I was having a random chat with my colleague Mo Koyfman about who we consider to be the most impressive and visionary technology leader around today.

One person that Mo brought up is Jeff Bezos, and I wholeheartedly agree.

There has obviously been a lot written about him that I’ll try not to rehash.  But what really sets him apart in my mind is that he has continuously reinvented and expanded his core business.

It’s one thing to build a great and successful business when the wind is at your back.  I experienced that at Ebay.  As smart as we thought we were, it was helpful to have an amazing business model and a vibrant community of buyers and sellers to keep the ship moving along.

But at some point, your core business will run out of gas.  Or at least start showing signs of weakness or fatigue.  Amazon started out selling books online… not exactly a rocket ship of an industry in this day and age.  But Bezos experimented constantly and rethought his comapny’s core competency many times over, giving us the web’s best online retail experience, scaleable web services, and a revolutionary new reading device.  Almost as impressive in my mind, are some of the company’s other experiments that may not have been as financially successful, but shows the kind of thinking and innovation that is fostered within Amazon (I particularly like Mechanical Turk, among their other experiments).

I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting Jeff personally, but he is an investor in Twitter with us, as well as mfg.com, where my brother-in-law Larry is on the board.  Hopefully I’ll have the chance to meet him soon.