Bezos, Jeff

1964–

Internet Entrepreneur

Jeff Bezos launched Internet mega-retailer http://Amazon.com in 1995. Amazon now has more name-brand recognition than Burger King, Wrigley's, or Barbie, according to Fortune magazine, and has customers in 150 countries. The company has made 38-year-old Bezos a multi-billionaire, and had industry-watchers proclaiming him an e-commerce visionary as recently as 1999. However, the rapid economic downturn of 2000 may have taken Bezos's hero status with it.

Bezos was born on January 12, 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. As a child, he had an insatiable curiosity, especially about outer space; before long, he was expressing an interest in space travel—not as an astronaut, but as a colonizing entrepreneur. After his father took a job in Miami as an Exxon engineer, Bezos graduated high school as valedictorian, delivering an address that stressed the importance of outer-space colonization. Later, he attended Princeton University, graduating with majors in electrical engineering and computer science.

Bezos' first job was at a financial-markets networking start-up called Fitel, which had been launched by two Columbia University professors. He left there to join D.E. Shaw & Co., a hedge-fund investment management firm. There he met his future wife Mackenzie, an aspiring novelist who was working at Shaw as a researcher.

While at Shaw, Bezos' job was to discover profit-making opportunities for the company, and it was there that he discovered the opportunity that he would parlay into Amazon. In 1994, while surfing the World Wide Web, he came upon a site that claimed to track the Internet's growth. It showed that the Web was growing by 2,300 percent a year. Bezos had a flash of inspiration, realizing that his own entrepreneurial future lay in building a company on the Internet.

His research indicated that his best chance for success lay in the book business. Books, he discovered, were perhaps the best-catalogued product in any industry; publishers had even put their inventory lists on CD-ROMs, which could easily be transferred to the Web. What's more, due to space constraints, real-world stores were unable to stock most of what was available. An online bookstore, he reasoned, would have no such restrictions, and could radicalize the way that people buy books. It could build a community of book-buyers. Bezos borrowed $300,000 and a used Chevy Blazer from his parents, and he and Mackenzie moved to Seattle, where one of the two biggest book wholesalers was located—and where there was a large community of 'Net-savvy people who could become his employees. Bezos got the http://Amazon.com site launched in July 1995. In 30 days, it had sold books to customers in all 50 states, and in 45 other countries. By early September, the company was pulling in $20,000 in sales per week.

Growth from that point was prodigious. Bezos quickly began adding product categories—first music and videos, later toys, electronics, software, home-improvement products, auctions, and an “online flea market” called “zShops”—partly to offset competition from other proliferating “e-tail” sites. Amazon, according to Bezos' vision, would compete by becoming the company that sold all things to all people all the time. By April 2001, Newsweek magazine was reporting that http://Amazon.com was raking in nearly $3 billion a year, and ranked it among the 50 top brands in the world.

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