00:00:00it is hard to imagine life without
00:00:04amazon.com
00:00:08even for someone of my advanced age
00:00:12after all where else can a few clicks of
00:00:17a mouse take you from the latest novel
00:00:20by Toni Morrison to an 18th century
00:00:23edition of the works of John Locke
00:00:26having stopped in power tools and
00:00:29women’s shoes along the way yet the
00:00:34founder and chief executive officer of
00:00:36the world’s largest retailer whose net
00:00:40sales surpassed twenty four point five
00:00:43billion dollars in 2009 is only 46 years
00:00:47old
00:00:48and amazon.com has only existed since
00:00:531995 making it even younger than the
00:00:57class of 2010 the moral of this story is
00:01:02that the right idea in the right hands
00:01:05at the right time can change the way we
00:01:09leave our lives the idea in this case
00:01:13was harnessing the power of the nascent
00:01:16Internet to create a virtual bookstore
00:01:19of limitless proportions
00:01:21the hands were those of our speaker Jeff
00:01:25Bezos a self-described nerdy commuter
00:01:29compute computer science and electrical
00:01:32engineering major who graduated from
00:01:35Princeton with highest honors in 1986
00:01:39and the time was 1994 when he and his
00:01:45wife Mackenzie Tuttle Bezos of the class
00:01:48of 1992 exchanged the security of Wall
00:01:52Street where they worked at de Shan
00:01:55company for the uncertain prospects of a
00:01:59dot-com startup but then as Jeff points
00:02:02out failure is an essential component of
00:02:06innovation and invention if you know
00:02:09it’s going to work it’s not an
00:02:12experiment and amazon.com was nothing if
00:02:16not a grand experiment
00:02:19working on improvised tables in the
00:02:21garage of a Seattle home and using his
00:02:24parents savings as startup capital jeff
00:02:28defied the forces that caused most young
00:02:31companies to fail
00:02:32partly he admits through sheer good
00:02:35fortune but also because of his
00:02:38unwavering determination to create the
00:02:42world’s most customer centric company
00:02:45and as he notes in his company’s latest
00:02:49annual report of the 452 goals that
00:02:53amazon.com has set for itself this year
00:02:57360 of them will directly affect the
00:03:01customer experience while the word
00:03:04revenue is used on only eight occasions
00:03:07I do not advise you to start off with
00:03:12452 goals this year by the way but this
00:03:17is just one of the keys to Jeff’s
00:03:19success another lies in his exceptional
00:03:23ability to marry commerce and technology
00:03:26in creative ways in his sheer
00:03:29inventiveness and willingness to take
00:03:31the risks inherent in this process
00:03:34indeed the history of amazon.com is one
00:03:38of daring leaps
00:03:39one such leap involved creating the
00:03:42capacity to search inside the books sold
00:03:45by his company not by designing a modest
00:03:49pilot project but by committing the
00:03:52resources to make it possible to scour
00:03:55the text of more than a hundred and
00:03:57twenty thousand volumes when this
00:03:59feature debuted in 2003 other
00:04:04innovations have included one-click
00:04:06shopping online product reviews by
00:04:09customers and of course the Kindle
00:04:12reading device which we test-drove in
00:04:15three courses this fall mirroring the
00:04:19rapid growth of Amazon itself the number
00:04:21of books available through the u.s.
00:04:23Kindle Store topped four hundred and
00:04:25sixty thousand in 2009 just two years
00:04:30after its long
00:04:31and there’s no turning back
00:04:34our vision is every book every printed
00:04:39in any language all available in less
00:04:42than 60 seconds jeff has stated an
00:04:45audacious proposition to be sure but as
00:04:49Elle Albert Einstein once observed if at
00:04:52first the idea is not absurd then there
00:04:55is no hope for it perhaps the American
00:04:59Academy of achievement summarized our
00:05:01speakers impact best when it noted
00:05:05having already revolutionized the way
00:05:08the world buys books Jeff Bezos is now
00:05:11transforming the way we read them as
00:05:14well I like to think the Princeton
00:05:17helped to lay the groundwork for this
00:05:19revolution dreamer and doer entrepreneur
00:05:24and engineer refreshingly unassuming
00:05:29even in the face of unimaginable success
00:05:32jeff has done his alma mater proud it is
00:05:36a true honor and pleasure to welcoming
00:05:39him back to old Nassau today
00:06:25as a kid I spent my summers with my
00:06:31grandparents on the ranch in Texas I
00:06:35helped fix windmills vaccinate cattle
00:06:39and do other chores we also watched soap
00:06:45operas every afternoon especially Days
00:06:47of Our Lives
00:06:50my grandparents belonged to a caravan
00:06:54Club a group of Airstream trailer owners
00:06:58who travel together around the u.s. and
00:07:01Canada and every few summers we joined
00:07:06the caravan we’d hitch up the Airstream
00:07:10to my grandfather’s car and off we’d go
00:07:15in a line with 300 other Airstream
00:07:19adventurers I loved and worshipped my
00:07:23grandparents and I really looked forward
00:07:27to these trips a one particular trip I
00:07:32was about ten years old I was rolling
00:07:36around in the big bench seat in the back
00:07:41of the car my grandfather was driving
00:07:44and my grandmother had the passenger
00:07:48seat she smoked throughout these trips
00:07:53and I hated the smell
00:08:02at that age I take any excuse to make
00:08:07estimates and do minor arithmetic I’d
00:08:10calculate our gas mileage figure out
00:08:13useless statistics on things like
00:08:15grocery spending I’ve been hearing an ad
00:08:18campaign about smoking I can’t remember
00:08:22the details but basically the ad said
00:08:25every pop of a cigarette takes some
00:08:29number of minutes off of your life I
00:08:31think it might have been two minutes per
00:08:33puff at any rate I decided to do the
00:08:37math for my grandmother I estimated the
00:08:41number of cigarettes per day estimated
00:08:44the number of puffs per cigarette and so
00:08:46on when I was satisfied that I had come
00:08:49up with a reasonable number I poked my
00:08:51head into the front of the car tapped my
00:08:54grandmother on the shoulder and proudly
00:08:57proclaimed at two minutes per puff
00:09:01you’ve taken nine years off of your life
00:09:03I have a very vivid memory of what
00:09:10happened next
00:09:12and it was not what I had expected I
00:09:17expected to be applauded for my
00:09:19cleverness and my arithmetic skills Jeff
00:09:26you’re so smart
00:09:28you had to have made some tricky
00:09:31estimates figure out the number of
00:09:33minutes in a year and do some division
00:09:38that’s not what happened instead my
00:09:44grandmother burst into tears i sat in
00:09:51the back seat didn’t know what to do
00:09:53well my grandmother was crying my
00:09:56grandfather who’d been driving in
00:09:59silence pulled over onto the shoulder of
00:10:02the highway he got out of the car and
00:10:04came around and opened my door waited
00:10:08for me to follow was I in trouble my
00:10:12grandfather was a highly intelligent
00:10:13quiet man he had never said a harsh word
00:10:17to me maybe this was to be the first
00:10:19time or maybe he would ask that I get
00:10:23back in the car and apologize to my
00:10:25grandmother I had no experience in this
00:10:28realm with my grandparents and no way to
00:10:31gauge what the consequences might be
00:10:35we stopped beside the trailer my
00:10:39grandfather looked at me and after a bit
00:10:43of silence he gently and calmly said
00:10:48Jeff one day you’ll understand that it’s
00:10:54harder to be kind than clever what I
00:11:02want to talk to you about today is the
00:11:05difference between gifts and choices
00:11:09cleverness is a gift kindness is a
00:11:13choice
00:11:14gifts are easy they’re given after all
00:11:18choices can be hard you can seduce
00:11:22yourself with your gifts if you’re not
00:11:24careful and if you do
00:11:26it’ll probably be to the detriment of
00:11:28your choices this is a group with many
00:11:31gifts I’m sure one of your gifts is the
00:11:35gift of a smart and capable brain I’m
00:11:38confident that’s the case because
00:11:40admission is competitive and if there
00:11:43weren’t some signs that you’re clever
00:11:45the Dean of Admissions wouldn’t have let
00:11:47you in your smarts will come in handy
00:11:52because you will travel in a land of
00:11:54marvels we humans plotting as we are
00:11:58will astonish ourselves will invent ways
00:12:02to generate clean energy and a lot of it
00:12:05atom by atom will assemble small
00:12:09machines that can inner cell walls and
00:12:11make repairs this month comes the
00:12:14extraordinary but inevitable news that
00:12:17we’ve synthesized life and the coming
00:12:20years will not only synthesize it but
00:12:23engineer it to specifications I believe
00:12:26you’ll even see us understand the human
00:12:28brain Jules Verne Mark Twain Galileo
00:12:33Newton all the curious from the ages
00:12:37would have wanted to be alive most of
00:12:40all right now as a civilization we will
00:12:45have so many gifts just as you as
00:12:47individuals have so many individual
00:12:50gifts as you sit before me how you use
00:12:53these gifts and will you take pride in
00:12:56your gifts or pride in your choices I
00:12:59got the idea to start Amazon 16 years
00:13:03ago I came across the fact that web
00:13:06usage was growing at 2,300 percent per
00:13:10year I had never seen or heard of
00:13:12anything that grew that fast the idea of
00:13:17building an online bookstore with
00:13:18millions of titles something that simply
00:13:21couldn’t exist in the physical world was
00:13:23very exciting to me I just turned 30
00:13:27years old and I’d been married for a
00:13:29year I told my wife McKenzie but I
00:13:33wanted to quit my job and go do this
00:13:35crazy thing
00:13:37that probably wouldn’t work since most
00:13:39startups don’t and I wasn’t sure what
00:13:42would happen after that
00:13:44McKenzie also Princeton grad and sitting
00:13:47here in the second row told me I should
00:13:50go for it as a young boy had been a
00:13:56garage inventor I’d invented an
00:13:59automatic gate closer out of cement
00:14:01filled tires a solar cooker that didn’t
00:14:05work very well out of an umbrella and
00:14:06aluminum foil baking pan alarms to
00:14:10entrap my siblings I’d always wanted to
00:14:13be an inventor and she wanted me to
00:14:15follow my passion I was working at a
00:14:20financial firm in New York City with a
00:14:22bunch of very smart people and I had a
00:14:25brilliant boss I much admired I went to
00:14:29my boss and told him I was going to
00:14:31start a company selling books on the
00:14:34Internet he took me on a long walk in
00:14:37Central Park listen carefully to me and
00:14:41finally said that sounds like a really
00:14:45good idea
00:14:46but it would be an even better idea for
00:14:48someone who didn’t already have a good
00:14:51job
00:14:55that logic made some sense to me and he
00:14:59convinced me to think about it for 48
00:15:01hours before making a final decision
00:15:07seen in that light it really was a
00:15:09difficult choice but ultimately I
00:15:12decided I had to give it a shot I didn’t
00:15:16think I’d regret trying and failing and
00:15:19I suspected I would always be haunted by
00:15:23a decision to not try at all after much
00:15:28consideration I took the less safe path
00:15:32to follow my passion and I’m proud of
00:15:36that choice tomorrow in a very real
00:15:43sense your life the life you author from
00:15:47scratch on your own begins how will you
00:15:52use your gifts what choices will you
00:15:55make will inertia be your guide or will
00:16:00you follow your passions will you follow
00:16:04Dogma or will you be original will you
00:16:10choose a life of ease or a life of
00:16:14service an adventure will you wilt under
00:16:19criticism or will you follow your
00:16:23convictions will you Bluff it out when
00:16:26you’re wrong or will you apologize will
00:16:32you guard your heart against rejection
00:16:36or were you act when you fall in love
00:16:40will you play it safe or will you be a
00:16:44little bit swashbuckling when it’s tough
00:16:49will you give up or will you be
00:16:52relentless will you be a cynic or will
00:17:00you be a builder
00:17:04will you be clever at the expense of
00:17:09others or will you be kind
00:17:13I will hazard a prediction when you are
00:17:2280 years old and in a quiet moment of
00:17:28reflection narrating for only yourself
00:17:32the most personal version of your life
00:17:36story the telling that will be most
00:17:42compact and meaningful will be the
00:17:45series of choices you have made in the
00:17:49end we are our choices build yourself a
00:17:54great story thank you and good luck
00:18:29you
00:18:38you