Anwaar Safdar

Jeff Bezos
The Best Entrepreneur

Who Is Jeff Bezos?

Entrepreneur and e-commerce pioneer Jeff Bezos is the founder and CEO of the e-
commerce company Amazon, owner of The Washington Post and founder of the space
exploration company Blue Origin. His successful business ventures have made him one
of the richest people in the world. Born in 1964 in New Mexico, Bezos had an early love
of computers and studied computer science and electrical engineering at Princeton
University. After graduation, he worked on Wall Street, and in 1990 he became the
youngest senior vice president at the investment firm D.E. Shaw. Four years later, Bezos
quit his lucrative job to open Amazon.com, an online bookstore that became one of the
Internet's biggest success stories. In 2013, Bezos purchased The Washington Post, and
in 2017 Amazon acquired Whole Foods. In February 2021, Amazon announced that
Bezos will step down as CEO in the third quarter of the year.

Early Life and Education:

Bezos was born on January 12, 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to a teenage mother,
Jacklyn Gise Jorgensen, and his biological father, Ted Jorgensen.
The Jorgensen’s were married less than a year. When Bezos was 4 years old, his mother
remarried Mike Bezos, a Cuban immigrant.
Bezos graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1986 with a degree in
computer science and electrical engineering.
Bezos showed an early interest in how things work, turning his parents' garage into a
laboratory and rigging electrical contraptions around his house as a child.
He moved to Miami with his family as a teenager, where he developed a love for
computers and graduated valedictorian of his high school. It was during high school that
he started his first business, the Dream Institute, an educational summer camp for
fourth, fifth and sixth graders.
Career in Finance
After graduating from Princeton, Bezos found work at several firms on Wall Street,
including Fitel, Bankers Trust and the investment firm D.E. Shaw. In 1990, Bezos
became D.E. Shaw's youngest vice president.
While his career in finance was extremely lucrative, Bezos chose to make a risky move
into the nascent world of e-commerce. He quit his job in 1994, moved to Seattle and
targeted the untapped potential of the Internet market by opening an online bookstore.

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Amazon

How amazon started?

Founding
The company was created as a result of what Jeff Bezos called his "regret minimization
framework", which described his efforts to fend off any regrets for not participating
sooner in the Internet business boom during that time. In 1994, Bezos left his
employment as vice-president of D. E. Shaw & Co., a Wall Street firm, and moved to
Seattle, Washington, where he began to work on a business plan for what would become
Amazon.com.
On July 5, 1994, Bezos initially incorporated the company in Washington State with the
name Cadabra, Inc. After a few months he changed the name to Amazon.com, Inc.
because a lawyer misheard its original name as "cadaver". In its early days, the company
was operated out of the garage of Bezos's house on Northeast 28th Street in Bellevue,
Washington. In September 1994, Bezos purchased the domain name relentless.com and
briefly considered naming his online store Relentless, but friends told him the name
sounded a bit weird. The domain is still owned by Bezos and still redirects to the
retailer.
Choosing a name:
Bezos selected the name by looking through a dictionary; he settled on "Amazon"
because it was a place that was "exotic and different", just as he had envisioned for his
Internet enterprise. The Amazon River, he noted, was the biggest river in the world,
and he planned to make his store the biggest bookstore in the world. Additionally, a
name that began with "A" was preferred because it would probably be at the top of an
alphabetized list. Bezos placed a premium on his head start in building a brand and told
a reporter, "There's nothing about our model that can't be copied over time.

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But you know, McDonald's got copied. And it's still built a huge,
multibillion-dollar company. A lot of it comes down to the brand name. Brand
names are more important online than they are in the physical world
Online bookstore and IPO:
In July 1995, Amazon opened as an online bookseller, selling the world's largest
collection of books to anyone with World Wide Web access. Computer Models of the
Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought. In the first two months of business, Amazon sold
to all 50 states and over 45 countries. Within two months, Amazon's sales were up to
$20,000/week. In October 1995, the company announced itself to the public. In 1996, it
was reincorporated in Delaware. Amazon issued its initial public offering of stock on
May 15, 1997, at $18 per share, trading under the NASDAQ stock exchange symbol
AMZN.
Barnes & Noble sued Amazon on May 12, 1997, alleging that Amazon's claim to be
"the world's largest bookstore" was false because it "...wasn't a bookstore at all. It's a
book broker." The suit was later settled out of court and Amazon continued to make the
same claim.
In 1999, Amazon first attempted to enter the publishing business by buying a defunct
imprint, "Weathervane", and publishing some books "selected with no apparent
thought", according to The New Yorker. The imprint quickly vanished again, and as of
2014 Amazon representatives said that they had never heard of it. Also in 1999, Time
magazine named Bezos the Person of the Year when it recognized the company's
success in popularizing online shopping.
2000s
Since June 19, 2000, Amazon's logotype has featured a curved arrow leading from A to
Z, representing that the company carries every product from A to Z, with the arrow
shaped like a smile.
According to sources, Amazon did not expect to make a profit for four to five years. This
comparatively slow growth caused stockholders to complain that the company was not
reaching profitability fast enough to justify their investment or even survive in the long
term. In 2001, the dot-com bubble burst destroyed many e-companies in the process,
but Amazon survived and moved forward beyond the tech crash to become a huge player
in online sales. The company finally turned its first profit in the fourth quarter of 2001:
$0.01 (i.e., 1¢ per share), on revenues of more than $1 billion. This profit margin,
though extremely modest, proved to sceptics that Bezos' unconventional business model
could succeed.
2010s to present:
In January 2011 Amazon acquires Love film, a DVD rental service known as
the Netflix of Europe.

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In 2011, Amazon had 30,000 full-time employees in the US, and by the end of 2016, it
had 180,000 employees.
In 2014, Amazon launched the Fire Phone. The Fire Phone was meant to deliver
media streaming options but the venture failed, resulting in Amazon registering a $170
million loss.
In June 2017, Amazon announced that it would acquire Whole Foods, a high-
end supermarket chain with over 400 stores, for $13.4 billion On August 23, 2017,
Whole Foods shareholders, as well as the Federal Trade Commission, approved the
deal
According to an August 8, 2018 story in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Amazon has
about a 5 percent share of US retail spending (excluding cars and car parts and visits to
restaurants and bars), and a 43.5 share of American online spending in 2018. The
forecast is for Amazon to own 49 percent of the total American online spending in 2018,
with two-thirds of Amazon's revenue coming from the US.
Amazon launched the last-mile delivery program and ordered 20,000 Mercedes-Benz
Sprinter Vans for the service in September 2018.
Amazon will generate $258.22 billion in US retail e-commerce sales this year, up 29.2%
over last year. Amazon's Marketplace sales will represent an increasingly dominant
portion of its e-commerce business—68.0% this year, compared with 32.0% for Amazon
direct sales. By the end of 2018, sales generated from Amazon's Marketplace will be
more than double that of Amazon's direct sales in the US.
HQ2
In November 2018, Amazon announced it would open its highly sought-after new
headquarters, known as (HQ2) in Long Island City, Queens, New York City, and in the
Crystal City neighborhood of Arlington, Virginia. On February 14, 2019, Amazon
announced it was not moving forward with plans to build HQ2 in Queen but would
instead focus solely on the Arlington location. The company plans to locate at least
25,000 employees at HQ2 by 2030 and will invest more than US$2.5 billion to establish
its new headquarters in Crystal City as well as neighboring Pentagon City and Potomac
Yard, an area jointly marketed as "National Landing."
COVID-19
At the end of March 2020, some workers of the Staten Island warehouse staged
a walkout in protest the poor health situation at their workplace amidst the 2020
COVID-19 pandemic. One of the organizers, Chris Smalls, was first put
on quarantine without anybody else being quarantined, and soon afterwards fired
from the company.
The pandemic caused a surge in online shopping and resulted in shortages of household
staples both online and some brick-and-mortar stores. From March 17 to April 10, 2020,
Amazon warehouses stopped accepting non-essential items from third-party sellers. The
company hired approximately 175,000 additional warehouse workers and delivery
contractors to deal with the surge, and temporarily raised wages by $2/hour.

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Acquisition of MGM
After months of speculation due to MGM's poor financial performance from the
COVID-19 pandemic's impact on the movie industry, Amazon entered negotiations to
acquire MGM at an estimated $9 billion in May 2021.The companies agreed to the
merger deal on May 26, 2021 for a total value of $8.45 billion, subject to regulatory
approval. The deal would allow Amazon to add the MGM library to the Amazon Prime
Video catalog, with the studio continuing to operate as a label under the new parent
company.

Amazon Go
On January 22, 2018, Amazon Go, a store that uses cameras and sensors to detect
items that a shopper grabs off shelves and automatically charges a shopper's Amazon
account, was opened to the general public in Seattle. Customers scan their Amazon Go
app as they enter, and are required to have an Amazon Go app installed on their
smartphone and a linked Amazon account to be able to enter. The technology is meant
to eliminate the need for checkout lines.
Amazon 4-Star
Amazon announced to debut the Amazon 4-star in New York, Soho neighborhood
Spring Street between Crosby and Lafayette on 27 September 2018. The store carries 4-
star and above-rated products from around New York.
Mergers and acquisitions
Amazon has grown through several mergers and acquisitions.
The company has also invested in a number of growing firms, both in the United States
and internationally. In 2014, Amazon purchased top level domain .buy in auction for
over $4 million.

15 companies that contribute to Jeff Bezos’ nearly Rs 14 lakh

crore net worth
1. Zappos
Acquired by Amazon Inc. in 2009, Zappos is a famous footwear and apparel e-
commerce website based in Las Vegas, Nevada. Zappos was bought by Amazon for an
all-stock deal of $1.2 billion at the time. Notably, Zappos recently appointed Indian-
origin Kadar Deshpande as their CEO.
2. Elemental Tech
Amazon Web Services (AWS) acquired Elemental Tech in 2015. Since then, AWS has
rebranded as AWS Elemental. Other than the US, AWS Elemental has offices in the
United Kingdom, France, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, China, Russia, Brazil and
India.

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3. Souq.com
Another e-commerce company owned by Jeff Bezos, Souq.com is popular as the Amazon
of the gulf. The e-commerce marketplace is based in Dubai and was acquired by Amazon
in 2017.
4. Blue Origin
As mentioned earlier, Blue Origin is Jeff Bezos’ space project. The aerospace company is
one of the prime focus of the world’s richest man's future projects. Founded by Bezos in
2000, Blue Origin is led by CEO Bob Smith. Its primary goal to make space travel
cheaper and more reliable.
5. Whole Foods
Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods for $13.2 billion was one of its biggest purchases
in the physical store industry. The all-cash deal did not result in a change in
management, but offered a range of benefits for Amazon users. Namely, prime exclusive
deals, two-day delivery in some areas and extra discounts, among others.
6. The Washington Post
One of his prized possessions, The Washington Post is held by Jeff Bezos’ Nash
Holdings. The 140-year-old, which was previously owned by Warren Buffett, was bought
by the private company in 2013 for $250 million.
7. IMDb
This might come as a surprise to many, but IMDb or Internet Movie Database is a
wholly-owned subsidiary of Amazon Inc. The website, which also offers ratings and
reviews of movies and TV shows, packs data of nearly 250 million titles.
8. Kiva Systems
Kiva Systems underwent a rebranding when it was acquired by Amazon in 2012, and is
now known as Amazon Robotics. The company manufactures package-carrying robots
in Amazon warehouses and was purchased for $775 million.
Other prominent companies owned by Jeff Bezos
9. Alexa Web Services 12. Fabric.com

10. Good Reads 13. Woot.com

11. Audible 14. DPReview

15. Twitch
Lessons for Entrepreneurs from Jeff Bezos's Tremendous
Success
1. Use the regret minimization framework.

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When Bezos first entertained the idea of moving across the country to start an online
bookstore, he used a mental exercise he calls a "regret minimization framework." The
idea was to think about turning 80 and looking back on his life.
2. Be customer-focussed
Most companies today consider this as the most important factor for business success
but Bezos truly incorporated it into his business. He once said "The secret sauce of
Amazon-there are several principles at Amazon -but the number one thing that has
made us successful, by far, is obsessive, compulsive focus on the customer."
3. Fear customers, not competitors
Never fear competitors as they are not the ones who are going to spend money. Bezos
once told his team. "Be afraid of our customers, because those are the folks who have the
money." In simple words, it means that you focus your energy on core areas that matter.
4. Set long term goals
Back in 1997, Amazon wasn't that huge as it is now. It catered to nearly 1.5 million users.
Bezos' letter to shareholders that year clearly stated that he didn’t care about the
company’s quarterly earnings. This attitude stayed close to the company’s beliefs for
years.
Bezos wrote, "We believe that a fundamental measure of our success will be the
shareholder value we create over the long term." He added, "This value will be a direct
result of our ability to extend and solidify our current market leadership position.”
5. Guard your culture
In 2016, Bezos wrote to investors "We never claim that our approach is the right one-just that
it's ours-and over the last two decades, we've collected a large group of like-minded people."
Over the years Amazon has faced criticism for its fierce work culture. To which, Bezos has
responded by saying that the company's culture is "created slowly over time by the people and
by events-by the stories of past success and failure that become a deep part of the company
lore."
The best thing to learn from this is that it is crucial to identify your own culture and stick
to it because that works best for you.

Conclusion:
I conclude that Jeff Bezos is the best entrepreneur in the world. He is the best
example for the entrepreneurs for getting success in life. There are many ups and down
in his life but he focus on his goal and work hard to become richest person in the world.
We should followed the lessons of Bezos to become the best entrepreneur.

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