The 12 Greatest Entrepreneurs of our Time (part 3 of 6)

Great ideas are hard to come by

Putting them to work is even harder

Meet the founders who turned concepts into companies and changed the face of business

4. Jeff Bezos

Company: Amazon
Market Value: $84.0 billion
Sales: $48.1 billion
Employees: 56,200
Advice: Take regular mini-retreats


After ignoring his boss' advice and quitting his job in New York, Jeff Bezos drove across the country to Seattle, drawn by the city's large population of software developers. Once he launched Amazon in 1994, it took the e-commerce company more than six years to report its first quarterly profit.

He was in no hurry then and he is in no hurry now to boost profits at the expense of building "an important and lasting company." Bezos has long resisted entreaties from an often frustrated Wall Street to manage his company for profit instead of revenue growth and customer service.

Leading a closely watched, high-growth company can be frenetic. One of the biggest problems: finding the time to be pro-active rather than reactive. But Bezos, at the end of each quarter, solves this by just going away. His solo retreats have been put to good effect, resulting in several new ideas and products, including Amazon's fulfillment center for third-party sellers. As he has explained it, "I just lock myself up. There are no distractions from the office. No phones ringing. It's just because with a little bit of isolation I find I start to get more creative. I do spend a lot of time web surfing during those two or three days and just looking at what hobbyists and hackers are doing. What are the sorts of things that are on the cutting edge?"

Bezos, 48, will then write up two- or three-page memos, sometimes to himself, other times to his executive team. "What I find is, by the time that process is done, I'm never really sure if I invented something or not, because it starts here and ends up there. That's what you want if you have a bunch of smart people. Somebody says, `Well, that will never work because you forgot x, y, and z.' And then you step back and recognize that's true and then it morphs and builds".

5. Larry Page and Sergey Brin

Company: Google

Sales: $37.9 billion
Market Value: $203.2 billion
Employees: 32,500
Advice: Spare no expense on innovation


Just like Paul McCartney, who says he literally dreamed the melody to "Yesterday," one of the most covered songs in the history of recorded music, Larry Page recalls the night in 1996 when he was 23 years old and had vividly dreamed about downloading the entire web onto computers. "I grabbed a pen and started writing," says Google co-founder and CEO Page. "I spent the middle of that night scribbling out the details and convincing myself it would work."

It certainly did. For the first time ever, in the final three months of 2011, Google exceeded $10 billion in quarterly revenue. Every day people around the world now use Google for an astounding 2.5 billion searches. But in all the gee-whiz statistics one could cite about the ubiquity of the company on the web, one statistic is even more telling: Page, 39, and co-founder Sergey Brin, 38, have spent $11.8 billion on research and development in the past three years.

That money fuels an innovation machine second to none, one that has moved Google well beyond its dominating lead in the search engine business. Staying innovative while scaling into a behemoth organization is often the most difficult passage for any growth company. For Page, who became CEO last year, and Brin, it comes down to what they call the 70-20-10 rule.

"About 70% try to work on the core efforts of the company," explains Brin, "about 20% goes to adjacent areas and expansion, and for the 10%, anything goes. As we have expanded our breadth of offerings, it's actually harder and harder to find the 10% out there. But I think that's important -- to let people be really creative and think outside the box".

Fuente: CNN Money - FORTUNE