Sycamore

“By the time he was in high school, his family had moved to Miami. Bezos was a straight-A student, somewhat nerdy, and still completely obsessed with space exploration. He was chosen as the valedictorian of his class, and his speech was about space: how to colonize planets, build space hotels, and save our fragile planet by finding other places to do manufacturing. “Space, the final frontier, meet me there!” he concluded. He went to Princeton with the goal of studying physics. It sounded like a smart plan until he smashed into a course on quantum mechanics. One day he and his roommate were trying to solve a particularly difficult partial differential equation, and they went to the room of another person in the class for help. He stared at it for a moment, then gave them the answer. Bezos was amazed that the student had done the calculation—which took three pages of detailed algebra to explain—in his head. “That was the very moment when I realized I was never going to be a great theoretical physicist,” Bezos says. “I saw the writing on the wall, and I changed my major very quickly to electrical engineering and computer science.” It was a difficult realization. His heart had been set on becoming a physicist, but finally he had confronted his own limits.”
― Jeff Bezos, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

“At the end of 1999 I was the editor of Time, and we made a somewhat offbeat decision to make Bezos our Person of the Year, even though he wasn’t a famous world leader or statesman. I had the theory that the people who affect our lives the most are often the people in business and technology who, at least early in their careers, aren’t often found on the front pages. For example, we had made Andy Grove of Intel the Person of the Year at the end of 1997 because I felt the explosion of the microchip was changing our society more than any prime minister or president or treasury secretary. But as the publication date of our Bezos issue neared in December 1999, the air was starting to go out of the dot.com bubble. I was worried—correctly—that internet stocks, such as Amazon, would start to collapse. So I asked the CEO of Time Inc., the very wise Don Logan, whether I was making a mistake by choosing Bezos and would look silly in years to come if the internet economy deflated. No, Don told me. “Stick with your choice. Jeff Bezos is not in the internet business. He’s in the customer-service business. He will be around for decades to come, well after people have forgotten all the dot.coms that are going to go bust.”
― Jeff Bezos, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

“You know you can count me in 100 percent,”
― Jeff Bezos, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

“After graduation Bezos went to New York to apply his computer skills to the financial industry. He ended up at a hedge fund run by David E. Shaw, which used computer algorithms to discover pricing disparities in the financial markets.”
― Jeff Bezos, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos