Jeffrey Preston Bezos: (Amazon.com)

Entrepreneur and e-commerce pioneer Jeff Bezos. Bezos had an early love of computers and studied computer science and electrical engineering at Princeton University. After graduation, he worked on Wall Street, and became the youngest senior vice president at the investment firm D.E. Shaw. Four years later, he quit his lucrative job to open Amazon.com, a virtual bookstore that became one of the Internet’s biggest success stories.

As a child, Jeff Bezos showed an early interest in how things work, turning his parents’ garage into a laboratory and rigging electrical contraptions around his house. As a teenager, his family moved to Miami where he developed a love for computers and excelled in school, becoming the student having highest academic rank in his class.  In high school, he also started his first business, the Dream Institute, an educational summer camp for fourth, fifth and sixth graders. Bezos pursued his interest in computers at Princeton University, where he graduated with a degree in computer science and electrical engineering. After graduation, he found work at several firms on Wall Street including Fitel, Bankers Trust, and the investment firm D.E. Shaw where he met his wife Mackenzie and was named the youngest vice president. While his career in finance was extremely lucrative, Bezos chose to make a risky move into the nascent world of e-commerce. He quit his job moved to Seattle and targeted the untapped potential of the Internet market by opening an online bookstore.

Bezos set up the office for his inexperienced new company in his garage where, along with a few employees, he began developing software. They expanded operations into a two-bedroom house, equipped with three Sun Micro stations, and eventually developed a test site. After inviting 300 friends to beta test the site, Bezos opened Amazon.com, named after the meandering South American River. The initial success of the company was very rapid. With no press promotion, Amazon.com sold books across the United States and in 45 foreign countries within 30 days. In two months, sales reached $20,000 a week, growing faster than Bezos and his start-up team had envisioned. Amazon.com went public and many market analysts questioned whether the company could hold its own when traditional retailers launched their own e-commerce sites. The start-up not only kept up, but also outpaced competitors, becoming an e-commerce leader. Bezos continued to diversify Amazon’s offerings with the sale of CDs and video and later clothes, electronics, toys and more through major retail partnerships. While many dot.coms went bust, Amazon developed rapidly and successfully with yearly sales that jumped from $510,000 to over $17 billion.

Amazon.com released the Kindle, a handheld digital book reader that allows users to buy, download, read and store their book selections. Bezos also set his sights far, far, away, announcing his investment in Blue Origin, a Seattle-based aerospace company that is developing technologies to offer space travel to paying customers. Bezos then moved Amazon into the tablet marketplace with the unveiling of the Kindle Fire. He announced the new Kindle Fire HD, the company's next generation tablet designed to give Apple's iPad a run for its money. "We haven't built the best tablet at a certain price. We have built the best tablet at any price," Bezos said.