COMSATS UNIVERSITY ISLAMABAD

SAAD ABDULLAH

FA20-BEE-178

ENTREPRENEURSHIP

ASSIGNMENT 04
QUESTION:

Review personal profile of any one Entrepreneur by your choice

in the developing countries including pakistan, highlits his or her
challenges and achievements.

SOLUTION:

PERSONALITY:
Personality that I selected is “JEFF BEZOS”. Jeff Bezos by
name of Jeffrey Preston Bezos was borned in January 12,1964 in
Albuquerque, New Mexico in U.S.
EARLY LIFE AND CAREER:
While still in high school Bezos developed the Dream Institute, a
centre that promoted creative thinking in young students. After
graduating (1986) summa cum laude from Princeton university
with degrees in electrical engineering and computer science, he
undertook a series of jobs before joining the New York
investment bank D.E. Shaw & Co. in 1990. Soon named senior
vice president—the firm’s youngest—Bezos was in charge of
examining the invesment possibilities of the Internet. Its
enormous potential—Web usage was growing by more than 2,000
percent a year—sparked his entrepreneurial imagination. In 1994
he quit D.E. Shaw and moved to seattle, Washington, to open a
virtual bookstore. Working out of his garage with a handful of
employees, Bezos began developing the software for the site.
Named after the South merican river, Amazon sold its first book
in July 1995.
Jeff Bezos is actually a American entrepreneur who played a
key role in the growth of e-commerce as the founder and chief
executive officer of Amazon.com, Inc., an online merchant of
books and later of a wide variety of products. As a teenager, Jeff
Bezos got his first job at a McDonald’s restaurant, where he was
a fry cook. His salary was less than $3 per hour. After
graduating from Princeton University, he worked at Fitel, an
international trade start-up.

JEFF BEZOS AND AMAZON:

In late 1993, Bezos decided to establish an online bookstore. He

left his job at D. E. Shaw and founded Amazon in his garage on
July 5, 1994, after writing its business plan on a cross-country
drive from New York City to Seattle. Prior to settling on Seattle,
Bezos had investigated setting up his company at an Indian
reservation near San Francisco in order to avoid paying taxes.
Bezos initially named his new company Cadabra but later
changed the name to Amazon after the Amazon River in South
America, in part because the name begins with the letter A,
which is at the beginning of the alphabet.At the time, website
listings were alphabetized, so a name starting with "A" would
appear sooner when customers conducted online searches.In
addition, he regarded "Amazon," the name of the world's largest
river as fitting for what he hoped would become the world's
largest online bookstore. He accepted an estimated $300,000
from his parents and invested in Amazon.He warned many early
investors that there was a 70% chance that Amazon would fail
or go bankrupt.Although Amazon was originally an online
bookstore, Bezos had always planned to expand to other
productsThree years after Bezos founded Amazon, he took it
public with an initial public offering (IPO). In response to
critical reports from Fortune and Barron's, Bezos maintained
that the growth of the Internet would overtake competition from
larger book retailers such as Borders and Barnes & Noble.
In 1998, Bezos diversified into the online sale of music and
video, and by the end of the year he had expanded the
company's products to include a variety of other consumer
goods. Bezos used the $54 million raised during the company's
1997 equity offering to finance aggressive acquisition of smaller
competitors. In 2000, Bezos borrowed $2 billion from banks, as
its cash balances dipped to only $350 million. In 2002, Bezos
led Amazon to launch Amazon Web Services, which compiled
data from weather channels and website traffic. In late 2002,
rapid spending from Amazon caused it financial distress when
revenues stagnated.After the company nearly went bankrupt, he
closed distribution centers and laid off 14% of the Amazon
workforce. In 2003, Amazon rebounded from financial
instability and turned a profit of $400 million.In November
2007, Bezos launched the Amazon Kindle. According to a 2008
Time profile, Bezos wished to create a device that allowed a
"flow state" in reading similar to the experience of video games.
In 2013, Bezos secured a $600-million contract with the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) on behalf of Amazon Web
Services.In October of that year, Amazon was recognized as the
largest online shopping retailer in the world.

CHALLENGES:
Obstacles that Jeff Bezos faced were:
• Amazon' Fire Phone' In 2010
In 2010, Amazon was growing more concerned with their loss of revenue on
the mobile app stores. To fix this financial cut, they decided to try and
directly connect mobile users to their product. That idea became a reality
when they launched the Amazon Fire Phone in 2014. However, the product
proved to be a flop due to superficial goals and improper planning. Rather
than looking at the big picture that could have made it successful, the
purpose of the creation was to recoup lost revenues. Because of its narrow
perspective, the Amazon team could not see the real value of a smartphone.
As a result, Amazon admitted defeat, and the product was discontinued just
three months after launch. The company lost $170 million in the process of
creating the Fire Phone
.
• Books getting deleted
 In 2009, the Internet went nuts when Amazon remotely deleted digital
editions of two books from the Kindle devices of readers who had bought
them. They got removed because the company had discovered that it did not
have the proper rights to them. Even when Amazon had to figure out a plan
of action, they knew that the deletions were a bad idea. Nevertheless, they
went ahead and removed the illegal copies from their systems and
customers’ devices and refunded customers. This seems like a minor issue
that any company would have to face. Nevertheless, when consumers look to
the Internet to voice concerns and make reviews of products and services, it
caused quite a stir. Customers were commenting on web forums, creating
reviews. They were also looking at Amazon’s published terms of service
agreement for the Kindle to find contradicting statements that did not give
the company the right to delete purchases after they had been made. They
were frustrated that while Amazon and its retailers cannot retract a physical
purchase, they seem to maintain a “unique tether” to its digital content.

• Feud with Hachette Book Group

Continuing down the book path, Amazon got into a very
public feud with one of its publishers after a contract
dispute. They wanted to negotiate the terms of Hatchette’s
contract after it had expired, with the primary condition
modified. When the conditions were not met, Amazon
decided to extend Hatchette’s contract regardless of its
current terms but made it impossible for them to create
digital sales. At the time, Amazon’s tactic was to block pre-
orders for many of Hatchette’s books and slow down
products’ delivery time because of the print inventory
available. As a result, Hatchette’s e-book sales declined,
but they were still adamant about having their freedoms
regarding their products. Many authors backed up their
claim denouncing Amazon for purposely harming
 Hatchette’s book sales and harming authors’ livelihood.
They went as far as calling on the Department of Justice to
investigate Amazon for illegal monopoly tactics.
Ultimately, Hatchette decided to settle the lawsuit because
they knew that they could not afford to defend themselves
in court. It did improve Amazon’s book sales because the
outcome of the situation boosted the company’s ability to
keep prices low. However, Hatchette would not go down
without a fight. Amazon tried to have minimum casualties
when they wrote a letter to Hatchette authors suggesting
that they should be not be put in the middle of the dispute
and Amazon would give them 100% of e-book profits until
the situation was resolved. Hatchette disagreed, calling the
terms “suicide.” This is because they wanted to have the
ability to control the price. Moreover, the only way to
respect authors and guarantee that literature will continue
being published is by setting prices depending on the
author’s merit, release date, etc., not the $9.99 that Amazon
wanted to charge for all e-books.

ACHIEVEMENTS:
Bezos was awarded an honorary doctorate in science and
technology from Carnegie Mellon University in 2008. In 2011,
The Economist gave Bezos and Gregg Zehr an Innovation
Award for the Amazon Kindle. In 2012, Bezos was named
Businessperson of the Year by Fortune. His successful business
ventures have made him one of the richest people in the world.