Approximately twenty years ago, serendipity helped new Seattle resident Maryam Mohit take a giant leap toward her dream to start an online bookstore. That vision helped blossom due to a friend’s suggestion that she meet with “a guy named Jeff” who had a similar outlook. That person turned out to be Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Mohit soldiered on despite the attitude of friends who told her that the concept of people giving someone their credit card information over the internet would be a disaster.
Bezos asked during their initial meeting if Mohit would be able to make the website interactive, and soon after she was hired by the then-25 person company as its first web producer. She eventually became the head of a site development department with Amazon, with 200 people working under her.
During her time working with Bezos, she was able to discover three important business lessons from him:
Using the lessons she gained from her time at Amazon, the now-47-year-old Mohit and co-founder Claudine Ryan have created startup firm GemShare, which is an iOS app. The new company has been compared to Yelp, but differs in the fact that only people a person trusts offer the recommendations that are seen.
Mohit has adopted those principles with her new company:
The app has met with strong success in app-happy San Francisco, an endorsement which will now move it to new markets in the months to come.