Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos delivers graduation speech at Princeton University

Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos gave the Baccalaureate address to Princeton University's Class of 2010. Bezos graduated from Princeton in 1986 with a degree in computer science and electrical engineering. He was introduced by Princeton University President Shirley M. Tilghman.

Bezos spoke to the Class of 2010 about the difference between choices and gifts. Cleverness, Bezos pointed out, is a gift, while being kind to others is a choice. One's character, he suggested, is reflected not in the gifts one is endowed with at birth but rather by the choices one makes over the course of a lifetime. Full transcript here:

http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S27/52/51O99/index.xml

It is hard to imagine life

without Amazon.com.

[Laughs]

Even for someone of my advanced age.

After all,

where else can a few clicks of a mouse take you

from the latest novel by Toni Morrison

to an 18th century edition of the works

of John Locke,

having stopped in powered tools and women shoes along the way?

Yet the founder and Chief Executive Officer

of the world's largest e-tailer,

whose net sales surpassed 24.5 billion dollars in 2009,

is only 46 year old,

and Amazon.com has only existed

since 1995, making it even younger

than the class of 2010.

The moral of this story

is that the right idea

in the right hands, at the right time,

can change the way we lead our lives.

The idea, in this case,

was harnessing the power of the nascent Internet

to create a virtual bookstore of limitless proportions.

The hands were those of our speaker, Jeff Bezos,

a self-described nerdy

computer science and electrical engineering major

who graduated from Princeton with highest honors

in 1986.

And the time was 1994,

when he and his wife Mackenzie Tuttle Bezos,

of the class of 1992,

exchanged the security of Wall Street,

where they worked at D.E. Shaw & Co.,

for the uncertain prospects of a dot com start-up.

But then, as Jeff points out,

"failure is an essential component"

"of innovation and invention."

"If you know it's going to work,"

"it's not an experiment."

And Amazon.com was nothing if not a grand experiment.

Working on improvised tables in the garage of his Seattle home,

and using his parents' savings as start-up capital,

Jeff defied the forces that cause most young companies to fail.

Partly, he admits, through sheer good fortune,

but also because of his unwavering determination

to create the world's most customers-centric company.

And as he notes in his company's latest annual report,

of the 452 goals that Amazon.com has set for itself this year,

360 of them will directly affect the customer experience,

while the word "revenue" is used on only 8 occasions.

I do not advise you

to start off with 452 goals this year,

by the way.

But this is just one of the keys to Jeff's success.

Another lies in his exceptional ability

to marry commerce and technology in creative ways,

in his sheer inventiveness and willingness

to take the risks inherent in this process.

Indeed, the history of Amazon.com

is one of daring leaps.

One such leap involved creating the capacity

to search inside the books sold by his company,

not by designing a modest pilot project,

but by committing the resources to make it possible

to scour the text of more 120,000 volumes,

when this feature debuted in 2003.

Other innovations have included

one-click shopping, online product reviews by customers,

and of course, the Kindle reading device,

which we test-drove in 3 courses this fall.

Mirroring the rapid growth of Amazon itself,

the number of books available through the US Kindle store

topped 460,000 in 2009,

just 2 years after its launch.

And there is no turning back.

"Our vision is every book,"

"every print ed, in any language,"

"all available in less than 60 seconds,"

Jeff has stated. An audacious proposition

to be sure, but as Albert Einstein once observed,

"If at first the idea is not absurd,"

"then there is no hope for it."

Perhaps the American Academy of Achievements

summarized our speaker's impact best

when it noted: "Having already"

"revolutionized the way the world buys books,"

"Jeff Bezos is now transforming the way"

"we read them as well."

I like to think that Princeton helped

to lay the groundwork for this revolution.

Dreamer and doer.

Entrepreneur and engineer.

Refreshingly unassuming,

even in the face of unimaginable success,

Jeff has done his alma mater proud.

It is a true honour and pleasure

to welcoming him back to Old Nassau today.

[Applause]

As a kid,

I spent my summers with my grandparents

on their ranch in Texas.

I helped fix windmills,

vaccinate cattle,

and do other chores.

We also watched soap operas every afternoon,

especially Days of Our Lives.

My grandparents belonged to a caravan club,

a group of Airstream trailer owners

who travelled together around the US and Canada.

And every few summers,

we'd join the caravan.

We'd hitch up the Airstream

to my grandfather's car

and off we'd go.

In line with 300 other

Airstream adventurers.

I loved and worshipped my grandparents.

And I really looked forward to these trips.

On one particular trip -

I was about 10 years old -,

I was rolling around

in the big bench-seat

in the back of the car,

my grandfather was driving

and my grandmother had the passenger's seat.

She smoked throughout these trips.

And I hated the smell.

At that age, I'd take any excuse

to make estimates and do minor arithmetic.

I'd calculate our gas mileage,

figure out useless statistics on things like groceries spending.

I'd been hearing an ad campaign about smoking.

I can't remember the details but basically, the ads said:

"Every puff of a cigarette"

"takes some number of minutes off of your life."

I think it might have been 2 minutes per puff.

At any rate, I decided

to do the math for my grandmother.

I estimated the number of cigarettes per day,

estimated the number of puffs per cigarette and so on.

When I was satisfied that I had come up

with a reasonable number,

I poked my head into the front of the car,

tapped my grandmother on the shoulder,

and proudly proclaimed:

"At 2 minutes per puff,"

"you've taken 9 years off of your life!"

I have a very vivid memory of what happened next.

And it was not what I had expected.

I expected to be applauded for my cleverness

and my arithmetic skills.

"Jeff, you're so smart!"

"You had to have made some tricky estimates,"

"figure out the number of minutes in a year,"

"and do some division..."

That's not what happened.

Instead,

my grandmother burst into tears.

I sat in the back seat,

and didn't know what to do while my grandmother was crying.

My grandfather, who'd been driving in silence,

pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway.

He got out of the car

and came around and opened my door,

and waited for me to follow. Was I in trouble?

My grandfather was a highly intelligent,

quiet man.

He had never said a harsh word to me,

and maybe this was to be the first time.

Or maybe he would ask that I get back in the car

and apologize to my grandmother.

I had no experience in this realm

with my grandparents,

and no way to gauge what the consequences might be.

We stopped beside the trailer.

My grandfather looked at me,

and after a bit of silence,

he gently and calmly said:

"Jeff, one day,"

"you'll understand"

"that it's harder to be kind"

"than clever."

What I want to talk to you about today

is the difference between

gifts and choices.

Cleverness is a gift.

Kindness is a choice.

Gifts are easy - they're given, after all.

Choices can be hard.

You can seduce yourself with your gifts

if you're not careful.

And if you do, it will probably be

to the detriment of your choices.

This is a group with many gifts.

I am sure one of your gifts

is the gift of a smart and capable brain.

I am confident that's the case, because

admission is competitive, and if there weren't

some signs that you're clever,

the Dean of admissions wouldn't have let you in.

Your smarts will come in handy

because you will travel in a land of marvels.

We humans, plodding as we are,

will astonish ourselves,

we'll invent ways to generate clean energy -

and a lot of it -, atom by atom,

we'll assemble small machines that can enter cell walls

and make repairs...

This month comes the extraordinary but inevitable news

that we've synthesized life.

And in the coming years we'll not only synthesize it,

but engineer it to specifications.

I believe you'll even see us understand the human brain.

Jules Verne, Mark Twain,

Galileo, Newton,

all the curious from the ages

would have wanted to be alive

most of all right now.

As a civilization, we will have so many gifts.

Just as you, as individuals,

have so many individual gifts as you sit before me.

How will you use these gifts?

And will you take pride in your gifts

or pride in your choices?

I got the idea to start Amazon 16 years ago.

I came across the fact that Web usage

was growing at 2,300 percent per year.

I had never seen or heard

of anything that grew that fast.

The idea of building an online bookstore

with millions of titles,

something that simply couldn't exist in the physical world,

was very exciting to me.

I'd just turned 30 years old

and I had been married for a year.

I told my wife Mackenzie that I wanted to quit my job

and go do this crazy thing

that probably wouldn't work,

since most start-ups don't,

and I wasn't sure what would happen after that.

Mackenzie, also a Princeton grad and sitting

here in the second row,

told me I should go for it.

As a young boy, I had been

a garage inventor;

I had invented an automatic gate-closer

out of cement-filled tires,

a solar cooker that didn't work very well

out of an umbrella and aluminum foil,

baking-pan alarms to entrap my siblings.

I'd always wanted to be an inventor

and she wanted me to follow my passion.

I was working at a financial firm in NYC

with a bunch of very smart people

and I had a brilliant boss I much admired.

I went to my boss

and told him I was going to start a company

selling books on the Internet.

He took me on a long walk in Central Park,

listened carefully to me,

and finally said:

"That sounds like a really good idea."

"But it would be an even better idea"

"for someone who didn't already have a good job."

[Laughs]

That logic made some sense to me

and he convinced me to think about it for 48 hours

before making a final decision.

Seen in that light, it really was a difficult choice.

But ultimately, I decided

I had to give it a shot.

I didn't think I'd regret

trying and failing.

And I suspected I would always be haunted

by a decision to not try at all.

After much consideration,

I took the last safe path

to follow my passion.

And I'm proud of that choice.

Tomorrow,

in a very real sense, your life,

the life you author from scratch,

on your own, begins.

How will you use your gifts?

What choices will you make?

Will inertia be your guide

or will you follow your passions?

Will you follow dogma

or will you be original?

Will you choose a life of ease

or a life of service and adventure?

Will you wilt under criticism

or will you follow your convictions?

Will you bluff it out when you're wrong

or will you apologize?

Will you guard your heart

against rejection

or will you act when you fall in love?

Will you play it safe

or will you be a little swashbuckling?

When it's tough, will you give up

or will you be relentless?

Will you be a cynic

or will you be a builder?

Will you be clever

at the expense of others

or will you be kind?

I will hazard a prediction.

When you are 80 years old

and, in a quiet moment

of reflection,

narrating for only yourself

the most personal version

of your life's story,

the telling that will be most compact

and meaningful

will be the series of choices you have made.

In the end,

we are our choices.

Build yourself a great story.

Thank you and good luck.

[Applause]