Amazon launched in 1994 as an online bookstore run out of a garage. Jeff Bezos reportedly chose books because they were a huge, standardized market easy to ship.

Amazon went nearly a decade after its 1997 IPO without turning an annual profit — Wall Street doubted it for years — before finally posting one in 2003.

Amazon started selling only books in 1994. Today its cloud arm, AWS, generates the majority of the company’s operating profit — retail is the storefront, but the cloud is the engine.

Amazon went public in 1997 at $18 a share, raising about $54 million. The company that Wall Street doubted for years is now worth well over a trillion dollars.