NEW YORK—Amazon.com Inc. has come a long way from selling books out of a Seattle garage.
The company had an inauspicious start in July 1995 at the dawn of the Web as an online bookseller. It narrowly escaped the dot-com bust of 2000 to reinvent online retailing. And eventually, it morphed into the global e-commerce powerhouse it is today with $89 billion in annual revenue.
Led by its 51-year-old founder, Jeff Bezos, the Seattle company’s strategy has long been to make big bets and expand into new areas. That has led to some misses, like the now shuttered fashionista site Endless.com that sold high-end handbags and shoes; some head-scratchers, like when it paid $970 million for video streaming site Twitch.tv a year ago; and some hits, like its money-minting Amazon Web Services cloud software.
