
Employee #1: Amazon - craigcannon
http://themacro.com/articles/2016/09/employee-1-amazon/
======
mikeleeorg
_Craig : How did you troubleshoot? Today I use Stack Overflow constantly. What
would you do when you ran into a bug that you couldn’t figure out?_

 _Shel : Stay up late._

Hahaha. I remember building an online art gallery back in 1996. It was for an
internship. I got it because I bluffed and said I knew HTML. After I was
hired, I purchased a book on HTML. Turns out, the company's "CTO" did the same
thing.

We both learned on the job and stayed up late trying to put that site
together. It's almost hard to remember how "primitive" that was now that
there's Google and SO.

~~~
0xmohit
[http://imgur.com/gallery/SZPjHwz](http://imgur.com/gallery/SZPjHwz)

[https://twitter.com/thepracticaldev/status/71639058321702912...](https://twitter.com/thepracticaldev/status/716390583217029124)

~~~
mikeleeorg
So true. So, so true.

So true that I often question technical interviewing practices that look
solely for ability to memorize complex algorithms exactly, vs ability to seek
out an even better solution and apply it effectively.

~~~
Benjammer
I recently went through a final-round interview process, and a large piece of
the technical part of the interview involved handing me a laptop connected to
the internet and the interviewer saying "Build a REST API that can handle
these 4 curl requests and respond correctly. Use any technology you want. You
have access to Google and anything else you can find. You have about an hour,
I'll be back to check on you in 20 minutes. Go!"

I felt like this was SUCH a better test of my abilities as a professional
programmer versus remembering specific algorithms or reciting "best practices"
for X, Y and Z.

~~~
wallacoloo
Oh man, I'd probably spend the first half of that time adjusting to somebody
else's development environment, and the second half troubleshooting all the
runtime errors caused by various ':w's and 'u's scattered throughout the code
(unless it were an OS I was familiar with, I'd hesitate to implement this in a
language that requires configuring a compiler & build system. Fortunately,
most web software seems to already be written in portable languages).

~~~
jon-wood
The better solution I've seen to this problem is for them to warn in advance
that something like that will happen, suggest bringing your own machine with
you, and point you at a skeleton git repository to start working on.

------
0xmohit
This is interesting:

    
    
      Craig: Had you and Jeff stayed close?
    
      Shel: Not really. When he replaced me in my original job and I
      was moved into the CTO slot, I was nominally in charge of
      architecture, but in fact that just meant rubber stamping
      projects that were 95% complete by the time I saw them. That
      was all after having told me that my job was mine as long as I
      wanted it. And I didn’t have resources other than myself to
      work on anything I was interested in either. So I would say we
      were not really on particularly friendly terms at that point.

~~~
AstralStorm
Beautiful example of Peter principle and how to promote someone into
uselessness and inefficacy.

~~~
mywittyname
I think this was more honorary than anything. It sounds like he didn't
necessarily have the skills necessary to be a true executive, but putting him
on a team where he's managed by someone else would seem like a slap in the
face. This was a decent way to keep him compensated fairly for his past
contributions.

I've seen at other companies where people like this are moved into "R&D" so
they can keep working on cool projects while the company can do what's needed
to grow.

Edit: fixed typo

~~~
cookiecaper
Personally I actually wish more liberal use would be made of this strategy.
I've worked at a lot of companies where obstructionist employees are kept in
their slots due to management's concern over the personal fallout (both for
their relationship with the employee and for the employee's relationships with
others).

It's none of my business whether they stay on payroll or not, and I don't mind
at all if they do if that's what management desires, I just want them put in a
sandbox where they can't do damage anymore. Scoot them over to R&D, give them
a title with a nice ring to it, heck, even give them a pay raise, but just
keep them out of the way.

~~~
gtirloni
That's an awful way to burn someone. Better to fire this person or really put
an effort to find a better position that he/she really wants.

~~~
hibikir
We are talking startups: Your typical early employee that didn't grow past mid
level dev is out of position by year four. Even though their options are
vested, chances are that can't afford to exercise them, and will be worth zero
if they quit. Therefore, firing those kind of people as a matter of course is
probably not what they want. You joined early for the great equity (a bad idea
in the first place). Imagine how bad it would be if you risked getting fired
if you don't grow into a good architect!

------
danielvf
On modern technology:

"You walk down the streets, you have to weave around people standing there in
random orientations in the middle of the sidewalk looking at their cellphones.
Then you see people speaking robotically so that their speech recognizer can
understand them. Now they are running around in mobs in parks with their
phones in front of them trying to catch imaginary animals. I don’t necessarily
see all that as a positive development."

~~~
afarrell
People, or at least children, have been running around in parks trying to
catch invisible animals for decades. As adults, it has definitely been a
positive development for my wife and I.

~~~
towndrunk
"it has definitely been a positive development for my wife and I."

Seriously? Just curious... what age range are you in?

~~~
paulddraper
Were you asking because of his interests or because of his grammar?

~~~
spdionis
What's wrong with his grammar?

~~~
paulddraper
s/I/me/

~~~
spdionis
I'm not a native speaker but I do think "my wife and I" is perfectly legit,
although maybe not in use in america.

------
amzn-336495
An Amazon employee less than #10 does a seminar about SDE careers at Amazon
where he/she brags about how Amazon fired all their early engineers because
"they weren't good enough." Yeah the people who got Amazon off the ground
weren't good enough. Then he/she talks about how if you want to be promoted
you better start sucking up to the people deciding your fate in "smoke filled
rooms" because you're wrong if you think it has anything to do with your work.
This is supposed to be a seminar on how to get promoted at Amazon. It is truly
vile and goes to the core of Amazon's culture. Smart people are only there to
be exploited.

So I read this article interested to see how long engineer #1 lasted: 5 years.

------
strangetimes
I was hoping Shel would talk about using Lisp in the early days of Amazon.

[https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/tour-de-
babel#TOC-...](https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/tour-de-babel#TOC-
Lisp)

~~~
skaphan
It was used only in the form of Emacs Lisp, as a set of tools for customer
service folks to make replying to typical email easier for them. They pretty
much built all that themselves (and they didn't start out as programmers).

~~~
DonHopkins
How do you do, fellow Kaleidan [1]?

We worked together with Eric Benson and Dan Bornstein on ScriptX [2], which
was basically Lisp with objects instead of parenthesis.

I found ScriptX quite useful for web programming [3]: "Link Globally, Interact
Locally"!

ScriptX's legacy lives on: After Kaleida shut down, John Wainwright, the
architect of ScriptX, created a very similar language called MaxScript [4] for
3D Studio Max, which I later used at Maxis for programming the character
animation content pipeline for The Sims [5].

[1] [http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-do-you-do-fellow-
kids](http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-do-you-do-fellow-kids)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ScriptX](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ScriptX)

[3] [http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/lang/scriptx/scriptx-
www.htm...](http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/lang/scriptx/scriptx-www.html)

[4]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autodesk_3ds_Max#Features](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autodesk_3ds_Max#Features)

[5]
[http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/30](http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/30)

~~~
napworth
+1 for Don. Thanks for all your hard work on The Sims!

------
pault
I have a friend that got an offer to be employee #15 or so, but turned it down
because "nobody wants to buy books online!".

~~~
bbcbasic
Ironically there is some truth in that, with moving towards ebooks, selling
other shit and of course AWS

------
thecus
Multiple people have asked about his wealth. In the S-1 it gives you a good
overview of the minimum amount of wealth generation potential he had.

His agreement stipulated that he had ISOs for 709,568 shares at a strike price
of $.001471.

[http://www.nasdaq.com/markets/ipos/filing.ashx?filingid=3847...](http://www.nasdaq.com/markets/ipos/filing.ashx?filingid=384706)

"This Amended and Restated Incentive Stock Option Letter Agreement (this
"Agreement") amends and supersedes paragraph 2(c) of the Employment Agreement
between you and the Company dated October 24, 1994, regarding the grant to you
of a stock option (the "Option") for the purchase of 709,568 shares (the
"Option Shares") of the Common Stock of Amazon.com, Inc., a Delaware
corporation (the "Company") at an exercise price of $.001471 per share
(reflects stock split effected on November 23, 1996)."

~~~
peter303
A lot of people would haved bailed during the dot.crash of 2000. Amazon lost
was high flyer and lost over 80% of peak value. Who knew it would become atop
ten most valuable company.

------
abc_lisper
The most important question left unasked :

Did he make enough money to retire after it?

~~~
BatFastard
Unquestionably! Lets say he had a typical 5%, no conservatively lets guess 1%.
So 1% of 366 billion! Let you do the math. On the other hand if he had 10%
which would not be unreasonable, he would be very rich.

~~~
giarc
A quote from a 2011 Geekwire article. " Jeff was working on it full-time
already, and his wife, Mackenzie, was writing checks every once in a while.
But that was it. I didn’t get founder’s stock."

0\. [http://www.geekwire.com/2011/meet-shel-kaphan-amazoncom-
empl...](http://www.geekwire.com/2011/meet-shel-kaphan-amazoncom-employee-1/)

~~~
phonon
Nope.

[http://www.secinfo.com/dr6nd.818y.s.htm#1stPage](http://www.secinfo.com/dr6nd.818y.s.htm#1stPage)

[http://www.geekwire.com/2011/meet-shel-kaphan-amazoncom-
empl...](http://www.geekwire.com/2011/meet-shel-kaphan-amazoncom-
employee-1/4/)

"So, after five years were up — and my stock was all vested — I probably would
have left a little earlier if that had not been the issue.

 _So, did you hang on to all of the shares because Amazon hit a rough patch
just after you left?_

“I don’t know what the effect on morale inside the company was since I wasn’t
there. But I did do a lot of selling during those times, because from the
outside, without knowing what was going on inside the company anymore, I
didn’t know if it was going to be a casualty of that era or not, so I cashed
out quite a bit of my position. But I did hold on to some of it, and I
continue to.”"

Probably between 1 and 2%, I would guess. Some of which he cashed out when the
stock was at a low. So between what his current shares are worth now and what
he cashed out, probably at least $100 million.

EDIT: His foundation has $53 million in assets, so that should give an idea...

[http://990s.foundationcenter.org/990pf_pdf_archive/651/65121...](http://990s.foundationcenter.org/990pf_pdf_archive/651/651211107/651211107_201412_990PF.pdf?_ga=1.239708291.1265744493.1455540321)

~~~
erubin
A lot of money to be sure, but he'd have an order of magnitude or two more if
he were the last cofounder instead of the first employee.

~~~
phonon
Well, he was given the option to put up some money with Jeff at the beginning
and declined. I'm guessing that would have doubled his eventual stake...

 _It was all done on a threadbare budget. At first Bezos backed the company
himself with $10,000 in cash, and over the next sixteen months, he would
finance the startup with an additional $84,000 in interest-free loans,
according to public documents. Kaphan’s contract required him to commit to
buying $5,000 of stock upon joining the company. He passed on the option to
buy an additional $20,000 in shares, since he was already taking a 50 percent
pay cut to work at the startup and would, like Bezos, earn only $64,000 a
year. “The whole thing seemed pretty iffy at that stage,” says Kaphan, who
some consider an Amazon cofounder. “There wasn’t really anything except for a
guy with a barking laugh building desks out of doors in his converted garage,
just like he’d seen in my Santa Cruz home office. I was taking a big risk by
moving and accepting a low salary and so even though I had some savings, I
didn’t feel comfortable committing more than I did.”_

(From "The Everything Store")

------
phonon
His review of "The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon"

[https://www.amazon.com/review/R3J863C5ZP53BA](https://www.amazon.com/review/R3J863C5ZP53BA)

"I wasn't really planning on reviewing this book, because I was mentioned in
it several times and it didn't seem appropriate. But several other people who
were also mentioned in the book have already posted reviews, and in fact,
MacKenzie Bezos, in her well known 1-star review, suggested that other
"characters" might "step out of books" and "speak for themselves".

I was at Amazon for the first 5 years of its existence, so I also have
firsthand experience of those times at the company, and I have been a fairly
close observer since I left. By and large I found Mr. Stone's treatment of
that which I know firsthand to be accurate -- at least as accurate as it is
possible to be at this great a remove, and with no contemporaneous
documentation of the early chaotic days or access to certain of the
principals. Relying on people's memories of nearly twenty-year-old events is
of necessity somewhat perilous. Of course there are a few minor errors here
and there, but I don't have firsthand knowledge of important mistakes much
less anything that appears to be intentionally misleading. But there are a few
minor glitches. In my case, I can testify that I did not, in fact, have a
bushy beard at age 17 when I worked at the Whole Earth Truck Store & Catalog
in Menlo Park. It was a publisher and seller of books and other things, not a
lending library. It was in a storefront and was no longer a mobile service
operating out of a truck by the time I worked there (p. 32). But I do not
think this is a reason to disregard the entire book; it's just some not
terribly relevant detail the author got a bit wrong in a way that doesn't
change the story materially. MacKenzie listed one error, which didn't seem
especially awful or material to me, and then referred only vaguely to "way too
many inaccuracies". Without a more explicit list of mistakes it is hard to
know what to make of that. Breaking news: a new 372 page book has some errors!

Since Mr. Stone did not have access to Jeff Bezos for this book, but had to
rely on previous interviews and the accounts of others, it would be surprising
if there weren't a few mistakes regarding his thought processes. As part of my
agreement to be interviewed for this book, I was allowed to read a draft of
the chapter which covered the time I was there, and I offered a number of
corrections, some of which Mr. Stone was able to verify and incorporate. To
the extent I am quoted, my quotes are, while not complete, fair and in
context. I don't love or agree with everything that Mr. Stone wrote about me
-- especially his broader conclusions regarding the circumstances of my
departure from the company -- but I do think it was fair and reasonable. I am
aware of at least one other interviewee who was also given a chance to check
over the chapter in which his story was discussed. I obviously can't know
this, but I suspect that if Mr. Stone had been granted access to Jeff Bezos,
that he would have extended a similar courtesy. I have a pretty high degree of
confidence that Mr. Stone made a significant effort, and did what was in his
power, to make the book accurate.

The irony is, of course, that by reviewing the book as MacKenzie Bezos did,
she has brought an immense amount more attention to it -- there are dozens of
articles referring to her review via Google News this morning -- and its sales
rank has shot up considerably. The book is not a fawning hagiography, but it
is also hardly a completely negative account either. It describes not only
Amazon's ultra-hardball business practices, but the better aspects of their
services and products as well. To the extent of my knowledge it is a pretty
realistic account, though necessarily incomplete. Of course Mr. Stone has his
own point of view, and of course he does what nearly all biographers do, which
is to impute thoughts and emotions to the people he writes about. It would be
mighty dull reading without that, but I think readers are generally smart
enough to understand that when they read biographies, especially unauthorized
biographies, the author has to recreate some kind of persona to make the
subject appear life-like. That doesn't make it fiction. This was written as a
business book for a popular audience anyway, not as an academic treatise, so
expecting every "Bezos thought..." to be footnoted, or couched in hypothetical
language, is not realistic.

Especially in comparison to the sad collection of awful books that have been
written on this subject, this one is much more detailed, more interesting, and
a lot more deeply reported. Sure, there is plenty more that could be written
about, and maybe someday somebody will. If and when that happens, I can only
hope it is also "unauthorized" and not sanitized by a corporate PR department,
and that some real investigative journalism is done, like Mr. Stone did here."

------
DINKDINK
>We were even talking about possibly locating it in Santa Cruz. This was in
spring of ‘94. Jeff went back home to New York and started thinking about
where he wanted to locate. We were looking at office space in Santa Cruz but
as he learned more about mail-order business he eventually decided it made
more sense to be in a smaller population state or one that didn’t charge sales
tax.

How California lost out on hosting Amazon because of taxes

~~~
blang
Not true. Washington has a high sales tax rate. Washington won out because of
its smaller population.

~~~
RyJones
no income tax in Washington, as well. B&O[0] taxes can make up for that,
though.

[0]
[http://dor.wa.gov/content/findtaxesandrates/bandotax/](http://dor.wa.gov/content/findtaxesandrates/bandotax/)

------
creeble
_Well, yeah. Those days were still before everything that’s happened with
glorifying startups. If you were going to do a startup business, there wasn’t
a huge expectation that it was going to be glamorous in any particular kind of
way. You were going to work really hard and maybe it was going to work, though
probably not._

Indeed.

Some might even go so far as to say:

    
    
      if (glorifying_startups > BUBBLE_MAX) { kaboom(); }
    

Anyway, great stories!

------
georgewsinger
> He connected us with Jeff because he knew that Jeff was going to leave to
> start a web-related business that he had analyzed for this hedge fund. For
> whatever reason, that company didn’t want to pursue it but Jeff did.

This makes it sound as if (i.e., connotes that) the idea for Amazon was DE
Shaw's, not Jeff's. Is this true?? I was under the impression that Bezos
personally brainstormed a bunch of ideas for businesses that he thought would
be useful with the new internet -- with books being low on the list -- and
then, over time as more analysis was done (by Jeff), it rose to the top. I'm
sure he talked with fellow DE Shaw employees about his thought process along
the way. But the idea was his.

I got this from internet folklore + reading the Jeff Bezos bio that came out a
few months ago. Am I right or wrong here? I find this historical fact pretty
interesting, so want to get it right :)

~~~
rwmj
The "idea for Amazon" being "bookshop" \+ "on the internet" is not a something
that can or should be owned or protected.

------
Twirrim
> For one reason or another, sorting out architectural issues to scale more
> gracefully was something I could never convince Jeff to allocate resources
> to do. There were always too many customer-facing features that needed to be
> developed.

Some things never change.

------
Osiris30
Prior discussion from the Geekwire article:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2975122](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2975122)

------
ahmetyas01
I can't imagine how much he would worth now if he got any stock option like
the employees of today's startups.

------
enahs-sf
Go Banana Slugs!

------
linkmotif
Woah that last question and answer...

------
Radle
"Shel Kaphan was the first employee at Amazon. _He is currently pursuing
personal interests and still living in Seattle._ "

Yes bro, live the dream.

