Fast Company has an article on Jeff Bezos, famous as the founder of Blue Origin - apparently he's also been involved in some wacky scheme to sell stuff on the Internet. Who Knew?

Anyway, the article has some of the usual business 'zine puff piece aspect to it, but it's fairly in depth, so worth a read if you'd like to get a sense of the man. He comes off fairly well, even allowing for the reporter's need to be nice in order to maintain access. I'm encouraged that he'll push Blue Origin towards a successful business model, and he seems willing to spend real money up front before seeing returns, which is probably a necessity in the suborbital launch services industry.

The two really deep pocketed players in the industry are Bezos and Allen. Of the two I suspect that Bezos has the better approach to business (based on little information, unfortunately). The article suggests that his business orientation places a premium on customer service, which I'd always thought was sort of the obvious thing to do until I started paying attention to the way many businesses actually work.

Interesting read, but I was disappointed that there was no mention of Blue Origin.

Bezos certainly has a better track record of raising investment cash than Allen - Allen has been a long time source of investment but never actually needed to find it.

Bezos, on the other hand, was excellent at getting money into Amazon - there's several books around on the "dot.con" and ComputingFailure.com and so forth which will furnish you with all the information you'll ever need on the economics of Amazon and what Bezo's achieved.

From what I've read there are question marks over his ability to run a traditional business i.e. one that makes money and self finances, but that wasn't necessary when he started Amazon.

If he can self finance Blue Origin that would be interesting. If he's expecting to raise cash like he did in the '90s then it's less interesting.