Jeff Bezos Success Story

By Matthew Bass on May 1, 2013

In 1994, Jeff Bezos was already what many would consider extremely successful. Fueled by a secret passion for the infant business of electronic retailing, Jeff dreamed of creating his own company in the vast, then virtually uncharted wilds of the World Wide Web. Just four years after Bezos created Amazon.com, the virtual bookstore became the template for how e-commerce businesses should be run, with sales of more than $610 million and more than 13 million customers worldwide.Jeff Bezos is one of the founding fathers of e-commerce, and part of a select group of entrepreneurs in that field who managed to survive the dot-com bubble without losing control of their companies. Today, his business, Amazon.com, is an Internet goliath that sells everything from books to laptops to gift baskets. Bezos first got the idea to start an Internet enterprise in 1994. Bezos immediately recognized the expansive possibilities of selling online and began exploring the entrepreneurial possibilities of developing an Internet business.After reviewing the list, books were the obvious choice, primarily because of the sheer number of titles in existence. Bezos passed up a fat bonus, packed his wife, MacKenzie, and their dog, Kamala (named after an obscure “Star Trek” character), and headed for Seattle.

For Bezos, Seattle was the ideal city for his new business. With $1 million raised from family and friends, Bezos rented a house in Seattle and set up his business in the garage.

For nearly a year, Bezos and a crew of five employees worked out of the garage, learning how to source books and setting up a computer system that would make Amazon.com easy to navigate. In July 1995, Amazon.com opened its virtual doors, calling itself “Earth’s Biggest Book Store,” with more than 1 million titles to choose from. Fueled by word of mouth, or more accurately, word of e-mail, Amazon.com rocketed off the line like a nitro-burning dragster. Enraptured by the enormous selection of books, the superior customer service and the user-friendly design of the site, Internet users ecstatically plugged Amazon.com on Internet newsgroups and mailing lists.

Amazon.com’s success did not go unnoticed by bookstore giant Barnes & Noble, who quickly put up its own Web site, www.barnesandnoble.com. To combat Amazon.com’s claim that it was “Earth’s Biggest Bookstore,” Barnes & Noble embarked on an aggressive marketing campaign proclaiming that they offered twice as many books as Amazon.com. The forward-thinking Bezos had already expanded Amazon.com’s product line to include CDs and replaced “Earth’s Biggest Book Store” with the tagline “Books, Music and More,” leaving Barnes & Noble, as one writer put it, “wrapping its fingers around the neck of a phantom.”

The company succeeded in large part because it quickly embraced e-commerce innovations that improved its customer experience. As if that wasn’t enough, Bezos has made venture capital a side project for Amazon, investing millions of dollars with varying success in start-ups such as Talk Market, a video shopping site; Foodista, which is a user-edited cooking encyclopedia; and the infamous dot-com casualty Pets.com. If you’re really interested in software and computer science, you should focus on that,’ Bezos told Inc. in 2004. You don’t choose your passions, your passions choose you.’

5. Know When To Throw Away The Rule Book

Estimated Net Worth: $25 billion

Charity Involvement: Bezos Family Foundation

Sources: Forbes.com, entrepreneur.com