Empowerment

Small and medium-sized businesses selling in Amazon’s stores come from every state in the U.S., and more than 130 countries around the world. Amazon works with more than 2 million independent partners in the U.S., including sellers, developers, content creators, authors, and delivery providers. We openly share information, tools, and services with third parties who work with Amazon to foster their business growth. When they thrive, our customers benefit from the products and services they offer.

Amazon is investing hundreds of millions of dollars to help 29 million people around the world grow their tech skills by 2025, with free cloud computing training through Amazon Web Services-designed programs. Our free training is designed to meet a wide variety of schedules, learning preferences, and career goals. Each program offers something different.

Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in 1995 as a bookstore, with the goal to offer the Earth’s biggest selection of books. In fact, that’s where our name came from. We wanted our selection to be vast and wide—like the Amazon River. Books, and supporting authors, remain core to what we do. Millions of writers around the world use Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) to build successful careers with self-publishing. And, Amazon Publishing is a leading trade publisher of fiction, nonfiction, and children’s books.

Amazon Web Services provides a highly reliable, scalable, low-cost infrastructure platform in the cloud that powers millions of businesses in 190 countries around the world—from the fastest-growing startups and largest enterprises, to nonprofits and government agencies. In 2020, AWS customers began helping local businesses operate through the complexities of COVID-19, and empowering neighbors to stay connected and assist each other while remaining safe. Amazon is made better by the many people we collaborate with outside of our company, including developers, partners, and the customers Amazon Web Services empowers.

We launched the Amazon Delivery Service Partner (DSP) program in 2018 to provide entrepreneurs access to tools, resources, and Amazon’s experience in logistics to enable them to launch and build successful delivery companies. Over the past five years, we have empowered 3,500 hands-on entrepreneurs to build and scale their businesses, which, in turn, have created 279,000 driving jobs, generated $45 billion in revenue, and are now delivering over 20 million packages every day across 19 countries. In 2020, we announced a new diversity grant to help reduce the barriers to entry for Black, Latinx, and Native American entrepreneurs—a $1 million commitment toward funding startup costs, offering $10,000 for each qualified candidate to build their own businesses in the U.S.