Jeffrey Preston is an American
entrepreneur and investor. He is a technology entrepreneur who has played a
role in the growth of e-commerce as the founder and CEO of Amazon.com, an
online merchant of books and later of a wide variety of products. Amazon.com
became the largest retailer on the World Wide Web and a model for Internet
sales.
One of the entrepreneurial traits
that Jeffrey Preston had is visionary which means thinking or planning the
future with imagination or wisdom. Jeffrey Preston founded Amazon.com in 1994
after making a cross-country drive from New York to Seattle, writing up the
Amazon business plan on the way. He initially set up the company in his garage.
Jeffrey Preston is also an open
risk taker which means an individual that tends to behave in a way that can
potentially cause physical harm or financial loss, but might also present an
opportunity for a rewarding outcome. He had left his “well-paying job” at a New
York City hedge fund after learning about “the rapid growth in Internet use”,
which coincided with a then-new U.S. Supreme Court ruling holding that mail
order catalogs were not required to collect sales taxes in states where they
lack a physical presence.
Besides that, Jeffrey Preston also
believes that failure is an option. In 2000, Jeffrey Preston founded Blue
Origin, a human spaceflight startup company. The company was kept secret for a
few years until it became publicly known only in 2006 when purchasing a sizable
aggregation of land in west Texas for a launch and test facility. In a 2011
interview, Jeffrey Preston indicated that he founded the space company to help
enable anybody to go into space. He stated that the company was committed to
decreasing the cost and increasing the safety of spaceflight. Like Amazon, the
company is secretive, but in September 2011, it was revealed that it had lost
an unmanned prototype vehicle during a short-hop test flight. Although this was
a setback, the announcement of the loss revealed for the first time just how
far Blue Origin’s team had advanced. Jeffrey Preston said that the crash was
“not the outcome that any of us wanted, but we’re signed up for this to be
hard”. In 2015, Jeffrey Preston further discussed the motivation for his
spaceflight-related business when he announced a new orbital launch vehicle
under development for late 2010’s first flight. He indicated that his ambitions
in space are not location dependent. Jeffrey Preston said that, “our number-one
opponent is gravity. The vision for Blue is pretty simple. We want to see
millions of people living and working in space. That’s going to take a long
time. I think it’s a worthwhile goal”.
Jeffrey Preston is also a proactive
person as he creates a situation by causing something to happen rather than
responding to it after it has happened. On August 5, 2013, Jeffrey Preston
announced his purchase of The Washington Post for $250 million in cash. The
sale is personal to Jeffrey Preston. Amazon.com is not to be involved. He told
the newspaper, “this is uncharted terrain and it will require experimentation”.
Shortly after the announcement of intent to purchase, The Washington Post
published a long-form profile of Jeffrey on August 10, 2013. The sale closed on
October 1, 2013 and Jeffrey Preston’s Nash Holdings took control. In March
2014, Jeffrey Preston made his first significant change at the Post and lifted
the online pay-wall for subscribers of some number of U.S. local newspapers
including The Dallas Morning News, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser and the
Minneapolis Star-Tribune.
Lastly, Jeffrey Preston has outcome
oriented in him which means that he only focus on the actual result. Under his
direction, Amazon has been criticized as stingy in its corporate giving
practices. Amazon has environmental initiatives for improving its internal
operations and researching climate change, has used its homepage for disaster
relief fundraising, supported writers, has a Wish List functionality for
non-profit donations and Amazon Smile offers a charitable donation of 0.5% on
purchases of selected items. McCoy noted that unlike many other billionaire
technology entrepreneurs, Jeffrey Preston had not signed the Giving Pledge to
give away half of their personal wealth in their lifetimes. Some found that
Jeffrey Preston more similar to Steve Jobs, who has skeptical of philanthropy
and made no known major donations.
