Jeff Bezos: From a parking garage to a giant business empire
(Baonghean.vn) - In 1994, Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in his garage in Seattle. 27 years later, Amazon has become an e-commerce giant, making its owner Jeff Bezos one of the richest people in the world with an estimated fortune of more than 197 billion USD. The 57-year-old billionaire has just unexpectedly announced that he will step down as CEO of Amazon this year, but this "business legend" is still the dream of every entrepreneur.
Humble Beginnings
Like many other billionaires in the world such as Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was not a billionaire from a young age. And their journeys to “establishing a career and making a living” seem to have similarities: Starting with ideas that are so far-fetched and daring, but always finding a way to turn them into reality.
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| Jeff Bezos chose books as the first product to be sold on Amazon. Photo: Getty |
Jeff BezosJeff Bezos was born on January 12, 1964 in Albuquerque, New Mexico (USA). He is the product of a quick marriage between Jacklyn and Ted Jorgensen. When they got married, Jacklyn was only 17 years old, a high school girl, and Jorgensen was the owner of a bicycle shop. Shortly after their divorce, Jacklyn remarried Miguel Bezos, a Cuban immigrant. Jeffrey Jorgensen was renamed Jeff Bezos. As a child, Bezos often spent the summer working on his grandfather's farm doing manual labor such as repairing windmills, laying water pipes, building fences, barns and repairing bulldozers. Bezos said that his time working on the farm taught him an important lesson: "Be resourceful. Every problem has a solution."
In the summer of his 16th birthday, Bezos took a part-time job at a McDonald's fast-food restaurant. That's when he began to gain experience that would later prove very useful in his career as Amazon's head. "I learned that customer service is really hard. Today, it's one of the most important things at Amazon," Bezos said.
“It's better to try and fail at starting a business than never to try at all.”
After graduating from Princeton University with a degree in computer science and electrical engineering, Bezos worked at several financial firms on Wall Street in New York City, such as Fitel and DE Shaw. It was here that he began to see the great earning potential that the Internet could bring. In an interview with the Academy of Achievement, Bezos shared: “One amazing statistic that seemed to wake me up was: Internet access in the United States in the spring of 1994 increased by 2,300%. Things couldn’t grow that fast. That was very unusual, and that got me thinking.” An idea suddenly came to Jeff Bezos and he decided to leave the investment firm DE Shaw while he was in the position of Senior Vice President, with the view: “It’s better to try and fail at starting a business than never to try at all.”
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| Bezos at a Blue Origin presentation. Photo: AFP |
After making a list of products that he felt had the highest potential for online sales, he decided on books because of their low price and high appeal. Bezos officially founded the start-up company in his family's garage, with an initial capital of 1 million USD, of which the largest contribution was nearly 300,000 USD - the amount borrowed from his parents. From there, Amazon was officially born.
In the first month after its founding, Amazon sold books to thousands of readers from more than 50 states in the US, and more than 45 different countries. On May 15, 1997, Amazon was listed on the US stock exchange at $18/share. Just 5 years after founding Amazon, in 1999, Bezos was voted “Person of the Year” by Time Magazine. The image of the founder of Amazon appeared on the cover of Time with the caption “E-commerce is changing the way the world shops”.
From millionaire to billionaire
Bezos became a millionaire in 1997 after raising $54 million through Amazon's initial public offering. Just two years later,Bezos becomes a billionaireThanks to Amazon’s soaring stock value, Amazon has gradually expanded its product range beyond books. Today, the e-commerce giant sells almost everything from technology devices, clothing to cloud computing services…
Jeff Bezos became the world's richest person in March 2018, but recently lost that title to Tesla boss Elon Musk.
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| Amazon robots transport packages to a chute at an Amazon warehouse in Goodyear, Arizona, in 2019. Photo: AP |
Of course, the road to success was not all roses. When Amazon started to make a name for itself in the world around 1998-1999, Bezos bought a series of companies from the movie site IMDB.com, the social network PlanetAll.com, the data company Alexa.com, but most of those investments went down the drain. At the same time, Amazon almost went bankrupt when the dot-com bubble burst. Many businesses lost 10-30 million USD in just 1 quarter, leading to the end of many famous e-commerce sites at that time. However, Amazon was one of the few startups that survived this crisis.
We did crazy things together and made it normal.”
After this crisis, Bezos adjusted his philosophy and business strategy, so Amazon began to take off with success until now with a value of 1.7 trillion USD. “We are considered one of the most successful companies in the world. To achieve such results, it is all thanks to innovation. Innovation is the root of Amazon's success. Together, we have done crazy things and made it normal,” the billionaire shared in a recent letter to 1.3 million employees.
After building his e-commerce empire, Jeff Bezos embarked on ambitious projects that had been in his childhood. He founded the space startup Blue Origin in September 2000, which he called “the most important work I do” in an interview with Business Insider. “I care about space because I’m passionate about it. I’ve been studying and thinking about it since I was 5 years old. But that’s not why I’m doing this. I believe that if we don’t do this, we’ll eventually end up as a stagnant civilization,” Bezos said.
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| Billionaire Jeff Bezos. Photo: GeekWire |
Conquering space is also a strategy that demonstrates Jeff Bezos's motto of constant development. Blue Origin aims to develop technology to carry out space flights at affordable prices. His resignation from the executive position of Amazon is said to be to spend time on more distant projects that this billionaire cherishes. It is very possible that Amazon in the future will not only be a "global supermarket" but also a market on the moon. There are things that seem to only exist in ideas but will become reality like what Jeff Bezos has done in the past 27 years.
“Amazon was just an idea and it didn’t even have a name. The question I was asking myself the most was: What is the internet? Luckily, I figured that out early on.”
