Amazon CEO Bezos '86 to speak at Baccalaureate

“A computer science major myself, I’ve always had great respect for Bezos and the innovation he’s driven,” Panda said in an e-mail to The Daily Princetonian. “It’s not every day that a Princetonian leaves a job on Wall Street to so dramatically change the face of technology and business worldwide. The fact that Bezos has been building upon his success and reinventing Amazon ever since makes him all the more remarkable.”

Born to a teenage mother, Bezos grew up in Texas and Florida and was the valedictorian of his class at Miami Palmetto Senior High School.

Bezos, a former Quadrangle Club member, graduated summa cum laude from the University as a concentrator in computer science and electrical engineering. After college, he worked in finance for several years before founding Amazon.com in 1994.

“I left this Wall Street firm in the middle of the year,” he said in an interview with the American Academy of Achievement about his decision to leave Wall Street to found Amazon.com. “When you do that, you walk away from your annual bonus. That’s the kind of thing that in the short term can confuse you, but if you think about the long term, then you can really make good life decisions that you won’t regret later.”

In 1999, Bezos was named Time magazine’s Person of the Year. He is married to MacKenzie Bezos ’92, whom he met while working at the financial firm D. E. Shaw & Co. This year, Forbes magazine ranked Bezos, who is worth $8.8 billion, the 28th richest American.

“The first initial start-up capital for Amazon.com came primarily from my parents, and they invested a large fraction of their life savings in what became Amazon.com,” Bezos told the Academy. “That was a very bold and trusting thing for them to do, because they didn’t know. My dad’s first question was, ‘What’s the internet?’ ”

In 2007, Bezos announced that Amazon.com was introducing a new electronic reader, the Kindle. This fall, the University introduced a pilot program in which Kindles were distributed to 50 students in three classes.

Bezos showed an early affinity for electronics and technology, experimenting with inventions throughout his childhood.

“I was constantly booby-trapping the house with various kinds of alarms, and some of them were not just audible sounds, but actually like physical booby-traps. I think I occasionally worried my parents that they were going to open the door one day and have 30 pounds of nails drop on their head or something,” Bezos said in the Academy interview. “Our garage was basically science fair central, and my mom is a saint, because she would drive me to Radio Shack multiple times a day, to the point where she would finally say, ‘OK. Look. Will you please get your parts list straight before we go? I can’t handle more than one trip to RadioShack per day.’ ”

“I was absolutely thrilled to hear that Jeff Bezos was our Commencement speaker,” Amit Mukherjee ’10 said.

He called Bezos “someone who could identify with students in a direct way and is also very influential in the world.”

Other seniors said they had not previously been familiar with Bezos, but were excited all the same.

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“I didn’t know who he was until today, actually,” Elaine Bigelow ’10 said. “He seems pretty cool. It seems like it’ll be a good talk.”

The Baccalaureate ceremony, an interfaith service that includes readings from various religious traditions, is one of the University’s oldest traditions, dating back to 1760. Until 1972, the University president delivered the Baccalaureate address. Since then, speakers have been chosen by the president after discussion with class leaders and other administrators.

Recent Baccalaureate speakers include Gen. David Petraeus GS ’85 in 2009, anthropologist and physician Paul Farmer in 2008 and professor emeritus John Fleming GS ’63 in 2007.

Panda explained that the senior class officers suggest a short list of finalists to President Tilghman who makes the final selection. Panda declined to comment on who else was considered this year.