As of November 2021, Jeff Bezos is the second wealthiest person in the world, with a total net wealth of around $205 billion. The computer engineer and entrepreneur is considered by many as the pinnacle of capitalism-based success, having started out a small company and turned it into one of the most-recognised names in the world.
Bezos is credited not just with creating the well-known e-commerce store Amazon, but also for powering a large portion of the world’s internet thanks to AWS servers and a variety of other services. Here we will look at the rise of Amazon and how Bezos began the endeavour.
The Origins Of Amazon
Bezos left Princeton University after earning degrees in both computer science and electrical engineering. He had started a small company already by this point, but his main focus was working in trade, where he was tasked with building a network for a company by the name of Fitel. It didn’t take long for him to be promoted to a director position and worked hard to become one of the most prominent figures in the tech industry.
By 1993, Bezos had the idea to create an online bookstore, one that would be available at any time of the day and would have a vast collection of books to choose from, and it was an idea that had occurred to him during a cross country drive. While he had originally named the company Cadabra, he decided to instead choose something that started with an “A”. Due to how the internet worked at the time, all listings were in alphabetical order, meaning that users were more likely to come across his site first when doing searches online. After receiving a $300,000 investment sum from his parents, it took only three years for him to take the company public.
Amazon’s Diversification
While the initial plans were to focus on a bookstore, Bezos had always wanted to expand the services that Amazon offered. By the time that 1998 had rolled around, the company was offering both online video and music, and before the start of 1999, he had also included some consumer goods into the catalogue.
While he had found some major success in the services that were offered, Bezos would eventually end up borrowing over $2 billion from banks to finance further expansions. Not long after this, Amazon Web Services was founded, which was used to compile data from web traffic and weather channels, and would eventually be used for a large portion of modern websites, such as the ones that host New Zealand pokies for real money. The company could not keep up with its spending, and by 2002, profits had all but come to a complete stop and Amazon almost had to declare bankruptcy, laying off around 14% of its staff.
Amazon’s Rebound
The next year, however, saw the company make a record profit, one that would continue year-on-year for an indefinite future. This rise of pushed even further thanks to a large $600 million contract with the CIA, and by 2013, Amazon was declared as the largest retailer in the world.