Our New Hero: Jeff Bezos of Amazon | Birth of a Salesman – WSJ.com

There is no doubt that Steve Jobs and Apple were/are the face of American Innovation and Entrepreneurship (over the last decade or so). To me, Jeff Bezo’s is the man to enter the vacuum that Jobs’ passing has created.

This past weekend the WSJ published an excerpt of an upcoming biography on Bezos by Richard L. Brandt. The book is called One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com

Bezos and Amazon have been amazing and his vision and execution are on par with anyone (including Jobs) during the past 20 years. From Brandt in the WSJ:

In the summer of 1994, Mr. Bezos quit his job in New York as a vice president at the financial-services firm D.E. Shaw. He and his wife, MacKenzie, moved to Seattle to take advantage of the explosive growth of the Internet and to start Amazon. The company’s original name, Cadabra, was nixed after someone misheard it as “cadaver.”

Their first rental, a three-bedroom house in the suburb of Bellevue, cost $890 a month. Mr. Bezos chose it in part because it had one crucial requirement—a garage, so that he could boast of having a garage start-up like Silicon Valley legends from Hewlett-Packard on. The garage had actually been converted into a recreation room, but Mr. Bezos figured it was close enough.

The site was launched on July 16, 1995—just as masses of people started moving onto the Internet and before many competitors had created strong commercial sites.

Mr. Bezos moved the company to an industrial neighborhood that it shared with a needle-exchange program and a shuttered pawnshop. He had 1,100 square feet of office space on the second floor and 400 square feet in the basement to use as a warehouse. The desks were made from cheap doors, with sawed-off two-by-fours for legs. The warehouse could store just a few hundred books on their way from the distributor to customers.

Thanks to discounts of 10% to 30%, orders started coming in as soon as the site launched. At first, there were a half-dozen orders per day. One of the programmers set up the computers so that a bell would ring every time an order came in. A great novelty at first, it quickly got annoying and had to be turned off.

The article is a great read and I am sharing it with my students. Will likely buy the Kindle Edition on iPad (though I really want a way to print my notes and highlights — am I missing something? Does the Kindle app do this?)

So look for more Jeff Bezos and talk of Amazon. Will be interesting to see how Bezos and Amazon will respond to the attention that I believe is about to come their way. Jobs managed it flawlessly. Will/can Bezo’s or Amazon? Is that their style?

via Jeff Bezos of Amazon: Birth of a Salesman – WSJ.com.

McComb’s School of Business Birthed uShip

Good piece highlighting another high impact company that was founded on campus by students. These student entrepreneurs  hail from University of Texas McCombs School of Business (home of the fabled Moot Corp) and they created an online shipping platform called uShip. From the article by Stacey Higginbotham:

Six years ago I attended a business plan competition where I watched a couple of guys explain how they wanted to streamline the process of shipping bulky items across the country by linking folks up via the Internet. The social Web was starting to heat up, but I liked how these guys and their company, uShip, were trying to take the Web and use it to bring people together, not to swap songs or photos but to take advantage of empty space in moving vans.

UShip, a matching service that connects people who want to send things across the country and those who happen to have space in their vehicles as they drive across country (and that also offers an alternate revenue stream for professional shippers) is now profitable, thanks to commissions the company takes when it matches shippers and shippees. The Austin (Tex.) company brought in between $5 million and $7 million in sales during 2009, double that of the previous year.

UShip has raised $7 million in outside capital from Benchmark and DAG Ventures and has helped broker more than $140 million in shipping contracts—with about 85% of those occurring during the past two years. Last week it received its one-millionth listing on the site.

From a March 2004 Moot Corp Newsletter highlighting uShip’s performance in the San Diego State University Business Plan Competition:

The uShip team is composed of four second-year students–Matt Chasen, Jay Manickam, Mickey Millsap and Todd Parsapour-whose start-up is uShip, a company that offers “ridesharing for your stuff.” That is, it matches cargo with drivers who have excess capacity on routes all around the country via patent-pending route deviation search technology.

uShip (www.uship.com) made its official launch March 1 and the early results have exceeded their wildest expectations. With limited marketing, they already have over 550 members, 60+ shipments listed, and have completed 12 transactions. uShip initially expected their model to be limited to lower cost in a limited geographic area, but their very first transaction was a $900 shipment of three beds and a dresser from Texas to Pennsylvania. uShip is looking to close a 500K round by May to scale their marketing and technology infrastructure.

What an impressive job by uShip and its founders. As we can, see they found seed funding through a variety of business plan competitions and have really been able to scale their firm; creating wealth for investors and entrepreneurs as well as jobs for residents of Austin and freight transporters. Pretty cool. Congrats to the team and McCombs for such a great success.

Austin’s uShip Profits from Slow Growth – BusinessWeek.

Rice Business Plan Competition’s Gigantic Prize Pool

Over $800,000 in prizes available to student run start-ups at the Rice University Business Plan Competition. Ka-ching!!!! Here are the rules for this university sponsored business plan competition. According to the site there have been 84 successful start-ups launched after competing. This one is well worth looking into and it highlights how certain entrepreneurship programs and universities have taken entrepreneurship education to a different level.

Entry closes February 5th and if you file your letter of intent you will receive a free copy of Palo Alto Software’s Business Plan Pro.

From the website:

42 Teams will be selected to compete at Rice University on April 15-17, 2010 in Rice Business Plan Competition.  Teams will compete for more than $800,000 in cash and prizes including a Grand Prize worth approximately $325,000.  Every team accepted into the Rice competition is guaranteed to win at least one cash prize.  The competition will be judged by more than 200 venture capital investors, angel investors, and other members of the entrepreneurial community.  Competitors receive incomparable feedback, networking opportunities and mentoring. Between 2001-2008, 85 teams who have competed have gone on to launch their ventures and have raised more than $150 million in funding.  More than 80% of 2009 competing teams have successfully launched their companies.