He is the founder of the organization called Amazon, which is the biggest factor in e-commerce's current position. He has always made a name for himself with his successful attempts.
In 1999, he was chosen as the "Person of the Year" with this pioneering move he made in his online shopping adventure. He is also the founder and owner of the aerospace research company Blue Origin. In 2013, he bought The Washington Post Newspaper. In 2018, his fortune exceeded the limit of 100 billion dollars and reached 112 billion dollars, surpassing Bill Gates.
Successful entrepreneur Jeff Bezos, who founded Amazon and pioneered e-commerce, was born on January 12, 1964, in New Mexico. His real name is Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen. He is the son of Jacklyn (née Gise) and Ted Jorgensen. At the time of his birth, his mother was a 17-year-old high school student and his father owned a bike shop. After his parents divorced, his mother married Cuban immigrant Miguel "Mike" Bezos in April 1968. Shortly after the wedding, Mike adopted four-year-old Jorgensen, whose last name was changed to Bezos.
For Jeff Bezos, who was born with a talent for many things, the basement of the house they stayed in was turned into a workshop and he worked on his inventions for hours. Although his mother tried to direct him to sports to be a different activity, Jeff Bezos could not give up this passion. He has been very successful in his education life as well as in his business life. Jeff Bezos, who met the computer at the age of 10, started his first step in entrepreneurship with a 10-day summer camp called the "Dream Institute" and educational lessons he gave to students for 600 dollars. After graduating from River Oaks Elementary School, he graduated from the gifted children's high school as the first. He later graduated from Princeton University's School of Computer Science in 1986 at the top of his class.
As soon as he graduated, he received a job offer from Intel, but he rejected this offer due to his dream of starting his own business and founding Fitel. However, things did not go as he wanted and Fitel's attempt ended in failure. Later, he started to work at DE Shaw and after working for 4 years, he was promoted to assistant general manager. He married his colleague, research assistant MacKenzie Tuttle, whom he met in 1993. Jeff Bezos, who read in a news article in 1994 that the Internet grew by 2300 percent a year, took important steps towards establishing Amazon by concentrating on online sales with this news.
Work on the Establishment of Amazon
In 1994, Jeff Bezos made a list of the 20 best-selling products with online sales after the news he read. As a result of this list, he concluded that the best choice would be to sell books, since there are no other online sales sites for book sales. He first started by selling the books he had accumulated in the basement of his house. Later, he resigned from his job and concentrated more on founding Amazon.
Jeff Bezos specifically wanted the first letter of the brand to be "A", and he thought that he could make a significant difference by standing out during the search. While searching the words with the first letter "A" in the dictionary, he found the Amazon River, which is considered the largest river in the world, and decided that this site would be a brand name, thinking that one day this site would be as big as the Amazon River. On November 1, 1994, the name was registered. It gives us the idea of growing Amazon with a small message on its logo. The small yellow arrow in the logo resembles a smiling face at first glance, but the fact that the arrow goes from the letter "A" to the letter "Z" means that everything from A to Z is available on this site.
Officially established on July 16, 1995 with the aim of selling books on the internet, Amazon.com received more than expected attention after going public in 1997 and carried Jeff Bezos to the headlines. Jeff Bezos, who used his earnings to develop his company, reached 7,000 employees on Amazon.com in a short time. However, it still worked for 7 years without making a profit. In this process, the company lost a total of 2.5 billion dollars. It stood against all odds and made its first profit of $5 billion in early 2001. In 2007, with an important initiative, the electronic book-reading device called Kindle caused Amazon to make a big splash.
Amazon's Link with Famous Sites We Know
Although Amazon appears to be just an online shopping site, Jeff Bezos has been linked to many well-known sites. Each of these websites is the best in its field and is known and used by everyone.
IMDb: This website stands for Internet Movie Database. The founder of this site, which is widely used by movie lovers, is not Jeff Bezos, but it was bought by Jeff Bezos in 1998 and joined the Amazon family of companies. Today, the site has more than 70 million members.
Twitch.tv: This website was also not founded by Jeff Bezos, but was purchased in 2014 for $970 million. It is a platform that is frequently used especially by young people.
Alexa: It is a website that monitors the world's internet data traffic and allows us to see the ratings of the sites.
Goodreads: Goodreads was also acquired by Jeff Bezos in 2013. It is a website frequently visited by readers and literature lovers. Today, the number of members is over 90 million.
We realize that Jeff Bezos has taken important steps towards developing Amazon by establishing a link between Amazon and these sites and observing what people are interested in, what they research, and what they need day by day.