Amazon (company) - Wikipedia

On July 5, 1994, Amazon.com was founded in Bellevue, Washington by Jeff Bezos. From the article:

"The company was founded as a result of what Jeff Bezos called his "regret minimization framework," which described his efforts to fend off any regrets for not participating sooner in the Internet business boom during that time.[15] In 1994, Bezos left his employment as vice-president of D. E. Shaw & Co., a Wall Street firm, and moved to Seattle, Washington. He began to work on a business plan[16] for what would eventually become Amazon.com.

On July 5, 1994, Bezos initially incorporated the company in Washington State with the name Cadabra, Inc.[17] Bezos changed the name to Amazon.com, Inc. a few months later, after a lawyer misheard its original name as "cadaver".[18] In September 1994, Bezos purchased the URL Relentless.com and briefly considered naming his online store Relentless, but friends told him the name sounded a bit sinister. The domain is still owned by Bezos and still redirects to the retailer.[19][20]

Bezos selected the name Amazon by looking through the dictionary; he settled on "Amazon" because it was a place that was "exotic and different", just as he had envisioned for his Internet enterprise. The Amazon River, he noted, was the biggest river in the world, and he planned to make his store the biggest bookstore in the world.[21] Bezos placed a premium on his head start in building a brand and told a reporter, "There's nothing about our model that can't be copied over time. But you know, McDonald's got copied. And it still built a huge, multibillion-dollar company. A lot of it comes down to the brand name. Brand names are more important online than they are in the physical world."[22] Additionally, a name that began with "A" was preferential due to the probability it would occur at the top of an alphabetized list.[21]

After reading a report about the future of the Internet that projected annual Web commerce growth at 2,300%, Bezos created a list of 20 products that could be marketed online. He narrowed the list to what he felt were the five most promising products, which included: compact discs, computer hardware, computer software, videos, and books. Bezos finally decided that his new business would sell books online, due to the large worldwide demand for literature, the low price points for books, along with the huge number of titles available in print.[23] Amazon was founded in the garage of Bezos' rented home in Bellevue, Washington."