Jeff Bezos, is the founder and CEO of e-commerce giant, Amazon Inc. Now known as the richest man on the planet with a net worth amounting to $178.2 billion and growing, he pioneered the growth of e-commerce, starting Amazon as an online merchant of books, later introducing a wide variety of products, leading Amazon to become the largest global online retailer.

Love him or hate him, let’s find out more about why we consider him a Claritas #Techspiration.

Background

• He was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, U.S.A in 1964
• Jeff Bezos studied computer science and electrical engineering at Princeton University
• After graduation from Princeton in 1986, he worked on Wall Street
• In 1990, he became the youngest senior vice president at the investment firm D.E. Shaw
• Bezos left his job at D.E. Shaw in 1994, moved to Seattle and set up Amazon – at that time, it was a virtual bookstore
• Jeff Bezos started Amazon in his own garage, with just a handful of employees when he started to develop software for the site, naming it after his trip down the South American river!
• Currently, alongside Amazon, Jeff Bezos also owns The Washington Post and is the founder of space company, Blue Origin.

What makes him great?

Amazon went public in 1997, and the initial success of Amazon was second to none. Without any promotion, Amazon sold books across America and 45 different countries within 30 days. In two months, sales reached $20,000 a week. In June 1998, Amazon began selling CDs, and later that year it added videos to its stockpile. In 1999, Bezos added auctions to the site and invested in other virtual stores, aiding its rise to an e-commerce leader.

Amazon is now a go-to for consumers with endless amounts of products on its platform and its convenient delivery, not to mention its other services like Amazon Prime, a rival streaming service to Netflix.

The ecommerce giant is also using advances in technology to disrupt several sectors outside of retail including medicine, banking, logistics, robotics, agriculture and much more.

Why he is a ‘techspiration’ to Claritas

Innovation and technology are at the core of whatever Amazon does, with tech ranging from AI to robotics, and everything in between. It has algorithms that forecast demand and place orders from brands, robots that sort and pack items in warehouses, and is even developing and testing drones that will soon be dropping packages off at homes. Not to mention its new Go Stores where it is possible to identify the people walking in and what products they pick up, helping add them to their online shopping baskets.

Jeff Bezos’ main source of income, Amazon Web Services, is a bi-product of the Amazon brand, and is an evolving cloud computing platform provider that includes a combination of infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and packaged software as a service (SaaS) offerings. Its services can offer an organisation, from Governments to SMEs, tools such as compute power, database storage and content delivery services.

Bezos invested in his very own aerospace company, Blue Origins, that is a rival to Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Blue Origin is on a mission to make space travel a possibility for everyone - another reason why he’s a techspiration of ours.

Our favourite thing

In the present, Bezos is focused on making Amazon more environmentally friendly, and is often an activist for issues across the globe like climate change. So much so, he has recently launched the Bezos Earth Fund, and is pledging $10bn to combat climate change with the funds coming from his personal wealth. Late last year, he also committed to Amazon emitting zero carbon emissions from its operations by 2040 and declared that it would move to power its entire corporate infrastructure with 100% renewable energy by 2030.

Our favourite quote

The thing that motivates me is a very common form of motivation. And that is, with other folks counting on me, it’s so easy to be motivated.