How This Single Stat Helped Jeff Bezos Make $3,715 Per Second This Year

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Abstract

one. Many don’t know this but Amazon started as an online bookstore in its early years. Jeff Bezos decided on selling books online for the following reasons:</p><ul><li>There are more items in the books category than any other one. At the time, there were 3 million books worldwide. The second largest product category was music and included 10x less items than books. Back then, there was 300,000 active music CDs;</li><li>Bezos’ online platform could include all 3 million books available globally. This would have been impossible in any physical bookstore. In fact, the largest physical shops could only carry 175,000 titles;</li><li>Having an online platform would come with lower warehousing costs and therefore Jeff Bezos could list his books at cheaper price than his peers;</li><li>Even if physical stores wanted to print a catalog that included Amazon’s 3 million titles, the catalog would be of the size of more than 40 New York phone books.</li></ul><p id="6e53">Jeff Bezos has also decided to name his company Amazon.com as a reference to the Amazon river which is the Earth’s biggest river. Equally, Amazon.com would end up being the Earth’s largest online bookstore.</p><h1 id="9121">How Amazon became a success</h1><p id="c16b">Jeff Bezos’ genius idea about a an online store that couldn’t exist any other way was complemented by his vision in how to make such a store succeed. Amazon only kept an inventory of a couple of thousand best selling books while having access to 400,000 others from an online network of wholesale distributors. These titles would be available within a day. Amazon has also made a deal with another 20,000 publishers to have access to more than a million titles. These would take a couple of weeks to get.</p><h1 id="4492">Avoid a life with regrets</h1><p id

Options

="f1e6">Jeff Bezos could have sticked to his stable and successful job at Wall Street. But what has prompted him to leave his banking career behind him was that he didn’t want to live a life of regret.</p><blockquote id="4d86"><p><i>He said in an interview in 2018</i>: ‘I wanted not to have regrets. I knew for a fact that if I don’t try, I’m going to regret having never tried’. <i>He added: </i>‘And I know also, if I try and fail, I’ll never regret having tried and failed. As soon as I thought about it that way, I knew I had to try.’</p></blockquote><p id="f106">Jeff Bezos’ decision paid off. Amazon grew quickly from its start. The company went public in 1997 with $16 million in revenues and 180,000 customers in more than 100 countries. Amazon is today valued at$ 1.7 trillion.</p><blockquote id="9a23"><p>‘What’s actually happened over the last 25 years is way beyond my expectations. I was delivering the packages myself, we were selling books. I was hoping to build a company, but not the company you see today’, he said in the same interview</p></blockquote><h1 id="b8e5">Few staggering stats about Jeff Bezos’ wealth</h1><p id="28bb">According to Forbes, Jeff Bezos is today the wealthiest person on earth with an estimated wealth of $200 billion. This is nearly$ 90 billion more than the second wealthiest person on earth, Bill Gates. He is also $100 billion wealthier than Mark Zuckerberg (founder of Facebook) and Warren Buffett (the legendary investor).</p><p id="3d4e">So far in 2020, Jeff Bezos’ net worth increased by a staggering$ 68 billion. This would equate to:</p><ul><li> $9 billion a month;</li><li>or$ 2.25 billion a week;</li><li>or $321 million a day;</li><li>or$ 13.4 million an hour;</li><li>or $222,884 a minute;</li><li>or$ 3,715 a second.</li></ul></article></body>

A sudden stop to a career on Wall Street on the back of reading an article on web usage

After graduating from Princeton in 1986, Jeff Bezos worked as an analyst for the hedge fund DE Shaw in New York. Given his background, Jeff was destined to have a successful career on Wall Street. At age 30 and while tasked with researching potential business opportunities involving the then brand-new internet landscape he came across a startling statistic: Web usage was growing at 2,300% a year.

In a speech has given to university students in 1998, he stated that: ‘Human beings are not good at understanding exponential growth. It is not something we see in our everyday life outside of Petri dishes.’

Jeff Bezos understood the power of compound growth or exponential growth so much that he decided to quit his job and started to think about a business plan that would benefit from this growth.

The idea of an online bookstore emerged

Jeff Bezos made a list of 20 different products that could be sold online but quickly the idea of selling books online emerged as the best one. Many don’t know this but Amazon started as an online bookstore in its early years. Jeff Bezos decided on selling books online for the following reasons:

There are more items in the books category than any other one. At the time, there were 3 million books worldwide. The second largest product category was music and included 10x less items than books. Back then, there was 300,000 active music CDs;

Bezos’ online platform could include all 3 million books available globally. This would have been impossible in any physical bookstore. In fact, the largest physical shops could only carry 175,000 titles;

Having an online platform would come with lower warehousing costs and therefore Jeff Bezos could list his books at cheaper price than his peers;

Even if physical stores wanted to print a catalog that included Amazon’s 3 million titles, the catalog would be of the size of more than 40 New York phone books.

Jeff Bezos has also decided to name his company Amazon.com as a reference to the Amazon river which is the Earth’s biggest river. Equally, Amazon.com would end up being the Earth’s largest online bookstore.

How Amazon became a success

Jeff Bezos’ genius idea about a an online store that couldn’t exist any other way was complemented by his vision in how to make such a store succeed. Amazon only kept an inventory of a couple of thousand best selling books while having access to 400,000 others from an online network of wholesale distributors. These titles would be available within a day. Amazon has also made a deal with another 20,000 publishers to have access to more than a million titles. These would take a couple of weeks to get.

Avoid a life with regrets

Jeff Bezos could have sticked to his stable and successful job at Wall Street. But what has prompted him to leave his banking career behind him was that he didn’t want to live a life of regret.

He said in an interview in 2018: ‘I wanted not to have regrets. I knew for a fact that if I don’t try, I’m going to regret having never tried’. He added: ‘And I know also, if I try and fail, I’ll never regret having tried and failed. As soon as I thought about it that way, I knew I had to try.’

Jeff Bezos’ decision paid off. Amazon grew quickly from its start. The company went public in 1997 with $16 million in revenues and 180,000 customers in more than 100 countries. Amazon is today valued at $1.7 trillion.

‘What’s actually happened over the last 25 years is way beyond my expectations. I was delivering the packages myself, we were selling books. I was hoping to build a company, but not the company you see today’, he said in the same interview

Few staggering stats about Jeff Bezos’ wealth

According to Forbes, Jeff Bezos is today the wealthiest person on earth with an estimated wealth of $200 billion. This is nearly $90 billion more than the second wealthiest person on earth, Bill Gates. He is also $100 billion wealthier than Mark Zuckerberg (founder of Facebook) and Warren Buffett (the legendary investor).

So far in 2020, Jeff Bezos’ net worth increased by a staggering $68 billion. This would equate to:

$9 billion a month;

or $2.25 billion a week;

or $321 million a day;

or $13.4 million an hour;

or $222,884 a minute;