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 was married to his biological father for only about a year. She married Mike Bezos when Jeff was four years old. Mike was a Cuban who fled to the United States when he was fifteen. He attended college in New Mexico and eventually became an engineer at Exxon. Jeff attended Miami Palmetto High School and was at the top of his class. He went to Princeton and planned to study physics. He believed, however, that other physics students were much smarter than him. Therefore, he studied electrical engineering and computer science. He graduated summa cum laude in 1986 with a GPA of 4.3 on a 4.0 scale. After graduating from Princeton, Jeff joined a New York high-tech startup 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 installed 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 build the most technically advanced hedge funds on Wall Street. He eventually went from being a computer expert to a financial manager, becoming the company's youngest vice president. In 1994, Jeff read a statistic that the Internet was growing at a rate of 2300% per year. He decided to leave DE Shaw and Company to found Amazon.com, which he named after the seemingly endless South American river. He and his wife MacKenzie went to Seattle to be near a book wholesaler called Ingram. MacKenzie drove the car while Jeff wrote the business plan for the company. 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 a contractor named Paul Barton-Davis built the Amazon.com prototype in Jeff's lab. garage in Seattle. The garage was heated by an oven located in the center of the room. There were extension cords everywhere. Jeff built desks out of doors that he purchased from Home Depot for sixty dollars each.