Connecting playback controls. You can also tap play in the video.
It is hard to imagine life without amazon.com, even for someone of my advanced age.
Keep playing while subtitles advance automatically.
Tap an English word for its meaning
After all, where else can a few clicks of a mouse take you from the latest novel by Tony Morrison to an 18th century editiona version of a book or other publication that is different from earlier versions. of the works of John Lockach, having
stopped in power tools and women's shoes along the way.
Yet, the founder and chief executive officer of the world's largest retailer, whose net sales surpassedto be greater than something in amount 24.5 billion in 2009, is only 46 years old.
And Amazon.com has only existed since 1995, making it even younger than the class of 2010.
The moral of this story is that the right idea in the right hands at the right time can change the way we lead our lives.
The idea in this case was harnessingto control and use something (like energy or power) for a useful purpose. the power of the naent internet to create a virtual bookstore of limitless proportions.
The hands were those of our speaker, Jeff Bezos, a self-described nerdy commuter commu computer science and electrical engineering major who graduated from Princeton with highest honors in 1986.
And the time was 1994 when he and his wife McKenzie Tuttle Bezos of the class of 1992 exchanged the securitythe state of being safe from danger or worry of Wall Street where they worked at De Shaun Company for
the uncertain prospectsthe possibility or likelihood of something happening in the future. of a dotcom startup.
But then, as Jeff points out, failure is an essential componentone of the parts that something is made of. of innovation and invention.
If you know it's going to work, it's not an experiment.
And Amazon.com was nothing if not a grand experiment.
Working on improvised tables in the garage of his Seattle home and using his parents' savings as startup capital, Jeff defied the forces that cause most young companies to fail.
Partly, he admits, through sheerused to emphasize how great or extreme something is. good fortune, but also because of his unwavering determination to create the world's most customer centric company.
And as he notes in his company's latest annual report, of the 452 goals that Amazon.com has set for itself this year, 360 of them will directly affect the customer experience.
While the word revenue is used on only eight occasions, I do not advise you to start off with 452 goals this year.
by the way.
But this is just one of the keys to Jeff's success.
Another lies in his exceptional ability to marry commerce and technology in creative ways in his sheer inventiveness and willingness to take the risks inherentexisting in something as a permanent in this process.
Indeed, the history of Amazon.com is one of daring leapsa sudden large increase or improvement in something..
One such leap involved creating the capacity to search inside the books sold by his company.
Not by designing a modest pilot project, but by committing the resources to make it possible to scourto search an area very carefully to find something. the text of more than 120,000 volumes when this feature debuted in 2003.
Other innovations have included one-click shopping, online product reviews by customers, and of course, the Kindle reading device, which we test drove in three courses this fall.
Mirroring the rapid growth of Amazon itself, the number of books available through the US Kindle store topped 460,000 in 2009, just two years after its launch.
And there's no turning back.
Our vision is every book, every printed in any language, all available in less than 60 seconds.
Jeff has stated an audaciousshowing a willingness to take surprisingly bold risks. proposition to be sure, but as Al Albert Einstein once observed, if at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.
Perhaps the American Academy of Achievement summarized our speaker's impact best when it noted, "Having already revolutionizedto change something completely and dramatically. the way the world buys books, Jeff Bezos is now transforming the way we read
them as well."
