Jeff Bezos, space warrior

JEFFREY BEZOS, 50, has epitomised exploration in several businesses—most famously in e-commerce with Amazon.com. He created the online shopping blueprint in 1994 and then built it into a $75 billion (Rs 4.6 lakh crore) retail giant. His other businesses include cloud services (Amazon Web Services) in 2006 and digital book readers (Kindle) in late 2007. Most recently, Bezos has gone beyond the Kindle Fire line of touchscreen tablets (launched in 2011) and introduced the Fire phone, which is the first smartphone from Amazon’s stable; and a TV set-top box called Fire TV, and the Fire TV Stick, à la Google Chromecast and Roku Streaming Stick. With Amazon Studios coming up with new shows and games, the content is bound to get a push through the company’s media streaming platforms.

It’s Bezos’s audacity, his ability to draw huge risk capital, and his near-perfect execution that transformed the industries he entered. In 2000 he made a foray into the ultimate frontier—commercial space travel—with Blue Origin. And the organisation has a motto that describes his legacy: Gradatim Ferociter (step by step, ferociously). Bezos started the project at a time when online ventures were under fire from investors after the dotcom bust. Just like other Internet businesses, Amazon also faced severe criticism for its losses. But for its founder, it was a time for discovery. “I just knew it would take a long time, so I better get started,” he says about foraying into space travel. The venture pits him against SpaceX founder Elon Musk (who has built diverse businesses, such as PayPal and Tesla Motors) and Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson.

Blue Origin’s mission is to lower the cost and risk of space travel. It developed and launched a vertical take-off and vertical-landing vehicle called Goddard in November 2006 under the New Shepard programme, which aims to take space travellers on suborbital journeys. In September 2014, Bezos and the launch provider, United Launch Alliance, unveiled plans to develop Blue Origin’s new BE-4 liquid rocket engine.

While India was celebrating the success of ISRO’s Mars mission, Mangalyaan, in September, Bezos was in Bangalore. In a freewheeling chat, he talked about exploration, his love for space, and how the space travel business is playing out. Edited excerpts:

You spent time at a Texas ranch with your grandfather Lawrence Preston Gise. Did it impact your life?
It did, especially when it came to my passion for space. You don’t choose your passions—your passions choose you. I fell in love with space when I was 5 years old and watched Neil Armstrong step onto the moon. After that, I started reading a lot of science fiction and got intrigued. My grandfather had a huge influence on me. At that time he had left his job at the U.S. Department of Defense and became a rancher. He would make veterinary needles, do his own veterinary work, and fix his own windmills. It’s all very natural in a rural area where you have to do everything yourself.

But I learnt a lot about self-reliance and resourcefulness. By then, I was passionately in love with space. I entered a NASA contest and wrote a paper titled: The Effect of Zero Gravity on the Ageing Rate of the Common Housefly. The winner got to run his or her experiment on board a space shuttle. I didn’t win but was one of the finalists. So we were taken to NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. It was fun and inspiring.

You ventured into space with Blue Origin in 2000 during the dotcom bust. Was it tough?
It started small, [and has] gotten bigger over time … now it is about 350-people strong. We have test-flown three different vehicles and are now getting close to flying our fourth development vehicle. Hopefully, it’ll be our last and we’ll be ready for commercial operations.

How do you see the space travel market building up?
Ask me after it’s done [laughs]. I think there’s potential to turn it into a real market over time. My long-term vision is millions of people living and working in space. There are only two problems with space travel: It is too expensive and it is too dangerous. Blue Origin’s mission is to solve those two problems. We are going to do it one step at a time.

As for our project, I am proud of the team. The technologies we have built are incredible, but the people—the rocket scientists—are doing a great job.

What’s turned space travel into a business opportunity? Is it because the U.S. government has tightened NASA budgets?
We are essentially focussed on taking people to space and not necessarily working for NASA. But what has made this business possible is that all the computation required now is extremely low cost. What we are able to do at Blue Origin with 350 people couldn’t have been done by a thousand people 20 or even 10 years ago. Now you can do computational fluid dynamics, say, simulate the combusting process. You can simulate what’s happening inside a rocket thrust chamber.

We can do these experiments on a computer and then build the hardware. By the way, all that runs on Amazon Web Services [laughs]. Of course, those extremely sophisticated computer codes that run the simulations were developed and validated by NASA over many decades. Blue Origin can do these things only because we stand on the shoulders of all those people who came before us.

How intuitive was the decision to venture into space travel?
I just knew it would take a long time, so I better get started.

Are you exploring digital media in the same way, considering you bought the Washington Post and invested in Business Insider?
I wouldn’t draw a thread through these things. They are separate decisions. I bought the Post because I was friends with Donald E. Graham [its owner] for 14 or 15 years. When he wanted to sell it, he called me because we’re friends. I thought there’s a good digital future for the Post. Perhaps it can be turned into a global publication, thanks to the Internet’s distribution capacity. I feel it is an important institution as a paper of record for the capital city of the U.S.

From e-commerce to space tourism to digital video production, exploration has been vital for you. Isn’t it?
You have to explore—you can’t do it from an ivory tower. You have to actually go out on the ground and do experiments. A lot of them will fail, but the winners can be much bigger than the failures combined. At Amazon, we have a culture that is very supportive of trying things. It is more fun to be an explorer.

When did you look at India as a market for Amazon to explore?
We have been in India for 10 years as a place for software engineering and other operations. We opened offices in Chennai and Hyderabad, employing thousands of people and keenly watching the e-commerce market here. Even 10 years ago, we were discussing when we should start Amazon’s local operations. In 2012 we opened Junglee [a comparison shopping site] to enter and organise “selection”, the first step to any buying process. Mobile explosion is another reason why we have so much momentum here. It’s still very early but the mobile factor could be especially important in India.

While Rocket Internet’s e-commerce strategy is to replicate and grow fast, would you say Amazon likes to study the terrain carefully before building its business?
No, we don’t have to know that something will work. Internally, I tell people exactly this thing: It’s okay if something doesn’t work. I want us to try things. If they work, it will be of meaningful scale. If you asked me a year ago, I would have said Amazon India was an experiment. Today I will say it is working: We have the results. India is the fastest-growing geography we’ve ever launched in. But we didn’t do a set of trials and then launch. The team has been unbelievably sophisticated, figuring out ways to help small and medium enterprises access the digital economy. It is an iterative process.