Jeff Bezos
Academy of Achievement
"I'm going to go do this crazy thing. I'm going to start this company selling books online." In 1994, Jeff Bezos was a 30-year-old Vice President of a New York investment firm, newly married, with a secure and prosperous future ahead of him. He decided to give it all up and drive to Seattle with his wife, in a used car, to start a business in their garage. He was betting his own savings -- and his parents' and friends' -- on a totally untried notion: that people would buy books through a little-known network of computers called the Internet. Jeff Bezos was convinced that this global network, primarily the domain of academics and government scientists, could become a vibrant new venue for commerce, with the right product and the right plan. Almost overnight, the company Bezos started, Amazon.com, changed the book-buying habits of a nation. Bezos and his investors found their shares in the company worth billions. As the company's capitalization soared, Bezos embarked on a risky strategy