Frederick W. Smith

Want to see a great company story? Read Jeff Bezos’s three-page letter he wrote to shareholders in 1997.

PHIL KNIGHT Cofounder and Chairman Emeritus, Nike Inc.

It took him 60 meetings and considerable powers of persuasion to raise his first $1 million from 22 investors—“anyone who knew anything about the book business did not invest,” Bezos remembered—but by the summer of 1995, Amazon .com was open for business.

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.

It reminds me of when they asked John Kennedy how he became a hero, and he said, “It’s easy, they sank my boat.” Tiger basically gave us an ultimatum that said: “Either sell us fifty-one percent of your company at book value, or we’re going to set up other distributors, no matter what this piece of paper says.” That gave us an idea that we maybe be