it is hard to imagine life without
amazon.com
even for someone of my advanced age
after all where else can a few clicks of
a mouse take you from the latest novel
by Toni Morrison to an 18th century
edition of the works of John Locke
having stopped in power tools and
women’s shoes along the way yet the
founder and chief executive officer of
the world’s largest retailer whose net
sales surpassed twenty four point five
billion dollars in 2009 is only 46 years
old
and amazon.com has only existed since
1995 making it even younger than the
class of 2010 the moral of this story is
that the right idea in the right hands
at the right time can change the way we
leave our lives the idea in this case
was harnessing the power of the nascent
Internet to create a virtual bookstore
of limitless proportions
the hands were those of our speaker Jeff
Bezos a self-described nerdy commuter
compute computer science and electrical
engineering major who graduated from
Princeton with highest honors in 1986
and the time was 1994 when he and his
wife Mackenzie Tuttle Bezos of the class
of 1992 exchanged the security of Wall
Street where they worked at de Shan
company for the uncertain prospects of a
dot-com startup but then as Jeff points
out failure is an essential component of
innovation and invention if you know
it’s going to work it’s not an
experiment and amazon.com was nothing if
not a grand experiment
working on improvised tables in the
garage of a Seattle home and using his
parents savings as startup capital jeff
defied the forces that caused most young
companies to fail
partly he admits through sheer good
fortune but also because of his
unwavering determination to create the
world’s most customer centric company
and as he notes in his company’s latest
annual report of the 452 goals that
amazon.com has set for itself this year
360 of them will directly affect the
customer experience while the word
revenue is used on only eight occasions
I do not advise you to start off with
452 goals this year by the way but this
is just one of the keys to Jeff’s
success another lies in his exceptional
ability to marry commerce and technology
in creative ways in his sheer
inventiveness and willingness to take
the risks inherent in this process
indeed the history of amazon.com is one
of daring leaps
one such leap involved creating the
capacity to search inside the books sold
by his company not by designing a modest
pilot project but by committing the
resources to make it possible to scour
the text of more than a hundred and
twenty thousand volumes when this
feature debuted in 2003 other
innovations have included one-click
shopping online product reviews by
customers and of course the Kindle
reading device which we test-drove in
three courses this fall mirroring the
rapid growth of Amazon itself the number
of books available through the u.s.
Kindle Store topped four hundred and
sixty thousand in 2009 just two years
after its long
and there’s no turning back
our vision is every book every printed
in any language all available in less
than 60 seconds jeff has stated an
audacious proposition to be sure but as
Elle Albert Einstein once observed if at
first the idea is not absurd then there
is no hope for it perhaps the American
Academy of achievement summarized our
speakers impact best when it noted
having already revolutionized the way
the world buys books Jeff Bezos is now
transforming the way we read them as
well I like to think the Princeton
helped to lay the groundwork for this
revolution dreamer and doer entrepreneur
and engineer refreshingly unassuming
even in the face of unimaginable success
jeff has done his alma mater proud it is
a true honor and pleasure to welcoming
him back to old Nassau today
as a kid I spent my summers with my
grandparents on the ranch in Texas I
helped fix windmills vaccinate cattle
and do other chores we also watched soap
operas every afternoon especially Days
of Our Lives
my grandparents belonged to a caravan
Club a group of Airstream trailer owners
who travel together around the u.s. and
Canada and every few summers we joined
the caravan we’d hitch up the Airstream
to my grandfather’s car and off we’d go
in a line with 300 other Airstream
adventurers I loved and worshipped my
grandparents and I really looked forward
to these trips a one particular trip I
was about ten years old I was rolling
around in the big bench seat in the back
of the car my grandfather was driving
and my grandmother had the passenger
seat she smoked throughout these trips
and I hated the smell
at that age I take any excuse to make
estimates and do minor arithmetic I’d
calculate our gas mileage figure out
useless statistics on things like
grocery spending I’ve been hearing an ad
campaign about smoking I can’t remember
the details but basically the ad said
every pop of a cigarette takes some
number of minutes off of your life I
think it might have been two minutes per
puff at any rate I decided to do the
math for my grandmother I estimated the
number of cigarettes per day estimated
the number of puffs per cigarette and so
on when I was satisfied that I had come
up with a reasonable number I poked my
head into the front of the car tapped my
grandmother on the shoulder and proudly
proclaimed at two minutes per puff
you’ve taken nine years off of your life
I have a very vivid memory of what
happened next
and it was not what I had expected I
expected to be applauded for my
cleverness and my arithmetic skills Jeff
you’re so smart
you had to have made some tricky
estimates figure out the number of
minutes in a year and do some division
that’s not what happened instead my
grandmother burst into tears i sat in
the back seat didn’t know what to do
well my grandmother was crying my
grandfather who’d been driving in
silence pulled over onto the shoulder of
the highway he got out of the car and
came around and opened my door waited
for me to follow was I in trouble my
grandfather was a highly intelligent
quiet man he had never said a harsh word
to me maybe this was to be the first
time or maybe he would ask that I get
back in the car and apologize to my
grandmother I had no experience in this
realm with my grandparents and no way to
gauge what the consequences might be
we stopped beside the trailer my
grandfather looked at me and after a bit
of silence he gently and calmly said
Jeff one day you’ll understand that it’s
harder to be kind than clever what I
want to talk to you about today is the
difference between gifts and choices
cleverness is a gift kindness is a
choice
gifts are easy they’re given after all
choices can be hard you can seduce
yourself with your gifts if you’re not
careful and if you do
it’ll probably be to the detriment of
your choices this is a group with many
gifts I’m sure one of your gifts is the
gift of a smart and capable brain I’m
confident that’s the case because
admission is competitive and if there
weren’t some signs that you’re clever
the Dean of Admissions wouldn’t have let
you in your smarts will come in handy
because you will travel in a land of
marvels we humans plotting as we are
will astonish ourselves will invent ways
to generate clean energy and a lot of it
atom by atom will assemble small
machines that can inner cell walls and
make repairs this month comes the
extraordinary but inevitable news that
we’ve synthesized life and the coming
years will not only synthesize it but
engineer it to specifications I believe
you’ll even see us understand the human
brain Jules Verne Mark Twain Galileo
Newton all the curious from the ages
would have wanted to be alive most of
all right now as a civilization we will
have so many gifts just as you as
individuals have so many individual
gifts as you sit before me how you use
these gifts and will you take pride in
your gifts or pride in your choices I
got the idea to start Amazon 16 years
ago I came across the fact that web
usage was growing at 2,300 percent per
year I had never seen or heard of
anything that grew that fast the idea of
building an online bookstore with
millions of titles something that simply
couldn’t exist in the physical world was
very exciting to me I just turned 30
years old and I’d been married for a
year I told my wife McKenzie but I
wanted to quit my job and go do this
crazy thing
that probably wouldn’t work since most
startups don’t and I wasn’t sure what
would happen after that
McKenzie also Princeton grad and sitting
here in the second row told me I should
go for it as a young boy had been a
garage inventor I’d invented an
automatic gate closer out of cement
filled tires a solar cooker that didn’t
work very well out of an umbrella and
aluminum foil baking pan alarms to
entrap my siblings I’d always wanted to
be an inventor and she wanted me to
follow my passion I was working at a
financial firm in New York City with a
bunch of very smart people and I had a
brilliant boss I much admired I went to
my boss and told him I was going to
start a company selling books on the
Internet he took me on a long walk in
Central Park listen carefully to me and
finally said that sounds like a really
good idea
but it would be an even better idea for
someone who didn’t already have a good
job
that logic made some sense to me and he
convinced me to think about it for 48
hours before making a final decision
seen in that light it really was a
difficult choice but ultimately I
decided I had to give it a shot I didn’t
think I’d regret trying and failing and
I suspected I would always be haunted by
a decision to not try at all after much
consideration I took the less safe path
to follow my passion and I’m proud of
that choice tomorrow in a very real
sense your life the life you author from
scratch on your own begins how will you
use your gifts what choices will you
make will inertia be your guide or will
you follow your passions will you follow
Dogma or will you be original will you
choose a life of ease or a life of
service an adventure will you wilt under
criticism or will you follow your
convictions will you Bluff it out when
you’re wrong or will you apologize will
you guard your heart against rejection
or were you act when you fall in love
will you play it safe or will you be a
little bit swashbuckling when it’s tough
will you give up or will you be
relentless will you be a cynic or will
you be a builder
will you be clever at the expense of
others or will you be kind
I will hazard a prediction when you are
80 years old and in a quiet moment of
reflection narrating for only yourself
the most personal version of your life
story the telling that will be most
compact and meaningful will be the
series of choices you have made in the
end we are our choices build yourself a
great story thank you and good luck
you
you
amazon.com
even for someone of my advanced age
after all where else can a few clicks of
a mouse take you from the latest novel
by Toni Morrison to an 18th century
edition of the works of John Locke
having stopped in power tools and
women’s shoes along the way yet the
founder and chief executive officer of
the world’s largest retailer whose net
sales surpassed twenty four point five
billion dollars in 2009 is only 46 years
old
and amazon.com has only existed since
1995 making it even younger than the
class of 2010 the moral of this story is
that the right idea in the right hands
at the right time can change the way we
leave our lives the idea in this case
was harnessing the power of the nascent
Internet to create a virtual bookstore
of limitless proportions
the hands were those of our speaker Jeff
Bezos a self-described nerdy commuter
compute computer science and electrical
engineering major who graduated from
Princeton with highest honors in 1986
and the time was 1994 when he and his
wife Mackenzie Tuttle Bezos of the class
of 1992 exchanged the security of Wall
Street where they worked at de Shan
company for the uncertain prospects of a
dot-com startup but then as Jeff points
out failure is an essential component of
innovation and invention if you know
it’s going to work it’s not an
experiment and amazon.com was nothing if
not a grand experiment
working on improvised tables in the
garage of a Seattle home and using his
parents savings as startup capital jeff
defied the forces that caused most young
companies to fail
partly he admits through sheer good
fortune but also because of his
unwavering determination to create the
world’s most customer centric company
and as he notes in his company’s latest
annual report of the 452 goals that
amazon.com has set for itself this year
360 of them will directly affect the
customer experience while the word
revenue is used on only eight occasions
I do not advise you to start off with
452 goals this year by the way but this
is just one of the keys to Jeff’s
success another lies in his exceptional
ability to marry commerce and technology
in creative ways in his sheer
inventiveness and willingness to take
the risks inherent in this process
indeed the history of amazon.com is one
of daring leaps
one such leap involved creating the
capacity to search inside the books sold
by his company not by designing a modest
pilot project but by committing the
resources to make it possible to scour
the text of more than a hundred and
twenty thousand volumes when this
feature debuted in 2003 other
innovations have included one-click
shopping online product reviews by
customers and of course the Kindle
reading device which we test-drove in
three courses this fall mirroring the
rapid growth of Amazon itself the number
of books available through the u.s.
Kindle Store topped four hundred and
sixty thousand in 2009 just two years
after its long
and there’s no turning back
our vision is every book every printed
in any language all available in less
than 60 seconds jeff has stated an
audacious proposition to be sure but as
Elle Albert Einstein once observed if at
first the idea is not absurd then there
is no hope for it perhaps the American
Academy of achievement summarized our
speakers impact best when it noted
having already revolutionized the way
the world buys books Jeff Bezos is now
transforming the way we read them as
well I like to think the Princeton
helped to lay the groundwork for this
revolution dreamer and doer entrepreneur
and engineer refreshingly unassuming
even in the face of unimaginable success
jeff has done his alma mater proud it is
a true honor and pleasure to welcoming
him back to old Nassau today
as a kid I spent my summers with my
grandparents on the ranch in Texas I
helped fix windmills vaccinate cattle
and do other chores we also watched soap
operas every afternoon especially Days
of Our Lives
my grandparents belonged to a caravan
Club a group of Airstream trailer owners
who travel together around the u.s. and
Canada and every few summers we joined
the caravan we’d hitch up the Airstream
to my grandfather’s car and off we’d go
in a line with 300 other Airstream
adventurers I loved and worshipped my
grandparents and I really looked forward
to these trips a one particular trip I
was about ten years old I was rolling
around in the big bench seat in the back
of the car my grandfather was driving
and my grandmother had the passenger
seat she smoked throughout these trips
and I hated the smell
at that age I take any excuse to make
estimates and do minor arithmetic I’d
calculate our gas mileage figure out
useless statistics on things like
grocery spending I’ve been hearing an ad
campaign about smoking I can’t remember
the details but basically the ad said
every pop of a cigarette takes some
number of minutes off of your life I
think it might have been two minutes per
puff at any rate I decided to do the
math for my grandmother I estimated the
number of cigarettes per day estimated
the number of puffs per cigarette and so
on when I was satisfied that I had come
up with a reasonable number I poked my
head into the front of the car tapped my
grandmother on the shoulder and proudly
proclaimed at two minutes per puff
you’ve taken nine years off of your life
I have a very vivid memory of what
happened next
and it was not what I had expected I
expected to be applauded for my
cleverness and my arithmetic skills Jeff
you’re so smart
you had to have made some tricky
estimates figure out the number of
minutes in a year and do some division
that’s not what happened instead my
grandmother burst into tears i sat in
the back seat didn’t know what to do
well my grandmother was crying my
grandfather who’d been driving in
silence pulled over onto the shoulder of
the highway he got out of the car and
came around and opened my door waited
for me to follow was I in trouble my
grandfather was a highly intelligent
quiet man he had never said a harsh word
to me maybe this was to be the first
time or maybe he would ask that I get
back in the car and apologize to my
grandmother I had no experience in this
realm with my grandparents and no way to
gauge what the consequences might be
we stopped beside the trailer my
grandfather looked at me and after a bit
of silence he gently and calmly said
Jeff one day you’ll understand that it’s
harder to be kind than clever what I
want to talk to you about today is the
difference between gifts and choices
cleverness is a gift kindness is a
choice
gifts are easy they’re given after all
choices can be hard you can seduce
yourself with your gifts if you’re not
careful and if you do
it’ll probably be to the detriment of
your choices this is a group with many
gifts I’m sure one of your gifts is the
gift of a smart and capable brain I’m
confident that’s the case because
admission is competitive and if there
weren’t some signs that you’re clever
the Dean of Admissions wouldn’t have let
you in your smarts will come in handy
because you will travel in a land of
marvels we humans plotting as we are
will astonish ourselves will invent ways
to generate clean energy and a lot of it
atom by atom will assemble small
machines that can inner cell walls and
make repairs this month comes the
extraordinary but inevitable news that
we’ve synthesized life and the coming
years will not only synthesize it but
engineer it to specifications I believe
you’ll even see us understand the human
brain Jules Verne Mark Twain Galileo
Newton all the curious from the ages
would have wanted to be alive most of
all right now as a civilization we will
have so many gifts just as you as
individuals have so many individual
gifts as you sit before me how you use
these gifts and will you take pride in
your gifts or pride in your choices I
got the idea to start Amazon 16 years
ago I came across the fact that web
usage was growing at 2,300 percent per
year I had never seen or heard of
anything that grew that fast the idea of
building an online bookstore with
millions of titles something that simply
couldn’t exist in the physical world was
very exciting to me I just turned 30
years old and I’d been married for a
year I told my wife McKenzie but I
wanted to quit my job and go do this
crazy thing
that probably wouldn’t work since most
startups don’t and I wasn’t sure what
would happen after that
McKenzie also Princeton grad and sitting
here in the second row told me I should
go for it as a young boy had been a
garage inventor I’d invented an
automatic gate closer out of cement
filled tires a solar cooker that didn’t
work very well out of an umbrella and
aluminum foil baking pan alarms to
entrap my siblings I’d always wanted to
be an inventor and she wanted me to
follow my passion I was working at a
financial firm in New York City with a
bunch of very smart people and I had a
brilliant boss I much admired I went to
my boss and told him I was going to
start a company selling books on the
Internet he took me on a long walk in
Central Park listen carefully to me and
finally said that sounds like a really
good idea
but it would be an even better idea for
someone who didn’t already have a good
job
that logic made some sense to me and he
convinced me to think about it for 48
hours before making a final decision
seen in that light it really was a
difficult choice but ultimately I
decided I had to give it a shot I didn’t
think I’d regret trying and failing and
I suspected I would always be haunted by
a decision to not try at all after much
consideration I took the less safe path
to follow my passion and I’m proud of
that choice tomorrow in a very real
sense your life the life you author from
scratch on your own begins how will you
use your gifts what choices will you
make will inertia be your guide or will
you follow your passions will you follow
Dogma or will you be original will you
choose a life of ease or a life of
service an adventure will you wilt under
criticism or will you follow your
convictions will you Bluff it out when
you’re wrong or will you apologize will
you guard your heart against rejection
or were you act when you fall in love
will you play it safe or will you be a
little bit swashbuckling when it’s tough
will you give up or will you be
relentless will you be a cynic or will
you be a builder
will you be clever at the expense of
others or will you be kind
I will hazard a prediction when you are
80 years old and in a quiet moment of
reflection narrating for only yourself
the most personal version of your life
story the telling that will be most
compact and meaningful will be the
series of choices you have made in the
end we are our choices build yourself a
great story thank you and good luck
you
you
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