In early 1997, Amazon was a three-year-old online bookstore. It was barely profitable. It was burning cash. And most people thought it was doomed. Jeff Bezos flew to Boston to give a presentation at Harvard Business School. He spoke to a class called Managing the Marketspace—a course focused on the future of online commerce. Bezos presented Amazon's model: an everything store that would start with books and expand into every category imaginable. Then something unusual happened. After his present