Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has weathered crashes both financial and physical in the course of building his business into the largest retailer on the internet.
Born in New Mexico in 1964 and raised in Texas and Florida, Bezos showed a mechanical aptitude from a young age – rigging an electronic alarm to keep his siblings out of his room, and turning his parents’ garage into a workshop.
He attended Princeton University, originally intending to study physics, but eventually settling on computer science and electrical engineering.
After graduating university Bezos found employment on Wall Street, where firms were turning to computer science to study market trends. It was during his stint at investment firm D.E. Shaw where he met his wife Mackenzie.
While his career in finance was extremely lucrative, Bezos couldn’t look past the fact that use of the newly public internet was growing 2400% per year. After looking into successful mail order companies, Bezos realised the internet would make it possible to stock far larger catalogues than traditional companies.
He and Mackenzie drove from New York to their new base in Seattle – where both a large pool of computer talent and the largest book wholesaler in the US were based – and on the drive Bezos wrote up the business plan for what would become Amazon.
Like many other tech startups, Amazon’s first office was in the garage. And ironically, in the early days, many of Amazon's business meetings were conducted in the café at the local Barnes & Noble – a bookseller who would file a lawsuit against Amazon in 1997. (It was settled out of court.)
Amazon was incorporated in 1994 and began to trade in 1995. The initial business plan was unusual in that it did not expect to make a profit for several years – market share was the primary goal. In 1998 Amazon began to expand its offerings beyond books.
It was likely this unconventional business plan which saved Amazon when the dot.com bubble burst and large numbers of other retailers went under. Customers kept coming to the site and Amazon turned it’s first profit quarter in 2001.
In 2003 Bezos weathered another crash, this time of a helicopter he was a passenger in. In the wilds of Texas, the helicopter overturned on take-off and crashed into a creek. Bezos says that in the moments before the crash he thought “What a dumb way to die.”
After successfully not dying, it’s mostly been further successes for Bezos. Of particular note was the launch of the Kindle eReader in 2007, which has led Amazon to sell more eBooks than physical ones. And Amazon Web Services launched in 2006, giving Amazon an early lead in the area of cloud computing.
In 2013 Bezos personally purchased the Washington Post newspaper for US$250 million, and he has invested in a number of successful tech companies including Airbnb, Twitter, Uber, and he was one of the early investors in Google.
Despite his success, Bezos remains ambitious. In 2000 he founded Blue Origin, a spaceflight company. This stayed under wraps for a number of years and only last year did one of Blue Origin’s vehicles successfully reach space. Still, Bezos has said it is one of his long-term goals to see nearly all heavy industry manufacturing facilities located in space.
Five Quotes on Business from Jeff Bezos
- “If you build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.”
- “What is dangerous is not to evolve.”
- “I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not trying.”
- “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.”
- “Work hard, have fun and make history.”