Jeff Bezos

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1964. His mother, Jackie, was in her teens when he was born and she was only married to his biological father for about a year. She married Mike Bezos when Jeff was four. Mike was a Cuban who escaped to the United States when he was fifteen. He put himself through college in New Mexico and eventually became an engineer at Exxon. Jeff attended Miami Palmetto high school and was valedictorian of his class. He went to Princeton and planned to study physics until arriving at Princeton and realizing that the courses were to difficult. He then decided to change his major to electrical engineering and computer science. He graduated summa cum laude in 1986 with a GPA of 4.3 on a 4.0 scale. After he graduated from Princeton, Jeff joined a high-tech startup in New York that was building a network to facilitate international trade. After two years with this company he left and joined Bankers Trust Company. At Bankers Trust, he climbed the ranks quickly and worked to setup computer systems that managed $250 billion in assets. Bezos eventually became the company's youngest vice president. In 1990, he decided to join D.E. Shaw and Company. After a few years here he helped the company build the most technically advanced hedge funds on Wall Street. He eventually went from being a computer expert to a money manager, and became the company's youngest vice president. After four years working for D.E. Shaw and Company Bezos was looking for another challenge and in 1994, he found one. One day, Jeff read a statistic that said the Internet was growing at a rate of 2300% per year. He realized the potential of the internet business and decided to leave D.E. Shaw and Company to form Amazon.com, which he named after the seemingly endless South American River. Jeff had already spent several months planning Amazon.com while he was at D.E. Shaw. During these months he realized he would need assistance with