Amazon Unbound

Amazon Unbound:  Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire, by Brad Stone, Simon and Schuster 2021

When Jeff Bezos' teenaged mother headed off to her last year in high school, she was in a tough position.  As a now divorced new mother, she was not welcomed back to class - in fact, as a condition of  the return which she had fought for, she was required to arrive five minutes before the opening bell, to not eat in the cafeteria, to basically not speak with anyone, and to leave promptly at the end of the school day.  But she did it, later taking her son, and two large carryalls - one for school books and one for toys to keep him amused -  to night school.  Later, much later, she hit school again for one more degree, but in the ensuing years she remarried a Cuban immigrant who gave Jeff the name Bezos, and began to live an easier life.

Somehow this story tells us a bit about the young Bezos' spirit.  As class valedictorian he had already demonstrated technical skills that deepened later at Princeton, where he was accepted and majored in electrical engineering and computer science.   After graduation he moved to a Wall Street hedge fund, D. E. Shaw, but at age 30 he made what became the big shift to his start-up, an on-line book business that expanded to become the on-line retail giant we depend on today.  Bezos tried two other company names before settling on Amazon, the name of the South American river, but also a name that, starting with the letter A, guaranteed better search results on the web!   Founded in his garage in Seattle, self-financed with a loan later from his parents of $245,000, Bezos clearly intended to scale.  Despite the newness of the world wide web - and the clear advantage pioneers held - volumes grew faster than he expected.  Warehouses and workers complicated the pressure, but the founder held on.  The Dot.com bust hurt everyone, but, Bezos, whose first job had been as a teenage McDonald's fry cook, was undeterred.  The money was there, and Bezos knew that no matter how messy the coding,  the technology was doable.

But what happened with Amazon during the pandemic is the most heartening piece of this unfinished story.  Unfinished because July 20 at 9 am EST, on the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moonshot, Bezos takes a ride to the edge of outer space. During the pandemic  Amazon's growth skyrocketed, and  Bezos wealth reportedly grew by $35B.  Amazon pandemic sales and profits both exploded, with profits at 220%  the same period one year earlier.   What began an an online book seller in a relatively uncrowded web marketplace scaled to big competition for Walmart and other retail contenders.   

Having watched him step aside as CEO in February, along with making other big changes in his personal life, we're going to wait and see what happens next.  The richest man in the world..  

Patricia E. Moody

FORTUNE magazine  "Pioneering Woman in Mfg" 

IndustryWeek IdeaXchange Xpert

A Mill Girl at Blue Heron Journal, on-line resource for business thought-leaders and decision-makers,  patriciaemoody@gmail.com