Amazon started 31 years ago, in the heart of the 1990s. It was a small online bookstore named Amazon after the Amazon, Latin America’s largest river. For the record, we almost all know it today as “Cadabra” from “abracadabra”, but in the end that name didn’t go forward since Bezos’ lawyer… misheard and thought it was called ” cadaver”, meaning corpse. A key reason it was called Amazon was because back then on the internet, websites were listed in alphabetical order and Jeff Bezos wanted his company to appear first.

Today the company employs about 1.56 million people worldwide, surpassing even the population of countries like Iceland or the Bahamas.

But let’s let Bezos himself describe his beginnings: “I had just turned 30 and had been married a year. I told my then-wife, Mackenzie, that I wanted to quit my job and do this craze that would probably fail, because most start-ups fail, and that I wasn’t sure what I would do next. Mackenzie told me to give it a try.” Bezos managed to convince his parents to give him a small, by today’s business standards, loan to get started – they invested $245,573 of their savings believing in his vision – and they have no regrets.