Jeff Bezos is stepping down as Amazon's CEO. A video of a young Bezos from 1997 shows why he decided to build his empire on books.

Bezos said books provided greater choice than any other product category.
The video provides insight into how Bezos first built his retail empire.
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Jeff Bezos is stepping back as CEO of Amazon , with executive Andy Jassy poised to take over in Q3 2021. The news is momentous, and in his time at Amazon, Bezos has molded both the tech and retail industries.

An early video of Bezos shows how he built the first bricks of his Amazon empire.

The video went viral on Twitter in 2019 when analyst Brian Roemmele posted it, garnering 1.2 million views at the time. It is from the Special Libraries Conference in June 1997, three years after Bezos founded Amazon.

The video provides a direct insight into how Bezos, who was the world's richest person before being overtaken by Tesla CEO Elon Musk in January , went about building his retail empire from scratch . It also shows how well he understood the internet, and the importance of giving customers exactly what they want.

At the time of the video, Amazon would have been a newly public company. It went public in May 1997 at $18 a share. Its shares are now worth $3,380.

The video opens with a young - and distinctly pre-swole - Bezos explaining who he is.

Asked by the interviewer where he got the idea for Amazon.com, Bezos responded:

"Three years ago I was in New York City working for a quantitative hedge fund when I came across the startling statistic the web usage was growing at 2,300% a year, so I decided I would try and find a business plan that made sense in the context of that growth, and I picked books as the first best product to sell online."

Bezos chose to start Amazon with books because of the nearly infinite selection

Bezos explained why he settled on selling books as the first step in what would eventually become his online shopping empire.

"I picked books as the first best product to sell online, making a list of like 20 different products that you might be able to sell," he said.

"Books were great as the first best because books are incredibly unusual in one respect, that is that there are more items in the book category than there are items in any other category by far."

There were more books than CDs, he argued.

"Music is number two - there are about 200,000 active music CDs at any given time," he said.

"But in the book space there are over 3 million different books worldwide active in print at any given time across all languages, more than 1.5 million in English alone," he added.

"So when you have that many items you can literally build a store online that couldn't exist any other way."

Later in the interview, Bezos also mentioned a phrase that has since become a motto for him and for Amazon. "What's really incredible about this is that this is day one - this is the very beginning," he said.

Twenty-four years later Amazon warehouses bear signs saying "It's still day one."

The Amazon founder concluded the interview by saying: "I think a millennia from now, people will look back and say, 'Wow, the late 20th century was really a great time to be alive on this planet."

It certainly was for Bezos, whose net worth at time of writing is $197 billion.