Word: personal
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...boss to meet him, saying, "He's going to make someone a lot of money someday." Shaw agreed, understanding that Bezos was unusual not only for his balanced intellect--he could handle complex logic as well as articulate his thinking--but also for the overall package: smart, creative, personable, precisely the kind of person they wanted. Over time, Bezos became a specialist in researching business opportunities in insurance, software and then the booming Internet...
...most important person Bezos hired was probably the first: Shel Kaphan, a brilliant programmer in Santa Clara, Calif., and veteran of a dozen start-ups, many of them, in fact, failures. Bezos persuaded him, over the course of a few months, to join his company in Seattle...
...Scott Randall. They also benefit from Metcalfe's Law (named after Robert Metcalfe, the founder of 3Com Corp.): the value of a network increases by the square of the number of people on it. Every time a conventional online retailer adds a new user, it's just one more person who can buy its products. But every time eBay adds a new user, he can buy from or sell to any of the 7.7 million people already on the network. A retailer, in other words, is one to many, while eBay is many to many...
Omidyar seems to realize that given his anticorporate values, it's more than a little ironic that he's one of the richest human beings on the planet. And clearly he's uncomfortable with his wealth. "What one person needs, and what one family needs and all of their future generations need is a tiny, tiny fraction of this total number," he says of his net worth. "That means we have an awesome responsibility to see that the wealth is put to good use." In addition to eBay's foundation, Omidyar and his wife are developing one of their...
...places, Charles Schwab, which has broken down the walls between its off-line brokerage business (with 335 retail locations) and Schwab.com its online business. Schwab had to be spry enough to devise cross-channel pricing for stock trades; allow account access via the Web, telephone and in person; and create advertising that speaks to the Web savvy as well as the Net illiterate. The result: over the past two years, Schwab has emerged as the best-positioned retail brokerage, with more than $628 billion in customer assets ($264 billion of which is managed online), vs. $23 billion and $29 billion...