The host of 60 minutes struggled to contain his incredulity. Could an online bookseller, with an office located next to a porn shop, really destroy Sears Roebuck, the second biggest retailer at the time, he mused. This TV program was aired over 20 years ago in 1999. Today, Sears is virtually gone, and in its place is Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN). The mastermind behind the online retailer is Jeff Bezos, its founder and largest shareholder. As a shareholder since 2010, I have picked up 10 lessons from Amazon’s rise from its roots as an online bookseller to a US$1.8 trillion dollar behemoth today. 1. From Earth’s biggest bookstore …  Amid the internet boom in the 1990s, Bezos’s initial idea was distilled into one key criteria: “Pick a product category where you can substantially improve the customer experience … that could only be done on the web” At the time, there were over 1.5 million English books in print....