Jeff Bezos studied electrical engineering and computer science at Princeton and rose quickly at the quantitative hedge fund D. E. Shaw. When he saw web usage growing at extraordinary rates in the early 1990s, he applied what he called a regret-minimization framework and decided he would not regret trying.
He founded Amazon in 1994 to sell books online, a deliberate wedge: books were a huge category, easy to ship, and impossible to stock fully in any physical store. The plan was never books. It was everything, and eventually the infrastructure underneath everything.
Bezos pushed Amazon into marketplace, Prime, devices, and most consequentially AWS, which turned the company's internal infrastructure into the default backbone of the internet. He moved to Executive Chairman in 2021.
Patterns
"We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details."