SUCESSFUL BUSINESS ENTREPRENEURS
JEFF BEZOS
( Executive chairman of Amazon)
Jeffrey Preston Bezos is an American business magnate best known as the founder, executive chairman, and former president and CEO of Amazon, the world's largest e-commerce and cloud computing company.
Early Life: Bezos Before Amazon
Jeff Bezos was born in Mexico to teenage parents Jacklyn and Ted Jorgensen. Not long after his birth, Bezos’ parents separated and his mother married Miguel Bezos. As he grew up, Bezos developed a sharp interest in computer science, though spent much of his early years working on his maternal grandparents’ ranch in Texas.
In the mid-80s, Bezos graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University, with degrees in computer science and electrical engineering, and went on to join startup Fitel after declining job offers from both Intel and Bell Labs.
By the age of 30, Bezos was on a six-figure salary, but his realisation that the world of web was then growing at 2300% pushed him to start his own company — Amazon.
How Bezos Founded Amazon
Once Bezos had realised the expansive possibilities of the web, he created a list of 20 potential products he believed could sell well online. He realised that even the largest bookstores could stock just a few hundred thousand books at one time — only a fraction of the almost infinite number of titles truly available. Books were Bezos’ winner.
In 1994, Bezos took his idea to Seattle, home to a huge pool of high-tech talent and within close proximity to Ingram Book Group’s Oregon warehouse. With $1 million raised from friends and family, Bezos rented a house in the city and established his new online book business from his garage.
For almost a year, Bezos and a team of five employees worked from the Seattle garage, learning how to source books and creating a computer system that would make Amazon.com easy to navigate. It called itself “Earth’s Biggest Bookstore” with over 1 million titles for customers to choose from. By September 1996, Amazon.com had over 100 employees and had made over $15.7 million in sales.
He is the co-founder, CEO and majority owner of Gymshark, a fitness apparel and accessories company founded in 2012.
Ben Francis started sewing his own workout gear as a 19-year-old college student and pizza delivery guy in 2012. Today he’s one of the world’s youngest billionaires, thanks to the rapid, social media-driven growth of his company Gymshark.
| Born | Benjamin David Francis June 4, 1992 West Midlands, England |
|---|---|
| Education | South Bromsgrove High School |
| Alma mater | Aston University (dropped out) |
| Known for | Co-founder, CEO and majority owner of Gymshark |
| Spouse | Robin Gallant (m. 2021) |
| Children | 2 |
| Website | benfrancis |
With a stake of over 70% in Gymshark which is currently valued by investors at $1.45 billion, Francis had a net worth of $1.3 billion as of April 2023. In April 2023, he made his debut on Forbes' annual The World's Billionaires list as the 2,259th richest person in the world.
Early life
Benjamin David Francis was born in the West Midlands, England in 1992 and grew up in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire. He attended South Bromsgrove High School. He first became interested in computing after studying IT at school. His first business was an online company that sold car number plates.Francis started going to the gym as a teenager. He later said "the structure, consistency and work ethic I found in t he gym I realised, could be applied to different areas of my life and it would work". In 2010, he studied international business and management at Aston University. He has said his time at university gave him "a strong foundation on which to build a business".He dropped out in 2012 to focus on Gymshark full-time.
How Francis Founded Gymshark
n December 1, 2021, Ben Francis stood outside of a shuttered J. Crew storefront on London's Regent Street, the prime shopping destination in the heart of the British capital. Sporting a trim, black workout jacket of his own design, Francis had an announcement to make: Gymshark, the sportswear brand he founded, was going to open its first-ever brick-and-mortar store.
“This is such a surreal moment," he says in a sleekly produced YouTube video of the event. "To have started this brand in my bedroom to now have a store here on Regent Street, is just mind blowing."
Ten months later the Gymshark store opened its doors, marking a milestone for a company built almost entirely on social media savvy and partnerships with fitness influencers on TikTok and Instagram. Started in 2012 in his parents’ garage, Francis built Gymshark into an athleisure powerhouse that in 2020 was valued at $1.45 billion when he sold a 21% stake to private equity firm General Atlantic. In the year that followed, net income more than doubled to $68 million while revenue grew by 78% to $608 million.
That growth made Francis a billionaire. Forbes estimates that Francis’ 70% stake in Gymshark is now worth $1.2 billion, making the 30-year-old entrepreneur one of the youngest newcomers on the 2023 World’s Billionaires List.
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