In depth: the story of Jeff Bezos, the so -called "King Midas" of the digital retail, in his new memoirs

Jeff Bezos, the creator of the digital supermarket with global tentacles that threatens the small businesses of the planet, is again, since January 16, 2021, the richest person in the world, with an estimated fortune of 181.500 million dollars, after unseating Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, in the dance of positions that both main.

Despite his fame, the content of the Bezos Negra Box was an enigma until the publication of Crea y Divaga.Life and reflections of Jeff Bezos (Planet), the memoirs of the tycoon written by Walter Isaacson, the former manager of Times Magazine, now specialized in biographies such as Albert Einstein or Steve Jobs.

The latter is whom, says Isaacson, most looks like Bezos, not only for his love of science fiction and space trips, but for his conviction of having to fulfill a mission: to conquer the world by land, sea and air,Although he prefers to call it "customer service".

In an old interview, Bezos deepened on this point."The value of the company is the client's obsession with the obsession with the competition.The advantage of focusing on the client is that customers are never satisfied.They always want more, so they take you to the limit.However, if you are obsessed with the competition and lead the market, you may see when you look around and see your competitors run behind you feel the temptation to loosen the march, "he said.

"In our retail business, we are firmly convinced that customers value low prices, the wide offer and quick and efficient delivery," he says in another section of his biography."It is difficult for us.A fact: Amazon has held the first position of the American client satisfaction index for eight consecutive years.

Among the cocktail of ingredients that Bezos has stirthat aliens appear that are able to create a new world thanks to the extraordinary power of their mind.

According to Bezos, his interest in space trips helps him keep an eye on the "distant horizon," he says.Anecdotal, Bezos has begun to build a "long -term clock" of ten thousand years, designed by the inventor Danny Hillis, which has a centennial hands that advances every century and a cuckoo that every millennium comes out.His advice for Amazon employees is "thirst for the turtle and not the hare", while Blue Origin's motto, his reusable spatial company, is Gradatim Ferociter, whose Latin translation is "step by step, with ferocity".

Because ... What is Jeff Bezos in intimacy?As for his biography and suggest some interviews, his obsession for business is sometimes translated into an exasperating character and in a pronounced tendency to stress.Nor awake passions at first glance.Shortly after Amazon, Bezos went to visit Craig Stoltz, then the consumer technology reporter of The Washington Post (a newspaper that years later would end up acquiring Bezos) to expose his project.Craig declined to write the article, but a few days later he scored on his blog: "He was low, with an uncomfortable smile, with little hair and feverish affection".

With regard to its scandalous and explosive laugh, Wired magazine describes it as an "ah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha" that frequently interrupts the conversation "when leaving as a long and prolonged Rebuzno, whichIt scares the uninitiated "and that the ardor of Bezos emphasizes.However, some Amazon employees (the Amazonians) have another opinion of this ardor, while they must work at full speed and with an important stress load due to the obsession of the Founder of Amazon to achieve extreme efficiency in their warehouses.

It is difficult to specify at what time Bezos' life began to aim very high.Isaacson says that in the Montessori children's school he attended, he already had the tendency to concentrate completely on what he was doing."The teacher told my mother that she abstained so much doing the exercises that when she wanted to capture my attention to change her activity she was forced to drag me with the chair," Bezos recalls."If you ask the people who work with me, they will probably tell you that the same is still happening to me today," he adds.

As a student, Jeff Bezos was a kind of Pytagorin, although almost never the smartest in the class, rather the third or the fourth.In the university stage, Bezos went to Princeton with the purpose of studying physics but, in the end, he had to accept his limitations.After graduating, he moved to New York to develop his computer skills in the financial sector.In the Big Apple ended up working for an investment fund that used algorithms to detect price disparities in the financial market.

In 1994 he saw how the Internet grew and the idea occurred: an online store to sell any published book

But in 1994 he learned that the world computer network was growing at an annual rate of more than 2.300% and a bombillite was lit at the height of the left cerebral hemisphere: open an online store, a kind of Sears catalog (the department stores that sold by mail "from a pin to an elephant" during the twentieth century), which would offerAny book published in El Mundo.

The light idea was to take advantage of the fact that there were more than three million paper titles, although the largest libraries in the world did not possess more than 100.000 títulos en sus estanterías físicas, en un momento, los años noventa, en que había pocos competidores de gran tamaño, como Barnes & Noble o Borders Group.

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Said and done: After investing 100.000 dollars of his savings and those of his wife, Mackenzie, who also graduated in Princeton and with whom he had been married for a year, Jeff Bezos launched Amazon on July 16, 1995.Bezos' parents also invested in the new company.

From that first day, beyond the criticisms received by its aggressive commercial policy, Amazon has taught a teacher on howacademic training), but also intuition.

Bezos wanted to call his Cadabra company, but sounded like a corpse and ended up baptizing it as the longest river on Earth

Anecdotal, Bezos wanted to call his Cadabra company, referring to the Kabbalistic Word Abracadabra.When telling him, his lawyer replied: "Corpse?", Tyling the explosive laugh of Bezos, who realized at that moment that he needed to find another more appropriate name."Finally he decided that the name of what was expected to be the largest store in the world would be the longest river on earth," says Isaacson.

He also decided to move to Seattle because the largest book warehouse in the world was near there, in a city called Roseburg (Oregon), which opened the possibility of hiring staff for your company, due to Microsoft's closeness.After discovering how to sell books on the web, Bezos decided to sell everything else, from wiper to clothes.

There are little -known Amazon strategies.The essence of your business, for example, is based on The Long Tail concept, that is, to offer items that are not the best selling of the moment and, therefore, they have no place on the shelves of most retail stores.

One of its business tactics is to value the leadership capacity of the military: it has signed thousands of war veterans

Another curious tactic is its high business consideration of the US Armed Forces.UU.and of its leadership capacity.Bezos has had a team called Military Talent for years who has signed thousands of military for Amazon (only in 2013, he signed more than 1.900 war veterans).

However, it cannot be said that Manu Militi acts with his employees, to whom he lets his opinions express (as well as allows Amazon customers to publish negative reviews about their products), although they do not offer them the advantages of Happy Companies (gyms, meditation rooms, etc..) so that they do not dismiss more than the account.

"In Amazon we pay very competitive salaries, but we have not established that field club culture in which you earn free massages and any other benefit that is offered at that time," he acknowledges."In addition, I have always been a bit skeptical about this kind of benefits because I worry that people stay in a company for wrong reasons.What you want is for employees to stay in the company for the mission.You don't want to have mercenaries in your company, you want to have missionaries, ".

Somehow, Bezos could be described as one of those types that invent things in their garage and that they do not stop thinking about new businesses since they get up until the eyelids close in bed.If Amazon already in 1999, four years after being founded, he served 17 million customers from 150 countries, in 2015 he became the company that managed to reach 100.000 million dollars in annual sales in less time since its creation.

As regards the businesses that Bezos has created to the Amazon wake, Amazon Prime stands out (an unlimited shipping service for an annual flat rate), Amazon Web Services (storage services, databases, Internet of things, applications, etc..), Alexa's smart speaker (when Bezos played as a child at Star Trek with his friends liked to assume the role of the computer of the Enterprise ship: hence the idea of Alexa), the space company Blue Origin (its goal is to reduce thecost of traveling to space) or The Washington Post (one of its passions, after acquiring it in 2013), among many others.

As a child he liked to play the computer of the Enterprise ship and from there the idea of Alexa, the smart speaker arose

Here are the worst that can be told Bezos: Your ideas cannot be executed, it is impossible.Just as Ellon Musk, Tesla's tycoon,.

On this particular, when their employees complain that any of their projects cannot be carried out, Jobs uses an irritating trick that he learned from a guru in India."He stares at them without blinking and tells them:" Don't fear.You can do it.It usually works.Go crazy to all, baffle them, but get them to do things that were believed unable to achieve, "Isaacson says in the biography.

There are some rules that Bezos has imposed on his private life that has allowed him to achieve success in the public sphere.In the morning, for example, he likes to take things calmly, get up, have breakfast with his family and read the newspaper."For me that time without hurry in the morning is very important.That's why I put the first meeting at ten, "reveals.

"I like to call meetings that require high concentration before food.Anything that will suppose a true mental demand is examined at a meeting at ten in the morning, because at five in the afternoon ..., in short, I am that I can no longer think about the matter in question.Let's leave it for the next day at ten.But, before, eight hours of sleep, "he says.

For this reason he acknowledges to bed early, although sometimes it is impossible for him to sleep eight hours, despite trying."Think one thing: when you are a high manager, why do they pay you? Well, for you to make a few high quality decisions.Your work does not consist of making thousands of decisions every day, "he says."If I take, for example, three good decisions a day, it is enough, and they should be of the highest possible quality.Warren Buffet says he is formed to make three good decisions a year, and I think he is right, "he adds.

As for his sentimental life, the founder of Amazon comes from paying the a whopping of 38.000 million dollars to his ex -wife, Mackenzie Tuttle, after being unfaithful to his current partner, Lauren Sánchez.After passing through the altar, being almost 27 years together, having four children (one of them adopted), the businessman decidedParadoxically, they are not part of the Amazon editorial seal ...), after meeting in 1994.

The founder of Amazon has paid 38.000 million dollars to his ex -wife after being unfaithful to his current partner

According to Business Insider, Bezos and Mackenzie had five houses owned in the United States: in Medina, Washington;Beverly Hills, California;Van Horn, Texas;Washington DC;and Manhattan, New York.But it has been his last acquisition that has taken the palm: the huge mansion that Bezos acquired at the beginning of 2020 for 165 million dollars, in addition to the adjacent farm, owned by Paul Allen, the co -founder of Microsoft, for another 90 million, which led him to spray California record that Lachlan Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch's eldest son, after buying the Chartwell farm in Bel Air for 150 million dollars.

In Isaacson's biography, there is also a lack of saying that Salvador Bezos, Jeff's paternal grandfather, comes from Villafrechós, a small town in Valladolid, which emigrated to Cuba at the beginning of the 20th century.In 2011 the billionaire businessman visited the town by surprise.But since then nothing has been known again, despite the desire that its inhabitants and local authorities would have to welcome MR.Bezos, said the avant -garde.