Jeff Bezos convinced 22 investors to back his new company Amazon in 1994. Their returns? Mind-boggling

In 1994, Jeff Bezos held 60 meetings with family members, friends and potential investors in an attempt to persuade them to each invest US$50,000 in his revolutionary idea to create an online bookshop. 

He failed to convince 38 of them, and 24 years later some of them still cannot bring themselves to talk about what life might have been like if they had taken a punt on Bezos and this “Amazon thing” that the then 30-year-old hedge fund manager wouldn’t shut up about.

“I’m in touch with a few of them now,” Bezos revealed in an onstage interview at a charity dinner in Washington DC last year. “It’s kind of a study in human nature … Some of them take it in their stride, and they recognise that they actually have ridiculously happy lives. [But] others of them just cannot talk about it – it’s too painful.”

That pain comes from knowing that they opted out of the chance to become billionaires. Each of the 22 investors – who included Bezos’s parents, his younger brother Mark and sister Christina – were granted just under 1 per cent of Amazon’s stock on average. If they held on to all of the shares their stakes would each now be worth up to US$7 billion each, a return of 14 million per cent. “That’s just human nature,” Bezos, now 54, says. “Some people are just better at rolling with the punches.”

The biggest winners from investing early in Bezos’s idea were his parents, Mike and Jackie Bezos, who pumped in US$300,000 in return for 6 per cent of the company, which sold its first book – about artificial intelligence – in July 1995. “It couldn’t happen to two nicer people,” Bezos says of his parents’ windfall.

They have given away US$68 million of it through their Bezos Family Foundation, which focuses on education. The foundation’s mission statement is a Winston Churchill quote: “What is the use of living, if it be not to strive for noble causes and to make this muddled world a better place for those who will live in it after we are gone?”

Bezos’s parents have also given US$65 million to Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre. Jackie Bezos, who was 17 and still in high school when Jeff was born, said the donation was: “The gift of time for all those people who will benefit from new treatments and cures. It’s the gift of more hugs, more graduations and more moments.” Bezos tweeted: “My parents rock.”