Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is the only famous dotcom entrepreneur of the late 90s to still be in executive control of the company he founded.
And Amazon remains one of the few businesses from that era to make substantial profits.
Bezos launched the website in 1994 as Cadabra.com, but renamed it in 1995. He had seen the potential of the internet as an online marketplace. A web front-end leading to a vast warehousing operation could offer the consumer far more choice than a conventional book or record shop.
The company grew rapidly, lionised as one of the leaders of the internet revolution. It listed on NASDAQ in May 1997, boasting an unusual business plan: it would not make profit for three years.
But in 2004, Amazon made $588m in profit – not bad for a company once pilloried by the press as “amazon.toast” for its slow growth during the boom years at the end of the last decade.
Bezos is an eccentric, sometimes wacky frontman who once played tennis with Anna Kournikova in Manhattan to publicise her new spots bra. Perhaps suited to a company like Amazon, his unpredictability has nevertheless sometimes enraged Wall Street.
Bezos is an ‘IT geek’ through and through, with an attention to detail bordering on the autistic. Obsessed with machines and computers since an early age, he fell in love with computers at school and studied computer science and electrical engineering at Princeton.
Rumours from within the company suggest that while Bezos has a refreshing approach to doing business – typified by his ‘two pizza’ approach to teams (if two pizzas aren’t enough to feed a team, it’s too big) – he is obsessed with measurement and numbers and tends to rely on spreadsheets and other analytic devices to steer his business forward.
Bezos – now worth $4.8bn according to Forbes – is not a rags-to-riches entrepreneur. Born in Albuquerque in 1964, he inherited a 62 square mile ranch in New Mexico.
Bezos has managed to prove wrong those who called him a fraud after the dot com crash, but his long-term reputation on Wall Street will depend on how he takes his company forward in an increasingly crowded internet marketplace.
