What do you think is the reason for the success of these billionaires? They have a rich family to back them up, or they are just extraordinary intelligent? I won’t deny that they are intelligent but what’s more important is that they think far ahead than most of us and doing something “out of the box”. Their ideas may not be acceptable then but it is just the matter of time for it to skyrocket to where it is today. Look at Amazon.com, what is online shopping then and now?
E-commerce pioneer and founder of Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos is an extremely ambitious person in seeking to push higher possibilities of modern technology beyond the imaginable. As a child, Bezos was already showing signs of a problem solver whereby he took apart his crib with a screwdriver because he wanted to sleep on a real bed. Bezos graduated in Bachelor Degree in Electric Engineering and Computer Science. Despite being offered jobs from Bell Labs and Intel, he declined the offer and joined a startup instead.
It is only in 1994 that Bezos has already realized that the potential of the internet world. Bezos looked for 20 possible product categories that can be sold online and he thought books were the best option. He then quit his job, moved to Seattle and build his own company. And this is how Amazon was started with just being an online bookstore. Amazon was named after the meandering South American River on 16th July 1995.
His office was merely in his own garage where he began developing the software along with a few employees. When they just started,the doorbell would ring every time someone made a purchase. After just a few weeks the bell was ringing so often they had to make it stop. In its first month, they have already managed to sell books across the Unites States and 45 other foreign countries. In two months, their sales was already $20,000/week and it was growing faster than Bezos envisioned.
Amazon went public in 1997 and eventually outpaced their competitors and became an e-commerce leader. Bezos continue to diversify Amazon’s marketplace by offering sales of clothes, toys, electronics and many more through major retail partnerships. Bezos was also one of the first investors in Google in 1998. In year 2000, Bezos founded Blue Origin, a Seattle-based aerospace company which develops technologies to offer space travel for ordinary citizens. The company was kept a secret and was only announced in 2006.
In the same year, Amazon ventured into launching video on demand service, initially known as AmazonUnbox on Tivo and they are now rebranded as Amazon Instant Video. Amazon also introduced a handheld digital book reader name Kindle in yea 2007 that allows users to buy, download, read and store their book selections.
In addition, Bezos made headline in 2013 when he purchased The Washington Post in a $250 million deal and and lifted the online paywall for subscribers of some U.S. local newspapers. The buy over marked the end of the four-generation reign over The Post Co. by the Graham family.
