Jeff Bezos
Founder and CEO, Amazon
Retail, then renting the internet its computers
Rating
96Impact score
Domains
E-commerceCloudLogistics
Scouting report
Started an online bookshop in 1994 and ran it for twenty-seven years on deliberately thin margins and reinvestment, which is how it outlasted competitors optimising for quarterly profit. The decision with the deepest technical consequences was internal: an API mandate that every team expose its data over service interfaces, which turned Amazon’s own plumbing into AWS in 2006.
Curator’s note
Sold books until the warehouse for the internet turned out to be the business.
Portrait
Painted from a photograph of Jeff Bezos by Seattle City Council from Seattle, licensed CC BY 2.0.
Sources
- 01Jeff Bezos en.wikipedia.org
- 02Amazon Web Services en.wikipedia.org