Why Amazon’s Success is Based on Dopamine

Guest author: Companies Talks

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that delivers pleasure to your brain. It’s often activated by a click… the click on “Buy Now”. And what is the source of this happiness? Let’s just call it “Amazon”.

Did you know that before it grew into the enterprise that we know today, Amazon started as a crazy adventure in an empty garage with just a few shelves and doors used as tables? In a virtual event hosted by Companies Talks and Mindspace in London, “The History of Amazon”, attendees heard from an actor performing as Jeff Bezos how Amazon really started.

5 Things you Didn’t Know About Amazon

With a vision to offer the customer the best solution at the best possible price, Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, managed to transform a simple online bookstore into a modern e-commerce empire. The history of Amazon is an incredible roller coaster of daunting failures and revolutionary ideas.

Here are some things you may not have known:

1. A humble beginning: Bezos started with just 10,000 dollars out of his own pocket (three years later Amazon would be worth 184 million dollars when listed on the stock market). Amazon’s first headquarters was an empty garage with just a few shelves in Seattle.
2. Abracadabra: initially, Bezos thought about calling his online bookstore “Cadabra”. But this name reminds too much of the word “cadaver”, so he decided to call it “Amazon”. But why “Amazon”? Because it starts with an A – therefore will be at the top of alphabetical lists. Another reason is that it’s inspired by the longest river in the world, reflecting his ambitions.
3. Even a genius can make mistakes: at the beginning, the Amazon store had a terrible bug – you could order a “negative number” of books (for example: minus one, minus two etc.), as if you were returning them. And since you had already left your credit card details, Amazon refunded you the corresponding sum – a sum you had not spent yet!
4. Zero profits: from 1995, and for the following 20 years, the profits of Amazon were… zero.
5. The keys for success: what were Bezos’s winning weapons that led him to success? Cognitive flexibility, work organization, and his obsession for the customer experience.

If today we can buy anything at any time, and receive it within 24 hours, we should thank the stubbornness of a man who believed in his dream and never gave up.

Learn more about the secrets of the web giants’ success with “Companies Talks”

Since 2017 Companies Talks has been collaborating with dozens of companies, providing training tools for both managers and employees.

They organize corporate training events that aim at empowering soft skills, such as people management, leadership, creativity, cognitive flexibility and much more, in an entertaining way. Through their digital thought-provoking monologues about the stories of the founders of the major dot coms in the world (such as Google, Whatsapp, Amazon, Airbnb, Netflix and Instagram), they stimulate reasoning and debate among spectators about working skills, entrepreneurship and business models.

The monologues are performed by professional actors. At the end of each event, they organize an engaging debriefing session to collect and share the opinions and thoughts of the participants.