Introduction
The aim of any investment pursuit is to generate income and increase value over time. Any method for producing potential profits can be referred to as an investment. This involves, for example, buying of shares, real estate property, or stocks.
Nowadays, people are trying to invest in different assets. It is really important to know which investment will yield a better outcome. Once you have gained all the necessary information about investments, you’d probably become successful just like one of the most famous investors in the world, Jeff Bezos. Here, we’ll talk about Jeff Bezos and what you can learn from him when it comes to wealth building and investments.
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Who is Jeff Bezos?
Jeffery Preston Bezos, also known as Jeff Bezos, is a well-known American businessman and investor. He is the chairman, CEO, and President of Amazon, one of the world’s largest technology firms. Jeff Bezos also owns the Washington Post and Blue Origin (an aerospace firm).
He was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on January 12, 1964, to a teen mother named Jacklyn Gise Jorgensen and father Ted Jorgensen.
The Jorgensen’s were only married for a year. Mike Bezos, a Cuban immigrant, married Jeff Bezos’ mother while he was four years old.
In 1986, Bezos earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science and electrical engineering from Princeton University and graduated as summa cum laude.
As a boy, Bezos rigged electrical constructions around his home and turned their garage into a lab.
After graduating, Bezos worked for a number of Wall Street firms.
Bezos wanted to take a bold leap into the emerging field of e-commerce, despite the fact that his profession in finance was highly lucrative. In 1994, he left his job, moved to Seattle, and started an online bookstore to capitalize on the untapped promise of the Internet.
On July 16, 1995, Bezos launched Amazon.com, named after a winding South American river, after asking 300 friends to beta test his web. A few workers started designing software with Bezos in his garage in the months leading up to its launch. They gradually extended operation into a two-bedroom home with 3 Sun Microstation.
Jeff Bezos’ multibillion-dollar empire was not built overnight. Amazon was formed in 1994 by Jeff Bezos in his Seattle garage. His plans and achievements have gotten him to where he is now. Nash Holdings, Bezos Expeditions, and Amazon are among his main investments. Some of his active investments include the Washington Post, Airbnb, Twitter, and Uber Technologies (UBER).
Bezos’ venture capital investment firm, Bezos Expeditions, is where he makes the bulk of his investments. Technology, industrials, and healthcare are the top 3 industries wherein Bezos Expeditions invests, according to the latest information collected by Thomson Reuters.
Jeff Bezos’ Investments
1. EverFi
In 2017, Jeff Bezos made an investment of $190 million to EverFi. It is an educational technology firm and its main focus is on financial literacy, social and emotional development, and career development. The business is trying to fulfill the need for flexible learning in an ever-changing world, according to the EverFi site.
2. General Assembly (GA)
In 2011, Bezos invested $4.5 million into General Assembly, which was then just a co-working room. GA has developed into a global network that fosters an affluent professional group of people and firms through learning and career development. They have Twenty offices around the world where they give virtual and actual courses.
3. MakerBot
In 2011, Jeff Bezos made a ten-million-dollar investment in MakerBot, a 3D printing business. It was among the first companies to produce 3D printing available to the general public in such a manner that was easy to understand. It was later purchased by Stratasys, a corporation that has been at the forefront of 3D printing technology for the past thirty years.
4. NextDoor
Bezos made an investment in the personal social media application Nextdoor during a 2013 Series B funding. The application is used to communicate with neighbors about neighborhood welfare, open positions, missing pets, and political issues.
5. Plenty
In 2017, Bezos Expedition invested in Plenty, a company that aims to develop technological development in agriculture. It develops agricultural sciences that enable plants to thrive without pesticides or genetically modified organisms. During the Series B funding, Bezos Expeditions invested $200 million in the land development business. You may have seen their mechanized farming, which generates agricultural productivity up to 350 times bigger than normal techniques while using just 1% of the water used in conventional farming.
6. Airbnb
According to a Visual Capitalist survey, the extremely common accommodation platform offers access to more than five million places to stay in, and it earned a 112 million dollars’ worth of investment from Bezos.
7. Grail
It’s a company that focuses on detecting cancer early before it becomes too serious. Grail received a hundred-million-dollar investment from Bezos Expeditions in 2016. Currently, the biotech firm is working on a blood sampling system that can diagnose cancer early while also generating genome datasets to support their product.
8. Juno Therapeutics
Bezos Expeditions made an investment of $134 million in Juno Therapeutics in 2014, a diagnostic and therapeutic business that creates cancer immunotherapies. Celgene, a pharmaceutical firm, paid $9 billion for Juno Therapeutics in January 2018.
9. Mark43
Bezos Expeditions contributed a portion of Mark43’s $38 million Series C funding round. Mark43 is a software company that was created in 2012 with the aim of improving community safety software. Mark43 is supported by Amazon Web Services, Amazon’s trusted security storage, for their massive law enforcement data security tasks.
10. Fundbox
It is a fintech firm that assists people in growing their local businesses by making credit access easy, safe, quick, and transparent. In a Series C funding round in 2015, Bezos Expeditions invested $50 million in Fundbox.
11. Lookout
In 2014, Bezos Expeditions made a $150 million investment in this cybersecurity firm. Over the course of 8 rounds of investment, Lookout has generated a total of $282.3 million. The cybersecurity firm offers services to both individuals and big corporations who want to protect their personal cell devices.
12. Uber
Bezos put $37 million into Uber’s Series B round of funding in 2011, and we all know how huge this company has grown and how Bezos scored huge profits from this venture.
13. Domo
Bezos invested sixty million dollars in Domo in 2013, a corporation that provides access to actual information and analytics to Chief executives and enables them to run their finances from their mobile phones. Domo stock is available for around $16 per share. Sadly, the company’s revenue fell less than its approximated $2.3 billion valuations to $511 million prior to its Initial public offering.
14. Mindstrong Health
Bezos Expeditions invested a $15 million Series B funding round in Mindstrong Health in 2018. The goal of the organization is to link patients and clinicians with consistent, reliable measurements of awareness and attitude, providing patients agency in their treatment and clinicians trust that they can detect early symptoms of cognitive health deterioration.
Since its inception in 2014, Mindstrong Health has earned $29 million in 2 funding rounds. The business is, unsurprisingly, creating a lot of excitement. According to MIT Technology Review, it is the mobile app that can detect that you are stressed before you realize it.
Jeff Bezos’ Business Tips that you can learn from
1. Be both stubborn and versatile.
Effective businessmen, according to Bezos, should be both stubborn and versatile. They are persistent in realizing vision.
The first component would be to commit to the goal, and the second is to be versatile with the strategies. According to him, if you are not stubborn, you will surrender on projects too quickly. You will smash your head into the wall if you are not versatile, and you won’t be seeing a different answer to a dilemma you are attempting to solve.
One of the characteristics of entrepreneurs is that they are naturally stubborn. They’re born leaders who enjoy taking charge and getting things done their way. In this way, it seems that they are focused on tactical specifics as well as vision. So, while natural leadership skills are desirable, one of the qualities that distinguish successful entrepreneurs is the ability to be versatile, pay attention to detail, and formulate long-term solutions to the most pressing problems.
2. 2 pizza rule.
Bezos seems to be a believer in small, self-contained communities. He agrees with the 2 pizza rule, which states that teams should be small enough to eat with just two pizzas. In most cases, this translates to a team of 5–7 people.
Whenever a group grows in size, it has a chance of becoming inefficient. This ineffectiveness decreases the team’s productivity. As a result, keep teams small and allow them to flourish this way.
3. Don’t stop to experiment
Many Corporate leaders would say that experimentation is critical to their company’s success. That is how innovative concepts emerge and remain competitive in the marketplace. Experimentation can be found anywhere and at any time.
Experimentation and a desire to create have always been a part of Amazon’s culture. The executives at Amazon wanted to understand if it was worth the money to promote advertising in the early years. As a result, they searched for two markets that had a strong mix of the consumer profiles they were looking for, and they discovered Minneapolis and Portland to be the best. They experimented for 16 months, which is longer than most businesses. Bezos, on the other hand, expressed that the company was “unbelievably fixated on it” and that it was a hard, costly test, but they were very committed to pursuing the experiment for their business once and for all.
Even though the advertisements increased Amazon’s revenue slightly, Bezos concluded that it’s not enough to offset the investment. While the trial was long, it was beneficial to Amazon’s strategy.
4. Experimentation, Inventiveness, and Innovation are all intertwined.
We already learn that Bezos together with his Amazon staff enjoys experimenting. So if you’d like to try new things, you’ll have to be willing to explore as you invest, and it’s one of Amazon’s core values. Especially if you’re still starting out, you can’t expect to get everything right away. There’s always a learning curve and experimentation stage, so feel free to explore the best investment strategy that works for you.
5. Memoranda, not SlideShows, should be presented and discussed.
According to Bezos, in a typical business meeting, someone takes the stage in front of the audience and provides a slide show. But for him, written memoranda are better.
You’ll know something incredible happens if you’re really in a writing flow. Your mind generates ideas and information quicker than your hands can type it. Then you’ll be fully immersed at the moment. It’s an enjoyable yet difficult process because you want to jot down all of your ideas so you wouldn’t forget them.
Constructing PowerPoint presentations has no such impact. Writing six pages allows the author to think things through, and reading and discussing them helps the viewer to hear the author’s entire argument.
6. Focus on the customer
On multiple occasions, Bezos has expressed that you should concentrate on the needs of your customers and from there, work backward.
When working backward, you begin with the customer and their requirements and issues. This is the exact opposite of what other businesses do, and that is to come up with ideas, create a product, and then see how well it does.
Bezos is a strong believer in doing what is best for the consumer because it is eventually what’s really best for the company. At the 2012 re: Invent conference he said:
“If we can plan it in such a way that our priorities are matched with our consumers, that will work out really well for customers and very well for Amazon in the long run.”
7. Identify and eliminate the risk
The best entrepreneurs, according to Bezos, dislike risk and seek to detect and eliminate it in the earliest stages of a company. Good entrepreneurs wouldn’t like risk, so they try to avoid it. Setting up a business is challenging enough, and then you have to systematically remove risks as early as possible. You have to recognize risks better and become steps ahead all the time. Foresight is important to minimize wasting time and resources. Although not everything can be predictable, imagining all possible scenarios can help you become better equipped to make the bold yet safer decisions for the company or for your venture.
8. Begin Now to Prevent Regret in the Future
When Bezos was considering starting Amazon, he had to choose between starting the business and keeping his stable Wall Street work. He developed a Regret Minimization Method to guide him through the decision-making process. It did help him recognize that he didn’t want to put it off and later regret it. One of the main reasons he decided to start Amazon was because he was afraid of regret.
9. Be open to new ideas.
Have you ever considered how many services and products Amazon has to offer? You can credit Bezos’ ideology of invention and experimentation for this. In this way, Bezos is the complete opposite of Steve Jobs. Apple only has a few items, whereas Amazon has hundreds.
Bezos and his Amazon team place a high value on innovation. He also uses the terms “explorers” and “pioneers” to describe his Amazon team. He seeks out people who enjoy inventing and are constantly searching for new ways to improve goods.
Bezos is a self-taught inventor. Bezos likes to invent, whether it’s his 10,000-year clock, his Blue Origin space business, his innovative airbag device for smartphones, the solar cooker he developed as a child, or his Amazon projects. He values it in his workers and supports it. Working in groups and brainstorming, according to Bezos, is among his favorite things to do. It’s plain that he’s enthralled by the idea of creativity.
10. Consider the long term.
Amazon has been in the retail business since 1994. Do you recall those old computers and the beginnings of the internet? Consumers will purchase goods off of it, and Bezos knew back then. He has stated that those were among the most difficult days of his life. He was attempting to raise $1 million in order to launch Amazon. However, obtaining the $1 million was extremely difficult. He said he spoke with 60 people and received $50K from 22 of them.
Clearly, long-term planning necessitates a great deal of patience. This is particularly true if you’re the CEO and still have to deal with day-to-day operations. No matter the pursuit, it’s important to begin with the end in mind and state your ideal destination. Without such long-range vision, nothing grand will take place.
Conclusion
Jeff Bezos becomes the richest man in the world because he invests wisely and takes bold steps. In investing you need to take risks and not be afraid to fail because failure is part of success. If you want to invest like Bezos, try to consider some of his business tips above and see how you can apply them to your journey. Try to experiment and explore opportunities while minimizing risks by equipping yourself with the knowledge and experience you need.
