In 1999 Jeff Bezos was already a successful entrepreneur who was gaining popularity in the growing internet sales industry, that’s why he got the attention of the presenter Bob Simon, who went to the Amazon offices to know his insides.
From that encounter, a photo emerged showing Bezos’s office: it was a place, with an old computer, a table with a broken leg, several stacked folders and the Amazon logo written with spray pasted on one of the walls.
The image became famous at the end of 2017 when the Twitter user shared it with the message: “This was the office of Jeff Bezos in 1999. Everyone starts somewhere. Keep going”.
However, the user made a mistake, since by that date, the owner of Amazon was already successful and his company began to generate great profits.
In fact, Amazon started in 1994 after Bezos left his post as vice president of D. E. Shaw & Co., a high-risk investment company on Wall Street. With the money he earned from his departure he founded his own internet company.
Thanks to his instinct to generate a website selling books online, his growth was rapid, and he took over a market that the large bookstore chains had ignored.
By 1997, Amazon was already listed on the stock market and two years later, in 1999 it was named “Person of the Year” by Time magazine.
60 minutes. In it the businessman gives lessons on how to raise an emporium and what a success he has achieved. During that conversation, Simon points to a leg on his desk, which is broken and patched with tape and Bezos responds, “It’s a symbol, my way of saying that you just have to spend money on things that matter to people customers. ”” data-reactid = “40”> It was also that year when the interview with Bob Simon for the program took place 60 minutes. In it the businessman gives lessons on how to raise an emporium and what a success he has achieved. During that conversation, Simon points to a leg on his desk, which is broken and patched with tape and Bezos responds, “It’s a symbol, my way of saying that you just have to spend money on things that matter to people customers”.
And this is demonstrated by the images of the entire apartment occupied by Amazon offices, where it seems that luxury was prohibited.
Something that was also in the company’s philosophy at that time was a phrase that Bezos repeated to his employees, “You have to live in fear.”
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Photo by Yves Forestier / Sygma via Getty Images
That fear and the austere way in which he lived, earned Amazon to survive the moment in which the “Puntocom Bubble” burst that led to the closure of several Internet companies that had experienced accelerated growth.
Currently, Amazon is a giant of worldwide sales, just the first half of 2019 billed US $ 123,104 million, US $ 20 million more than what was earned in the same period but of 2018.
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Amazon is the largest Internet retailer in the United States. Photo: Getty Images
According to Bloomberg analysts, by the end of 2019 Amazon generated profits of US $ 275,060 million and they estimate that by the end of 2020 it will exceed its income and exceed US $ 320,000 million.
So that broken table symbol and patched with adhesive tape shows that it served Jeff Bezos a lot, today becoming the richest man in the world, with a fortune valued at 117 billion dollars, according to the Forbes list.
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