What Would Be The Alternate Career Option For Jeff Bezos If Amazon Had Failed?

Young Jeff Bezos set out to pursue a career involving computers and automation. He graduated from Princeton University in 1986 with a degree in electrical engineering and computer science. After graduation Bezos turned down job offers from a few technology companies, including Intel, Bell Labs and Anderson Consulting, and went to work ‘debugging code’ at a telecommunications start-up called Fitel. After two years, Bezos left Fitel to be a software developer at Bankers Trust. From there Bezos planned to leave the bank and commit to finding a job in tech, as he originally wanted, rather than continuing in financial services. But instead he went to work for hedge fund D.E. Shaw after clicking with founder David Shaw, who was also a computer scientist.

At hedge fund, Bezos was put in charge of researching potential business opportunities in what was a relatively new landscape; the internet. Thus during a brainstorming session, Bezos came up with an idea to sell books on the internet. He shared the idea to Shaw several times but discouraged by him. Shaw also did not wanted Bezos to leave the company and pursue his own business, but Bezos knew that if he tried and failed, he would never regret it.

He then  moved to the suburbs of Seattle to work out his garage and build a business that would ultimately become Amazon. Everyone knows how Amazon, one of the world’s most valuable companies, came into existence. It was started by Jeff Bezos as an online book store in his garage in 1994. Amazon gradually expanded its operations and Bezos launched a test site in July 1995. That was the beginning of a revolution which resulted in making Bezos the founding CEO of a trillion dollar company and the richest man on the planet.

During a fireside chat with Amazon India Head and Senior Vice President Amit Agarwal at the first edition of Amazon Smbhav – a summit for small, micro and medium business (SMBs), in New Delhi.

Amit first asked Jeff, “Did you think Amazon would be so successful?” To this Jeff responded,

“What’s actually happened over the last 25 years (at Amazon) is way behind my expectations. I was hoping to build a company but not a company like what you see today”.

Then, Amit asked Jeff, what he would have done if Amazon had not worked out. To this Bezos said,

“I would be an extremely happy software programmer somewhere”.

However if Bezos would have been a software programmer, he would be a lot less rich. Today the average salary for a software programmer is around $92000 per year, according to Glassdoor. According to Forbes, Bezos networth is $116 billion.

Speaking of Amazon’s early days, Jeff reminisced,

“I was an SMB myself. Twenty-five years ago, Amazon was a tiny, little company. I was driving the packages to the post office myself. I was also wrapping the packages.”