Профиль: Джефф Безос28.07.2017 11:52

​Как сын матери-одиночки стал одним из самых богатых людей на планете.

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Джефф Безос родился в 1964 году в Альбукерке, штат Нью-Мексико. Его родители — Жаклин Гиз и Тед Йоргенсен — познакомились в школе. Йоргенсену было 18 лет, когда Гиз забеременела. В то время он работал продавцом и гастролировал по стране в составе труппы моноциклистов.

По воспоминаниям Гиз, отец Безоса злоупотреблял алкоголем, и когда их ребенку исполнилось 1,5 года, она решила от него уйти. В то время ей было 17 лет. Спустя несколько лет она встретила Мигеля Безоса — эмигранта из Кубы, который приехал в США в 1962 году, не зная по-английски ни одного слова, кроме «гамбургер».

В 1968 году пара поженилась, а Мигель Безос усыновил четырехлетнего Джеффри. «Разумеется, 'это сложно оценить, но обстоятельства рождения, возможно, сформировали у Безоса плодотворный микс качеств, присущих предпринимателям — сообразительность, амбициозность и неутолимая потребность проверять себя на прочность», — писал биограф Безоса Бред Стоун в книге The Everything Store.

В школе Безос проводил летние каникулы в Техасе на ранчо бабушки и дедушки, неподалеку от городка Котулла. «Я помогал чинить водокачки, делал прививки скоту и занимался другими делами. А после обеда мы садились смотреть разные мыльные оперы», — вспоминал предприниматель во время торжественной речи в Принстонском университете.

Его бабушка и дедушка были членами клуба любителей домов на колесах Airstream. Вместе с другими участниками они отправлялись в путешествия по США и Канаде. Иногда в одном караване было до 300 автомобилей, вспоминает Безос: «Я обожал наши вылазки и всегда ждал их с нетерпением. Дедушка цеплял домик к машине, и мы отправлялись в путь».

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По словам биографа Безоса, он был круглым отличником в школе и именно ему доверили произносить прощальную речь на выпускном. За выдающиеся академические способности он получил стипендию в Принстонском университете и собирался стать физиком-теоретиком.

От нью-йоркского хедж-фонда к Amazon

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Launching Amazon: «I took the less safe path to follow my passion, and I’m proud of that choice»

Bezos got straight As in high school, was the valedictorian of his class and was accepted early admission to Princeton, according to Stone’s biography. For a time in college, he thought he would be a theoretical physicist.

But it was years later, while working in finance in New York City that he had the idea to start Amazon.

«I came across the fact that Web usage was growing at 2,300 percent per year. I’d never seen or heard of anything that grew that fast, and the idea of building an online bookstore with millions of titles — something that simply couldn’t exist in the physical world — was very exciting to me,» says Bezos, in his 2010 Princeton address.

At the time, Bezos was just 30 and had been married for a year. «I told my wife MacKenzie that I wanted to quit my job and go do this crazy thing that probably wouldn’t work since most startups don’t, and I wasn’t sure what would happen after that,» he says.

«AFTER MUCH CONSIDERATION, I TOOK THE LESS SAFE PATH TO FOLLOW MY PASSION, AND I’M PROUD OF THAT CHOICE.»-Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, Blue Origin

His wife told him to go for it.

«As a young boy, I’d been a garage inventor. I’d invented an automatic gate closer out of cement-filled tires, a solar cooker that didn’t work very well out of an umbrella and tinfoil, baking-pan alarms to entrap my siblings,» he says. «I’d always wanted to be an inventor, and she wanted me to follow my passion.»

But not everyone was on board. Bezos boss took a walk through Central Park and told Bezos that, while it sounded like a «really good idea,» it would be an even better idea for somebody who didn’t already have a good career.

«That logic made some sense to me, and he convinced me to think about it for 48 hours before making a final decision,» says Bezos. «Seen in that light, it really was a difficult choice, but ultimately, I decided I had to give it a shot. I didn’t think I’d regret trying and failing. And I suspected I would always be haunted by a decision to not try at all.

«After much consideration, I took the less safe path to follow my passion, and I’m proud of that choice.»

The early days of Amazon: «I thought maybe one day we would be able to afford a forklift»

When Amazon first started, it sold only books. Bezos would drive the packages to the post office himself in his 1987 Chevy Blazer. «I thought maybe one day we would be able to afford a forklift,» Bezos tells Charlie Rose in a wide-ranging interview in 2016. «And it is very, it’s very, very different today.»

After books, the next items Bezos added to Amazon were music and videos. Then, he asked customers to see what else they would want to buy from the online retailer.

«I sent an email message out to the customer base, actually a thousand randomly selected customers, and I said, besides books, music and video, what would you like to see us sell? And the list came back incredibly long,» explains Bezos.

«It was basically just whatever the person had on their mind right now,» says Bezos, and that sparked an idea.

Here’s what makes up the Jeff Bezos empire

«One of customers said, 'I wish you sold windshield wipers because I need windshield wipers for my car.' A light kind of went on in my head. You know, people — people will want to use this new fangled e-commerce way of shopping for everything,» Bezos says to Rose.

«People are very convenience-motivated,» says Bezos. «So that really started the kind of the expansion into all categories, consumer electronics, and then apparel, and so on.»

Expand he did. Today, Amazon sells almost everything. From toilet paper to groceries to electronics to fashion to furniture.

When Bezos enters a new product category, he is not intimidated by a lack of expertise.

«I am never disappointed when we’re not good at something because I think, well think how good it’s going to work when we are good at it,» Bezos tells Rose. «And the apparel is like that. There is so much opportunity. Nobody really knows how to do a great job of offering — apparel online yet. And we have tons of invention and ideas and working our way through that experimental list.»

Amazon’s North star: «Customer obsession, as opposed to competitor obsession»

Bezos has always been a rare combination of optimistic, idealistic and visionary.

Back in 2003, while much of the tech industry was still hungover from the dot-com bust, Bezos was aggressively foretelling the potential of the Internet. «I do think there’s more innovation ahead of us than there is behind us,» says Bezos in a TED Talk he gave that year. «We’re very, very early.»

As Bezos charged full force into the Wild West that was the Internet then, he was — and still is today — guided by a single belief: Do what is best for the customer.

«Thing that connects everything that Amazon does is the number one — our number one conviction and idea and philosophy and principle which is customer obsession, as opposed to competitor obsession. And so we are always focused on the customer, working backwards from the customer’s needs, developing new skills internally so that we can satisfy what we perceive to be future customer needs,» Bezos tells Rose.

Another through line to Bezos' business strategy is his «willingness to think long-term,» he says.

«We are very happy to invest in new initiatives that are very risky, for five to seven years, which most companies won’t do that,» Bezos tells Rose. «It’s the combination of the risk-taking and the long-term outlook that make Amazon, not unique, but special in a smaller crowd.»

Finally, he’s obsessive about finding problems and fixing them.

«Taking real pride in operational excellence, so just doing things well, finding defects and working backwards — that is all the incremental improvement that in business, most successful companies are very good at this one. … [Y]ou don’t want to ever let defects flow downstream,» Bezos says to Rose. «That is a key part of doing a good job in any business in my opinion.»

The evolution of Jeff Bezos: See if you can recognize him through the years

From e-commerce to media

As consumer behavior on the web has evolved, so, too has Amazon. Prime, the e-commerce’s popular two-day shipping membership comes with access to premium television shows, for example.

Being a content creator built on the back of an e-commerce giant gives Amazon freedom to be creative. For example, one of Amazon’s most popular shows, «Transparent,» is about a patriarch who becomes a woman later in life. It’s won eight Emmys and been nominated for another 28.

«A show like 'Transparent' which has won Golden Globes and Emmys is not ever — it is not a show that could be successfully done on broadcast TV, because broadcast TV needs a much bigger audience,» says Bezos to Rose. «And so you can actually think about the creative process a little differently. You can attract different storytellers. You can go for stories that are narrower but incredibly powerful and well told.»

In addition to producing online shows, Bezos is also the owner of another kind of content: journalism. Through his Nash Holdings LLC, he bought the Washington Post in 2013 for $250 million.

«I bought it because it’s important,» says Bezos. «I would never buy a financially upside down salty snack food company. You know, that doesn’t make any sense to me. But The Washington Post is important. And so it makes sense to me to take something like that, and I also am optimistic. And I thought there were some ways to make it — I want it to be a self-sustaining, profitable enterprise,» Bezos says to Rose. «And I think it can be done.»

Bezos' empire now stretches far and wide. Amazon, which currently has a market cap of about $500 billion, agreed tobuy Whole Foods last month and also owns companies like Zappos and Twitch. Through Bezos Expeditions, he’s also invested in companies like Twitter and Basecamp, among many others.

The final frontier: «I fell in love with the idea of space and space exploration and space travel when I was 5»

While shipping toiletries and downloading books has made Bezos wealthy, his passion is outer space.

View image on Twitter

FollowJeff Bezos✔@JeffBezosBuzz Aldrin dropped by Blue Origin HQ to say hi to the team yesterday. Thanks @TheRealBuzz!8:55 PM — Feb 2, 2017 427427 Retweets 1,8781,878 likes

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«This is a childhood dream,» Bezos says to Rose. «I fell in love with the idea of space and space exploration and space travel when I was 5 years old. I watched Neil Armstrong step onto the moon. You don’t choose your passions, your passions choose you. So I am infected with this idea. I couldn’t ever stop thinking about space. I have been thinking about it ever since then.»

To that end, Bezos is the founder of Blue Origin, a company that aims tomake space tourism affordable.

«Basically what I am doing right now is taking my Amazon winnings and investing them. Every time you see me sell stock on Amazon, it’s send more money to the Blue Origin team,» Bezos says to Rose.

In addition to making it possible for more people to travel to space, Bezos says he is building the infrastructure for the next generation of space entrepreneurs.

»[I]f I’m 80 years old, looking back on my life and the one thing I have done is make it so that there is this gigantic entrepreneurial explosion in space for the next generation,» says Bezos, «I will be a happy, happy man.»

Fortune http://fortune.com/amazon-jeff-bezos-prime/Blue Origin

Bezos quietly started Blue Origin 16 years ago as a research project and has been mostly mum about it until now. Rob Meyerson, a soft-spoken Midwesterner and former NASA aerospace engineer who is its president, says the stealthy profile largely has been an effort to avoid hyping unproven technology. Meyerson, who worked at a private Seattle-area rocket company called Kist­ler Aerospace, which went belly up, joined Blue Origin in 2003 when it had about 10 employees. At the time, Bezos had charged his researchers with finding an alternative to the polluting and earsplitting blastoff methods that space programs have used since the 1960s. The research failed, and Bezos changed his mind. «Jeff realized we should invest in liquid propulsion so we could fly a lot,» says Meyerson. «All of this is tied to his original vision of having millions of people living in space.»

After years of fits and starts, Blue Origin is finally ready to go airborne. It has successfully sent an automated spacecraft into suborbital space—about 100 kilometers above earth, known as the Kármán line, a 10-minute trip from start to finish—and landed it safely on earth. The company won«t say when, but it plans shortly to begin taking reservations for passengers. It intends to develop a rocket to fly into earth«s orbit, a feat Elon Musk«s SpaceX has already achieved, which will allow it to carry humans and satellites. «Eventually,» says Meyerson, «we want to sell these things to customers. We think we«ll start flying passengers in 2017. These will be test engineers. Then we«ll sell tickets. I imagine Jeff and I will fly in the 2018-ish time frame.»

As with the Washington Post, Bezos is regularly engaged with Blue Origin, though in a nonoperational role. Meyerson says Bezos attends a daylong monthly operational review that often includes presentations by outside experts. He also visits for weekly four-hour updates on the progress of its orbital launch vehicle and New Shepard spacecraft. Meyerson says he initially resisted writing the famous six-page «narratives» Bezos requests before meetings, where PowerPoint is banned. Bezos kept asking, though, and Meyerson relented. Now, he says, he«s a «complete convert.»

Bezos won«t say how much money he has sunk into Blue Origin. Reports several years ago put the figure at $500 million, and the company«s spending velocity has only increased. It has 600 employees on the way to 800, with launch facilities in Texas and soon at Cape Canaveral, Fla. «Nobody gets into the space business because they«ve done an exhaustive analysis of all the industries they might invest in and they find that the one with the least risk and the highest returns on capital is the space business,» says Bezos. With his fortune, he can fund rockets for quite a while to come. Indeed, were Bezos to keep blowing through $500 million a year on Blue Origin, he would have to close the place … in 90 years.

Об устройствах

Every little bit counts, of course, and Amazon is adding bits across its vast empire at a furious pace. Its Amazon Web Services business, with $7.8 billion in sales in 2015, has grown so ubiquitous that it now effectively exacts a tax, as venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya has called it, on every startup to run its business. Every day seems to bring another experiment. Amazon«s efforts to compete against Apple«s AAPL -1.97% iPhone failed miserably. But Amazon«s Echo personal assistant devices running on its Alexa natural-language engine have won rave reviews for superior performance compared with Apple«s Siri. Amazon is cranking up an ambitious same-day delivery program, becoming a major force in TV and movies, and has made moves to operate its own air and shipping transportation fleets.

It«s all too much for Bezos to micromanage, and he acknowledges picking his spots. His latest passion is for higher-end fashion, an area Amazon has been upgrading in recent years; Bezos says he is focused on Amazon«s plans for its own private label. «I think there«s so much opportunity for invention there,» he says. «It«s very hard to do online. It«s fragmented offline. People value a curatorial approach.» This, he says, is a significant departure for Amazon. «We didn«t curate a selection of books.» As for Bezos«s other areas of focus at Amazon, he says he«s spending time on «certain elements of AWS, but out a few years,» as well as on Alexa and the company«s fulfillment centers. As for specifics, «I can«t really share any because it«s too much of a road-map kind of issue.»

One reason Bezos can concentrate narrowly at Amazon is the length of tenure of his top lieutenants. Jeff Wilke, for example, joined Amazon in 1999, and today he runs Amazon«s consumer business, which he calls «Amazon Classic.» He says Amazon«s annual planning process—and the detailed narratives its managers prepare for them—allows Bezos to closely «audit» the company«s efforts. Otherwise, says Wilke, «I would say his style has gone from being more prescriptive to teaching and refining.» Jeff Blackburn, an 18-year Amazon veteran who runs the company«s M&A activities and content businesses, describes Bezos as consistent in his selection process. «He still works 65 hours a week. He«s still connected to the office and doesn«t travel very much. He dives in on the same issues now that he did many years ago.»

О критике:

One thing that has changed at Amazon is the level of scrutiny it endures. Brad Stone«s 2013 book, The Everything Store, lauded Amazon«s successes while portraying its treatment of partners and suppliers as shabby. A 2015 exposé by the New York Timesportrayed life at Amazon as only marginally more pleasant than in a Soviet gulag. The severe depiction cascaded through the media, and Bezos told employees that «the article doesn«t describe the Amazon I know.» Asked how the criticism has affected him and Amazon, Bezos deflects the question with a politician«s ease. «A company of Amazon«s size needs to be scrutinized,» he says. «It«s healthy. And it«s a great honor really to have a company that has grown into something worthy of such scrutiny.»

Amazon had long been known as a grueling place to work, but the Times article struck a nerve. Amazon fired back by criticizing the paper«s journalism in a post on Medium by its senior vice president for communications, Jay Carney, a former spokesman for President Obama (and former writer for Time, Fortune«s sister publication). The controversy cooled, and Amazon says it hasn«t affected hiring. To this day, Bezos insists Amazon«s intense culture is a strength, not a weakness. A company spokesperson notes that Amazon has implemented a few HR modifications—such as an improved parental-leave program—but then hastens to add that the changes were in the works before the Times article. In the end, the consensus is that Amazon«s culture is every bit as ferocious and demanding as it ever was. Did you really expect Bezos to abandon the formula that got him here?

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