my mom had me when she was 17 years old and she was still in high school levels of fame and wealth that are hard to comprehend our stock peaked somewhere around 113 our stock went down to six as a result of going up 70 percent this year you have become the wealthiest man in the world is that a title the year is 1980 a 16 year old high school student shows up to a small mcdonald's located in albuquerque new mexico for his first shift as a line cook after beginning his shift he will be given the job of cleaning the restaurant corner to corner considering he was branded as the new guy his manager co-workers and customers didn't think much of him at the time but only because they had no idea as to who this kid would eventually become the name of that 16 year old mcdonald's newbie happened to be jeffrey preston bezos and exactly 38 years after cleaning that albuquerque mcdonald's corner to corner he would take on the title as the richest man on planet earth however it's safe to say that such a journey would be no walk in the park a journey full of risk reward ups downs successes failures and a load of hair loss this is from mcdonald's to multi-billionaire becoming jeff bezos [Music] jeffrey preston jorgensen was born in albuquerque new mexico on the 12th of january 1964. at the time of his birth jeff's mother jacqueline was still extremely young and was yet to graduate from high school i was two weeks past my 17th birthday and a junior in high school when i gave birth to my first son jeff she was a pregnant 16 year old in albuquerque new mexico in high school which was not cool at the time jeff's mother jacqueline was so poor that she ruled out the idea of owning the most basic household items such as a telephone i figured out that jeff and i could move into our own apartment if we just didn't have a phone jacqueline had been married to a man named theodore jorgensen at the time of jeff's birth who she later divorced and soon remarried immigrant mike bezos in 1968 resulting in a name change from geoffrey jorgensen to jeffrey bezos at the age of four as jeff bezos began to grow up he would start spending his summers at a ranch owned by his grandfather in catoala texas spent three months every year from the age of four to age of 16 working on the ranch with my grandfather which was just an incredible incredible experience this fact by itself is of no value however this ranch in south texas would be the location at which jeff's grandfather would begin to teach him the basics of self-reliance he was incredibly self-reliant he did everything himself you know he didn't call that if one of the animals was sick he figured out what to do himself as well as the importance of taking on tasks that he didn't know how to solve he would take on major projects that he didn't really know how to do and then figure out how to do it as jeff continued to grow into his early teens he began to display an interest in science and technology he would begin to use his guards to make various pieces of tech such as an alarm to keep his brother and sister out of his room you know our garage was basically you know science fair central possibly based on this interest jeff bezos would be accepted into the gifted program at his elementary school displaying his cognitive ability from a young age early age were you a pretty smart student and your teachers tell you this oh you were good or i have always been academically smart as jeff entered into high school he would win a silver knight award which was presented to outstanding individuals and leaders who have applied their knowledge and talents to serving their school and communities also being named valedictorian upon graduation you were the valedictorian of your high school uh in miami which hopefully gives everyone a good idea of who jeff was becoming by his late teens i was a good student i always worked really hard i was nerdy you were nerdy i was nerdy i was um in the goody goody uh class of students however despite having gifted cognitive skills jeff was far from being well off throughout his high school years at the age of 16 jeff would get his first job at mcdonald's earning 2. 69 per hour while it didn't pay all that well and was far from glamorous jeff saw the positives in the situation claiming that the job got him interested in the process of automation taught him the basics of customer service and the importance of staying focused on a single task she couldn't get me to switch tasks so she would have to just pick up my chair and move me and by the way i think that's if you ask the people who work with me that's still probably true and jeff never had a problem working at mcdonald's back at the age of 16 because he would later explain that it was never about the present for him it was all about the future the same way i do they work in the future they live in the future none of the people who report to me should really be focused on the current and as mentioned in the beginning what the future had in store for jeff was undoubtedly something that he was unable to predict jeff's early life successes would continue after being accepted into the prestigious princeton university where he would begin his studies with the goal of getting into the field of physics i went to princeton primarily to because i wanted to study physics uh which and and was it and it's such a fantastic place to study physics however jeff would change his degree after realizing that physics wasn't really for him switching to electrical engineering and computer science i changed my uh major very quickly to electrical engineering and computer science jeff would then graduate summa laude which similar to his experience in high school meant he graduated amongst the highest achievers in the year and while his ability to excel in school was impressive this was really only the beginning for jeff he had finished universally was about to get out into the real world where he would begin to turn his potential into reality unsurprisingly jeff would receive numerous job offers upon the completion of his degree at prestigious companies such as intel nokia and accenture however would decline these offers and instead take a job at a financial tech startup by the name of fytel but a financial tech startup simply wasn't good enough for a genius like jeff bezos so he would eventually take his skills to a hedge fund by the name of d shaw in 1990 at the age of 26.
i went to new york city and i ended up working at a quantitative hedge fund run by a brilliant man named david shaw d. e shawn co despite now being in this extremely prestigious high-paying job rather than valuing the money he was being paid it seemed as though jeff bezos preferred to value the lessons he was being taught by his bosses i learned so much from him i used a lot of his ideas and principles on things like hr and recruiting and what kind of people to hire and jeff was going to need all of the lessons he could possibly learn because jeff was already thinking about leaving the hedge fund with the intention of taking on the biggest adventure he could possibly think of however before taking on another big venture he made what seemed to be somewhat of an impulsive decision he wanted to get married at a certain point i decided i wanted to get married and i had all my friends setting me up and i had my list of criteria and this was like good old-fashioned blind dates i went on dozens of blind dates as mentioned jeff began to go on blind dates stating to have gone on so many that he became somewhat of a professional blind data i had all my friends set me up on blind dates none of them worked out very well perhaps the reason jeff went on so many blind dates without successfully meeting someone was because of his bizarre criteria when it came to finding a partner when i was telling my friends my criteria one of the ones that i would list was that i wanted a woman who could get me out of a third world prison he stated that this was a requirement not because jeff planned on landing himself in a third world prison but rather because he wanted a wife who was resourceful and i said no it's just a visualization for somebody really resourceful because i think that you don't want to go through life with teammates who aren't resourceful this requirement would eventually be fulfilled when jeff would meet mackenzie scott in 1992 who he would then marry only six months later in 1993. we dated for three months were engaged for three months and then got married so our whole kind of dating engagement period was only six months long jeff's life seemed somewhat perfect at this point on the outset a job at a hedge fund in one of the most prestigious cities in the world newly married to a beautiful resourceful wife it seemed like jeff couldn't have had it any better at the time but as he said when everything gets too perfect the first thing we want to do is break it apart so we can have a challenge and a challenge was certainly what jeff bezos was preparing for what propelled you to say i'm quitting this i'm going to start a company selling books over the internet i'm going to do it from seattle where'd that idea come from in early 1994 after recently becoming the fourth hedge fund senior vice president at d shaw and co jeff bezos began to think heavily about what he wanted from life eventually deciding that he was going to focus on a phenomena called a regret minimization framework with the goal of having no regrets during his later years in life when i'm 80 years old i want to have minimized the number of regrets that i have i don't want to be 80 years old in a quiet moment of reflection thinking back over my life and and cataloging a bunch of major regrets at around the same time jeff found out about this new thing by the name of the internet internet is uh that massive computer network the one that's becoming really big now an online network called internet alison can you explain what internet is now that i've gotten on the internet i'd rather be on my computer than doing just about anything the internet itself however is definitely exploding it hit and within like two years it just it's become so powerful the internet gave us a whole world of exciting new possibilities so i guess this is a story of how it changed our lives [Music] when it came across the startling statistic the web usage was growing at 2300 a year so i decided i would try and find a business plan that made sense in the context of that growth jeff realized that he could sell products through the internet and decided that creating an online bookstore might work as a business model i picked books because there were more items in the book category than any other category and so you could build universal selection there were three million in 1994 this desire to minimize regret combined with the genuine plan of selling books through the internet ultimately led jeff bezos to quit his prestigious headphone job and venture out into the unknown of the business world you had a great job you had i remember you had a great apartment on the upper west side working on wall street and a year after we got married i went to her and said i want to quit my job thankfully jeff's wife was supportive of the dream which would lead them to leave new york city and head to seattle where the company would begin even before she could say what's the internet she said great let's go because she wanted to support it we're about to take off driving across the country to start amazon go to seattle with jeff literally writing the business plan for the company in the car trip over i wrote the first draft on the car trip uh from you know from from the east coast to the west coast shortly after arriving in seattle the company which was originally called kadabra was stereotypically started out of jeff's new garage the movers packed their things and were already on the road when bezos phoned them to say he had decided on seattle jeff bezos then accepted his parents life savings of approximately three hundred thousand dollars and instantly invested it into the company initial startup capital for amazon.
com came primarily from my parents and they invested a large fraction of their life savings uh in what became amazon. com also changing the name from cadabra to amazon named after the amazon river in south america and he said cadaver and i knew then that was not gonna be a good name we changed it about three months later however despite having this three hundred thousand dollars worth of funding the future of amazon was far from certain jeff would warn his early investors that there was a 70 chance that amazon would either fail or go bankrupt and i told them that i thought there was a 70 chance that they would lose their whole investment which was a few hundred thousand dollars i thought i was giving myself triple the normal odds it's only about 10 here i was giving myself a 30 chance jeff had to deliver the books to the post office himself and didn't have enough money for basic machinery i was driving the packages to the post office myself and hoping one day we could afford a forklift jeff and his team were literally packing books on the floor as they didn't even have tables we were so inefficient with our operations and logistics in those early days when there were just 10 of us that i didn't have packing tables we were packing on the floor on our hands and knees and on top of everything jeff had to get his wife mackenzie to do the accounting despite the fact that she was extremely inexperienced in the area she did our accounting um for like the first year was it the first year something like that however despite these areas of inexperience on the part of jeff and his team the business idea actually worked surprisingly well we were shocked at the customer response literally in the first 30 days we had orders from all 50 states and 45 different countries i was shocked at how many books we sold we were ill prepared better yet they did it without having to spend a dollar on advertising in the first year of opening amazon. com to the public we didn't do any paid advertising and all of our growth was fueled by word of mouth and media exposure and this initial success made sense really as previously mentioned amazon had the ability to sell as many different titles as they wanted without the inventory problems that a normal bookstore would have all while saving their customers the time of having to physically go to their local barnes noble it was perfect plus jeff focused on what he described to be the absolutely most important part of any business the number one thing that has made us successful by far is obsessive compulsive focus on the customer as opposed to obsession over the competitor this initial success led to a range of investment from various individuals totaling a further one million dollars to put into the growth of the company i raised a million dollars from 22 different investors 50 000 at a time and they got 20 of the company for a million dollars between 1990 and 1997 the percentage of households in the u.
s owning computers increased from 15 to 35 because owning a computer was less of a luxury and more of a necessity increased computer usage as well as further funding led up to a point where the amazon company would make their next big move the initial public offering today amazon. com went public and it seems to be trading well a little under three years after beginning the company jeff bezos would take amazon public 1. 73 per share not a bad price considering that same share would be worth more than 3 000 today the ipo raised amazon a total of 54 million dollars and bezos would officially receive the title of millionaire for the first time exactly one year after the ipo at 1.
73 per share the stock price had climbed to 6 an increase of 350 percent this almost quadrupled jeff's net worth but more significantly began to spark new ideas for what jeff could do with the company ultimately leading him to email his customers asking what it was that they wanted to buy off the internet i wish you sold windshield wiper blades because i really need windshield wiper blades and i thought to myself we can sell anything this way and and then so then we launched electronics and toys and many other categories over time it was through this market research that amazon would go from an online bookstore to more of an online marketplace supplying any product that the general consumer had a demand for edible glitter inflatable sloths taco sleeping bags whatever you wanted there was a good chance that amazon would stock it and with an increase in products came an increase in revenue leading the stock price to go from six dollars as previously mentioned to sixty dollars only one year later it went up almost a thousand percent last year when have you seen anything comparable nothing and as one of the greatest old sayings goes it takes years to become an overnight success no exception for jeff bezos because despite only becoming a millionaire in 1997 after amazon's ipo only two years later in 1999 he would be registered in forbes world's billionaires list with a net worth of 10. 1 billion dollars despite having a multi-billion dollar net worth bezos remained humble and committed to his customers by continuing to drive his three-year-old honda record you yourself are worth somewhere in the vicinity of nine or ten billion dollars today what's with the honda this is a perfectly good car as well as keeping an old desk that had been made out of a door now i've heard a lot about your desk it's a door with four by fours i mean you can afford a better desk than that it's a symbol of spending money on things that matter to customers and not spending money on things that don't however saving as much money as possible was exactly what jeff needed to commit to because unbeknownst to him one of the biggest stock market crashes in history was already underway at the peak of the internet bubble our stock peaked somewhere around 113 dollars and then after the internet bubble uh you know busted open our stock went down to six it went from 113 to six in less than a year the dot-com bubble a dark cloud was looming on the horizon for every online tech business and it's safe to say that amazon was about to be put to the test amazon had serious crisis in 2002 you went almost bankrupt so what went wrong and what did you learn from that between march 2000 and october 2002 the nasdaq would drop by 78 causing multiple large online businesses such as pets. com to fail and shut down pretty strong fear about losing it all are you afraid of that i know we can lose it all it's not a fear in 1999 just before the crash would begin amazon's stock price would hit a high water mark of 113 per share the dotcom bubble would begin to burst in march 2000 and it would be less than a year after hitting 113 that the share price would drop to only 15 by late 2001 the stock had fallen further to 5.
51 per share a total drop of approximately 95 percent since its peak my annual shareholder that year starts with a one word sentence and that one word sentence is the word ouch amazon had to lay off 14 of its staff indicating that the company was absolutely on the ropes jeff's personal net worth had dropped from 10. 1 billion in 1999 to 6. 1 billion in 2000 then 2 billion in 2001 finally dropping to 1.
5 billion by 2002 and if you follow that trend all the way along the eventual outcome could have been zero for jeff bezos however jeff wasn't going to give up that easily he was a fighter [Music] in fact he wasn't even gonna see it as a negative he had such a strong mindset that it was simply a learning experience the whole point of of moving things forward is you run into problems you run into failures things don't work you have to back up and try again despite the stock dropping by 95 jeff explained that the stock wasn't the company and the company wasn't the stock because despite the massive plunge things weren't looking all that bad internally at amazon every single thing about the business was getting better and fast and so as the stock price was going the wrong way everything inside the company was going the right way and while the company had to lay off 14 of its staff there was still extensive innovation going on behind the scenes amazon would announce amazon web services in 2002 which took data from website traffic and helped third-party retailers build their own web stores perhaps it was just good timing in relation to the end of the dot-com bubble but around this time amazon's stock began to rise in value once again eventually reaching 50 approximately two years after its low point during the dot-com bubble representing a gain of 500 per year but this total stock price rebound of a thousand percent was nothing in comparison to what was coming for jeff bezos and it wouldn't be long before he would take his life to the next level by 2006 after innovative introductions at amazon such as the kindle jeff's net worth had once again increased back up to around the 8 billion mark at this point jeff decided that he wanted to help humanity in more ways than simply shipping products worldwide on amazon and as a result began to focus on a different company if you could just take a minute or two and sort of help us understand what is blue origin up to jeff bezos had always had an interest in space his valedictorian speech focused on the exploration of space and had claimed to have gotten interest in other planets after watching the moon landings for the first time space is like that for me i watched neil armstrong step under the moon when i was five jeff bezos created the company blue origin all the way back in 2000 however had kept it on the down low until around 2006 when it was considered financially feasible at which point a large plot of lane in texas would be purchased for launching and testing the company's rockets the vision for blue origin is millions of people living and working in space the goal of the company was very much similar to another well-known and loved entrepreneur by the name of elon musk i learned that the fundamental issue is actually the cost of access to space with both entrepreneurs attempting to produce cheap rockets while ensuring the future of human existence we're now big compared to the size of the planet we can fix that problem my role in that is i want to build reusable space vehicles that's the heavy lifting and while bezos was working on blue origin as a passive side project amazon was still churning away in the background barely being touched by the global financial crisis making bezos richer and richer and richer 12 billion 18 billion 29 billion by 2013.
