Who is Jeff Bezos?

Fast Company has an article on Jeff Bezos, famous as the founder of Blue Origin – apparently he’s also been involved in some wacky scheme to sell stuff on the Internet. Who Knew?

Anyway, the article has some of the usual business ‘zine puff piece aspect to it, but it’s fairly in depth, so worth a read if you’d like to get a sense of the man. He comes off fairly well, even allowing for the reporter’s need to be nice in order to maintain access. I’m encouraged that he’ll push Blue Origin towards a successful business model, and he seems willing to spend real money up front before seeing returns, which is probably a necessity in the suborbital launch services industry.

The two really deep pocketed players in the industry are Bezos and Allen. Of the two I suspect that Bezos has the better approach to business (based on little information, unfortunately). The article suggests that his business orientation places a premium on customer service, which I’d always thought was sort of the obvious thing to do until I started paying attention to the way many businesses actually work.