Question

write a paper about an entrepreneur you admire. Select one entrepreneur in your country, region or the world that you admire. Then write a biographical essay on the person using the requirements outlined below.Word limit: 1500-2500 words.

Your essay should contain:

2.   Introduction. This will provide the reader with basic background information on why this entrepreneur was chosen.
3.   Body of the essay. This should include the following information:

•   Business and industry of your selected entrepreneur (innovation, market share, future in the industry, and profitability)
•   Entrepreneur’s background.
•   Decision for the entrepreneur to start their own company as well as the industry they chose.
•   Major events and decision in the entrepreneur’s life.
•   Challenges that the entrepreneur had to overcome.
•   Innovative techniques and practices the entrepreneurs used to gain a competitive advantage.

4.   Conclusion. Discuss the innovative techniques used by the entrepreneur and how they gave a competitive advantage.
5.   References

Answer 1

JEFF BEZOS

2. INTRODUCTION

Who Is Jeff Bezos?
Entrepreneur and e-commerce pioneer Jeff Bezos is the founder and CEO of the e-commerce company Amazon, owner of The Washington Post and founder of the space exploration company Blue Origin. His successful business ventures have made him one of the richest people in the world.

Born in 1964 in New Mexico, Bezos had an early love of computers and studied computer science and electrical engineering at Princeton University. After graduation, he worked on Wall Street, and in 1990 he became the youngest senior vice president at the investment firm D.E. Shaw.

Four years later, Bezos quit his lucrative job to open Amazon.com, an online bookstore that became one of the Internet's biggest success stories. In 2013, Bezos purchased The Washington Post, and in 2017 Amazon acquired Whole Foods.

Jeff Bezos' Family
Jeff Bezos was born on January 12, 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to a teenage mother, Jacklyn Gise Jorgensen, and his biological father, Ted Jorgensen.

The Jorgensens were married less than a year. When Bezos was 4 years old, his mother remarried Mike Bezos, a Cuban immigrant.

Jeff Bezos' Education
Bezos graduated summa laude from Princeton University in 1986 with a degree in computer science and electrical engineering.

Bezos showed an early interest in how things work, turning his parents' garage into a laboratory and rigging electrical contraptions around his house as a child.

He moved to Miami with his family as a teenager, where he developed a love for computers and graduated valedictorian of his high school. It was during high school that he started his first business, the Dream Institute, an educational summer camp for fourth, fifth and sixth graders.

BODY

Founder and CEO of Amazon.com
Bezos opened Amazon.com, named after the meandering South American river, on July 16, 1995, after asking 300 friends to beta test his site. In the months leading up to launch, a few employees began developing software with Bezos in his garage; they eventually expanded operations into a two-bedroom house equipped with three Sun Microstations.

The initial success of the company was meteoric. With no press promotion, Amazon.com sold books across the United States and in 45 foreign countries within 30 days. In two months, sales reached $20,000 a week, growing faster than Bezos and his startup team had envisioned.

Amazon.com went public in 1997, leading many market analysts to question whether the company could hold its own when traditional retailers launched their own e-commerce sites. Two years later, the start-up not only kept up, but also outpaced competitors, becoming an e-commerce leader.

Bezos continued to diversify Amazon’s offerings with the sale of CDs and videos in 1998, and later clothes, electronics, toys and more through major retail partnerships.

While many dot.coms of the early '90s went bust, Amazon flourished with yearly sales that jumped from $510,000 in 1995 to over $17 billion in 2011.

As part of Bezos' 2018 annual shareholder letter, the media tycoon said the company had surpassed 100 million paid subscribers for AmazonPrime. By September 2018, Amazon was valued at more than $1 trillion, the second company to ever hit that record just a few weeks after Apple.

Amazon Instant Video & Amazon Studios
In 2006, Amazon.com launched its video-on-demand service. Initially known as Amazon Unbox on TiVo, it was eventually rebranded as Amazon Instant Video.

Bezos premiered several original programs with the launch of Amazon Studios in 2013. The company hit it big in 2014 with the critically-acclaimed Transparent and Mozart in the Jungle.

The company produced and released its first original feature film, Spike Lee's Chi-Raq, In 2015.

In 2016, Bezos stepped in front of the camera for a cameo appearance playing an alien in Star Trek Beyond. A Star Trek fan since childhood, Bezos is listed as a Starfleet Official in the movie credits on IMDb.

In early 2018, The Seattle Times reported that Amazon had consolidated its consumer retail operations in order to focus on growing areas including digital entertainment and Alexa, Amazon's virtual assistant.

Kindle E-Reader
Amazon released the Kindle, a handheld digital book reader that allowed users to buy, download, read and store their book selections, in 2007.

Bezos entered Amazon into the tablet marketplace with the unveiling of the Kindle Fire in 2011. The following September, he announced the new Kindle Fire HD, the company's next-generation tablet designed to give Apple's iPad a run for its money.

"We haven't built the best tablet at a certain price. We have built the best tablet at any price," Bezos said, according to ABC News.

Amazon Drones
In early December 2013, Bezos made headlines when he revealed a new, experimental initiative by Amazon, called "Amazon Air," using drones to provide delivery services to customers. He said these drones would be able to carry items weighing up to five pounds and be capable of traveling within a 10-mile distance of the company's distribution center.

The first Air delivery took place in Cambridge, England, on December 7, 2016.

Fire Phone
Bezos oversaw one of Amazon's few major missteps when the company launched the Fire Phone in 2014. Criticized for being too gimmicky, it was discontinued the following year.

Whole Foods
Bezos had been eyeing the food delivery market, and in 2017 Amazon announced it had acquired the Whole Foods grocery chain for $13.7 billion in cash.

The company began offering in-store deals to Amazon loyal customers and grocery delivery in as little as two hours, depending on the market. As a result, Walmart and Krogers also began offering meal delivery to its customers.

Owner of The Washington Post
On August 5, 2013, Bezos made headlines worldwide when he purchased The Washington Post and other publications affiliated with its parent company, The Washington Post Co., for $250 million.

The deal marked the end of the four-generation reign over The Post Co. by the Graham family, which included Donald E. Graham, the company's chairman and chief executive, and his niece, Post publisher Katharine Graham.

"The Post could have survived under the company's ownership and been profitable for the foreseeable future," Graham stated, in an effort to explain the transaction. "But we wanted to do more than survive. I'm not saying this guarantees success, but it gives us a much greater chance of success."

In a statement to Post employees on August 5, Bezos wrote:

"The values of The Post do not need changing. ...There will, of course, be change at The Post over the coming years. That's essential and would have happened with or without new ownership. The Internet is transforming almost every element of the news business: shortening news cycles, eroding long-reliable revenue sources, and enabling new kinds of competition, some of which bear little or no news-gathering costs."

Bezos hired hundreds of reporters and editors and tripled the newspaper's technology staff (hundreds of those employees published an open letter to their boss asking for salary increases and better benefits in the summer of 2018). The organization boasted several scoops, including revealing that former national security advisor Michael Flynn lied about his contact with Russians, leading to his resignation.

By 2016, the organization said it was profitable. The following year, the Post had an ad revenue of more than $100 million, with three straight years of double-digit revenue growth. Amazon soon bypassed The New York Times digital in unique users, with 86.4 million unique users as of June 2019, according to ComScore.

Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin
In 2000, Bezos founded Blue Origin, an aerospace company that develops technologies to lower the cost of space travel to make it accessible to paying customers. For a decade and a half, the company operated quietly.

Then, in 2016, Bezos invited reporters to visit the headquarters in Kent, Washington, just south of Seattle. He described a vision of humans not only visiting but eventually colonizing space. In 2017, Bezos promised to sell about $1 billion in Amazon stock annually to fund Blue Origin.

Two years later, he revealed the Blue Origin moon lander and said the company was conducting test flights of its suborbital New Shepard rocket, which would take tourists into space for a few minutes.

“We are going to build a road to space. And then amazing things will happen,” Bezos said.

In August 2019, NASA announced that Blue Origin was among 13 companies selected to collaborate on 19 technology projects to reach the moon and Mars. Blue Origin is developing a safe and precise landing system for the moon as well as engine nozzles for rockets with liquid propellant. The company is also working with NASA to build and launch reusable rockets from a refurbished complex just outside of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.

Jeff Bezos' Wealth and Salary
As of August 2019, both Bloomberg and Forbes estimated Bezos' net worth at $110 billion, or more than 1.9 million times the median American household income. Bezos topped Forbes' list of wealthiest people in the world in both 2018 and 2019.

Bezos has earned the same $81,840 salary at Amazon every year since 1998, and he has never taken a stock award. However, his shares of Amazon have made him a very wealthy man. One analysis of Bezos' 2018 stock earnings had him taking home roughly $260 million per day.

In July 2017, Bezos first briefly surpassed Microsoft founder Bill Gates to become the richest person in the world, according to Bloomberg, before dropping back to No. 2. The Amazon chief then reclaimed the top spot in October. By January 2018, Bezos had eclipsed Gates' previous wealth record with a net worth of $105.1 billion, according to Bloomberg.

In inflation-adjusted terms, however, Gates was wealthier than Bezos in the late 1990s. The massive fortunes of American business tycoons John Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford would also surpass Bezos' wealth.

Bezos Day One Fund
In 2018, Bezos launched the Bezos Day One Fund, which focuses on "funding existing non-profits that help homeless families, and creating a network of new, non-profit tier-one preschools in low-income communities." The announcement came a year after Bezos had asked his Twitter followers how to donate part of his fortune.

Bezos founded the organization with his ex-wife MacKenzie before their divorce, and he gave away $2 billion of his personal fortune to fund the nonprofit. As one of the world's wealthiest people, Bezos had been publicly criticized in the past for his lack of philanthropic efforts.

Healthcare Venture
On January 30, 2018, Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase delivered a joint press release in which they announced plans to pool their resources to form a new healthcare company for their U.S. employees.

According to the release, the company will be "free from profit-making incentives and constraints" as it tries to find ways to cut costs and boost satisfaction for patients, with an initial focus on technology solutions.

"The healthcare system is complex, and we enter into this challenge open-eyed about the degree of difficulty," said Bezos. "Hard as it might be, reducing healthcare's burden on the economy while improving outcomes for employees and their families would be worth the effort."

Bezos Earth Fund
On February 17, 2020, Bezos announced that he was launching the Bezos Earth Fund to combat the potentially devastating effects of climate change. Along with committing $10 billion to the initiative, Bezos said he would begin issuing grants and fund "scientists, activists, NGOs — any effort that offers a real possibility to help preserve and protect the natural world."

CHALLENGES

AOC slams Jeff Bezos' pay
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has slammed Amazon CEO Bezos for being a billionaire while his company pays its warehouse workers what she called "starvation wages."

She recently said in an interview with ABC News that the company's low worker pay has helped make Bezos the world's richest person.

In a response to the New York Democrat, Amazon said she is "just wrong." The company says it pays a $15 minimum wage and offers full benefits to employees in their first days on the job. It also noted that it has lobbied to raise the federal minimum wage.

Senator Bernie Sanders has also made similar arguments against Amazon's worker pay.

Biden questions Amazon's taxes
Joe Biden knocked Amazon over the amount of corporate taxes it pays.

"I have nothing against Amazon, but no company pulling in billions of dollars of profits should pay a lower tax rate than firefighters and teachers. We need to reward work, not just wealth," he said on Twitter. The tweet from the former vice president and Democratic presidential hopeful referenced a corporate tax rebate that Amazon received in 2018.

Amazon responded, saying in a tweet that the company pays "every penny we owe." It added: "Congress designed tax laws to encourage companies to reinvest in the American economy. We have $200B in investments since 2011 & 300K US jobs. Assume VP Biden's complaint is w/ the tax code, not Amazon."

Trump investigates post office deal
Amazon isn't getting much reprieve from the Trump administration, thanks to the president's beef with Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos as well as the United States Postal Service.

Last year, Trump ordered a federal task force to investigate the Postal Service's finances because he thinks Amazon takes advantage of the agency. At the root of all this drama is likely Bezos' ownership of The Washington Post, which has published stories that are unfavorable of to Trump throughout his presidency.

Amazon has a confidential agreement with the Postal Service under which the agency delivers a large number of packages directly to the post office closest to their destination. The Postal Service then delivers the packages to customers.

Employees want to fix climate change
Amazon employees are putting pressure on the company to rethink how it contributes to the battle against global warming.

In April, a group of 3,500 employees signed a Medium post that urged Bezos to publicly outline the company's plans to reduce carbon emissions and its reliance on fossil fuels. The signatories said that Amazon's "sustainability goals lack context."

Amazon unveiled in February a project it called Shipment Zero, which makes all packages net zero carbon and 50% of all shipments net zero by 2030. The company said it has 200 scientists, engineers, and product designers focused on sustainability efforts, from solar and wind farms to efforts around shipment waste.

Angering its hometown headquarters
Amazon publicly opposed a proposed a new "head tax" that the city of Seattle wanted to place on large businesses to address homelessness and fund affordable housing. Companies would pay 26 cents per working hour for each employee it has in Seattle, or roughly $540 a year for every full-time employee.

The tax would've hit Amazon hard, since it's the city's largest private employer. It has more than 45,000 employees in the Washington city, so it would've paid more than $20 million a year. In response, Amazon temporarily halted construction of a new 17-floor tower.

The bill was scuttled and Seattle ended up passing a smaller version of the tax.

Problems with its HQ2
Amazon had to retreat from Long Island City in New York after it announced in February that it planned to build a second headquarters there. That news prompted lots of public outcry from both the public and local officials.

Amazon ditched its plans three months later, saying "a number of state and local politicians have made it clear that they oppose our presence." Critics blasted the $1.525 billion in incentives New York offered to lure the tech behemoth and worried that it would soon lead to longtime residents being priced out of their homes.

Amazon ditches China
Amazon also pulled back from the world's biggest market for online shopping, China. It closed its marketplace, meaning Amazon customers in the country will no longer be able to buy goods from Chinese merchants.

Amazon first entered the Chinese market 15 years ago, when it acquired an online book retailer, but it has struggled amid fierce competition. Research suggests that the company's market share in China was miniscule compared to local rivals, like Alibaba (BABA).

CONCLUSION

Bezos is known for his double-personality that turns him from a kind person into a rough executive inducing fear and respect in his employees. A hyper-intelligent, ultra-driven individual, he expects everyone around him to behave likewise. Amazon staff are said to be living in fear of his abrasive flare-ups, including “Why are you wasting my life?” and “Are you lazy or just incompetent?”

Jeff Bezos seems to have no problem running the company while still personally reading feedback from customers. “We research each of them because they tell us something about our processes. It’s an audit that is done for us by our customers. We treat them as precious sources of information,” senior Amazon vice president Jeff Wilke explains. When there is a real issue, the consequences can be harsh on the employees responsible for the issue. There is an official system within Amazon that ranks the severities of its internal emergencies. A Sev-5 would be a relatively standard problem that engineers solve all the time while a Sev-1 is an urgent issue that gets everyone on their toes as it requires an immediate response. There is another level of severity that has employees sweating just at the sight of it. Informally dubbed by the employees, the “Sev-B” is anyone’s greatest nightmare at Amazon. Sev-B means when an employee receives an email directly from Jeff Bezos containing the notorious question mark. When someone receives it, it basically has an effect of a ticking time-bomb. They drop everything they’re doing and give full attention to the issue that the CEO is highlighting. Within a few hours, the employee has to prepare a formal thorough explanation of how the problem occurred to a team leads who will have to review the report before sending it to Bezos. It is the company’s way to ensure that the customer’s voice is always heard inside Amazon.

Bezos always moves faster, makes his employees work harder, and pursues both significant innovations and small ones. The superb image for Amazon is not just the everything store, but ultimately the everything company. The future has many things in store for Amazon. They still haven’t achieved next-day or even same-day delivery for their members and they are still set to expand their grocery service Amazon Fresh beyond Seattle, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Jeff Bezos expects Amazon’s mass expansion to as many countries as possible. Also, wants their customers to eliminate the need to buy products from manufacturers, by using 3D printer technologies to manufacture their own and so on.

Here are the three reasons I think Amazon is the world’s best business.

* It has a sustainable competitive advantage

Competitive advantage is measured by market share leadership which flows from three sources.

— Giving customers more bang for the buck

When people buy things, they compare different suppliers on a ranked set of factors. For Amazon customers those factors, or customer purchase criteria (CPC), include price, fast delivery and reliable service. Consumers choose Amazon because it does better than its competition on these CPC.

— Harnessing capabilities to win at scale

Winning and keeping customers — especially when a company has millions of them — depends on doing certain things well. For Amazon, such capabilities include offering a wide selection of products and services, operating an efficient supply chain to fulfill orders; and providing excellent customer service.

— Sustaining competitive superiority

While many large companies can do the first two things in one industry — think Apple in smart phones — very few can stay ahead as competitors try to copy their strategies and make successful bets on new growth opportunities.

Amazon did this first in online book selling and has continued to lead — it controls about 40% of the U.S. e-commerce market; its Echo devices have about 75% of the smart-speaker market; it runs a major Hollywood studio; and its Amazon Web Services (AWS) unit leads with over 40% of the cloud computing market.

REFERENCE

https://astrumpeople.com/jeff-bezos-biography/

https://www.biography.com/business-figure/jeff-bezos

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/197608

https://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2018/02/02/3-reasons-amazon-is-the-worlds-best-business/#1ea7fb006356

https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/04/business/amazon-25th-birthday-challenges-trnd/index.html

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