this one bookmarked, because I think of Amazon now as the corporate version of an old aphorism, about how things that seem quite improbable at the time often seem inevitable in retrospect.

Back in the mid-1990s, if you can transport yourself there, it really was wildly improbable.

No matter what you think of Jeff Bezos and his company and how it changed the world, it took a special kind of vision to see what the world would look like in the future…