Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1964. His mother, Jackie, was a teenager when he was born and she had only been married to her biological father for about a year. She married Mike Bezos when Jeff was four years old. Mike was a Cuban who fled to the United States at the age of fifteen. He attended college in New Mexico and eventually became an engineer at Exxon. Jeff attended Miami Palmetto High School and was valedictorian of his class. He went to Princeton and planned to study physics. However, he thought that the other physics students were much smarter than him. So he studied electrical engineering and computer science. He graduated summa cum laude in 1986 with a cumulative GPA of 4.3 on a 4.0 scale. After graduating from Princeton, Jeff joined a high-tech startup in New York called FITEL, which was building a network to facilitate international trade. After two years at FITEL, he joined Bankers Trust Company. At Bankers Trust, he built computer systems that managed $250 billion in assets and eventually became the company's youngest vice president. In 1990, he joined DE Shaw and Company. He helped the firm create the most technically advanced hedge funds on Wall Street. He eventually moved from computer expert to money manager and became the company's youngest vice president. In 1994, Jeff read a statistic that the Internet was growing at a rate of 2,300% per year. He decided to leave DE Shaw and Company to create Amazon.com, which he named after the seemingly endless South American river. He and his wife, MacKenzie, traveled to Seattle to connect with a book wholesaler called Ingram. MacKenzie drove the car while Jeff wrote the company's business plan. Jeff had already spent several months planning Amazon.com while at DE Shaw. He had traveled to California several times to meet Shel Kaphan, a programmer who was Amazon.com's first employee, and other programmers. Jeff, Shel, and an entrepreneur named Paul Barton-Davis built the prototype for Amazon.com in Jeff's factory. garage in Seattle. The garage was heated by an oven placed in the middle of the room. There were extension cords everywhere. Jeff built desks made from doors he bought at Home Depot for sixty dollars each..