It’s no secret that Amazon.com is dominating multiple aspects of our daily lives. We can possibly find out everything we need on their site and if you have Amazon Prime you just have to wait two days for free delivery. For our digital media we can read books on Kindle, listen to music with Alexa and watch movies and TV series on demand. This all started with an idea that exploded into a digital revolution. So, who is the man behind the trillion dollar company?
Childhood
Jeff grew up in a very loving and supportive family. His stepfather, Mike, was very resourceful and hardworking. His mother was very loving and supportive, and she was especially concerned about making sure her son got the best education possible. She put Jeff into a Montessori School. The idea behind this educational method is to allow a child to excel in their natural talents, so they choose what they want to learn at their own pace, instead of forcing every child to learn the same things at the same time. Jeff was extremely focused on his school work, even from a young age. After the allotted time in each subject was up, his teachers had a hard time getting him to move on to the next topic. In preschool, they had to pick him up while still sitting in his chair and move him just to break his concentration. Jeff Bezos spent his summer vacations living with his grandparents and helping them run their ranch in Texas. His grandparents own Edan airstream trailer, so they would go on long road trip vacations together as well. During these road trips, he would find excuses to do math problems on a scrap of paper, like their average gas mileage, and how much they were spending on groceries. Even though he helped around the ranch with the chores, he did not particularly enjoy the outdoors, and he preferred to watch TV and read books. At a very early age, Jeff Bezos was showing signs that he was a genius. His grandfather was also a very intelligent man, and he could see the potential in Jeff’s future. So he gave him some very valuable advice, which stuck with him for the rest of his life. Bezos explained, “It is harder to be kind than to be clever". Cleverness is a gift. Kindness is a choice, and choices can be hard. He spent the rest of his life reminding himself that no matter how much he accomplished, he would try to stay down-to-earth. He was competing in science fairs, reading science fiction novels, and watching episodes of Star Trek on TV. When he was just 10 years old, he found a teletype computer at his school. He and his friends found out that there was a Star Trek game pre-programmed into the system called Trek73, so he and his friends used the computer to play the game. This sparked his interest in computer programing, and it would carry on for the rest of his life.
Jeff Bezos started his first business in High School. He was disappointed by the quality of his town’s local summer camp where kids were just playing games outside most of the day and not really learning anything. So he founded a new camp called 'The Dream Institute'. They allowed kids from the fourth, fifth and sixth grade to attend, and focused on teaching children about important works of literature in a fun and exciting way. The business was a success, and many of these kids who were doing their summer reading would then go on to get better grades in school. Not surprisingly, he was the valedictorian of his High School class, and during his graduation speech, he said that he believed that one day, human beings would colonize space.
Job Life
After graduation, he attended Princeton University and earned a degree in computer science. His first job was at a startup called Fitel While working there, he was expected to fly between New York and London nearly every week to get this job done, which was costing the company a tremendous amount of money. He realized that this was not the most efficient way to run a business, and it got him thinking about all of the different things he would do more efficiently if he ran his own company one day. His next job was at Banker’s Trust, which gave him some experience in the financial industry. Next, he worked for an investment firm on Wall street called D. E. Shaw. He helped to develop software for trading stocks online. As the years went on, Jeff Bezos was staying on top of the news about the growth of the Internet. He realized that every single year, the number of people who were using the internet was increasing by 2,300%. Even though the World Wide Web had many naysayers, he knew that the internet wasn't just a passing fad, and it would become apart of people’s daily lives in the future. He knew early on to take advantage of this, and Bezos figured that if he could he could genuinely create an online business that would help people make their lives easier, it would last. His motto was, “Think about the customer, and then work from there.” Personal Life Before Jeff Bezos met his wife, MacKenzie, he said that he was looking for a “processed woman”, as he always appreciated how his own parents would work as a team to suit their circumstances. He was lucky to find her while he was still at his job working for D.E. Shaw. MacKenzie Tuttle was a fellow Princeton alumni who was applying to work for the firm. Since Jeff Bezos was the one in charge of hiring new candidates, he saw her resume, and even before meeting her, he knew that she was very intelligent and capable woman. When she arrived for the job interview, he felt cupid’s arrow strike him in the heart. Even though office romances are sometimes frowned upon, they fell in love. Even though he secretly admired her, he did not want to cross the line, so MacKenzie actually made the first move to ask him out for lunch. They were dating for just three months before they got engaged, and they got married in 1993.When Jeff Bezos turned 30 years old, they had been married for only a year.
Early stage of Amazon
He told his wife about his idea for an online bookstore, and that he wanted to quit his job in order to pursue it. They decided to leave New York City in 1994. Bezos chose to start his company in Seattle, because it is also the location of Microsoft, so there was a lot of talent in the tech industry living there for him to find employees. It’s also far cheaper to start a company there compared to New York or Silicon Valley. They now have several children together, and they built a rock solid foundation together long before Amazon.com ever existed. Once the company began to do well, Mackenzie was able to fulfill her dream of becoming a published author. Today, Jeff Bezos still puts family first. He says that he refuses to take any meetings before 10AM, because spending time with his family and have breakfast with his children before they go to school is far more important to him than anything else. The Beginning of Amazon When Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos first moved out to the west coast to start Amazon.com in 1994, and at that time, the website only sold used books. In his mind, Jeff Bezos imagine Once the bookstore with millions of titles, and he knew that would eventually be the end-goal. MacKenzie did the accounting, and he began building the website and sourcing inventory. In the beginning, they ran the company out of their garage. After receiving an order for a book, Jeff would then go to thrift stores and used book shops looking for the book that was requested, and then send it to the customer in the mail. If he could not find it, he would source it from somewhere else online, just to make sure the sale went through. This way, they were able to run the company without using very much physical space storing a library of books. When they were ready to hire a team to help them run the business out of their house, the staff of an Amazon.com was only 8 people. Since the company did not have very much money, he asked his employees to make desks out of old doors. Even to this day, the door desk is still a tradition in the Amazon.com offices. Before bringing the website live on the worldwide web, Bezos sent it to 300 of his friends, so that they could test it beforehand. When the team was getting ready to officially launch the site in 1995, they had set up the computer to ding every time that there was a sale. In the beginning, everyone would shout and cheer every time there was a new sale, but within just a few days, there were so many sales, that they grew tired of the noise and they had to turn it off. The website was so popular, they were getting business through word-of-mouth without paying a dime for press coverage. Jeff’s idea was working, and it was clear to the team that the company would become a success. The reason Amazon.com succeeded so quickly was because Bezos met the real needs of the people. It was the very first online book store, even two years before Barnes and Noble began selling their stock on the internet. Ever since then, Amazon continued to pioneer various aspects of incorporating the internet into people’s daily lives, and he says that for 7 years, there was no similar competition out there who were even thinking on the scale that he was.
IPO of Amazon
In 1997, Bezos wanted to take Amazon.com public. Thankfully, he still had connections on Wall street, so he knew exactly how to approach investors with a business plan. He fully admitted that he did not actually intend to make any profits for the first 5 years that the company was operating. Jeff Bezos gave stock options to all of his original employees, and this made them very motivated to make the company succeed. After a couple years, every single one of those 8 original employees had become multi-millionaires. After a while, Bezos wanted to sell far more than just books. He emailed 1,000 random customers asking what sort of items that would want to buy on the internet. Soon enough, he was getting replies of items in just about every category. He realized that he wanted to grow Amazon into a store that sold everything, and he began using the same method that he had with books; listing a product online, buying the item in person, and then shipping it to the customer. Of course, this only helped the company grow even more. But even after earning millions of dollars, Bezos continue to drive his beatup old Honda. He wanted to show his employees that he still stand core values of action and resources. Instead of spending that money on himself, he re-invested the money to make Amazon.com better. They bought out other competing online book retailers, and brought them into the fold. He also decided to give anyone in the United States the opportunity to sell on the Amazon.com platform as third-party sellers, which only made the platform stronger, because it expanded their inventory. Every decision Jeff Bezos made for the expanding business was with the future in mind. When he learned about e-books, he gave people the opportunity to self-publish their work online for the first time and earn an income for themselves. Next, he developed the Kindle e-reader to give people a place to read all of their e-books. When he knew digital streaming service became popular, he jumped on that bandwagon, too. The list goes on and on. Today, Amazon.com is one of the most massive corporations in the world, and they have dipped their toes into so many different industries at this point, it’s hard to keep track. Amazon has been criticized for putting independent bookstores out of business. Even major corporations like Borders Books could not compete. According to Amazon.com’s former manager, Mike Daisey, “(Amazon is) designed from the ground up to be a shark. It’s designed to dissolve and destroy other businesses by under cutting them”. However, Jeff Bezos argues that he should not be blamed for the downfall of these other businesses, because the future was coming no matter what, whether it was him, or someone else. Jeff Bezos says that whenever he makes a major business decision, he imagines himself at 80 years old, and if he would be proud of his actions looking back. If the answer is “yes”, he listens to his intuition, and goes for it. By listening to his heart, he has become one of the most successful people in the world. LeadershipAmazon.com has been so incredibly successful, and a lot of people attribute it to Jeff Bezos skills in leadership. He has a list of core values for Amazon, and he always abides by those rules himself, in order to set a good example for his employees. At the end of the Dot-Com bubble, the value of Amazon’s stock went from $113 per share all the way down to $6 per share. For many members of the original team, they lost millions of dollars in their stock portfolio, and this was enough to destroy the vast majority of those early internet businesses. One of the many reasons why Amazon survived was that Jeff Bezos wasn’t judging the business success on the stock price. He knew that people were still using the website, and that it was growing every day.
Customer care
As we mentioned before, Bezos always made his customers his number one priority. Whenever he received a very serious complaint, he would never try to reprimand his employees for making a mistake. Instead, he would forward a particularly troubling customer complaint to the managers of each department with a simple question mark in the subject line. According to former employees, getting one of these question mark-mails was terrifying, and they would quickly do everything they could to fix the problem immediately. When the issue was resolved, Bezos would simply reply with a smiley face. If he sees a bad experience with a customer, he used it as a case study to improve the company overall, and not just an individual experience.
Problem handling
Amazon is now available in 16 countries, so he has had to give up much of the power over those branches of the company, since he can’t be everywhere at once. Some countries are actually trying to fend off Amazon’s monopoly over certain industries. In France, for example, there is a law that no book store, whether it be online or in person, is allowed to discount a book more than 5% off the retail price, and they cannot give free shipping to entice buyers. This way, independent bookshops in France are still thriving. Only time will tell just how many nations will adopt Amazon.com in the future. To Infinity and Beyond by a stroke of genius, Jeff Bezos has managed to run Amazon.com with little to no profits, despite the fact that they are bringing in billions of dollars in revenue every year. This is because he is always thinking about the future, and trying to grow the business to keep pushing the envelope in what it is going to do next. Bezos then started private space company called Blue Origin. Just like he said during his High School graduation speech, he still believes that someday, it will be very normal for people to be live and working in space, and he wants to be on the forefront of the future. So now Bezos is the wealthiest person in history of world. Bezos also donates in charity and use money for good purpose.
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