How Bezos imagined his own future at age 80 before creating Amazon

Jeff Bezos worked at an alternative resources management company based in New York before setting up Amazon. According to InfoMoney, the decision to leave this career behind was not obvious, and he was hesitant to make the switch.

In the beginning, the plan was very simple: sell books online, in a period of the rise of the web, according to the same report.

To decide, Bezos resorted to a method he himself called “regret minimization”. According to InfoMoney, the logic is to imagine yourself at age 80, looking back, and wishing you had minimized life's regrets.

The reference comes from an interview given by Bezos in 2001 to the Academy of Achievement. This record resurfaced on digital platforms and brought back attention to the logic he followed at that time.

What draws attention, besides the personal story, is the criteria. Exchanging an established career for a project that, in the beginning, fit into one sentence is a risky choice. From a liberal perspective, the case reinforces the role of the entrepreneur who takes risks with his or her own choices.

In practice, what does this mean for those who invest

Bezos' story does not provide numbers, results or projections about Amazon, and should not be read as a signal about the share price. For those who invest, the useful point is the method: long-term theses are usually evaluated with balance sheet data, margins and capital allocation, and not with reports of personal motivation. Any market movement driven by the repercussion of the video would be speculative and cannot be measured based on the facts established.

Automatically translated from Portuguese.