Jeff Bezos: The Early Years

January 12, 1964.
Albuquerque, New Mexico.

17-year-old Jacklyn Gise and 19-year-old Theodore Jørgensen become parents to a baby boy — Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen. This boy would go on to redefine how the world shops

Bezos’ parents divorced shortly after his birth, but his mother tenaciously completed her schooling by attending night school with infant Jeff in tow. In April 1968, she married Miguel 'Mike' Bezos, who adopted the 4-year-old Jeff.

The family moved around the US while his father completed his education. Even as a youngster, Bezos began to display prodigious intellect, reportedly keeping his younger siblings — Christina and Mark — from entering his room with a rigged electric alarm.

Besides his mother, Bezos was exposed to strong, hardworking individuals early on. His father Mike had immigrated from Cuba, and later become an engineer at Exxon.

His maternal grandfather Lawrence Preston Gise was a regional director of the US Atomic Energy Commission. Lawrence had a 25,000 acre ranch in Cotulla, Texas, where Jeff spent many summers laying pipes and fixing pumps.

His grandfather encouraged young Jeff's curious nature, keeping him occupied with educational projects. In his school years Bezos' superpower was his brain. When he wanted a contraption that he could not afford, he figured out how to procure individual parts and built it himself.

"I think single-handedly we kept many Radio Shacks in business," his mother quipped.

Jeff ticked the stereotypical 'geek' boxes, spending hours playing a Star Trek game with his friends when his school got access to a computer.

Worried he wasn't developing social skills, his parents enrolled the slightly built Jeff into a youth football team. Despite his parents being apprehensive of his prospects in the athletics department, Jeff's brain was up to the task. In a short time, he had already won favour with his coach by easily memorising complex plays for the entire team. Bezos' academic exploits continued at Miami Palmetto High School in Florida, where he became valedictorian, National Merit Scholar, and Silver Knight Award winner.

In his graduation speech, he expressed his ambition of seeing humankind colonise space.

The year was 1982.

In high school, Bezos juggled a job as a fry cook at McDonald's and started a summer camp for middle schoolers with his then girlfriend Ursula Werner. The curriculum mixed science with literature — reading Gulliver's Travels to learn about interstellar travel. Fuelled by his passion for science, Bezos took up theoretical physics at Princeton University, but soon realised he couldn't keep up with the best in class.

Unsatisfied, he changed his major to electrical engineering & computer science... and went on to graduate summa cum laude. With his track record, Bezos received job offers from the best in the business — Intel, Bell Labs etc.

He turned them down and joined Fitel, a hot telecommunications startup. His proclivity for getting results saw him move up the ranks, but the company failed to take off.Today, Jeff Bezos is known for many rules and frameworks, like the famous '2 Pizza Rule' and six-pager system he instituted Amazon. nother framework that he uses is a 'Regret Minimization Framework' — where he picks the choice he is less likely to regret later in life.

This framework led him to switch from Fitel to Bankers Trust, and 2 years later, in 1990, to a new hedge fund — D.E. Shaw. This is where Bezos, now 26, would begin his pivotal moves to become the billionaire entrepreneur we know him as today

Already developing a knack for distilling everything down into quantitative data, Bezos began trying to apply the same frameworks used to find great investments to find the right romantic partner.

This plan didn't work, but serendipity did.

Bezos fell in love with and married his assistant Mackenzie Scott. The two were married for 25 years. Mackenzie would go on to help build #Amazon in its early years and became one of the key shareholders in the company, making her one of the richest women in the world today.

At D.E. Shaw, Bezos again displayed his ability to climb the ladder quickly, becoming a senior vice president at the firm.

Around this time, the Internet's popularity was booming, and Shaw asked Bezos to look out for business opportunities on this new frontier.He made a list of products that could be sold online, settling on books as the best option. When he pitched the idea to Shaw and didn't get a favourable response, Bezos was faced with a choice — continue the job or work on the vision himself.

He chose to minimise regret.

"I knew that I might sincerely regret not having participated in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a revolutionizing event. When I thought about it that way … it was incredibly easy to make the decision.”

— Bezos to @BradStone

Jeff and Mackenzie embarked on a cross country road trip to Seattle, during which he jotted down the business plan for Amazon. Seattle was a good location to start this venture due to its proximity to Ingram, one of two major book distributors in the US. Bezos made a recruiting trip to California and hired some engineers to build his online bookstore. His first hire was an engineer named Shel Kaphan — who agreed to relocate to Seattle and become the first employee of the fledgling venture.

In true startup fashion, the prototype for what would become Amazon was worked on in a converted garage in a small Seattle suburb. The house's power supply barely managed to keep up with their machines as they worked on turning their vision into reality.

Jeff and team would even cheekily meet with potential stakeholders at a Starbucks located inside a Barnes & Noble bookstore — one of the incumbents Bezos' company would have to dethrone.

Things were coming together. Now, they needed a name.

Jeff liked the idea of 'Cadabra' to convey a sense of magical whimsy but was advised against it due to it being too obscure a reference. It didn't help that there was a tendency for people to mishear the name as 'cadaver'

Another name that came into consideration, also owing to Jeff's nature — was 'Relentless'.

(Fun fact: Have you ever tried visiting http://relentless.com. If you haven't, go on and try it, we'll wait.)

Since website listings were alphabetised in the 90s, Bezos picked up a dictionary and began thumbing through the 'A' section. That's when he stumbled across the word: Amazon.

The largest river in the world. An entity mighty enough to accommodate the scale of his vision.

On Nov. 1, 1994, the amazon.com url was registered. The world was about to change. Over the next few months, the seed capital started pouring in. Bezos wasn't out to reinvent the wheel, but his dogged pursuit of customer centricity started to work soon after.

The Amazon site went live in July 1995. Right from the beginning, sales started coming in from around the country.

In a couple of weeks, the site was making thousands of dollars in revenue. By September, the figure had climbed to about $20,000 a week.

The rise of Amazon was steady, with the company branching out from books into music and video CDs. Even though his venture was clearly onto something. Bezos still had his share of detractors.

None of this fazed Bezos. Just as he did during his school and college years, he always managed to find a way to make Amazon grow bigger. More unassailable.

Even when that meant taking big risks.

As his wealth grew, he set his sights back on that childhood dream voiced in 1982, making plans to take humanity beyond Earth with Blue Origin. His public persona changed as well, going from plain, shy computer nerd to the fit, confident, sharply dressed man we see today.

Even as Amazon grew from strength to strength, Bezos the leader has always been seen as a mixed bag. A bonafide visionary, but also one who pushes people to the brink in the pursuit of his version of excellence.

After taking Amazon to dizzying heights, and building a personal fortune that is now the stuff of legend, Bezos has finally announced he is stepping down as CEO of the company he founded. The company that has rewritten the rules of what an 'Internet Company' can be.

What Bezos does next is anyone's guess. But there is no doubt that the legacy he leaves behind is one that will not be lightly forgotten. Bezos and Amazon have become the template for some of the biggest tech companies in the world today.

Yodaa is a smart money app and card for the entire family. Join the club of the smartest financially empowered teens in India and SE Asia. Get Yodaa today.