Having graduated from Princeton University in 1986 with a degree in engineering, Bezos highlighted his own journey of climbing the corporate ladder at Wall Street before founding Amazon—and the billionaire thinks following the steady path actually increases your odds of landing entrepreneurial success later.
The key, he said, is using those years straight out of college to join “a best practices company, somewhere where you can learn a lot of basic fundamental things, how to hire really well, how to interview.”
In Bezos’ eyes, that experience won’t set you back. Instead, it’ll lay the groundwork for going at it alone: “There’s still lots of time to start a company after you have absorbed it and it increases your odds, in my opinion.”
“I started Amazon when I was 30, not when I was 20, and I think that that extra 10 years of experience actually improved the odds that Amazon would succeed,” he added. “So that would always be my advice, I finished college, and I think it’s been helpful to me.”
The CEO, who formerly served as the 14th United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, revealed that he’s expecting an influx of unemployment as AI impacts those entry-level jobs. Already he says, “it’s much harder to find a job… It’s really hitting young adults without college degrees.”
Anant Agarwal, Chief Academic Officer at 2U, an educational technology company that contracts with nonprofit colleges and universities to develop online programs, echoed that degrees “future-proof your career by preparing you for the next big technology, whatever it might be.”
