Jeffrey Preston Bezos

Jeffrey Preston Bezos is the founder and chief executive officer of Amazon.com. Bezos is a son of Cubans and one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the digital world. At 49 years old, he is the owner of one of the most popular and profitable E-commerce companies, with a value of 25 billion dollars.

Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen was born in the city of Albuquerque, New Mexico in the United States. His mother, Jackie Bezos, had Jeff at 17 years of age, and after a short marriage of 18 months, she remarried at an early age to Cuban migrant Miguel Bezos, who legally adopted Jeff. Forming the Bezos family, it was later formed with 2 younger siblings, Christina Bezos and Mark Bezos, who describe their brother as the family "Geek," for the various creations he made in his childhood. Not much is known about his biological father. Although he was raised by his grandfather on a farm, he followed in the footsteps of his adoptive father as an engineer.

Jeffrey's stepfather, Miguel Bezos, was born in Cuba. When Jackie married, the family moved to Houston, Texas and Miguel Bezos became an engineer at Exxon. Jeffrey studied at River Oaks Elementary in Houston from 4th to 6th grade. His family moved again to Miami, where he studied at Miami Palmetto Senior High School.

He studied Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Princeton University, where he graduated in 1986. He worked for a fiber optics company and later on Wall Street.

Jeffrey Bezos held various jobs related to his profession, but it was not until 1994 that he decided to forge his own path, founding an online bookstore called Cadabra.com at that time, officially launched on July 16, 1995, with an initial investment of 300 thousand dollars.

From the beginning, Jeff Bezos had managed to have the vision of what the Internet would become in a few years, betting on the massification of the network, which would soon have a presence in all markets. For this reason, it seemed like a brilliant idea to be able to offer an online book catalog in which the different publications from publishers would be compiled, and through which the public could search for available books within stock, to finally order them directly through the Internet.

That first project, which had not yet been called Amazon, had its first office in the garage of a house that Jeff and his wife Mackenzie had rented in the city of Seattle. There they installed the three servers with which they began to process the site's information.

Once the company was up and running, for various reasons shortly after he decided to rebrand his company with the name Amazon. Some point out that the identity change was due purely and exclusively to the Amazon River, while others claim it was a simple positioning strategy, taking into account that at that time website listings distributed alphabetically were being promoted, which is why Amazon began to appear in the first places in search engines.

With more than 200,000 titles when starting the company, and being a novel service that allowed users to purchase books through email contact, Amazon quickly became a true success.

So much so that within a few months the website managed to reach more than 2,000 daily visitors, and the following year it managed to multiply that sum by 25.

Over the years, Amazon became one of the most important online companies, since that distant July 16, 1995 when the first book sale was registered, becoming known worldwide in 1997.

This also managed to demonstrate that the e-commerce system is viable, and that when focused correctly it can become an even better business than the type of conventional market.

The unexpected growth of the company led Jeff Bezos to decide to venture into other areas, so he expanded his business. In this way, today not only can books be purchased through Amazon, but also an infinite number of articles in various categories, from CDs, DVDs, toys, electronics, clothing, food and more.

Coinciding with this, Bezos outlined what is the main objective of his company, stating: "Our goal is to be the world's most customer-centric company. The place where people can find and discover anything they want to buy online."

It was precisely his vision for doing good business that led Jeff Bezos not only to revolutionize the way people had used for years to buy books, but also the way to read them. During 2007, the Amazon company launched an innovative electronic device called Kindle, and its particularity was that it had been specially designed to read digital books. Little time passed before this new Amazon gadget finally proved its great usefulness for book lovers, offering the features necessary to meet user requirements.

On August 5, 2013, Bezos bought the newspaper "The Washington Post"; but this is not the only purchase that will change the history of Bezos, as he is in financial negotiations with Richard Branson, multibillionaire and founder of the Virgin group.