The 3 key lessons from Jeff Bezos’ new movie for emerging entrepreneurs

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There is a new Jeff Bezos biopic which will be available in August, and which chronicles the Amazon owner’s effort to create an online book store that eventually expanded into an e-commerce empire.


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The biopic, named Bezosattempts to chart the early days of Amazon by following the challenges faced by the businessman, played by Armando Gutiérrez, after quitting his job at the fund DE Shaw, based in New York. Viewers are reminded of the pain points any young startup founder can face: access to capital, work-life balance.

Yes ok Bezos certainly not an Academy Award contender, it does offer lessons for emerging entrepreneurs. Here are three:

1. A company name is everything

One of the first impressions a company makes on a consumer is its name. Amazon is named after the world’s largest river by volume, a nod to the entrepreneur’s ultimate goal of becoming everyone’s store.

In the early days of the company, Bezos set out to name his company after Cadabra Inc.. That name ended up being criticized when people began to confuse it with the word “corpse”. Bezos decided to look at other names until he thought of Relentless.com. He and his now-ex-wife, MacKenzie Scott, bought the web domain for Relentless, in fact typing Relentless.com into a web browser ends up redirecting to Amazon’s home page.

In the film, viewers watch Bezos flip through the front of the dictionary until he lands on the word “Amazon.” And so Amazon.com was born, as dot-coms “tell our customers that we exist exclusively on the Internet,” Bezos says in the film.

2. Believe in your idea

Bezos rose through the ranks of DE Shaw, eventually becoming the hedge fund’s youngest senior vice president. Bezos’s then-boss David Shaw was interested in the future of the Internet, prompting Bezos to investigate its value propositions and growth potential. He then stumbled upon the fact that the web was growing at 2,300 percent each year.

And so Bezos approached Shaw with his idea. Though he wasn’t received with the enthusiasm Bezos likely expected, Shaw tried to dissuade Bezos from leaving a financially secure position to dive headfirst into a startup. In the film, Shaw even says that he likes the idea, but actively discourages Bezos from pursuing it. As is obvious to everyone, Bezos chose to ignore that advice.

3. Know your market

The decision to make, or walk away from, an offer to buy comes down to a few factors, such as how important the decision is and whether an entrepreneur believes the time is right to sell. When Amazon was starting out, Barnes & Noble dominated the book-selling industry with hundreds of stores and roughly $2 billion in revenue in 1995. Meanwhile, Bezos was setting out to create the largest online bookstore with few available resources. .

B&W’s Riggio reportedly approached Bezos about working together, and the Bezos it also portrays him, showing a tense meeting between the two in which Riggio offers to acquire Amazon for $1 million before the startup even launched its website. Bezos says no, emphasizing to his bewildered team that they must be on to something if they’ve already received a buyout offer this early.

Finally, the Bezos movie will arrive next August, according to a media representative from the film. The representative shared that the film could receive a short-term release in theaters, but declined to share where the film will be available as “the network is still going through final deals.”

(Text originally published in Geektime in Spanish).

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The 3 key lessons from Jeff Bezos’ new movie for emerging entrepreneurs