Jeff Bezos' risky bet (2006)
nbcnews.com
nbcnews.com
Some plans succeed, while others fail. It’s a numbers game.
Invest in every half-decent Bezos you find, and one of them will likely make you a multimillionaire in a decade or two.
Bezos is literally a one-in-million entrepreneur. Like you say, it's a numbers game. The vast majority of entrepreneurs fail (especially startup, "hockey-stick growth"-type entrepreneurs).
But you seem to be holding analysts to a much higher standard. Yes, lots and lots of analysts are wrong about the future, but a few of them are right. I'd probably bet that analysts are more right than entrepreneurs are, simply due to the fact that it's easier to be right about generalities than to do everything necessary it takes to be a successful entrepreneur.
That's besides the point. The critical aspect is that Amazon was tapping into a market that Wall Street analysis failed to even understand existed, even though it was there staring at them and poking them in the eye.
It's hard to even conceive how, in the middle of the dot-com boom, market analysis systematically failed to even identify there was a market for cloud infrastructure.
It's like during the gold rush failing to realize there's a market for pickaxes.
It's very easy for internet randos to dismiss Amazon's strategy as one-in-a-million bets and something no one would ever conceive. Except this was exactly the opposite. Amazon was sitting on top of a huge compute infrastructure, which they had to build themselves from scratch, and which the company was financing as a purely operational expense. Any business analyst worth it's name would ask "how can we turn this into a revenue stream?" If they looked outside the figurative window, they would see lines of CTOs of dotcom startups imploring everyone for renting any semblance of compute infrastructure to get their startup off the ground. You do not need to be a genius to put two and two together.
> But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.