Frederick W. Smith
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Frederick W. Smith
Fred Smith wasn’t your typical rich kid. At the age of four, his old man dropped dead of a massive heart attack, leaving the young boy to grow up fatherless. Worst yet, Smith suffered from calcium deficiency disease. This weakened his bones, preventing him from playing sports, rough housing and enjoying physical activities.Longing for freedom, Smit... See more
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Smith, however, was an entrepreneur, and that Yale paper became the basis for FedEx, which he founded in 1971. He was also a betting man: once, in the early days of FedEx, after a bank had refused to extend a crucial loan, he took the company’s last $5,000 to Las Vegas and won $27,000 playing blackjack to cover the company’s $24,000 fuel bill. Of c
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The largest employer in Memphis today is FedEx. It was founded by Frederick Smith in 1973. Smith, who was from nearby Marks, Tennessee, decided Memphis was an ideal location. It is near the center of the country but, unlike the Midwest, doesn’t frequently suffer inclement weather. He came from a business family—his father had been one of the founde
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WebVan in particular was uniquely insane. With just $500K in gross revenues, no profits, and millions in annual burn, their IPO hit an $8 Billion valuation on day one.
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Take Emery Air Freight. Emery was in the air freight services business. Anything you wanted to ship you could ship via Emery. Small packages, large packages, overnight service, delayed service. From a marketing point of view, what did Federal Express do? It concentrated on one service: small packages overnight. Today Federal Express is a much bigge
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In 2014, Forbes ranked him as the 134th richest American, at $3.8 billion. One of his hires was Jeff Bezos, who, while researching business opportunities in 1994 for Shaw, got the idea for an online bookstore and left to start a company called Amazon.com. At $30 billion in 2014, Bezos was the fifteenth richest American.