Remember when Amazon only sold books?

When Jeff Bezos first launched Amazon.com in 1994, he gave himself a 30% chance of success -- slightly better than the 1 in 10 odds for Internet start-ups. That's actually a very liberating expectation, expecting to fail," he said to Time magazine when it named him Person of the Year in 2000. By then, sales had ticked past $1 billion, but the company had yet to turn a profit. Some analysts remained skeptical that Bezos could deliver on his plan to sell everything and anything. But two decades after its launch, Amazon has conquered online retail, racking up $136 billion in sales in 2016.