Word: founds
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Jeff was an exceptionally smart child. Fed up with sleeping in a crib, the toddler found a screwdriver and reduced his jail to its component parts. He constantly built models, worked a Radio Shack electronics kit that Pop bought him down to the nubs and endlessly tinkered with stuff. When he was six, his sister Christina was born; a year later, his brother Mark arrived. When the siblings were old enough to get into Jeff's bedroom, he rigged a buzzer to his door that would go off like a burglar alarm. Later, in what his family has come...
...time when suddenly everything became clear about what the future had in mind for Jeff Bezos, it was on a May day in 1994. The 30-year-old was sitting at the computer in his 39th-floor office in midtown Manhattan, exploring the still immature Internet, and he found a site that purported to measure Net usage. Bezos couldn't believe it: the Internet was growing at a rate of 2,300% a year. "It was a wake-up call," he says. "I started thinking, O.K., what kind of business opportunity might there be here...
When Sharon Balkowitsch sold antiques from a stall in Bismarck, N.D., she was a victim of geography. There were few buyers in her hometown of 54,000, and prices were low. She started putting her wares up for auction on eBay last year and suddenly found herself part of the global marketplace. An Art Deco ashtray she bought for $20 was bid up quickly--and sold for $290. A vase she got for $5 went to a California buyer--for $585. She even sold an old tractor online--for $2,300, to a priest from New York. Checks have been...
...eBay's only full-time employee, Omidyar soon found himself thrust into a new and unwanted role: grievance officer. Buyers and sellers with complaints about each other were e-mailing him personally and asking him to step in. Omidyar urged them to work things out amicably between themselves. But if eBayers really had to gripe, he decided, they should do it publicly on the site. "I wanted to reinforce the notion that if you're going to bring a complaint about someone, do it out in the open," says Omidyar. "You can't come running to Daddy...
...pinpoint just when the task of foraging for food on the Web finally began to overwhelm me. It might have been when I found out that because of the law in Washington, the wine would take at least ten days for delivery. But wait...fast delivery was possible to West Virginia. The political columnist in me wanted to know why: the power of Senator Robert Byrd? Some anomaly in the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms? But the Martha Stewart in me just wanted the wine. A round trip to West Virginia would take more time than...