it is hard to imagine life without amazon. com even for someone of my advanced age after all where else can a few clicks of a mouse take you from the latest novel by Toni Morrison to an 18th century edition of the works of John Locke having stopped in power tools and women's shoes along the way yet the founder and chief executive officer of the world's largest retailer whose net sales surpassed twenty four point five billion dollars in 2009 is only 46 years old and amazon. com has only existed since 1995 making it even younger than the class of 2010 the moral of this story is that the right idea in the right hands at the right time can change the way we leave our lives the idea in this case was harnessing the power of the nascent Internet to create a virtual bookstore of limitless proportions the hands were those of our speaker Jeff Bezos a self-described nerdy commuter compute computer science and electrical engineering major who graduated from Princeton with highest honors in 1986 and the time was 1994 when he and his wife Mackenzie Tuttle Bezos of the class of 1992 exchanged the security of Wall Street where they worked at de Shan company for the uncertain prospects of a dot-com startup but then as Jeff points out failure is an essential component of innovation and invention if you know it's going to work it's not an experiment and amazon.
com was nothing if not a grand experiment working on improvised tables in the garage of a Seattle home and using his parents savings as startup capital jeff defied the forces that caused most young companies to fail partly he admits through sheer good fortune but also because of his unwavering determination to create the world's most customer centric company and as he notes in his company's latest annual report of the 452 goals that amazon. com has set for itself this year 360 of them will directly affect the customer experience while the word revenue is used on only eight occasions I do not advise you to start off with 452 goals this year by the way but this is just one of the keys to Jeff's success another lies in his exceptional ability to marry commerce and technology in creative ways in his sheer inventiveness and willingness to take the risks inherent in this process indeed the history of amazon. com is one of daring leaps one such leap involved creating the capacity to search inside the books sold by his company not by designing a modest pilot project but by committing the resources to make it possible to scour the text of more than a hundred and twenty thousand volumes when this feature debuted in 2003 other innovations have included one-click shopping online product reviews by customers and of course the Kindle reading device which we test-drove in three courses this fall mirroring the rapid growth of Amazon itself the number of books available through the u.
s. Kindle Store topped four hundred and sixty thousand in 2009 just two years after its long and there's no turning back our vision is every book every printed in any language all available in less than 60 seconds jeff has stated an audacious proposition to be sure but as Elle Albert Einstein once observed if at first the idea is not absurd then there is no hope for it perhaps the American Academy of achievement summarized our speakers impact best when it noted having already revolutionized the way the world buys books Jeff Bezos is now transforming the way we read them as well I like to think the Princeton helped to lay the groundwork for this revolution dreamer and doer entrepreneur and engineer refreshingly unassuming even in the face of unimaginable success jeff has done his alma mater proud it is a true honor and pleasure to welcoming him back to old Nassau today as a kid I spent my summers with my grandparents on the ranch in Texas I helped fix windmills vaccinate cattle and do other chores we also watched soap operas every afternoon especially Days of Our Lives my grandparents belonged to a caravan Club a group of Airstream trailer owners who travel together around the u. s.
