Business person: Jeff Bezos - from bookstore to launching rockets

The “Business Person” heading tells “Megamind” readers about what stories and facts surround the most prominent IT entrepreneurs from all over the world, the value of companies running which exceeds any reasonable limits. We will not be limited only to the “new wave” of businessmen and we will also tell about those who are called the “old school”.

Today, close-up is Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, the owner and founder of the aerospace company Blue Origin and The Washington Post. According to last year's data, his fortune is estimated at $ 57 billion and he is considered one of the richest people in the world.
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Childhood, education, hobbies

Jeff Bezos was born on January 12, 1964 and grew up without his father until he was four, raised by his mother, Jackie Bezos. When Jeff was four, his mother married Cuban immigrant Mike Bezos, who adopted him.

The fact that he grew up with his adoptive father, Jeff found out only at the age of ten, but already then he didn’t worry much about it - the grades at school turned out to be more important. It is noteworthy that his genetic father did not know who his son had become and only found out about it after an interview with Brad Stone for the book The Everything Store.

Jeff Bezos demonstrated his ability to learn and think outside the box as early as his childhood - he made out his bed with a simple screwdriver. The reason was simple - he wanted himself an adult bed.

One of the main instigators for Bezos became his grandmother and grandfather, with whom he spent the summer at the ranch from four to sixteen years old. It was his grandfather who helped Bezos to fall in love with intellectual tasks. During one of his speeches in 2010, Jeff once said that his grandfather told him that "it is much easier to be smart than kind."

Jeff was also a fan of the Star Trek universe and even thought of calling Amazon with a reference to captain Jean-Luc Picard - MakeItSo.com. As a child, Bezos even told his teachers that the future of people was not on this planet and wanted to start building space corporations. It's funny, but now it is he who heads the Blue Origin aerospace company.

After working at McDonalds in the summer, Jeff launched the 10-day Dream Institute summer camp with his girlfriend. They took $ 600 from each child and managed to collect six interested people, and the Lord of the Rings was in the list of books for reading to all members of the camp.

Entrepreneurial experience

Jeff Bezos enrolled at Princeton College in Computer Science, graduating from which he refused to work at Intel and Bell Labs and joined the start-up team Fitel. After some time, he left Fitel and almost launched his own startup, along with Helmi Minor, who later founded CNET.



But Jeff chose to join the DE Shaw hedge fund, where he took the post of vice president in just four years. This work also affected the future life of the founder of Amazon - at work, he met his future wife, MacKenzie Tuttle, who was a research assistant at DE Shaw.

Amazon

The turning point in Jeff Bezos’s life was 1994 - it was then that he read an article about the growing popularity of the Internet, which for the year showed an increase of 2300%. This figure so stunned him that he immediately thought about ways to extract potential benefits from this area.

Trying to come up with a suitable project, he made a list of 20 product categories to sell something online and books became the most suitable choice.

“When you are 80, you won’t even wonder why you should quit and refuse the money bonus in the middle of a year working for a company on Wall Street. But when I thought about this and launching something revolutionary, I had no doubts left, ”recalled Jeff Bezos.

The head of Dewige Show at DE Shaw tried to persuade him to stay at the firm, but Jeff then clearly decided to try to launch his startup and fail, rather than try it.

Amazon was born that way — along with his wife, Jeff, went to Texas, borrowed a car from his father, and then headed to Seattle. At the new location, Jeff founded Amazon in the garage - a key place for many startups. However, most of the meetings within the question of the company Amazon.com were held in Barnes & Noble.

At first, Amazon.com had a tradition of ringing the bell when someone bought something from the store. Only a few weeks passed and this habit had to be abandoned - the breaks between calls to the bell almost disappeared, which hampered the work. In the first month after launch, Amazon.com sold books to people in 50 states and 45 different countries, and the customer base never stopped growing.

The public company became in 1997, and even after the dot-com crash, Amazon.com remained one of the few who remained afloat. Amazon shares continued to grow - at that time the company began selling all goods and services. The list even included cloud storage and cloud computing services — over the past year, Amazon Web Services generated almost $ 8 billion in revenue and continued to grow next year. In general, this direction was extremely promising, and it is in this segment that Amazon has the most significant growth.

Subsequently, Amazon tried to launch its own smartphone, which users perceived very coldly, but even after such a failure, the company did not stop the pace of development of new market segments. The company is still developing the Amazon Fire TV Stick in an attempt to enter the television market. It must be admitted that for the time being this direction is quite promising and Amazon has every chance of capturing a large share of it.

As with most other startup founders of the time, Bezos turned out to be extremely demanding of employees and could literally explode because of any mistake. Without unusual requirements and restrictions, too, was not done - in Amazon, presentations at Power Point were banned. He even became involved with a personal trainer to correct this trait of character. He didn’t give up all the principles and became known for his unwillingness to develop corporate culture and provide employees with additional benefits in the form of free meals, massage and a number of others.

The washington post

In August 2013, Bezos acquired The Washington Post for $ 250 million. In just a few years, the number of visitors to The Washington Post grew to 71.6 million unique users, overtaking The New York Times by this indicator.

To date, the publication occupies a leading position in the market - The Washington Post
during this time it has become one of the most reputable and sought after media. Jeff has several funny moments with this business. So, once he flew in a personal plane to pick up The Washington Post reporter, detained in Iran, back to the US.

Blue origin

The love of Star Trek led to the founding of Blue Origin, which was one of the first to be able to launch a reusable rocket. As of 2003, there were only 10 employees in the company, but in recent years, Bezos has been actively developing this area to successfully compete with SpaceX from Ilona Mask. Currently, the company has more than 600 employees, with a possible increase to 800 after the launch of new research centers in Texas.

Blue Origin plans to send first engineers to space in 2017, and Jeff, along with Blue Origin president Rob Myerson, can go on the first flight around 2018.

Until now, no one knows exactly how much of Jeff’s investment in Blue Origin, but analysts estimate this amount to be approximately $ 500 million.

The main rule of Bezos is not to stop experimenting to find new solutions without fear of any setbacks.

“Only with the help of experiments and bold new solutions, one can not be afraid that the company will lose its position in the market and become simply outdated,” said Jeff Bezos in an interview with Business Insider.

Hobbies and investments

With such a state, it is not surprising that Jeff Bezos is actively engaged in investing in projects of interest. In 1998, he became one of the earliest investors in Google, acquiring 3.3 million shares of the company, which are currently valued at $ 2.2 billion. True, he never shared information about whether he retained any shares after Google's initial public offering in 2004.

Bezos also invested $ 42 million in the project of underground clocks, which should last 10 thousand years. The project itself does not carry any scientific importance in comparison with other similar projects with this amount of investment.

Bezos's friends talk about his love of flying - in 2003, he almost died in an accident while controlling a helicopter at a test site in a single Texas backwater. But even this did not stop him, and so far Bezos continues to take a great interest in similar hobbies - apparently, in this he also adheres to the principle “you should always continue to experiment and try new things”.