> This journey began some 27 years ago. Amazon was only an idea, and it had no name.
It had a name, and that name was "Cadabra".
It didn't become Amazon until Jeff watched a documentary about the Amazon River. His lawyer had already turned up his nose at "Cadabra", and Jeff was looking for something else.
It's also worth noting that the idea didn't grow over time - Jeff always intended to build something like "Sears for the 21st century". The bookstore was just the way in, not the long term plan.
Something that always stuck with me is I remember reading in a book about the internet long ago about how innovative the name Amazon.com was and how it was the future of internet business. It said it needs to be more memorable. You aren’t going to buy your books on Books.com you are going to use Amazon. Turned out to be very right. And this was in the pets.com era. Everyone thought you needed the most generic name possible and that if you got something like books.com or travel.com you had cornered the market on it.
I think you are leaving out a really important aspect of the early internet- content discovery was really hard for users. If you were looking for something about Pets until google became dominant, you were just as likely, if not more likely, to type pets.com into your browser as you were to go to a search engine.
Getting the initial traffic to your site was really hard in those days, the domain was really important for that.
One often overlooked fact is that fixed-price book policy of a lot of countries (like here in Germany where we have it to this day) helped amazon a lot. Books have a margin of around 30% and - by law - you must sell them at a fixed price which is the same in every bookstore in the country. That allowed Amazon to offer free shipping, as the resulting margin was still high enough.
And since you as a consumer have to pay the same price for a book no matter where you buy it anyways, it became a lot easier to just order a book online instead of driving to a bookstore to collect it (oftentimes the shop had to order them anyways and you had to come back a day later to pick it up). Once Amazon was a serious player in the book business with existing logistics, payment etc. it was an easy move for them to expand to other products.
The irony is domains like books.com sounded like a sure winner but that only works for books. How would Jeff be doing today if he ran books.com and just sold ... books. bookswebservice (BWS) doesn't have that same ring to it.
I wonder if the browsers themselves weren't responsible for the reversal of this trend. Back in the day, if you typed something into address bar, there wasn't a "fallback to search" like we have today.
I've always hated the name, though I obviously can't argue against its efficacy. The Amazon river and rainforest are symbolically and literally among the most significant features of our natural world. Now, it's better known as the name of a company that can send us every kind of new junk to replace our old junk.
People still think you need the most generic name possible, they just don't understand that the reason QuantumSpiritualCrystals.com was still available is that it wasn't generic.
I don’t think naming actually matters. In retrospect it seems important. But names as bland as Facebook and as zany as Yahoo! and as creepy as Tungle.Me have all succeeded.
I wonder how much that was linked to trust? People were leery about online shopping in the beginning, and a name like books.com sounds a little too generic.
> He is also an ultra-marathon and touring cyclist. Some excellent accomplishments have included the 298 mile Cannonball in 14:01, and a five-week tandem camping tour from Amsterdam to Athens.
Got this from your Wiki entry. Hats off to you dear sir!
I heard the same story (I joined in 2004). The version I heard was that Jeff was driving cross-country NY -> Seattle and was on the phone with his lawyer about incorporation papers, and the lawyer misheard “Cadabra” as “Cadaver”. That's when Jeff knew he needed a better name.
I sat through a talk by Jeff Bozos where he said the same thing, that to register his company he was talking on the phone to his lawyer and the lawyer asked what he wanted his company name to be and Jeff said Cadabra (telling the audience like Abra Cadabra) whereupon the Lawyer said Cadaver which made Bozo develop cold feet.
> It's also worth noting that the idea didn't grow over time
I doubt that he started out imagining he would build the world's biggest cloud hosting platform or open the first chain of checkoutless grocery stores.
The internet - the only place you can find a snarky comment doubting the validity of a statement made by the actual 2nd ever employee of Amazon, who knows infinitely more about what Jeff Bezos wanted to achieve than the doubting commenter.
I always find retrospective and hypothetical discussions of idea genesis and maturation fascinating.
Amazon retail aside, I wonder if you (or anyone else) would be willing to give perspective on AWS:
Was it similarly fully formed on conception?
I’ve heard the (potentially stylized) stories about holiday traffic bursts, selling off-season compute to startups, etc.
But assuming AWS the idea did need to grow with increased perspective, the times, and experience - do you think AWS could have become what it is today if that had been the goal from the onset?
That does sound vaguely familiar. Jeff did have a handful of other "name candidates" sitting around, and this seems like one in keeping with the sort of thing he was thinking about. I don't specifically remember it though.
"Bezos and his wife grew fond of another possibility:
Relentless.com. Friends suggested that it sounded a bit
sinister. But something about it must have captivated
Bezos: he registered the URL in September 1994, and he
kept it. Type Relentless.com into the Web today and it
takes you to Amazon." -- Stone, Brad. The Everything Store (p. 31). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition.
N.B.: "Today", in the context of that quote, is ca. 2013, when the book was published. relentless.com redirected to amazon.com for me this morning (2021-02-03).
Giving it the benefit of the doubt, I could not help but wonder if this was the Usenet post you saw back in the day that made you apply for a job at Amazon :)
To be fair, "Sears for the 21st century" is not what Amazon is today. It's a whole lot more than that. And that does seem to have grown over time. Stuff like AWS and Alexa and all of that. That's likely what he's referring to.
Hadn't heard the documentary story, thanks for sharing!
Were there any choices in the first few years that you think made a particularly big difference in setting Amazon up for what it is today? Anything you're particularly proud of that you did there?
Why would it matter if they didn't? All they would have if they held it is more money on top of the gobs they already had.
When you have that kind of money, if you want to grow it the surer strategy is to invest in lots of stuff, not keep it all sunk in your previous employer. It's probably more fun too.
And beyond a certain point that stock and the accompanying valuation in AMZ probably isn't so gratifying in itself, and unless one has a juvenile obsession with out net-worthing others, you need to find something more personally meaningful to do with it, whether that is start a new industry (Elon Musk) or address pressing global health issues (Bill Gates). It sounds like the GP has spent some of his funding free software.
Put into perspective that the dot boom happened around 1999-2001 and the dot bomb set in hard by 2003. Between 1996 and through that roller coaster people went through a lot, and since then there have now been two financial crises in the US, one ongoing.
It probably doesn't feel good to be asked this question. I say this as an early employee of three startups.
90% of startups fail, in Las Vegas you have a 14% chance to win now make your choice. I sold my stocks (not Amazon but a very early employee at a small company that still exist and somewhat profitable) as soon as I could and ended up selling at an all time high so YMMV
Hi Paul, I :heart: JACK and spend lots with Amazon, cheers.
I wonder if you have an opinion on this bit of gossip: Is there any relationship between Jeff's departure and this FTC Tips scandal? https://komonews.com/news/local/amazon-took-away-62-million-...
The only evidence I see is relating to their very similar timing of publication.
Lol, so your take is that you have a better handle on the history of Amazon than its founder? He is likely referring to a point in time when Amazon was just an idea.
>> This journey began some 27 years ago. Amazon was only an idea, and it had no name.
> It had a name, and that name was "Cadabra".
This seems like nitpicking. Lots of projects start out with long forgotten names. I'm involved in one that's pretty successful, but you can see from the code base the name evolved over time (~15 years). Codenames and attempts at product placing in the market evolve, stuff becomes myth or forgotten. I can absolve Bezos (this once) of not remembering exactly what that embryonic Amazon was to begin with, or was called, because it was ~25 years ago, probably during a period of great turmoil.
And the tone of this comment feels like someone who checked out of the company too early and feels a bit sour at doing so. I say this as a single digit employee who could have made a small fortune a couple of times but either bottled it, or the gig wasn't right for me. I missed out on some nice payouts, but I'm not that sour about it. It was my choice.
I have ZERO regrets about checking out of Amazon when I did. I've had an awesome life, raising my daughter, writing a DAW, living. I want for nothing, really.
There's a lot of historical revisionism regarding the early history of corporations. Claiming, specifically, as Jeff did, that 27 years ago (1994) that he had no name for his idea is ... not really true. It's likely true that when he actually started working out what the business might be, he didn't have a name. But who does?
Does it matter? Obviously that depends on your perspective. Probably not much. But it's not even particularly hard to read up on the early history (e.g. Brad Stone's "Get Big Fast"), so memory is not really required.
I don’t know if it’s nitpicking. If it’s true that the Amazon #2 employee took time to post this here, Jeff Bezos should have remembered and be precise in his speech.
> Invention. Invention is the root of our success. We’ve done crazy things together, and then made them normal... If you get it right, a few years after a surprising invention, the new thing has become normal. People yawn. And that yawn is the greatest compliment an inventor can receive.
Jeff speaking about innovation, invention (based on first principles), making data-driven decisions (and also when to not trust data), learned helplessness at Stanford (2005): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhnDvvNS8zQ
I'd argue that the customer experience of Amazon has declined dramatically in the last few years. Maybe there should be more internal viewings of that video.
Do people do any analysis anymore or do they just repeat memes? i.e. "we put the customer first".
For reference, I'm someone who hadn't used amazon (i'm in Australia, and I've just had no need). These holidays was my first real experience with the amazon brand and the amazon website.
What I saw was an incredibly user hostile site: reviews mashed together from all over the world, and you can't even be sure whether they're reviewing the right product or the seller. Search that doesn't work and you're never really sure what you're getting and from whom. I was searching for keyboard trays and it quickly became apparent various products were all the same but just re-labelled cheap chinese output.
When I went to check out, i had at least 3 dark patterns encountered where Amazon was directly trying to screw me: trying to trick me to sign up for prime, promising free shipping on the click but then default you out of it when you check out until you go searching for it, and continually spamming me with offers for whatever their streaming service is.
They weren't "customer first", they were actively customer hostile. I don't understand how this keeps getting repeated, unless their tech side is completely different from their consumer side...
The last experience I had with Amazon customer service was so bad I decided to stop using them as much as is physically possible. If your situation does not fit in a simple bucket, they will force it into one even if its bad for them and you at the same time.
Amazon's customer support is mediocre at best. I tried to buy something from them and the card transaction failed because I had some protections in place. Instead of them trying again, they asked for all kinds of documents to prove the ownership. I sent them a receipt from a local store, but it wasn't good enough for them. I guess they don't want my money :-)
Thank you for sharing the video. I liked seeing Bezos on startup phase. I had not heard the story, so I learned that he started as a quant on Wall St and left that job to start Amazon later in life. Many people expect tech startups to happen in your college dorm room, but Bezos took a completely different route.
He sounds like a time traveler from the future. He talks like it's a given that the Internet is going to take over the world but back then it really wasn't.
Ostensibly it was going to take over the world? I think you mean to say it was non obvious. But unless we’ve split timelines that is exactly what was going to happen.
In what way, if you don't mind? I always have the impression that he is practical to a fault, and consistent in his prescription for engineering above all.
I'm wondering for what else it is day 1, right now.
I know cryptocurrencies have been booming, it's not clear exactly if they will continue to boom but the space is already so big that one has to really read a lot to catch up.
What else seems like a promising field that one could go 100% into right now to bet on?
Yes cryptocurrencies are one thing but look at the possibilities afforded with having a decentralized, distributed ledger in all areas of life. Having a source of truth in things like law or politics. This would be a fundamental shift for society as a whole not just finance.
Quibble: to me "This is day one" is less about "what market can we get in on the ground floor of and ride a wave". It is more to underscore we are driving the innovation or market and that we are always starting from zero, never too late to change / pivot and we're still aggressively growing everything, or that is the goalline.
That isn't meant to take away from your question. As a developer I'm often focused on leaf concerns. Your question is more about broad strokes and I have to remind myself to think about fundamental changes.
I am in robotics and it seems well poised to grow. There’s a lot of big problems left to solve at the research level but deep learning seems to be slowly knocking down big problems left and right.
> I don’t know of another company with an invention track record as good as Amazon’s
Come on man, that's just bs.
From wikipedia:
> Researchers working at Bell Labs are credited with the development of radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, the photovoltaic cell, the charge-coupled device (CCD), information theory, the Unix operating system, and the programming languages B, C, C++, S, SNOBOL, AWK, AMPL, and others. Nine Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work completed at Bell Laboratories.
It's too bad that as soon as AT&T gets to commercialize the lab it ran it to the ground.
Previously, the lab was protected by an agreement between the US and AT&T where AT&T has a lawful monopoly but there were only so much it can earn and X% will always go to fundamental research, and that's why the lab was so successful.
That all changed when the federal government decided to break AT&T up in 1983. The for profit baby bells had no incentive to keep the lab and they proceeded to ruin it.
There are quite a few caveats with all of the items he lists:
> We pioneered customer reviews, 1-Click, personalized recommendations, Prime’s insanely-fast shipping, Just Walk Out shopping, the Climate Pledge, Kindle, Alexa, marketplace, infrastructure cloud computing, Career Choice, and much more.
1-click was hardly an "invention" IMO, the Kindle was "just another e-book reader" (arguably the best, but they did not "invent" the concept), Alexa is a Siri clone, and so forth.
Only "infrastructure cloud computing" is something there Amazon really took the lead and invented stuff. Not a small thing, but also hardly worthy of the bold claim in the article. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Sun, and many other companies seem to have done more invention than Amazon.
Yeah, that quote is management hyperbole at its best. I wouldn't even call what Amazon does "invention", maybe "innovation" - but Ok, you have to call it "invention" if you want to patent it, like the (in)famous "one-click patent".
Invention is the lower rung. ATT is the much more inventive + innovative company. Innovation disrupts/transforms. Invention sparks anew. In fact, what makes Amazon so wildly successful is not even particularly inventive but optimization driven.
Worth noting also is the company qualifier. To exclude universities from innovations seems arbitrary. Another line of attack is asking how much profit Amazon got from these innovation vs. how much they paid back to the various education systems that produced the skilled labor required.
Jeff Bezos bragging about this is for sure illustrative of the dissonance billionaires have over the value of their companies.
Or maybe he said "company" because Amazon is one, and isn't a university. While an interesting conversation could be had about large companies/small companies/university/individual contributions to progress and invention, Bezos isn't necessarily having that conversation, and certainly isn't obliged to contextualize Amazon's achievements that way.
Upvoted; and thanks for sharing these details. They might be obvious for you, but I had only a limited knowledge of all that innovation happening at Bell Labs.
And IBM invented the hard drive, (arguably) computer product lines, the relational database, and standardized the 8-bit byte. Pretty sure I'm leaving stuff out. They're not quite Bell Labs, but they're incredibly influential.
Amazon has had (and continues to have) its share of failed products, a very lot of them in fact. But then that's just how they operate[1]. Given their DNA they wouldn't have been where they are without those failed experiments. One could argue it's just one of those PR angles. But it's not. My last stint at Amazon was in Kindle tablet team. And boy did they experiment with hardware! ~2012 was the year when Amazon made a conscious choice to enter the hardware market to complement their AWS offering. There were close to a dozen devices being worked upon at that time. I think about 5-6 of them failed, some didn't even launch. But then, Eco succeeded and how! And now just look at the hardware devices they have launched.
I tend to look at Amazon and Apple and wonder. Both of them are valued at trillion dollars but the path couldn't have been more different. Apple being very deliberate, very long term, sometimes decade or more long, planning. Amazon on the other hand, hundreds of experiments, most fail and some succeed spectacularly. I remember an Amazon exec comparing these experiments to Cambrian explosion and I think it beautifully captures Amazon's DNA.
Yes, this was after ma Bell was broken up and Yann ended up in the AT&T Research. And then AT&T management closed the whole project. Glory days of Bell Labs are all in the distant past, unfortunately.
It was public knowledge that Bezos stopped running Amazon day-to-day a while ago. It was headed by the two execs under him (Andy Jassy for AWS and Jeff Wilke for retail). Jassy even had the CEO (of AWS) title. With Wilke announcing his retirement a few months ago, Jassy was the clear frontrunner to take over from Bezos. In hindsight I guess Wilke retired because Jassy was picked over him. The timing of the announcement is unexpected, but nothing else.
That does tell us something about the corporate structure though - whilst a lot of people think AWS would be better off being spun out, there's no way you hire the head of AWS as CEO of Amazon if you think that's the direction forward.
My mental image is that people want to spin off AWS for society’s benefits because Amazon grew too big and abuses the integration. Amazon squarely resisting this idea seems uncontroversal.
Yes, a bit of shakeup at the top. Jassy now CEO, Dave Clark stepping into Jeff Wilke's role as head of retail. I assume Charlie Bell will step up as head of AWS.
Listening to cbell rip someone apart in the weekly ops meeting while watching the #wtf peanut gallery whilst sipping my coffee are probably my fondest memories of working at AWS
AWS support is pretty great in my experience. That’s with a paid plan, but I consider it great even for a paid plan. Typically instant chat with someone who can usually fix it is a game changer.
I think it’s a little unreasonable to expect free support for such a technical product to be as good as that for the retail site.
Nah, its just that you'll have to change your perspective of customer support. Any questions will be answered in 5 days by pointing to the FAQ and each response will take an additional 5 days. If fact, you'll probably find the answer yourself before support helps you. Finally, the feedback mechanism will be so generic as to be useless.
Unless you want to pay 10% of your order for expedited service. Then those days drop from 5 to 3.
Love him or hate him, Jeff Bezos has been a legendary figure in the world of business for over 25 years now. His focus on the long term has led to the tremendous success Amazon has undergone.
When he started selling just books, he was laughed at by some people; but he had a why behind starting off with books. One thing is certain, Bezos has stayed consistent on his principles. His annual letters to his shareholders contain a lot of business wisdom.
There are a million titles, so no physical store will be able to compete with a warehouse. There are no refrigeration or unusual logistics with books. They are fungible: generally speaking, one book is as good as another, identical book.
It’s quite simple: generally standardized product sizes and media mail. Don’t think it’s farfetched to say Amazon benefited greatly from USPS in its early days.
BS dude. He wasn't laughed at. The man went to Princeton. Right next to other billionaires like Andy Florence. His family was rich etc... He was already a millionaire. It's not a rags-to-riches story by any stretch.
I always find comments like this interesting. This is similar to the comments I see whenever anyone says something remotely nice about a wealthy person on HN. What does going to Princeton have anything to do with being laughed at for selling books on the internet ? Who claimed he had a rags-to-riches story ? It oozes insecurity and envy.
He went to Princeton because he was smart, not because his family was rich. It isn't a school of billionaires or something. The majority of Ivy League enrollment is regular kids from working class families. They all have the best need-based scholarship programs in the country.
His dad was a Cuban immigrant who worked as an engineer at Exxon.
It will be interesting to watch how Andy Jassy as head of AWS (dealing with building out data centers, SW partnerships, API uptime, negotiating with Intel, designing Graviton CPUs, etc.) will be able to transition to such things as Prime Video content licensing discussions and goal setting for Whole Foods and the nuances of warehouse distribution labor disputes.
As a founder of Amazon - having built Amazon from nothing, Bezos probably had certain in-built persona and gravitas which probably helped with leadership talent acquisition and vision setting in all domains of the business universe. The opportunity to report to Jeff Bezos was probably a huge selling point - no matter what industry you were coming from.
Its interesting Amazon never attempted to give Andy Jassy a trial run as a public facing COO running both sides of the house.
Anecdotally I have heard that Amazon as a company does delegation very effectively. Individual departments have complete autonomy over their own business decisions, and this applies on the engineering side as well.
I do agree that the shitstorm over warehouse workers, automation, unionization etc. is only going to get a lot worse over the next few years, and Jassy may even find handling that becoming his primary job.
Jeff is a man of contradictions. I’ve heard him micromanage to the level that individual AWS launch pages were reviewed and approved by him; so were the choice of databases (oracle vs MySQL) and SOA. At the same time, he gives extreme leeway and time for product teams to prove their mettle. The general assumption is you have 7 years from start to profitability. It’s a long time by tech industry standards. (Just look at Google).
I think the challenge is when it comes down to resource allocation between different business units in radically different industries. Like how does someone who is not Jeff Bezos go about deciding whether Amazon should use its free cashflow to make big bold bets such as acquiring LionsGate for Prime Video content, expanding Amazon fulfillment centers globally, acquiring Humana for a push into Amazon health insurance or buying a chip fab to make Graviton chips. Perhaps the fact that Andy Jassy actually comes more from a business background means he'll do well.
Wow. I still remember when Amazon started as an online bookstore selling books and people kind of laughed at the idea, and the time Amazon kept losing money and refused to post an earning and people got mad. Amazing long game.
Interestingly, it seemed at the time that books were just about the least exciting things being sold on the Internet, and the shipping costs looked fatal to the business. You could buy just about anything, and everybody was going out of business trying to compete on big ticket items like electronics and movies and games and beanie babies. Not much competition on books online (anybody remember the “Duwamish book store demo” from Microsoft?). It seems to me that he looked way out and thought about how things would be done 20 years hence, regardless of what made sense at the time, and chose to start on the piece of that future with the weakest competition.
There was competition. Bookstacks.com had been in business with a telnet-only interface for more than a year before Amazon.
As noted by others, the shipping cost-to-item-average-cost ratio is precisely why Jeff chose books to start with. But yes, he also looked way out (even if he couldn't see as clearly as some people seem to think he could).
Shipping books was/is one of the cheapest things to ship, as they need minimal packaging, and the USPS offers a special media mail rate. This allowed him to work out all the logistics behind the scenes, and then make incremental improvements to handle other products.
When I was working in Tokyo in the 90's, English technical books were somewhat hard to come by and fairly expensive so co-workers would often pool together to do bulk purchases. There was one book site that I don't remember the name of now that almost always beat Amazon when it came to purchase price plus shipping at least in the beginning so we would always comparison shop. Maybe not sexy but online bookstores were certainly something of a lifeline in our case and I would often look forward to the arrival of a book order like a kid waiting for Christmas.
I think AWS ended up subsidizing the rest of the company. Amazon stumbled backwards into a highly profitable business that allowed them to continue playing the long game to create a monopoly in distribution.
It is utterly surprising that even Bezos couldn't resist choosing a business MBA guy as his successor just like Steve Jobs, Larry Page and Bill Gates did! They talked ALL their lives about importance of "product person", innovators, disruptors, technologists and derided "business" CEOs. But when it came down to it, they ALL chose the safest possible suit at their disposal to run their ships. Steady as it goes...
And Tim Cook trailblazed the world’s most valuable supply chain, IIRC. I don’t think the parent was implying these are talentless drones, just that they are the obvious safe choices for succession.
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It had a name, and that name was "Cadabra".
It didn't become Amazon until Jeff watched a documentary about the Amazon River. His lawyer had already turned up his nose at "Cadabra", and Jeff was looking for something else.
It's also worth noting that the idea didn't grow over time - Jeff always intended to build something like "Sears for the 21st century". The bookstore was just the way in, not the long term plan.
ps. amazon employee #2
Getting the initial traffic to your site was really hard in those days, the domain was really important for that.
Nothing wrong with something broad. We sell more than board game tables, but everything is connected and it gets us a lot of traffic and search juice.
With SEO getting so much money and attention dumped into it, the usefulness has kind of come back around for a name like this.
And since you as a consumer have to pay the same price for a book no matter where you buy it anyways, it became a lot easier to just order a book online instead of driving to a bookstore to collect it (oftentimes the shop had to order them anyways and you had to come back a day later to pick it up). Once Amazon was a serious player in the book business with existing logistics, payment etc. it was an easy move for them to expand to other products.
Microsoft also made it work by adding something else next to the name. Microsoft Excel. Microsoft Outlook. Microsoft Access.
By the way, books.com redirects to barnesandnoble.com
Also, hello mr famous internet person: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Davis_(programmer)
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Got this from your Wiki entry. Hats off to you dear sir!
True. I've heard (employee #20k-something, joined in early 2008) that the issue with Cadabra was its resemblance to the sound of the word "cadaver".
I doubt that he started out imagining he would build the world's biggest cloud hosting platform or open the first chain of checkoutless grocery stores.
I always find retrospective and hypothetical discussions of idea genesis and maturation fascinating.
Amazon retail aside, I wonder if you (or anyone else) would be willing to give perspective on AWS:
Was it similarly fully formed on conception?
I’ve heard the (potentially stylized) stories about holiday traffic bursts, selling off-season compute to startups, etc.
But assuming AWS the idea did need to grow with increased perspective, the times, and experience - do you think AWS could have become what it is today if that had been the goal from the onset?
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25693618
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25697941
N.B.: "Today", in the context of that quote, is ca. 2013, when the book was published. relentless.com redirected to amazon.com for me this morning (2021-02-03).
https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=PaulDavisThe1st
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Davis_(programmer)
Giving it the benefit of the doubt, I could not help but wonder if this was the Usenet post you saw back in the day that made you apply for a job at Amazon :)
I'd wonder how much that's worth today.
I won't ask what Jeff did wrong for obvious reasons, but what did he do really well?
I loved your other comment on here about living a fulfilled life. Thanks for sharing.
Were there any choices in the first few years that you think made a particularly big difference in setting Amazon up for what it is today? Anything you're particularly proud of that you did there?
I hope it worked out for you! Early days employees bear a high risk.
How was Amazon back then when only a handful people ran the show? Any lessons to be learned?
Just curious, no agenda, I grew up on the Sears Catalogue.
Would be a fun conceptual project
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In fact having saw horses and a flat surface in your garage is superior to having a regular table, because all the pieces are easily movable.
Nobody is going to ask you, why are there saw horses and a door in your garage, but they will ask you why you have a table in your garage.
Offhand it sounds a bit too close to cadaver for the marketing dept, but what would a legal objection be?
That logo is brilliant.
Oh wow that's nice. Yeah, Amazon was definitely a better name choice.
Please tell me you held onto your stock
When you have that kind of money, if you want to grow it the surer strategy is to invest in lots of stuff, not keep it all sunk in your previous employer. It's probably more fun too.
And beyond a certain point that stock and the accompanying valuation in AMZ probably isn't so gratifying in itself, and unless one has a juvenile obsession with out net-worthing others, you need to find something more personally meaningful to do with it, whether that is start a new industry (Elon Musk) or address pressing global health issues (Bill Gates). It sounds like the GP has spent some of his funding free software.
It probably doesn't feel good to be asked this question. I say this as an early employee of three startups.
1) Any cool anecdotes from Amazon that you can tell?
2) Any advice you have for young entrepreneurs looking to uproar an industry?
I wonder if you have an opinion on this bit of gossip: Is there any relationship between Jeff's departure and this FTC Tips scandal? https://komonews.com/news/local/amazon-took-away-62-million-... The only evidence I see is relating to their very similar timing of publication.
Lol, so your take is that you have a better handle on the history of Amazon than its founder? He is likely referring to a point in time when Amazon was just an idea.
You know, there's actually a pretty good chance that he's not pulling this out of his ass.
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> It had a name, and that name was "Cadabra".
This seems like nitpicking. Lots of projects start out with long forgotten names. I'm involved in one that's pretty successful, but you can see from the code base the name evolved over time (~15 years). Codenames and attempts at product placing in the market evolve, stuff becomes myth or forgotten. I can absolve Bezos (this once) of not remembering exactly what that embryonic Amazon was to begin with, or was called, because it was ~25 years ago, probably during a period of great turmoil.
And the tone of this comment feels like someone who checked out of the company too early and feels a bit sour at doing so. I say this as a single digit employee who could have made a small fortune a couple of times but either bottled it, or the gig wasn't right for me. I missed out on some nice payouts, but I'm not that sour about it. It was my choice.
There's a lot of historical revisionism regarding the early history of corporations. Claiming, specifically, as Jeff did, that 27 years ago (1994) that he had no name for his idea is ... not really true. It's likely true that when he actually started working out what the business might be, he didn't have a name. But who does?
Does it matter? Obviously that depends on your perspective. Probably not much. But it's not even particularly hard to read up on the early history (e.g. Brad Stone's "Get Big Fast"), so memory is not really required.
I don’t know if it’s nitpicking. If it’s true that the Amazon #2 employee took time to post this here, Jeff Bezos should have remembered and be precise in his speech.
Jeff's pitch at the time (1997); so on point, so precise: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWRbTnE1PEM
> The question I was asked most frequently at that time was, “What’s the internet?” Blessedly, I haven’t had to explain that in a long while.
Here's Jeff explaining the Internet (at a TED talk): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMKNUylmanQ
> Invention. Invention is the root of our success. We’ve done crazy things together, and then made them normal... If you get it right, a few years after a surprising invention, the new thing has become normal. People yawn. And that yawn is the greatest compliment an inventor can receive.
Jeff speaking about innovation, invention (based on first principles), making data-driven decisions (and also when to not trust data), learned helplessness at Stanford (2005): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhnDvvNS8zQ
> When times have been good, you’ve been humble.
Heh. Reminds me of this 2008 lecture where Jeff is selling AWS to startup school students: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nKfFHuouzA Classic.
> Amazon couldn’t be better positioned for the future. We are firing on all cylinders, just as the world needs us to.
Not sure about that last part, Jeff.
So long, and thanks for all the fish.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxwjzVW7z5o
For reference, I'm someone who hadn't used amazon (i'm in Australia, and I've just had no need). These holidays was my first real experience with the amazon brand and the amazon website.
What I saw was an incredibly user hostile site: reviews mashed together from all over the world, and you can't even be sure whether they're reviewing the right product or the seller. Search that doesn't work and you're never really sure what you're getting and from whom. I was searching for keyboard trays and it quickly became apparent various products were all the same but just re-labelled cheap chinese output.
When I went to check out, i had at least 3 dark patterns encountered where Amazon was directly trying to screw me: trying to trick me to sign up for prime, promising free shipping on the click but then default you out of it when you check out until you go searching for it, and continually spamming me with offers for whatever their streaming service is.
They weren't "customer first", they were actively customer hostile. I don't understand how this keeps getting repeated, unless their tech side is completely different from their consumer side...
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Agreed! He knew exactly what he was doing.
Interesting that he talks about attention being a scarce resource. Things did not improve from that point....
I'm wondering for what else it is day 1, right now.
I know cryptocurrencies have been booming, it's not clear exactly if they will continue to boom but the space is already so big that one has to really read a lot to catch up.
What else seems like a promising field that one could go 100% into right now to bet on?
Biotech/bioinformatics/bioengineering.
That isn't meant to take away from your question. As a developer I'm often focused on leaf concerns. Your question is more about broad strokes and I have to remind myself to think about fundamental changes.
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Come on man, that's just bs. From wikipedia:
> Researchers working at Bell Labs are credited with the development of radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, the photovoltaic cell, the charge-coupled device (CCD), information theory, the Unix operating system, and the programming languages B, C, C++, S, SNOBOL, AWK, AMPL, and others. Nine Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work completed at Bell Laboratories.
Previously, the lab was protected by an agreement between the US and AT&T where AT&T has a lawful monopoly but there were only so much it can earn and X% will always go to fundamental research, and that's why the lab was so successful.
That all changed when the federal government decided to break AT&T up in 1983. The for profit baby bells had no incentive to keep the lab and they proceeded to ruin it.
If you want to read a great book about when Bell Labs was really Bell Labs:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005GSZIWG/
> We pioneered customer reviews, 1-Click, personalized recommendations, Prime’s insanely-fast shipping, Just Walk Out shopping, the Climate Pledge, Kindle, Alexa, marketplace, infrastructure cloud computing, Career Choice, and much more.
1-click was hardly an "invention" IMO, the Kindle was "just another e-book reader" (arguably the best, but they did not "invent" the concept), Alexa is a Siri clone, and so forth.
Only "infrastructure cloud computing" is something there Amazon really took the lead and invented stuff. Not a small thing, but also hardly worthy of the bold claim in the article. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Sun, and many other companies seem to have done more invention than Amazon.
> I don’t know of another company
He didn't say contemporary company.
Jeff Bezos bragging about this is for sure illustrative of the dissonance billionaires have over the value of their companies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFfdnFOiXUU
I tend to look at Amazon and Apple and wonder. Both of them are valued at trillion dollars but the path couldn't have been more different. Apple being very deliberate, very long term, sometimes decade or more long, planning. Amazon on the other hand, hundreds of experiments, most fail and some succeed spectacularly. I remember an Amazon exec comparing these experiments to Cambrian explosion and I think it beautifully captures Amazon's DNA.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/dec/03/jeff-bezo...
* public cloud computing -- Amazon got it to work in a scalable and secure way.
* S3 object storage
* Dynamo -- A distributed, key-value store that ended up in products from S3 to Cassandra
* Redshift -- First cloud SQL data warehouse with ground-breaking ease of use
* RDS -- Cloud relational databases
* Amazon Aurora -- Relational DBMS that pushes the log and store into a virtualized, replicated storage layer
They've been particularly innovative in applications related to data.
I think it’s a little unreasonable to expect free support for such a technical product to be as good as that for the retail site.
Unless you want to pay 10% of your order for expedited service. Then those days drop from 5 to 3.
/s
When he started selling just books, he was laughed at by some people; but he had a why behind starting off with books. One thing is certain, Bezos has stayed consistent on his principles. His annual letters to his shareholders contain a lot of business wisdom.
I wrote about him covering the theme: Thinking as a means of leverage in https://leveragethoughts.substack.com/p/jeff-bezos-amazon-an...
His dad was a Cuban immigrant who worked as an engineer at Exxon.
As a founder of Amazon - having built Amazon from nothing, Bezos probably had certain in-built persona and gravitas which probably helped with leadership talent acquisition and vision setting in all domains of the business universe. The opportunity to report to Jeff Bezos was probably a huge selling point - no matter what industry you were coming from.
Its interesting Amazon never attempted to give Andy Jassy a trial run as a public facing COO running both sides of the house.
I do agree that the shitstorm over warehouse workers, automation, unionization etc. is only going to get a lot worse over the next few years, and Jassy may even find handling that becoming his primary job.
As noted by others, the shipping cost-to-item-average-cost ratio is precisely why Jeff chose books to start with. But yes, he also looked way out (even if he couldn't see as clearly as some people seem to think he could).
Though i imagine a lot of reasons justified books.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWRbTnE1PEM
It's amazing what he's been able to do. Good for him.
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