Lessons from Leaders: Jeff Bezos

Amazon launched in 1995 as an online book marketplace. How did its founder Jeff Bezos successfully scale the company to become the game-changing e-commerce giant it is today? Scaling up a business is hard work. It requires vision, strategy, drive, and the confidence to make difficult — and often high-risk — decisions. You’d be hard pushed to find someone who has made more of a success of scaling up their business than Amazon’s founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos. Today, Amazon accounts for 45% of the U.S.’ e-commerce market, one in three Americans are Prime members, and the company records $4,722 worth of sales every single second. In 2020, the company reported net sales of $386.06 billion.