When Jeff Bezos told David Shaw, his employer of that time, he wanted to quit the job and start his own business, Shaw pointed out some of the risks.
D. E. Shaw (a hedge fund business, where Bezos had risen to become the company’s youngest senior vice-president within two years, making a lot of money for the firm and for himself) was a stable, proven company; Bezos would give that up for an unknown. He would be losing his extremely high salary and living without an income for some time. There was a good chance his online bookstore would never make money. Shaw asked Jeff to reconsider.
As he did with every big decision, Bezos analyzed the risks and the potential benefits of the two choices. But his passion for computers, his excitement about his new project, and his hurry to be the first in e-commerce made his decision difficult. He settled on a decision-making method he called “regret minimization”. He would try to minimize, or reduce, the number of things he might feel sorry about later in life. He tried to imagine all the consequences of the different choices. For each one he asked himself: When I am eighty years old, how will I feel if I make this choice and it has this result?
He thought about leaving Shaw – walking away from Wall Street, the financial industry, the big bonuses, the good salary. When he was eighty, would he regret not staying at Shaw? No, he thought. He would simply get another job. If he started a new business and it succeeded, would he regret that? Of course not. If he went ahead with his bookstore and failed, would he be sorry? No, not even then. But what if he stayed at D. E. Shaw and never tested his dream, never saw for himself what the Internet could do, never stepped into the new frontier? That, he knew, he would deeply regret.
So the decision was made. Jeff Bezos left D. E. Shaw to start his online bookstore.
Ann Byers, Jeff Bezos: The Founder of Amazon.com (Internet career biographies), 2007
