But it was Geoff's introduction to Vinod Khosla, who ultimately funded the company along with Geoff, that really made the difference. Vinod interrupted the demo and said, "Can your technology scale? Can it search a big database?" And we said, "That's an interesting question. Nobody's asked us before." We liked the fact that he d

When the 1999 holiday season ended, employees and executives of Amazon could finally take a breather. Sales were up 95 percent over the previous year, and the company had attracted three million new customers, exceeding twenty million registered accounts. Jeff Bezos was named Time’s Person of the Year, one of the youngest ever, and credited as “the

The company had leased the building two months earlier, outgrowing a space above an ice-cream parlor in downtown Palo Alto. Two months before that, I’d placed my biggest bet in nineteen years as a venture capitalist, an $11.8 million wager for 12 percent of a start-up founded by a pair of Stanford grad school dropouts. I joined Google’s board. I wa

Sometimes I wasn’t sure what motivated John. It certainly wasn’t money. To most investors, the prospect of a quick sellout to IBM would be irresistible. But for John, investing in high technology was a calling, and monetary reward was the byproduct of a successful mission. The higher goal was to create something enduring, a growing enterprise that

The Entrepreneur is easy to recognize when encountered. This is the person who is afflicted by a monomaniacal fever, who cannot not be an entrepreneur. There are others, though, who do not fit the template, such as Louis Borders, who had left the game, or thought he had, until he was hit with a singular inspiration and could not not test the Big Id