In 1994, Jeff Bezos founded Amazon.com, Inc., now the leading online retailer, with 59 million active customer accounts and 10 billion dollars in 2006 sales.

Bezos graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Princeton University in 1986. After college, Bezos joined FITEL, a high-tech start-up company in New York building a network to conduct international trade. Two years later, Bezos began working for Bankers Trust Company in New York, where he led the development of their computer systems and became the company's youngest vice president in 1990. From 1990 to 1994, Bezos worked for D.E. Shaw & Co where he helped build one of the most technically sophisticated quantitative hedge funds on Wall Street.