Jeff Bezos

Amazon.com

Entrepreneur and e-commerce pioneer Jeff Bezos was born, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Bezos had an early love of computers and studied computer science and electrical engineering at Princeton University. After graduation, he worked on Wall Street, and in 1990 became the youngest senior vice president at the investment firm D.E. Shaw. Four years later, he quit his lucrative job to open Amazon.com, a virtual bookstore that became one of the Internet’s biggest success stories.

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Jeff Bezos' Amazon.com is the world's largest internet retailer of any kind, reporting more than $61 billion in 2012 sales, up $13 billion from the previous year. A 40% surge in the price of the company's stock added $6.8 billion to Bezos' net worth over the past year.

The Seattle company continues to separate from the pack on service and speed, adding 20 new shipment hubs in 2012. It just announcedthe coming launch of Amazon Coins in May 2013, a virtual currency that can be used to buy Kindle Fire content. Bezos also continues to invest in side projects that fuel his adventurous side.

In March 2012, Bezos Expeditions discovered the lost engines from the Apollo 11 lunar mission on the ocean floor, and is planning an attempt to bring them to the surface. Bezos also funnels money into aerospace firm Blue Origin, a West Texas-based research and development outfit working to create a vertical take-off and landing rocket.

In the meantime, he's looking to add robots to his workforce: in 2012, Amazon bought robotics firm Kiva Systems for $775 million in hopes of speeding up its order fulfillment process.

Princeton grad Bezos once worked at hedge fund D.E. Shaw; he quit Wall Street before his 30th birthday to sell books online from his Seattle garage. He founded Amazon.com in 1994 and took it public three years later. Amazon didn't turn a profit until late 2001.

“We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.”Jeff Bezos

Jeff Bezos was born on January 12, 1964 in Albuquerque, New Mexico to a teenage mother, Jacklyn Gise Jorgensen, and his biological father Ted Jorgensen. Bezos’ parents were married less than a year, and when Bezos was four years old his mother married his step-father Mike Bezos, a Cuban immigrant.

As a child, Jeff Bezos showed an early interest in how things work, turning his parents’ garage into a laboratory and rigging electrical contraptions around his house. As a teenager, his family moved to Miami where he developed a love for computers and excelled in school, becoming the valedictorian of his class. In high school, he also started his first business, the Dream Institute, an educational summer camp for fourth, fifth and sixth graders.

Amazon.com

Bezos founded Amazon.com in 1994 after making a cross-country drive from New York to Seattle, writing up the Amazon business plan on the way. He initially set up the company in his garage. He had left his "well-paying job" at a New York City hedge fund when he "learned about the rapid growth in Internet use", which coincided with a "then-new U.S. Supreme Court ruling[that] online retailers don't have to collect sales taxes in states where they lack a physical presence"; he had headed to Washington because its relatively small population meant fewer of his future customers would have to pay sales tax.

Bezos pursued his interest in computers at Princeton University, where he graduated summa cum laude in 1986 with a degree in computer science and electrical engineering. After graduation, he found work at several firms on Wall Street including Fitel, Bankers Trust, and the investment firm D.E. Shaw where he met his wife Mackenzie and was named the youngest vice president in 1990.

While his career in finance was extremely lucrative, Bezos chose to make a risky move into the nascent world of e-commerce.

He quit his job in 1994, moved to Seattle and targeted the untapped potential of the Internet market by opening an online bookstore.

Two powerful Saturn V first-stage rocket engines that are believed to be part of the five of the Apollo 11 mission that has taken astronauts to the Moon have been recovered from the Atlantic in a Jeff Bezos-funded expedition.

Pioneering e-commerce

Bezos set up the office for his fledgling company in his garage where, along with a few employees, he began developing software. They expanded operations into a two-bedroom house, equipped with three Sun Microstations, and eventually developed a test site. After inviting 300 friends to beta test the site, Bezos opened Amazon.com, named after the meandering South American River, on July 16, 1995.

According to Forbes, Amazon's shares have "defied gravity" in 2011, jumping 55% and adding $6.5 billion to Bezos' net worth.

The initial success of the company was meteoric. With no press promotion, Amazon.com sold books across the United States and in 45 foreign countries within 30 days. In two months, sales reached $20,000 a week, growing faster than Bezos and his start-up team had envisioned.

Amazon.com went public in 1997 and many market analysts questioned whether the company could hold its own when traditional retailers launched their own e-commerce sites. Two years later, the start-up not only kept up, but also outpaced competitors, becoming an e-commerce leader.

Blue Origin

In 2000, Bezos founded Blue Origin, a human spaceflight startup company, partially as a result of his fascination with space travel, including an early interest in developing "space hotels, amusement parks and colonies for 2 million or 3 million people orbiting the Earth." The company was kept secret for a few years until it became publicly known only in 2006 when purchasing a sizable aggregation of land in west Texas for a launch and test facility.

Bezos continued to diversify Amazon’s offerings with the sale of CDs and videos in 1998, and later clothes, electronics, toys and more through major retail partnerships.

While many dot.coms of the early ‘90s went bust, Amazon flourished with yearly sales that jumped from $510,000 in 1995 to over $17 billion in 2011.

In 2007, Amazon.com released the Kindle, a handheld digital book reader that allows users to buy, download, read and store their book selections. That same year, Bezos also set his sights far, far, away, announcing his investment in Blue Origin,a Seattle-based aerospace company that is developing technologies to offer space travel to paying customers.

Recognition

He was named Time magazine's Person of the Year in 1999. In 2008, he was selected by U.S. News & World Report as one of America's best leaders. Bezos was awarded an honorary doctorate in Science and Technology from Carnegie Mellon University in 2008. In 2011, The Economist gave Bezos and Gregg Zehr an Innovation Award for the Amazon Kindle. In 2012, Bezos was named Businessperson of The Year by Fortune Magazine.

Bezos then moved Amazon into the tablet marketplace with the unveiling of the Kindle Fire in 2011. The following September, he announced the new Kindle Fire HD, the company's next generation tablet designed to give Apple's iPad a run for its money.

"We haven't built the best tablet at a certain price. We have built the best tablet at any price," Bezos said, according to ABC News.

By John Greathouse,

Forbes ,april 2013

Amazon’s Founder,Jeff Bezoshas had an incredible entrepreneurial career. He has gone from simply selling books online to offering consumers tens of thousands of products. Not satisfied with conquering the online retail world, Amazon then productized access to its infrastructure, ushering in the era of the public cloud. This innovation has eliminated billions of dollars of annual costs previously associated with creating and maintaining web-based businesses.

2014 will mark the 20th anniversary of Amazon’s founding. During the intervening 20-years, Jeff has offered business executives numerous valuable tips, including the following:

1.Establish A High Hiring Bar – You’re Creating An Enduring Culture

“I’d rather interview 50 people and not hire anyone than hire the wrong person.”

“Cultures aren’t so much planned as they evolve from that early set of people.”

The impact of each new hire during your startup’s early days is tremendous. A mis-hire at the outset of your company can irreversibly alter the trajectory of your corporate culture. If you hire sharks, you cannot expect them to act like dolphins.

2.Be Flexibly Stubborn

“We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details…. We don’t give up on things easily. Our third-party seller business is an example of that. It took us three tries to get the third-party seller business to work. We didn’t give up.”

“If you’re not stubborn, you’ll give up on experiments too soon. And if you’re not flexible, you’ll pound your head against the wall and you won’t see a different solution to a problem you’re trying to solve.”

This advice is easier said than done, as it is difficult to know when you should be flexible with your vision and when you should remain dogmatic. Serially successful entrepreneurs are typically indifferent as to the specific tactics they must employ to accomplish their fervently held strategic objectives. If your culture rewards those who seek the truth, your team will be prone to objectively identify tactical course corrections.

3.Obsess On Your Customers’ Experiences, Not Your Colleagues’Politics

“We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.”

“There are multiple ways to be externally focused that are very successful. You can be customer-focused or competitor-focused. Some people are internally focused, and if they reach critical mass, they can tip the whole company.”

As Jeff points out, hiring right-minded people who will reinforce the attributes of your corporate culture. If a critical mass of new hires enter your organization with a self-serving mindset, selfish behavior will become the norm and a de facto aspect of your company’s culture. By obsessing on serving your customers, you will create a culture in which employeesfeedeach other, rather thanfeed oneach other.

4.Periodically Pitch Your Organizational Chart

“The great thing about fact-based decisions is that they overrule the hierarchy. The most junior person in the company can win an argument with the most senior person with regard to a fact-based decision. For intuitive decisions, on the other hand, you have to rely on experienced executives who’ve honed their instincts.”

In the early days of a startup, the executive team must accept input from all levels of the organization, rather than be wedded to the artificial hierarchy of an organizational chart. It is not unusual for a growing business to completely retool its reporting structure several times before reaching maturity.

5. Know When To Throw Away The Rule Book

From the start, Amazon had an audacious goal – to sell virtually every book online. Before launching Amazon, Jeff consulted with several publishing experts, none of whom appreciated the Internet’s eventual ubiquity. They applied a rear-view mirror perspective to Jeff’s proposal and attempted to dissuade him from pursuing such an encompassing strategy. Their advice was to focus on best-selling books and a handful of popular genres – the same approach which had been successful for large retail booksellers.

“Every well-intentioned, high-judgment person we asked told us not to do it. We got some good advice, we ignored it, and it was a mistake. But that mistake turned out to be one of the best things that happened to the company.”

By offering an inventory which far surpassed anything else available at that time, Amazon endeared itself to its early users, who happily granted the company priceless word-of-mouth promotion. If Jeff and his team had launched a more prudent, scaled-back site, it is arguable they would have never achieved the critical mass that eventually led to the company’s widespread market acceptance.