Word: jeffs
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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...
...high school in Miami--his father, an engineer with Exxon, moved the family several times--Jeff became the valedictorian. He didn't drink, do drugs or even swear. People liked him anyway. And almost every summer, he headed for his grandfather's ranch in Cotulla. It was the perfect antidote to the brainy world he inhabited the rest of the year. On the ranch he'd ride horses, brand cattle with a LAZY G, fix windmills and tool around in a 1962 International Harvester Scout. He helped his grandpa fix a D6 Caterpillar tractor using nothing...
...pick a single eureka! moment, a 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...
...said he wanted to sell books on the Internet, we said, 'The Internet? What's that?'" remembers Mike Bezos, who initially questioned his son's sanity when he heard him say he was quitting his cushy job to start a company that would probably fail. But this was Jeff, after all, and his parents trusted him and believed in him every moment of his life. In the end, "we talked about it for two minutes," says Jackie Bezos. They ponied up $300,000, a huge chunk of the money they had saved for retirement. "We didn't invest in Amazon...
...July 4 weekend, Jeff and MacKenzie flew out to Fort Worth, Texas, bid goodbye to his family and headed for Seattle--a city near one of the two big book wholesalers and chockfull of the kinds of Net-savvy people he'd need to hire. MacKenzie drove a 1988 Chevy Blazer that Mike Bezos donated, while Jeff tapped out a business plan on a laptop. On that road trip West, somewhere near the Grand Canyon, Bezos called a lawyer who specialized in start-ups. What do you plan to call your company, the lawyer asked. Bezos liked the sound...