Jeff Bezos once revealed that before Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) ever existed, he had a candid conversation with his boss during a long walk in New York that could have stopped the company before it began.

Bezos, speaking in an interview with the Academy of Achievement in 2001, recalled going to his boss while working at a Wall Street firm to explain his plan to start an online bookstore.

The idea itself was not dismissed.

Instead, Bezos said his boss suggested they take a walk through Central Park — a walk that lasted nearly two hours.

“The conclusion of that was this,” Bezos said. “He said, ‘You know, this actually sounds like a really good idea to me, but it sounds like it would be a better idea for somebody who didn’t already have a good job.'”

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Bezos said his boss urged him to think about the decision for 48 hours before quitting, advice that forced him to step back and consider the long-term consequences.

At the time, Bezos had a stable career and stood to lose his annual bonus by leaving midyear. The final decision, he said, came down to what he later called a “regret minimization framework.”

“I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, ‘OK, now I’m looking back on my life,'” Bezos said. “I wanted to minimize the number of regrets I would have.”

Bezos said he knew he would not regret trying — even if the venture failed. The real risk, he explained, was never attempting it at all.

“I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried,” he said. “I knew that would haunt me every day.”

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His ex-wife, MacKenzie Scott, was fully supportive, Bezos added, despite the uncertainty of leaving a stable career to pursue what many viewed as a risky idea.

Bezos, once a computer engineer on Wall Street, founded Amazon on July 4, 1994, as an online bookstore.

Following the company’s initial public offering in 1997, Amazon’s stock skyrocketed nearly 40 times, pushing Bezos’ net worth past $12 billion. However, after the tech bubble burst, his holdings were worth under $2 billion by 2001.