Jeff Bezos

Jeff Bezos was born on January 12, 1964 is an American technology and retail entrepreneur,
investor, and philanthropist who is best known as the founder, chairman, and chief executive
officer of Amazon.com, the world's largest online shopping retailer. The company began as an
Internet merchant of books and expanded to a wide variety of products and services, most recently
video streaming and audio streaming. Amazon.com is currently the world's largest Internet sales
company on the World Wide Web, as well as the world's largest provider of cloud infrastructure
services, through its Amazon Web Services arm.

Bezos's other diversified business interests include aerospace and newspapers. He is the founder
and manufacturer of Blue Origin (founded in 2000) with test flights to space which started in 2015,
and plans for commercial suborbital human spaceflight beginning in 2018. In 2013, Bezos
purchased The Washington Post newspaper. A number of other business investments are managed
through Bezos Expeditions.

With an estimated net worth of US$85.4 billion as of June 2017, Bezos is currently the second-
richest person in the world, just behind fellow American Bill Gates in first place, and just ahead
of Warren Buffett and Amancio Ortega in third and fourth place respectively.

Business career:

Early Career:

After graduating from Princeton in 1986, Bezos worked on Wall Street in the computer science
field. He then worked on building a network for international trade for a company known as Fitel.
He next worked at Bankers Trust. Later on he also worked on Internet-enabled business
opportunities at the hedge fund company D. E. Shaw & Co.

Amazon.com:

Bezos founded Amazon.com in 1994 after making a cross-country drive from New York to Seattle,
writing up the Amazon business plan on the way. He initially set up the company in his garage.
He had left his well-paying job at a New York City hedge fund after learning "about the rapid
growth in Internet use," which coincided with a new U.S. Supreme Court ruling that exempted
mail order companies from collecting sales taxes in states where they lack a physical presence."
Bezos is known for his attention to business details. As described by Portfolio.com, he "is at once
a happy-go-lucky mogul and a notorious micromanager…an executive who wants to know about
everything from contract minutiae to how he is quoted in all Amazon press releases."

On August 15, 2015, The New York Times wrote an article entitled "Inside Amazon: Wrestling
Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace" about Amazon's business practices. Bezos responded to his
employees with a Sunday memo claiming it did not represent the company he leads and challenged
its depiction as "a soulless, dystopian workplace where no fun is had and no laughter heard", and
to contact him directly if true.

Blue Origin:

In 2000, Bezos founded Blue Origin, a human spaceflight startup company, partially as a result of
his fascination with space travel, including an early interest in developing "space hotels,
amusement parks, colonies and small cities for 2 million or 3 million people orbiting the Earth."
The company was kept secret for a few years; it became publicly known only in 2006 when
purchasing a sizable aggregation of land in west Texas for a launch and test facility. In a 2011
interview, Bezos indicated that he founded the space company to help enable "anybody to go into
space" and stated that the company was committed to decreasing the cost and increasing the safety
of spaceflight. Blue Origin is one of several start-ups aiming to open up space travel to paying
customers. Like Amazon, the company is secretive, but [in September 2011] revealed that it had
lost an unmanned prototype vehicle during a short-hop test flight. Although this was a setback, the
announcement of the loss revealed for the first time just how far Blue Origin's team had advanced.
Bezos said that the crash was 'not the outcome that any of us wanted, but we're signed up for this
to be hard." A profile published in 2013 described a 1982 Miami Herald interview he gave after
he was named high school class valedictorian. The 18-year-old Bezos "said he wanted to build
space hotels, amusement parks and colonies for 2 million or 3 million people who would be in
orbit. 'The whole idea is to preserve the earth' he told the newspaper ... The goal was to be able to
evacuate humans. The planet would become a park."

The Washington Post:

On August 5, 2013, Bezos announced his purchase of The Washington Post for $250 million in
cash. Amazon.com was not to be involved. "This is uncharted terrain," he told the newspaper, "and
it will require experimentation." Shortly after the announcement of intent to purchase, The
Washington Post published a long-form profile of Bezos on August 10, 2013.The sale closed on
October 1, 2013, and Bezos's Nash Holdings LLC took control.

Brilliant Strategies Jeff Bezos Used To Build The Amazon Empire:

1. Be like the Godfather: Make them an offer they can’t refuse

In 2004, Amazon set its sights on the Melville House. The boutique publisher of serious fiction
and nonfiction based in Brooklyn, N.Y., was just a fledgling company when things got tense with
Amazon. Co-owner Dennis Johnson recalls his distributor calling him and describing negotiations
with Amazon “like dinner with the Godfather.”

As The New Yorker reports, Amazon "wanted a payment without having to reveal how many
Melville House books were sold on the site." Johnson was critical of the policy and shared his
concerns with literary trade magazine Publishers Weekly. A day after it published a story on
Johnson, the "Buy" button on Melville House's Amazon pages suddenly vanished.

So Johnson, who’s since blogged of Amazon’s war on books, decided to pony up. “I paid that
bribe,” he says, “and the books reappeared.”

2. Don't give up information unless absolutely necessary

Amazon didn’t tell Melville House how many of its books were sold on the site. Amazon also
stays mum on Kindle sales and won’t say how many employees it has in Seattle. Moreover, the
floor where the Kindle team works at the Seattle headquarters is called Area 51, since you can't
set foot there unless you're directly involved with the product. Bezos, it seems, likes to deliver
information — and create Amazon's narrative — in his own way, such as his carefully crafted
shareholder letters.

3. Keep teams small enough that members can be fed with two pizzas:

Bezos is famous among management nerds for his Two Pizza Rule: No team should be larger than
can be fed with two large pizzas. That means that task forces are limited to just five to seven
people, allowing teams to test their ideas without too many onlookers, which guards against
groupthink — one of Bezos’s pet peeves. Those tiny teams have led to big innovations, like the
Gold Box deals, a popular promotion that gave customers limited-time deals.
4. Stop talking so much:

At an off-site retreat in the early 2000s, word was going around that groups needed to communicate
more. Bezos got up and said, "No, communication is terrible!"

How could talking too much be a problem? Cross-team communication limits team independence
and leads to people agreeing too much, he estimated, which stands in opposition to the creative
conflict that defines Amazon's culture.

5. Get adversarial:

“The people who do well at Amazon are often those who thrive in an adversarial atmosphere with
almost constant friction,” writes Brad Stone, author of "The Everything Store," which chronicles
Amazon’s rapid growth. Why? Bezos can’t stand “social cohesion,” the cloying tendency of people
who like to agree with each other and find consensus comfortable.

6. Experimenting and innovations:

In our research interviews for The Innovator’s DNA, we asked Bezos about the crucial role
experimentation plays at Amazon. “Experiments are key to innovation because they rarely turn
out as you expect and you learn so much,” he told us. “We’ve tried to reduce the cost of doing
experiments so that we can do more of them. If you can increase the number of experiments you
try from a hundred to a thousand, you dramatically increase the number of innovations you
produce.”

7. Deconstruct products, processes and ideas:

In 1994, before the Internet was truly valued, Bezos came across an article stating the Internet was
growing 2,300% a year. Instead of shrugging the statistic off, he asked, “What kind of business
opportunity might this new-fangled thing called the Internet represent?” Bezos deconstructed a
traditional business process for delivering goods and “The Earth’s Biggest Bookstore” was born.
Just as Tesla CEO Elon Musk and his team took apart a brand new Mercedes Benz to better
understand how it worked before building their own, experimenters seize opportunities to learn
more about the world (and items) around them.
8. Focus on process, not failure:

Experimenting is the ultimate way to transform an idea into reality – it’s the mechanism by which
great new insights translate into new markets. When Amazon became profitable beyond
bookselling, Bezos made a risky bet to build a number of large warehouses throughout the country,
a decision which initially sank stock prices but later helped the company become the leading online
discount store.

Innovators must have the courage to fail and learn from failures. So whether you’re reconstructing
a product like Bezos did on his grandfather’s farm, or testing a new idea after getting a little
inspiration at work, remember that it is the spirit and action of experimentation that can lead you
to unexpected places and great new ideas. The more experiments you conduct, the closer you’ll
get to powerful, positive results.