英语演讲君按 福布斯2018年财富排行榜上个月刚刚出炉,最大的热门就是世界首富的名头落在了亚马逊CEO杰夫·贝索斯身上,他首次成为这个星球上最富有的人,同时也是全球第一个个人财富超过1000亿美元的人。其财富达到1120亿美元,比2017年增加392亿美元。 他一手创建的公司亚马逊,一个持续亏损超过20年的公司,却在资本市场很受欢迎,根据今天最新的股价,市值高达7000亿美元,是仅次于苹果的全球市值第二大公司。想知道贝索斯是如何带领这家公司持续创造奇迹的吗?一起来看看他2010年在母校普林斯顿的精彩毕业演讲。 善良比聪明更重要,选择比天赋更重要。天赋和选择不同。聪明是一种天赋,而善良是一种选择。天赋得来很容易——毕竟它们与生俱来。而选择则颇为不易。如果一不小心,你可能被天赋所诱惑,这可能会损害到你做出的选择。 年少特殊家庭,意志得到磨练 1964年1月生下贝索斯时,他的妈妈杰姬还是名未成年的高中生。贝索斯4岁时,杰姬选择和他的生父离婚,并让后者远离他们的生活。贝索斯的生父曾是马戏团演员。曾有媒体披露,贝索斯生父有些坏习惯:酗酒,回家太晚。作为父亲和丈夫,他对家人缺乏照料和关心。后来,杰姬嫁给了古巴移民迈克·贝索斯。 很小的时候,贝索斯就表现出非凡的天赋。年仅3岁时,他就是用螺丝刀把自己的婴儿床拆卸开,只因想在真正的大床上睡觉。4岁到16岁之间,贝索斯每年夏天都与外祖父母在他们位于得克萨斯州的农场度过,帮着他们做农活。外祖父教会他“善良比聪明更难”。他从小表现出来的就是不相信感觉,只相信算术的天赋。 贝索斯从童年就开始迷恋《星际迷航》,因此他从小就喜欢和小伙伴一起,用纸板制作三录仪和移相器,扮演《星际迷航》里的角色。上学时,贝索斯就曾对老师说:“人类的未来并不在地球上。”从小时候起,贝索斯就想成为一名太空企业家。现在,他已经拥有了属于自己的太空探索公司Blue Origin。 考入名校,年少得志十几岁时在麦当劳打了一暑假工之后,贝索斯和女友创建了“Dream Institute”——专为孩子们建立的、为期10天的小型夏令营。每个孩子收费600美元,一期最多只招募6个学生。 中学的时候,贝索斯加入了学校的「天才计划」,高中毕业后考入爱因斯坦执教的普林斯顿大学。1986 年,贝索斯于普林斯顿大学毕业,获电气工程与计算机科学学士学位。 毕业后,他拒绝了英特尔和贝尔实验室发来的工作邀请,转而加入了一家名为Fitel的初创公司。 从Fitel辞职后,贝索斯与霍尔西·米诺尔几乎立即就创建了一家通过传真发送新闻的初创公司。 后来,25 岁贝索斯加入纽约一家银行信托公司,成为这家公司史上最年轻的副总裁,掌管价值 2500 亿美元的电脑系统。之后,他转战华尔街,又当上了对冲基金 D. E. Shaw & Co 的副总裁。 当机立断,抓住机遇当时,使用互联网的人数每年都以 2300%的速度在高速增长。这个数字令贝索斯感到震惊,于是他决定找到能够充分利用这种暴增的方式。他列出表格,包含了20多种可能在网上出售的产品,并决定书籍是最佳选择。 于是,亚马逊诞生了。创建初期,亚马逊办公室中安装了一个铜钟,每当有人要买东西时,所有人都会聚集起来,看是否有人认识客户。然而,短短几周后,钟声频繁响起,亚马逊员工不得不停用它。创建首月,亚马逊便已向全美50个州和45个不同国家出售书籍,并且一直在不断扩张。1997年,亚马逊上市。 互联网泡沫破裂时,分析师们称亚马逊为“亚马逊.炸弹”。然而,这家电商挺过了风暴,成为少数在网络泡沫破裂中存活下来的初创公司之一。 但亚马逊投资的 pets.com、gear.com 等网站失败,损失巨大。这让贝索斯开始反省自己的公司运营过程中犯下的错误,并不再奉行「利益至上」的原则,转向「扩张优先」,不怕打价格战,不断地发掘对客户有价值的产品和服务,才有了之后的秘密实验室 Lab126、Prime 会员业务、AWS 云计算服务、Kindle 电子书阅读器等等行业领先产品或服务。 得益于贝索斯的扩张策略,亚马逊的业绩获得了突飞猛进的增长,如今亚马逊已经是全球第二大的互联网公司,仅次于 Alphabet。在近 20 年的时间里,亚马逊的营利一直接近于零,尽管如此,亚马逊却从一家网上书店发展成为了世界顶尖的技术公司——拥有世界上规模最大的云服务 AWS,机器人、人工智能等技术也处于世界前沿。 由于年少时的太空梦,贝索斯创办了蓝色起源(Blue Origin)私人太空公司,致力于发展太空旅行。 蓝色能源的公司精神恰好可以用来描述他的经历:用令人敬畏的方式循序渐进。 我们也许没有他的智慧和胆识,但是我们可以从他身上学到坚持梦想、抓住机遇以及在困难中前行的精神。 贝索斯2010年普林斯顿大学毕业演讲稿双语版
Jeff Bezos (Amazon创始人、CEO) American entrepreneur Jeff Bezos is the founder and chief executive officer of Amazon.com and owner of 'The Washington Post.' His successful business ventures have made him one of the richest people in the world. QUOTES “We will need to invent, which means we will need to experiment. Our touchstone will be readers, understanding what they care about—government, local leaders, restaurant openings, scout troops, businesses, charities, governors, sports—and working backwards from there. I'm excited and optimistic about the opportunity for invention. [On the future of 'The Washington Post.']” —Jeff Bezos Who Is Jeff Bezos? Entrepreneur and e-commerce pioneer Jeff Bezos was born on January 12, 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Bezos had an early love of computers and studied computer science and electrical engineering at Princeton University. After graduation he worked on Wall Street, and in 1990 he became the youngest senior vice president at the investment firm D.E. Shaw. Four years later, he quit his lucrative job to open Amazon.com, a virtual bookstore that became one of the internet's biggest success stories. In 2013, Bezos purchased The Washington Postin a $250 million deal. His successful business ventures have made him one of the richest people in the world. Early Life and Career Jeff Bezos was born on January 12, 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to a teenage mother, Jacklyn Gise Jorgensen, and his biological father, Ted Jorgensen. The Jorgensens were married less than a year, and when Bezos was 4 years old his mother re-married, to Cuban immigrant Mike Bezos. As a child, Jeff Bezos showed an early interest in how things work, turning his parents' garage into a laboratory and rigging electrical contraptions around his house. He moved to Miami with his family as a teenager, where he developed a love for computers and graduated valedictorian of his high school. It was during high school that he started his first business, the Dream Institute, an educational summer camp for fourth, fifth and sixth graders. Bezos pursued his interest in computers at Princeton University, where he graduated summa cum laude in 1986 with a degree in computer science and electrical engineering. After graduation, he found work at several firms on Wall Street, including Fitel, Bankers Trust and the investment firm D.E. Shaw. It was there he met his wife, Mackenzie, and became the company's youngest vice president in 1990. While his career in finance was extremely lucrative, Bezos chose to make a risky move into the nascent world of e-commerce. He quit his job in 1994, moved to Seattle and targeted the untapped potential of the internet market by opening an online bookstore. Launching Amazon.com Bezos set up the office for his fledgling company in his garage where, along with a few employees, he began developing software. They expanded operations into a two-bedroom house, equipped with three Sun Microstations, and eventually developed a test site. After inviting 300 friends to beta test the site, Bezos opened Amazon.com, named after the meandering South American River, on July 16, 1995. The initial success of the company was meteoric. With no press promotion, Amazon.com sold books across the United States and in 45 foreign countries within 30 days. In two months, sales reached $20,000 a week, growing faster than Bezos and his start-up team had envisioned. Amazon.com went public in 1997, leading many market analysts to question whether the company could hold its own when traditional retailers launched their own e-commerce sites. Two years later, the start-up not only kept up, but also outpaced competitors, becoming an e-commerce leader. Bezos continued to diversify Amazon’s offerings with the sale of CDs and videos in 1998, and later clothes, electronics, toys and more through major retail partnerships. While many dot.coms of the early '90s went bust, Amazon flourished with yearly sales that jumped from $510,000 in 1995 to over $17 billion in 2011. In 2006, Amazon.com launched its video on demand service; initially known as Amazon Unbox on TiVo, it was eventually rebranded as Amazon Instant Video. In 2007, the company released the Kindle, a handheld digital book reader that allowed users to buy, download, read and store their book selections. That same year, Bezos announced his investment in Blue Origin, a Seattle-based aerospace company that develops technologies to offer space travel to paying customers. Bezos entered Amazon into the tablet marketplace with the unveiling of the Kindle Fire in 2011. The following September, he announced the new Kindle Fire HD, the company's next generation tablet designed to give Apple's iPad a run for its money. 'We haven't built the best tablet at a certain price. We have built the best tablet at any price,' Bezos said, according to ABC News. Buying 'The Washington Post'Bezos made headlines worldwide on August 5, 2013, when he purchasedThe Washington Post and other publications affiliated with its parent company, The Washington Post Co., for $250 million. The deal marked the end of the four-generation reign over The Post Co. by the Graham family, which included Donald E. Graham, the company's chairman and chief executive, and his niece, Post publisher Katharine Weymouth. 'The Post could have survived under the company's ownership and been profitable for the foreseeable future,' Graham stated, in an effort to explain the transaction. 'But we wanted to do more than survive. I'm not saying this guarantees success, but it gives us a much greater chance of success.' In a statement to Post employees on August 5, Bezos wrote: 'The values of The Post do not need changing. ...There will, of course, be change atThe Post over the coming years. That's essential and would have happened with or without new ownership. The internet is transforming almost every element of the news business: shortening news cycles, eroding long-reliable revenue sources, and enabling new kinds of competition, some of which bear little or no news-gathering costs. There is no map, and charting a path ahead will not be easy. We will need to invent, which means we will need to experiment. Our touchstone will be readers, understanding what they care about—government, local leaders, restaurant openings, scout troops, businesses, charities, governors, sports—and working backwards from there. I'm excited and optimistic about the opportunity for invention.' Amazon Prime & Amazon StudiosIn early December 2013, Bezos made headlines when he revealed a new, experimental initiative by Amazon, called 'Amazon Prime Air,' using drones—remote-controlled machines that can perform an array of human tasks—to provide delivery services to customers. According to Bezos, these drones are able to carry items weighing up to five pounds, and are capable of traveling within a 10-mile distance of the company's distribution center. He also stated that Prime Air could become a reality within as little as four or five years. Bezos oversaw one of Amazon's few major missteps when the company launched the Fire Phone in 2014; criticized for being too gimmicky, it was discontinued the following year. However, Bezos did score a victory with the development of original content through Amazon Studios. After premiering several new programs in 2013, Amazon hit it big in 2014 with the critically acclaimed Transparent and Mozart in the Jungle. In 2015, the company produced and released Spike Lee's Chi-Raq as its first original feature film. In 2016, Bezos stepped in front of the camera for a cameo appearance playing an alien in Star Trek Beyond. A Star Trek fan since childhood, Bezos is listed as a Starfleet Official in the movie credits on IMDb. In July 2017, Bezos briefly surpassed Microsoft founder Bill Gates to become the richest person in the world, according to Bloomberg. Gates, who was the richest person in the world since 2013, made $90.7 billion, shy of Bezos' worth of $90.9 billion, which rose with a surge in Amazon.com Inc. shares. However, by the close of the market, Gates' net worth climbed to $90 billion while Bezos' had a net worth of over $89 billion. 您的赞赏 是我们源源不断的动力 想第一时间接收英语演讲文章&视频?置顶精彩英语演讲就对了!操作办法就是:进入公众号——找到“置顶公众号”—— 开启。 |
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