Bezos’ noteworthy success within the e-commerce industry all started with the risk he took in 1994, after he quit a lucrative job on Wall Street to create an online bookstore in hopes to capitalize on the Internet’s rapid growth. “I came across the fact that Web usage was growing at 2,300 percent per year. I’d never seen or heard of anything that grew that fast, and 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,” Bezos said in a 2010 address at Princeton University, his alma mater.
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What caused him to take the leap of faith? Fear of regret later in his life. “In most cases, our biggest regrets turn out to be acts of omission. It’s paths not taken and they haunt us. We wonder what would have happened… I knew that, when I’m 80, I would never regret trying this thing that I was super excited about and it failing. If it failed, fine. I would be very proud of the fact when I’m 80 that I tried. I also knew that it would always haunt me if I didn’t try,” Bezos said at Summit LA.
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