Seconded. Please. Share as much as you can.
One of the problems with properly documenting the first year or so is that the people involved mostly don't want to talk about it, or want to turn it into the stuff of legend.
The one person who was there for the full first 5 years besides Jeff (and Mackenzie, to whatever extent she was deeply involved, which I never sensed was a lot, but I may be wrong about that) doesn't like talking about Amazon publicly (though he did a little for a recent PBS documentary). Lots of other people came and went during that time (including me), and we're all a bit like the blind folk feeling out the elephant: we know part of the story, but not the full picture.
Jeff himself doesn't seem very interested in talking about the early period, or if he does, it seems important to him that the story describes a trajectory that obviously connects with what was to come (which is not entirely unfair).
The people who stayed for the long haul generally don't want to talk, it seems; the people who left mostly have not-so-positive stories to tell at this point (partly because of the behemoth that the company has become).
Personally, I think that Amazon's complete failure to take the high road in creating the model of retail in the 21st century is the more important story than details from the early days. The appalling treatment of employees, the conflicts between operating a marketplace and being a seller within that marketplace, and the general emphasis on our lives as consumers instead of the more important roles of citizen and employee .... this is what's really important about the Amazon story in my opinion.
Oh wait, it's HN. You want to hear about how I pushed and pulled C++ objects to and from Oracle in 1994, and how integrated that into NSAPI, amirite? :)
I have served as a fact witness for Amazon in a couple of patent cases, saving the company very large amounts of money. I'd like to think he's aware of this, although I have no basis for that.
I wonder what Bezos thinks of himself. Does he envision himself as a self-made man, or does he see his success as the result of the hard work of many thousands or millions of people?
I'm inclined to say the former, especially given his treatment of the Amazon workforce, as you laid out in your public statements. I would love to hear more of your story, and I'll look for any documentaries with you. Thanks for your answer :).
Even if you just want to say no, just say hello in any case :)
In addition, we had to invent a whole new way of doing what was essentially mail order - there were several mail order packages available in 1994, but all of them were predicated on the notion that you either had stuff in stock, or were going to order a bunch more so that you had it in stock. Amazon was different: in the early days, we had essentially nothing in stock, so we had to invent an entirely new way of managing order flow and stock management.
No. In fact, everything you shared is really interesting.
By the way, I was at AWS from 2008 to 2014, I started when the team was about 150 people or so. It's now in the ballpark of 50k I think, or even north of that.
It's interesting how the "beginnings" of a business that eventually gets big are always "adapted" to current times.
Sure. Collecting all the pieces and building a full picture is the job of a historian.