How Jeff Bezos left Wall Street, drove cross-country with MacKenzie Scott, and built Amazon's business plan from a car
By
Neha Tandon Sharma
A five-star bake. Worth schmearing, sharing, saving.
Summary
The article recounts the origin story of Amazon, focusing on Jeff Bezos's decision in 1994 to leave his lucrative Wall Street job as a senior vice president at D. E. Shaw (earning the equivalent of $1.5-2 million annually) to start an online bookstore. With support from his then-wife MacKenzie Scott, a research associate at the same firm, Bezos borrowed his father's Chevy and had Scott drive him over 2,000 miles across America to Seattle while he typed the business plan for what would become Amazon, now a nearly $3 trillion company worth $275 billion to Bezos.
Key quotes
· 3 pulledLife is full of risks for those who make it big, or is it the other way around, that life gets big only when you take those risks?
Bezos was 30 at the time and the firm's youngest senior vice president, reportedly earning the equivalent of roughly $1.5 million to $2 million a year in today's money at the elite Wall Street firm.
Yet he jumped into action with Scott's support, who was a research associate at the same company.
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