Amazon Research Paper

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Unlike other large corporations, Amazon.com names only one founder: Jeff Bezos. From an early age, Bezos has always been an entrepreneur and an innovator. One summer in his high school years, he started his own small business. Along with his friend Ursula Werner, he ran a summer camp designed to teach kids about science and technology that he dubbed “The Dream Institute.” When Bezos recalls this venture, he mentions that he considers Werner his first business partner. As an adult he worked for many other corporations, such as McDonald’s, Bankers Trust Company, and D.E. Shaw & Co. He preferred working for young startup companies, such as Fitel, rather than established corporations such as Intel and Bell Labs (Scally 20-22, 29-30).
While he was working for D.E. Shaw, Bezos discovered that Internet usage was supposedly growing by 2,300 percent each year. He knew that this was too good of an opportunity to pass up, and that he had to create a business model taking full advantage of the rapid expansion of the Internet. Bezos decided to sell books because there was no store in existence that could offer a consumer any book they could possibly want. The diversity of books …show more content…

His original staff consisted only of himself, his wife MacKenzie, and two programmers. Bezos received a $300,000 loan from his parents and other smaller investments totalling $1 million to help start his business (Wittekind 33-34). Instead of promising to be profitable in two or three years, Bezos told investors that he didn’t plan on turning a profit for four or five years. However, enough investors took the plunge. Amazon.com officially opened for business in July 1995, and even though there was no advertising for the website, it was immediately very popular (Scally 42, 44-45). The first book ever sold by Amazon.com was Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies (Wittekind

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