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- Jeff Bezos on raising Amazon’s seed round: “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done”
Jeff Bezos on raising Amazon’s seed round: “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done”
“To raise the first $1 million of seed capital for Amazon, I sold 20% of the company at a $5 million valuation. I sold 20% of the company for a million dollars to 22 angel investors, roughly $50,000 each.”
Jeff recalls taking 60 meetings to get to those 22 angels who said yes, which means roughly 40 of the investors he pitched said no.
“And by the way, the 40 ‘no’s were hard-earned ‘no’s… They were multiple meetings, working really hard to get people to write that $50,000 check. And the whole enterprise could have been extinguished then.”
This was in 1995, and the first question Jeff would always get was, “What’s the Internet?”
So Jeff would patiently explain what the Internet was. He would also always tell them he thought there was a 70% chance they would lose their investment.
“In retrospect, I think that might have been a little naive, but I think it was true. In fact, if anything, I think was giving myself better than the real odds.”