11 thinkers, books, and ideas connected to this field.
American technology and commerce company founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994 as an online bookstore that became the world's largest e-commerce company, the dominant cloud infrastructure provider, and a major media, AI, and logistics company.
Dutch online travel agency founded in 1996, acquired by Priceline in 2005, and now the world's largest accommodation booking platform with over 28 million listings.
American online travel platform founded as a division of Microsoft in 1996, spun out through IAC, now the world's largest online travel agency by revenue.
American entrepreneur who founded Amazon in 1994 in a garage — building it from an online bookstore to the world's largest e-commerce platform, AWS (cloud computing), Whole Foods, Washington Post, and Blue Origin — one of the most consequential businessmen in history.
American business executive who served as CEO of eBay from 1998 to 2008, growing it from 30 employees to 15,000, and later as CEO of Hewlett-Packard.
American digital payments company co-founded by Max Levchin and Peter Thiel as Confinity in 1998 — merged with Elon Musk's X.com in 2000 — which created the dominant internet payment platform and whose alumni (the PayPal Mafia) went on to found or fund Tesla, SpaceX, YouTube, LinkedIn, Yelp, Yammer, and more.
American online travel company founded in 1997, famous for its 'Name Your Own Price' model, which later acquired Booking.com in 2005 — making that acquisition the most value-creating deal in online travel history.
American technology executive and angel investor who sold Junglee to Amazon in 1998 and subsequently became one of Google's original four investors — one of the most consequential angel investments in history.
Tobi Lütke's Ottawa e-commerce platform — enabling merchants to build online stores — the dominant SMB e-commerce platform globally, with its merchant ecosystem being its core product.
German-Canadian entrepreneur who co-founded Shopify in 2004 — building it into the dominant e-commerce platform powering millions of businesses — known for his engineering background, radical internal transparency, and the Chaos Monkey culture that expects employees to challenge assumptions.
American e-commerce marketplace founded by Pierre Omidyar in 1995 that invented the online person-to-person auction model and briefly appeared to be winning the internet commerce race against Amazon.