Amazon.com

Jeffrey Preston "Jeff" Bezos is an American entrepreneur who played a key role in the growth of e-commerce as the founder and chief executive officer of Amazon.com, Inc., an online merchant of books and later of a wide variety of products. Under his guidance, Amazon.com became the largest retailer... on the World Wide Web and the model for Internet sales. Bezos was born Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Jacklyn Gise Jorgensen and Ted Jorgensen. His maternal ancestors were settlers who lived in Texas, and over the generations acquired a 25,000 acre ranch in Cotulla. Bezos' maternal grandfather was a regional director of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in Albuquerque. He retired early to the ranch, where Bezos spent many summers as a youth, working with him. At an early age, Bezos displayed a striking mechanical aptitude – as a toddler, he tried dismantling his crib with a screwdriver. Bezos was born to a teenage mother in Albuquerque. Her marriage to his father lasted little more than a year. When Jeff was five, she remarried, this time to Miguel Bezos.
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John Doerr is a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. He’s optimistic, enthusiastic and energetic. John joined KPCB in 1980, and... with KPCB’s partners backed many of America’s best entrepreneurial leaders, includingLarry Page, Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt: Google [GOOG]Jeff Bezos: Amazon [AMZN]Scott Cook, Bill Campbell: Intuit [INTU]Andy Bechtolsheim, Scott McNealy, Bill Joy, Vinod Khosla: Sun [SUNW]And many othersJohn was founding CEO of Silicon Compilers, a CAD software company; and co-founder of the first broadband cable network, @Home. He came to Silicon Valley in 1974 and joined a small chipmaker, Intel, just as they invented the legendary 8080 microprocessor. He worked in engineering, marketing, and sales, where he was a top-ranked sales executive.John Chambers described John as “the single best venture capitalist in the world.” Eric Schmidt called him “one of Google’s best board members.” And Jeff Bezos said, “Doerr {and Kleiner} is the center of gravity in the internet.”He has also been part of several big failures, most famously GO Corporation, chronicled by Jerry Kaplan in the book “Startup”.John serves on the boards of Google, Amazon, Intuit, Homestore, and Sun. And also private ventures Good Technology, Miasole, Purkinje, Spatial Photonics.He is passionately encouraging innovators to prevent pandemic avian flu and global infectious disease.John is a technologist and inventor, holding patents for computer memory devices. He earned a BS and MS in Electrical Engineering from Rice University, and an MBA from Harvard.John enjoys conversations with students and entrepreneurs, including:Haas Commencement SpeechStanford ETLJohn also cares a lot about public education, global poverty/health, research and innovation, science and women as leaders. He is backing social and policy entrepreneurs, working withTed Smith and Kim Smith, as co-founder of NewSchools.orgLezlee Westine, John Chambers, Jim Barksdale, as cofounder of TechNet.orgReed Hastings, EdVoice.orgMuhammed Yunnus, Grameen BankBono’s DATA.orgSteve & Jean Case, Dr. David Agus, Accelerate Brain Cancer Cures, abc2.org/, andWalter Isaacson, Aspen InstituteJohn was co-chair ofCalifornia Proposition 39, raising $18 Billion of funding for public schoolsCalifornia Proposition 71, authorizing $3 Billion for stem cell research, andNO on California Proposition 211, stopping frivolous lawsuits E-mail: johnd@kpcb.
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