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Leadership Spotlight: Jeff Bezos

Jarvis Buckman

· Jarvis Buckman,Business,Finance,Leadership,Entrepreneurship

Many people know Jeff Bezos as the founder and CEO of Amazon but this leader has a great story of what life was like before he became the head honcho.

Jeff Bezos was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1964 and displayed an early love of how things worked. He would turn his parents’ garage into a lab, of sorts, and began putting together electrical devices. When he was a teenager, his family relocated to Miami. This is where Bezos’ love of computers began to flourish. It was actually during high school that Bezos began his first business called The Dream Institute. This business was an educational summer camp for students in the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades.

This love led him to study computer science and electrical engineering at Princeton University where he would graduate summa cum laude in 1986. He quickly found employment at several firms on Wall Street like Fitel, Bankers Trust, and D.E. Shaw. He met his wife, Mackenzie, in 1990 and became D.E. Shaw’s youngest vice president.

After enjoying initial success in the world of finance, Bezos decided to dive into the world of e-commerce by quitting his job at D.E. Shaw to move to Seattle. He began targeting the potential of the internet market by opening an online bookstore. He set up the office for his new company in his garage and began developing software. After working through bugs and updates, Bezos opened Amazon.com in 1995.

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