Amazon Almost Went Bankrupt | The $1 Trillion Mistake That Became Its Biggest Weapon
May 16, 2026âąChannel
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Video Details
Published1 month ago
Duration23:08
Video IDeypest93zoA
Languageen-IN
CategoryEducation
PrivacyPublic
Made for KidsNo
Video TypeRegular Video
Performance Metrics
Views66.3K
Likes3.3K
Comments108
Engagement Rate5.11%
Likes per 100 views4.95
Comments per 1K views1.63
Video Tags
#thethinkschool#think school#think#thinkschool#ganeshprasad#think school case study#think school business#amazon case study#aws#amazon web services#jeff bezos#how amazon makes money#bezos api mandate#aws explained#amazon business case study#cloud computing#how aws started#amazon vs walmart#business case study#startup lessons
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VIDEO INTRODUCTION:
The year is 2000, and Amazon is on the verge of bankruptcy. By 2001, Amazon had burned nearly $3 billion. Its stock had collapsed 93% from $107 to $7. They had laid off 1,300 people, and Jeff Bezos had become a national punchline. [CLIP] Jay Leno mocking Bezos on The Tonight Show, 1999. Leno: âYou lost $12 million last year and you're doing great?â Bezos laughs awkwardly. âIt's new math, isn't it?â
Now before you judge, please understand, it was the .com bubble where every Tom, Dick, and Harry was raising a million dollars, everyone was selling something online, and in front of all these fragile companies was a legend named Walmart. Around the same time, while Amazon incurred a loss of $1.4 billion, Walmart made $5.38 billion in profits with $168 billion in revenue.
But you know what? While journalists were writing Amazon's obituary, while analysts were modeling its bankruptcy, while Walmart was preparing its execution â a small group of engineers inside Amazon were quietly working on something that had nothing to do with books, nothing to do with retail, nothing to do with anything Amazon was supposed to be. It was a side project born out of a random email, and on paper, it made absolutely no sense for a dying bookstore to be working on.
But accidentally, this idea is worth $1 trillion, and it makes more money than Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and Starbucks combined. And in 2025, while Walmart made $19 billion in profits, this side project of Amazon made $45 billion. This side project is now called Amazon Web Services. The question is: how does a side project at a dying company accidentally become a trillion-dollar idea? What actually happened inside Amazon that led to this discovery? And as a business, what are the lessons that we need to learn about the innovation culture of Amazon?
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Study Materials:
https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/amazon-outlives-lehmans-early-obituary/#:~:text=Amazon%20outlives%20Lehman%27s%20early%20obituary
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/aws/the-deceptively-simple-origins-of-aws
https://www.scribd.com/document/923419361/AWS-History
https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=36511
https://focusonrisksv.substack.com/p/amazon-inc-2001-shareholder-letter#:~:text=Accumulated%20Deficit%20%26%20Indebtedness%3A%20Acknowledged%20a%20substantial%20accumulated%20deficit%20(%242.86%20billion)%20and%20significant%20long%2Dterm%20debt%20(%242.16%20billion)%20as%20of%20December%2031%2C%202001.
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