Video: Jeff Bezos: After the gold rush, there’s innovation ahead

The dot-com boom-and-bust is often compared to the 1849 Gold Rush, and Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos offers historical evidence showing how similar they were: from the riches made by pioneers to the media hype that attracted luckless speculators. But a better analogy can be found in the early days of the electric industry, he says. In the late 1800s, the U.S. was first wired to support lightbulbs; the following century saw a long procession of new appliances, life-changing advances, and of course some amusing failures. His conclusion in 2003: “I believe there’s more innovation ahead of us than behind us.”

Who is Jeff Bezos?

Jeff Bezos didn’t invent online shopping, but he almost single-handedly turned it into a multi-billion-dollar enterprise. His Amazon.com began as a bookstore in 1994, and quickly expanded into dozens of product categories, forcing the world’s biggest retailers to rethink their business models, and ultimately changing the way people shop. It now sells more than $8 billion a year of goods, profitably, and its technology will influence the changes to business and media that will come next.