On July 27, James Marcus sat down with Henry Blodget at the Housing Works Café in New York City for an extended conversation about Amazonia, e-commerce, and Internet fever. Blodget, of course, witnessed Amazon’s spectacular rise at very close quarters: covering the company for CIBC Oppenheimer in December 1998, he set the famous $400-per-share target, which the split-adjusted stock obligingly hit only two weeks later. But the former analyst, who now writes for Slate and other publications, also brings some welcome historical and economic context to the table. He began the exchange by explaining his own role in the story, and comparing the Internet Bubble to the speculative frenzy of the Roaring Twenties.

Henry Blodget: I began covering the Internet back in the Netscape days, around 1995. I picked up on Amazon in 1998—and for reasons that James goes into in the book, I probably will be forever linked to some degree with the company. I followed it all the way up and all the way down. By way of disclosure: I’ve owned the stock since, I believe, 1999 and continue to own it now. I should also say that I’m a character in the book. Sometimes I’m treated favorably, sometimes not so favorably, or so it seemed to me as I read it.

But I should also say that I think this book is far more important than just somebody’s experience at Amazon. What we really experienced—and what James went through—is an incredibly important period, both for the Internet and for the stock market in general. In 25 years, I think, people will look back on the Bubble of 1999 the same way we look back on 1929. It will seem like the same sort of historical moment.

Now, I’ve read a lot of the books about 1929. Very few of them are actually written from an honest perspective of what it looked like at the time. Everything is obvious in hindsight, of course. It’s easy to look back and say, oh, we were all such idiots, all these stupid things happened, and so forth. What’s much more interesting is to get into the meat of it: to see how it felt, how decisions were made, why they were made. And that comes through in this book very well. I think there is some hindsight, which we’ll talk about, but Amazonia really does convey the experience of the era.

From my perspective on Wall Street, obviously, we watched Amazon from the outside. You had this image of incredible experimentation, and hyper-growth, and this brilliant freak at the helm. You were never were quite sure if Jeff Bezos was going to go off on some tangent and blow the company up. One interesting discovery for me in reading the book was that Bezos was viewed the same way within the company—meaning that we weren’t totally misperceiving things on Wall Street.

Anyway, to begin the conversation, let me go back to my earlier point, that everything is obvious in hindsight. James, you were employee number 55, which is extraordinarily early in Amazon’s history. When you joined, what was your expectation, if any, of what the company could become? And was that expectation shared by your colleagues?

James Marcus: I have an oddly bifurcated response. On one hand, my immediate reason for joining was simply that somebody was offering me a job. It seemed to me that the company might well detonate and explode a year later, because e-commerce was so much in its infancy. It wasn’t that I thought e-commerce was a bad idea, or that nobody would buy books from the company. It seemed likely, however, that Amazon would be shoved out of the way as big players like Barnes & Noble entered the marketplace. So in that sense, my expectations were low. I thought, well, I’m getting a job at a very interesting operation, and I’ll just see what happens.

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