He is one of the most successful and richest CEOs in the world, as well as an icon in the business world. His path to success has been a true inspiration for many. Discover how Bezos turned a small idea into one of the most important tech giants of our time.
According to Forbes, Jeff Bezos has an estimated net worth of $136.1 billion at the time of writing this article, making him one of the richest people on the planet.
Most of Bezos’s wealth comes from his shares in Amazon, which he founded in 1994 from his garage near Seattle, Washington.
Behind the success of Amazon and, in turn, its founder, lies innovation, creativity and hard work. Let’s learn more about the path that led the online sales market leader and its founder to the top.
Early years: Bezos before Amazon
Jeff Bezos was born in Mexico to teenage parents Jacklyn and Ted Jorgensen. Not long after his birth, Bezos’s parents separated and his mother married Miguel Bezos.
As he grew up, Bezos developed a strong interest in computing, though he spent much of his early years working at his maternal grandparents’ ranch in Texas.
In the mid-1980s, Bezos graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University with degrees in computer science and electrical engineering, and joined the startup Fitel after turning down job offers from both Intel and Bell Labs.
At the age of 30, Bezos had a six-figure salary, but realizing that the web world was growing at 2,300% pushed him to start his own company: Amazon.
How Bezos founded Amazon
Once Bezos realized the expansive possibilities of the web, he created a list of 20 potential products he believed could sell well online.
He realized that even the largest bookstores could only store a few hundred thousand books at a time—just a fraction of the almost infinite number of titles actually available. Books were Bezos’s winning bet.
In 1994, Bezos brought his idea to Seattle, home to a large pool of high-tech talent and very close to Ingram Book Group’s warehouse in Oregon. With $1 million raised from friends and family, Bezos rented a house in the city and set up his new online book business from his garage.
For almost a year, Bezos and a team of five employees worked from the Seattle garage, learning how to source books and building a computer system that would facilitate browsing Amazon.com.
It dubbed itself “the Earth’s biggest bookstore” with over 1 million titles for customers to choose from. By September 1996, Amazon.com had over 100 employees and had generated more than $15.7 million in sales.
After the launch of Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble rushed to launch its own online presence and a marketing campaign claiming it offered twice as many books as Amazon.
However, Bezos had already expanded Amazon’s product line and changed its e-commerce motto to “books, music, and more.”
Other reasons for Amazon’s success include its:
Wide range of products
Fast and easy delivery was its compass
And the launch of innovative technology such as Kindle, Amazon Alexa and Amazon Fire TV
Although Jeff Bezos stepped down as Amazon’s CEO in 2021, his name will always be linked to the status of the e-commerce giant as one of the world’s leading companies
According to Bezos, one of the key lessons he learned while building Amazon was “that success can come through iteration: invent, launch, reinvent, relaunch, start over, rinse, repeat, over and over again,” he said, adding that “the path to success is anything but straight”