Profiles of Greatness: Jeff Bezos

 

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is one of the greatest entrepreneurs of our times.

Jeff Bezos started Amazon in 1994, was an angel investor of Google in 1998 and has built one of the biggest businesses on the internet since then.

Initially, he studied Physics but changed to Electronics where he graduated with excellence. He then became involved with the hedge-fund industry and focused on quant trading while the internet started to grow at very high rates at the time.

His decision to leave the financial industry, borrow 300’000 from his parents and start selling books online turned into a long run decision and leading to the hall of fame in the entrepreneur space.

 

Jeff Bezos did try so many different businesses and ventures, proving his approach to failure and modeling success.

 

“Overnight success takes 10 years!”

Jeff Bezos figured out 3 mayor key focus points for his businesses:

• Customer obsession
• Inventions
• Longterm

 

If you want to invent, you need to be willing to experiment and you have to be willing to fail and take the risk it takes.

 

He builds his business on top of 3 big ideas and executes against them:

• People will always want things delivered faster
• People will always want things cheaper
• People will always want more selection possibilities

 

The man behind the story

Amazon is an incredible story and it keeps going on while even Google is afraid of its market domination.

 

About Leadership, AI, Washington Post, Space

 

Constantly reinventing

While Amazon started by selling books on the internet, over the years the company had to reinvent its business again and again and its founder Jeff Bezos is a highly diversified investor. While some business ideas did not work over time, others did and provided strength to the company.

Once again it is the dreams and the vision of a person, carrying all the big ideas we already experience and those in the pipeline of the giant.

 

Conclusions

Amazon is one of the most important players in the e-commerce competition and the long-term view of its founder Jeff Bezos implies, that this will not change so fast.

Even Google is afraid of the giant’s power and potential.

 

The Amazon platform

Amazon is providing a layer to many different sectors of people and businesses. While it is mostly known as a retailer, they also are heavily invested in providing technical services through their cloud platform AWS (Amazon Web Services).

Same as with the retail part, the giant provides the infrastructure for small businesses to take advantage of a new form of a service layer.

 

By operating your IT services on AWS you get the chance to distribute your services around the world through the connected infrastructure of Amazon.

The same is true concerning the Amazon fulfillment model FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon) where individuals can sell products they source anywhere in the world, send them to the fulfillment center and Amazon is handling the rest.

Through the Amazon Prime membership, they also make sure to have the clients tied to the brand.

On the delivery side, it is incredibly effective and smart to use the affiliate model to provide an incentive for individuals who want to sell products on the platform.

 

Data mining

The challenge of the big tech giants is to accumulate and understand client data and client behavior.

In comparison to other players like Google and Facebook, Amazon gets data from clients who are actually spending real money in retail. They don’t operate a free service but have access to the data, needed to analyze the action of buyers.