Great Tech Entrepreneurs:
Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos[1]
(born January 12, 1964) is an American technology entrepreneur, investor, and
philanthropist. He is the founder of Amazon[2]
which became the world's largest online shopping retailer. An Internet merchant
of books and a wide variety of products and services, most recently video streaming and
audio streaming, Amazon became the world's largest internet sales website on
the World Wide Web. His mother divorced his
biological father and married Miguel Bezos, a Cuban immigrant and petroleum
engineer, who adopted Jeff. He graduated from Princeton University Suma Cum
Laude, with degrees in electrical engineering and computer science. He took a
job at DE Shaw, a hedge fund, but he was interested in computer programming. He
noticed that the Internet was the NeXT big thing. He noticed there was not a
comprehensive catalog for books, and he quit his Wall Street job to create one
of the world's first Online bookstores. He had a unique profile, since he had
both a finance and business guy. His first investor was none other than his
father, who invested not on the company but on his son.
Bezos and his wife
established themselves in Washington State, and hired two programmers to code. In
1995, Amazon was launched. The goal was to establish the Amazon Brand and grow
the overall business in the E-Commerce segment. As always, earning took time as
the capital was reinvested in the business to expand at a fast pace. On May
1997, Amazon went public. The business expanded into a full E-Commerce business
including grocery, healthcare, cell phone plans, etc. The dot.com bubble
slumped the price of the stock, but in 2002 Bezos bold strategies paid off and
Amazon started to bring in a profit.
In 2007, Amazon
released the Kindle[3], a
device that enabled users to browse, buy, download and read e-books, newspapers, magazines and
other digital media via wireless
networking to the Kindle Store,
a total success. In 2009, Amazon buys Zappos[4]
an online shoe and clothing shop in an amazing 1.2 billion USD transaction.
However, in January 2010 Apple launched the iPad, a serious competition for the
Kindle. Forced to change their business model, Amazon saw an opportunity by
empowering authors to self-publish. In 2012, Amazon stepped into the
video-streaming industry going head to heads against Netflix. Jeff Bezos is
today the 2nd richest person in the world, with a Net worth of 20 billion USD.
Amazon is the fastest company ever to reach 100 billion USD in sales. Can you
imagine how a what started as a simple book store turned into one of the most
lucrative companies of all times? Jeff Bezos and Amazon clearly show us the
importance of building a business and a brand AROUND the initial concept, which
was simply selling books online.
Cristian Bøhnsdalen
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