Amazon History: Founding, Growth & Key Milestones

Jeffrey Preston Bezos

Amazon was founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos, an electrical engineering and computer science graduate from Princeton who was working as a paid quantitative analyst at the Wall Street firm D. E. Shaw & Co. In early 1994, Bezos read a statistic that altered the trajectory of his life: internet usage was growing at 2,300% per year. Convinced that such growth would enable new commercial structures, he created a list of 20 products that could be sold online, eventually narrowing it down to books because of their universal demand, catalog size (which no physical store could hold), and low price point. Bezos famously left his lucrative Wall Street job, packed up his wife MacKenzie, and drove across the country to Seattle, Washington, choosing the location because of its proximity to the book distributor Ingram, and the local pool of technical talent emanating from Microsoft. He incorporated the company originally as 'Cadabra' (as in abracadabra), but changed it to 'Amazon' after a lawyer misheard the original name as 'cadaver.' The new name was strategic: it began with 'A' (ensuring it would appear at the top of alphabetized web directories) and was named after the world's largest river, reflecting his ambition to build the world's largest store. The founding ethos of Amazon was defined by extreme, aggressive frugality and a fanatical obsession with customer experience over short-term profitability. Bezos operated out of a garage, famously building his own desks out of cheap, solid-core wooden doors bought at Home Depot, a tradition that Amazon continues today as a symbol of its culture. Despite deep skepticism from Wall Street and the devastation of the Dot-Com crash (which saw Amazon's stock plummet from $107 to $6), Bezos insisted that his investments in logistics and technology would eventually compound. He was entirely correct, ultimately stepping down as CEO in 2021 as the wealthiest man on Earth, leaving behind an inescapable digital and physical empire. Jeffrey Preston Bezos was born in 1964 in Albuquerque. Education: Miami Palmetto High School; River Oaks Elementary School.