Jeff Bezos, pronounced bay-zos, is the CEO of one of the internets most well known sites, Amazon.com. Jeff who started his career in finance, is an interesting character to follow, and a major player in the United States economy, as well as the global economy. His company over the past couple years has generated an enormous amount attention with its overarching participation in hundreds of existing markets and has become what Bezos originally set out to create, the “sell everything store.”
Beginning as an online book retailer, because Jeff saw books as a great commodity and something that held it’s value no matter who was selling it. A book is a book, regardless if you buy it at Barnes and Noble, or you purchase it online. Amazon has obviously come to offer a lot more than just books and now offers almost any tangible product you can think of, putting every large big box store on its heels. “Evolve or die,” is a principal by which Jeff operates, and it is not Amazon that is taking over, but rather the future is taking over, and Amazon is just positioning itself appropriately. with 1 day shipping, talk about drone delivery and the new dash buttons, Amazon is quickly outpacing the competition and creating the path of least resistance for consumers and ultimately winning business left and right.
At the dawn of the internet, and when people still speculated on its full adoption Bezos bet big, which has been a quality of many successful entrepreneurs, and went all in on the idea of Amazon, or what at that time was called Kadabra. Later becoming Amazon because Kadabra sounded too similar cadaver. Amazon’s name choice was also chosen because it began with the letter A, which was helpful because the internet originally organized website directories alphabetically, and it also represented the worlds largest river that was substantially bigger than any other river, which offered some intended symbolism.
As an individual Jeff shares a lot of similarities to other entrepreneurs we have discussed here in the past. He has an extreme dedication and relentless work ethic and was said to have a sleeping bag at his office position in the finance industry prior to Amazon. He like Elon Musk has brought this die hard mentality into his company and only wants to fill his company with those that share this same dedication. In the early days and even today there is an unspoken expectation that people are working 7 days a week. This is not an unusual quality of any of the big tech companies or popular companies coming out of silicon valley. The competition is stiff and it demands both brains and massive acceleration.
During the beginning of Amazon, Bezos was racing with other companies to establish long term presence on this thing called the internet. Companies were quickly coming to see the value, and the opportunity this online front was going to offer the world, and how integral it was going to become. Nobody was quite betting on it like Bezos was though. Leaving a high paying career on Wall Street, Bezos set out with his girlfriend Mackenzie to start one of the internets first billion dollar companies. Funding initially came from Jeff’s parents who were betting on him and his abilities with little understanding of the potential of this internet thing. Investment than cam in from large investors who took shares in Amazon that eventually came to pay dividends.
Jeff is characterized as focused, determined and intimidating, with an uncanny laugh that resembles some sort of animal mating call or power tool of some sort. The CEO of Amazon and their company in general is not overly outspoken and leaves much for people to speculate. However here is a great read on the Amazon CEO to get a better understanding of Jeff and Amazon which ironically enough is an affiliate link to Amazon, I think I forgot to mention they have the worlds largest affiliate program…go figure.