The founder of Amazon.com had childhood dreams of becoming a cowboy or astronaut. Instead, he unleashed an internet trading phenomenon on the world. In 1994, Bezos read that the internet was growing by 2,300 per cent a year and knew he had to find a way in. With money borrowed from friends and family, Bezos built an online retail empire in about five years and revolutionized the way the world shops. As well as books, music, and DVDs, Amazon now sells a vast range of products, and is the world's biggest online retailer. The mission is “Our mission is to be Earth's most customer-centric company.” (Zaczkiewicz 55)
Bezos knew there was a huge amount of money to be made on the internet but was initially unsure what type of business would work best. He researched the mail-order industry and decided on books, believing that the millions of titles in print offered enormous potential for sales. On 6 July 1995, Bezos launched Amazon.com, with financial support from family and friends. The company operated out of the garage at his home in suburban Seattle, Washington.
Discussion
The business was a runaway success from day one. “It was obvious that we were onto something much bigger than we ever dared to hope,” says Bezos. By the end of 1999, Amazon.com was a multibillion-dollar corporation selling 3.5 million titles via its pioneering website. Amazon had fundamentally changed shopping and was a role model for a new generation of e-commerce whiz-kids worldwide. Then came the dotcom share crash. Bezos says he went from “internet poster boy to internet piñata.” In 2000, Amazon - still investing heavily in infrastructure - lost $1.4 billion. While other online businesses were bankrupted in the crash, Bezos held on by putting in place dramatic cost-cutting measures, including shedding 1,300 staff. By 2001, Amazon was able to post a net profit of $5.1 million. (Brooker 25-30)
Bezos is a rare CEO who can claim to have pioneered a completely new industry from scratch. No longer just a bookstore, Amazon has expanded to sell a diverse array of goods from scientific supplies to groceries, and Bezos is positioned to revolutionize books themselves with the Kindle, an “iPod” of reading.
Biography
Jeff Preston Bezos (Bay'-zose) was born in Albuquer-que, NM, on 12 January 1964, a few years after his father emigrated from Cuba. He graduated from Princeton in 1986 with honours in electrical engineering and computer science. Though most of the entrepreneurs profiled in this article made their mark by creating hardware or software for others to use, Jeff Bezos took the Internet as he found it and used it as the basis for the best known and largest online retail enterprise to date, the Seattle-based bookseller Amazon.com.
In 1994, Bezos left Wall Street to found Armazon.com. He named his company after the river that carries the greatest volume of water because he wants Amazon, by revenue, to be a $10 billion company. Amazon offers an easily searchable list of 3 million titles, ...