11 ms·

Employee #1: Amazon

368 points by craigcannon 10y ago

pault 10y ago
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 10y ago
  Ironically there is some truth in that, with moving towards ebooks, selling other shit and of course AWS
0xmohit 10y ago
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 10y ago
  Beautiful example of Peter principle and how to promote someone into uselessness and inefficacy.
  - 0xmohit 10y ago
    http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-w...
  - mywittyname 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      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.
      - jsprogrammer 10y ago
        I believe Amazon compensates with equity, so, if you were a co-worker of his, it would be your business if he stayed on payroll.
        0xCMP 10y ago
        I think he means it still wouldn't matter to him because someone like the guy interviewed would have obviously already contributed/was there early/etc.
      - gtirloni 10y ago
        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.
  - protomyth 10y ago
    How is that the Peter Principle? It sounds like he was shunted into a ceremonial position rather than any incompetence on his part in the position.
    - LeifCarrotson 10y ago
      He failed to gain greater power in the organization and accomplish greater tasks after being promoted out of the role in which he was very competent. This implies that he wasn't very good at being a CTO. If he was, he would have had a bigger role in the projects and a larger team with which to accomplish his desired tasks. This may have been intentional as a courtesy rather than accidental due to the Peter Principle, but the result is the same. It is the opposite of the Dilbert Principle, where incompetent people are promoted into a position at which they are sufficiently abstracted from real work that they can no longer do too much damage.
      - protomyth 10y ago
        > He failed to gain greater power in the organization and accomplish greater tasks after being promoted out of the role in which he was very competent. He didn't fail, as he was put in a role with no actual power. The Peter Principle is being promoted into a role you are incompetent at. He was shunted away into a ceremonial position with no power. He didn't even have staff. > This may have been intentional as a courtesy rather than accidental due to the Peter Principle, but the result is the same. I'm not talking about the ultimate result, I am talking about the definition of the Peter Principle.
      - sliverstorm 10y ago
        Where does an awesome CTO get promoted to? It kind of seems like the end of the road, with the possible exception of CEO, but that position is probably occupied.
        0xCMP 10y ago
        Other companies I'd guess.
  - 0xmohit 10y ago
    Quoting from The Peter Principle: in most hierarchies, super-competence is more objectionable than incompetence. disrupts and therefore violates the first commandment of hierarchical life: the hierarchy must be preserved.
  - gumby 10y ago
    I wouldn't call that the Peter Principle; he wasn't promoted above his skill set (per se) due to things like time in grade, which is what Laurence Peter wrote about. In the Peter Principle book the person causes damage through having responsibility without the ability to execute in that particular role. As others mentioned it was more a great way to reward someone who now didn't really have a specific spot. This is frankly the most common use of the CTO spot. The best description I heard from a founder-moved-into-CTO was "Chief Talking Officer": they trotted him out to give talks but basically he had no other responsibility.
    - AstralStorm 10y ago
      Great way to reward someone by not using their best skills and making them essentially ineffective? He said he became essentially a reviewer placed too late in the development process to matter. Peter principle concerns efficacy, not necessarily active damage. "PR guy" (direct marketing) is actually a role many founders do well.
    - DonHopkins 10y ago
      John Gage's [1] title at Sun was "Science Officer". But he sure did a lot of cool useful Official Science Stuff. He was also on Richard Nixon's Enemy List, which is the kind of community service experience that I am always impressed to see on a resume. At Sun, if they didn't actually want an executive to continue working for the company, they'd promote them to Vice President of Looking for a New Job. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gage
  - kamaal 10y ago
    No, he was likely promoted because he wouldn't cause much trouble as approving authority. This is sort of being politically nice is rewarded in every institution. People like this are not given any genuine power per se. But since they listen to the powers and more or less do exactly as they say, they are put in positions where they can't be much trouble and are rather useful the higher authorities political goals.
    - bbcbasic 10y ago
      Like Nelson “Big Head” Bighetti
  - __derek__ 10y ago
    In THE EVERYTHING STORE, which I happen to be reading, it's noted that Bezos told Kephan early on that he would have his job as long as he wanted it. This was Bezos's compromise, basically: stick to the letter of his promise while doing what he had to do for the company. As others have noted, it was not an example of the Peter Principle because it moved SK out of the hierarchy.
    - AstralStorm 10y ago
      It is an example because hierarchy is not required and does not necessarily have to be linear. What you saw is specifically moving a good developer and architect into a managerial (and quite irrelevant) role. It is almost a textbook example.
  - DonHopkins 10y ago
    I chuckled when I saw that question. Beautiful example of being tactful enough not to reply "No fucking way would I want to stay close to that psycho!"
danielvf 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    "it has definitely been a positive development for my wife and I." Seriously? Just curious... what age range are you in?
    - radicaledward 10y ago
      I'm not the parent, but the new Pokemon game has been amazing for me. I'm 28 and single though. So obviously the target market. I've done more walking since the game came out than I had done in years. I've seen a lot of nature too. I found an owl in the park near my house. It was so close I could almost reach out and touch it. In the context of the article, Kaphan is talking about technologies that isolate versus technologies that connect people. For the examples he gives: 1 seems to be neutral to me (people talking robotically to voice recognition systems). This is neither isolating nor connecting. It is just a different means of interfacing with a computer. I'm sure someone somewhere made a similar argument when the typewriter was invented. 1 seems isolating. Looking at your phone instead of being mentally present at your current location can be isolating. But then it depends on what you are doing. If you are participating in a text message communication, that's connecting you to someone else while isolating you from the physical world. But Pokemon seems like it falls in the "connecting" category. I have something new in common with random strangers that we can discuss. I go out with my friends to play the game. The downside for some people seems to be that I am now physically present connecting with them and they would really rather I didn't. They liked the park empty and quiet. Of course there are the incidents of people playing while driving or the one guy who walked off a cliff that one time (99% of the articles I've read slamming Pokemon Go mention the same 3 Reddit posts without attribution). But for me personally, I'm more present and walking around when I play Pokemon than I am when I'm posting on HN.
strangetimes 10y ago
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-Lisp https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/tour-de-babel#TOC-...
- djsumdog 10y ago
  Tour de Babel is one of my favourite posts. I feel it's a pretty objective look at languages.
- parrish 10y ago
  I was wishing for the same when I saw the title.
- skaphan 10y ago
  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).
  - nocarrier 10y ago
    There was more Lisp influence than just the CS macros you mention here. Eric Benson was a major contributor to Lucid Emacs and many early Amazon engineers had Lisp experience. SICP was practically issued to every new software engineer--it was that popular. The template language for Amazon's website at the time (catsubst) was a Lisp-inspired prefix notation language with a relatively small number of functions. For example, there was an add macro but not a subtract macro, so to do A-B, you had to say ${add A -B}. I might have the exact syntax wrong since it's been 20 years.
    - skaphan 10y ago
      EB and I both worked at Lucid, which produced a Common Lisp system, not to my knowledge a version of Emacs (though maybe so after I left in 1989?). Some other early employees knew and liked Lisp, but we didn't use it on any core functionality. The text substitution logic you mention, that I wrote, was really simple and not particularly Lisp-like. Though again, after I handed it off, who knows what happened.
abc_lisper 10y ago
The most important question left unasked : Did he make enough money to retire after it?
- gumby 10y ago
  You could just look him up in the S-1 to answer the question. I have talked to him a couple of times and although I have no idea what the sum is yes, he made enough over the years to retire.
  - abc_lisper 10y ago
    Thats cool.
- kensai 10y ago
  His LinkedIn account says that the occupation is "Philanthropy". That probably means he has more than enough to retire. :D https://www.linkedin.com/in/shelkaphan https://www.linkedin.com/in/shelkaphan
- BatFastard 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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-employee-1/ http://www.geekwire.com/2011/meet-shel-kaphan-amazoncom-empl...
    - nevir 10y ago
      No founders stock doesn't imply no stock of any type.
mikeleeorg 10y ago
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 10y ago
  http://imgur.com/gallery/SZPjHwz http://imgur.com/gallery/SZPjHwz https://twitter.com/thepracticaldev/status/716390583217029124 https://twitter.com/thepracticaldev/status/71639058321702912...
  - mikeleeorg 10y ago
    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.
    - grahamburger 10y ago
      At a previous job I put this in to practice. I would give interviewees a short list of questions on a piece of paper and after the interview they could use a browser and take as much time as they needed to answer the questions. Some were logic type questions that would be difficult to Google, some were just process questions that very few people would know off the top of their head but should be able to Google. The idea was to see if someone could find answers when they ran in to problems. Got some great hires using that technique (and avoided some hires that might have been disastrous!) HR killed it, though.
      - 0xmohit 10y ago
        Open book exams are known to be tougher! I don't mind giving candidates access to language reference manuals, man pages and such.
linkmotif 10y ago
Woah that last question and answer...
phonon 10y ago
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."
Radle 10y ago
"Shel Kaphan was the first employee at Amazon. He is currently pursuing personal interests and still living in Seattle." Yes bro, live the dream.
ahmetyas01 10y ago
I can't imagine how much he would worth now if he got any stock option like the employees of today's startups.
Twirrim 10y ago
> 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.
DINKDINK 10y ago
>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 10y ago
  Not true. Washington has a high sales tax rate. Washington won out because of its smaller population.
  - RyJones 10y ago
    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/
georgewsinger 10y ago
> 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 10y ago
  The "idea for Amazon" being "bookshop" + "on the internet" is not a something that can or should be owned or protected.
creeble 10y ago
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!
enahs-sf 10y ago
Go Banana Slugs!
thecus 10y ago
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=384706 http://www.nasdaq.com/markets/ipos/filing.ashx?filingid=3847... "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 10y ago
  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.
amzn-336495 10y ago
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.
Osiris30 10y ago
Prior discussion from the Geekwire article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2975122 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2975122

368 points by craigcannon 10y ago

pault 10y ago

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 10y ago
Ironically there is some truth in that, with moving towards ebooks, selling other shit and of course AWS

0xmohit 10y ago

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 10y ago
Beautiful example of Peter principle and how to promote someone into uselessness and inefficacy.
- 0xmohit 10y ago
  http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-w...
- mywittyname 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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.
    - jsprogrammer 10y ago
      I believe Amazon compensates with equity, so, if you were a co-worker of his, it would be your business if he stayed on payroll.
      - 0xCMP 10y ago
        I think he means it still wouldn't matter to him because someone like the guy interviewed would have obviously already contributed/was there early/etc.
    - gtirloni 10y ago
      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.
- protomyth 10y ago
  How is that the Peter Principle? It sounds like he was shunted into a ceremonial position rather than any incompetence on his part in the position.
  - LeifCarrotson 10y ago
    He failed to gain greater power in the organization and accomplish greater tasks after being promoted out of the role in which he was very competent. This implies that he wasn't very good at being a CTO. If he was, he would have had a bigger role in the projects and a larger team with which to accomplish his desired tasks. This may have been intentional as a courtesy rather than accidental due to the Peter Principle, but the result is the same. It is the opposite of the Dilbert Principle, where incompetent people are promoted into a position at which they are sufficiently abstracted from real work that they can no longer do too much damage.
    - protomyth 10y ago
      > He failed to gain greater power in the organization and accomplish greater tasks after being promoted out of the role in which he was very competent. He didn't fail, as he was put in a role with no actual power. The Peter Principle is being promoted into a role you are incompetent at. He was shunted away into a ceremonial position with no power. He didn't even have staff. > This may have been intentional as a courtesy rather than accidental due to the Peter Principle, but the result is the same. I'm not talking about the ultimate result, I am talking about the definition of the Peter Principle.
    - sliverstorm 10y ago
      Where does an awesome CTO get promoted to? It kind of seems like the end of the road, with the possible exception of CEO, but that position is probably occupied.
      - 0xCMP 10y ago
        Other companies I'd guess.
- 0xmohit 10y ago
  Quoting from The Peter Principle: in most hierarchies, super-competence is more objectionable than incompetence. disrupts and therefore violates the first commandment of hierarchical life: the hierarchy must be preserved.
- gumby 10y ago
  I wouldn't call that the Peter Principle; he wasn't promoted above his skill set (per se) due to things like time in grade, which is what Laurence Peter wrote about. In the Peter Principle book the person causes damage through having responsibility without the ability to execute in that particular role. As others mentioned it was more a great way to reward someone who now didn't really have a specific spot. This is frankly the most common use of the CTO spot. The best description I heard from a founder-moved-into-CTO was "Chief Talking Officer": they trotted him out to give talks but basically he had no other responsibility.
  - AstralStorm 10y ago
    Great way to reward someone by not using their best skills and making them essentially ineffective? He said he became essentially a reviewer placed too late in the development process to matter. Peter principle concerns efficacy, not necessarily active damage. "PR guy" (direct marketing) is actually a role many founders do well.
  - DonHopkins 10y ago
    John Gage's [1] title at Sun was "Science Officer". But he sure did a lot of cool useful Official Science Stuff. He was also on Richard Nixon's Enemy List, which is the kind of community service experience that I am always impressed to see on a resume. At Sun, if they didn't actually want an executive to continue working for the company, they'd promote them to Vice President of Looking for a New Job. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gage
- kamaal 10y ago
  No, he was likely promoted because he wouldn't cause much trouble as approving authority. This is sort of being politically nice is rewarded in every institution. People like this are not given any genuine power per se. But since they listen to the powers and more or less do exactly as they say, they are put in positions where they can't be much trouble and are rather useful the higher authorities political goals.
  - bbcbasic 10y ago
    Like Nelson “Big Head” Bighetti
- __derek__ 10y ago
  In THE EVERYTHING STORE, which I happen to be reading, it's noted that Bezos told Kephan early on that he would have his job as long as he wanted it. This was Bezos's compromise, basically: stick to the letter of his promise while doing what he had to do for the company. As others have noted, it was not an example of the Peter Principle because it moved SK out of the hierarchy.
  - AstralStorm 10y ago
    It is an example because hierarchy is not required and does not necessarily have to be linear. What you saw is specifically moving a good developer and architect into a managerial (and quite irrelevant) role. It is almost a textbook example.
- DonHopkins 10y ago
  I chuckled when I saw that question. Beautiful example of being tactful enough not to reply "No fucking way would I want to stay close to that psycho!"

danielvf 10y ago

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 10y ago
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 10y ago
  "it has definitely been a positive development for my wife and I." Seriously? Just curious... what age range are you in?
  - radicaledward 10y ago
    I'm not the parent, but the new Pokemon game has been amazing for me. I'm 28 and single though. So obviously the target market. I've done more walking since the game came out than I had done in years. I've seen a lot of nature too. I found an owl in the park near my house. It was so close I could almost reach out and touch it. In the context of the article, Kaphan is talking about technologies that isolate versus technologies that connect people. For the examples he gives: 1 seems to be neutral to me (people talking robotically to voice recognition systems). This is neither isolating nor connecting. It is just a different means of interfacing with a computer. I'm sure someone somewhere made a similar argument when the typewriter was invented. 1 seems isolating. Looking at your phone instead of being mentally present at your current location can be isolating. But then it depends on what you are doing. If you are participating in a text message communication, that's connecting you to someone else while isolating you from the physical world. But Pokemon seems like it falls in the "connecting" category. I have something new in common with random strangers that we can discuss. I go out with my friends to play the game. The downside for some people seems to be that I am now physically present connecting with them and they would really rather I didn't. They liked the park empty and quiet. Of course there are the incidents of people playing while driving or the one guy who walked off a cliff that one time (99% of the articles I've read slamming Pokemon Go mention the same 3 Reddit posts without attribution). But for me personally, I'm more present and walking around when I play Pokemon than I am when I'm posting on HN.

strangetimes 10y ago

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

djsumdog 10y ago
Tour de Babel is one of my favourite posts. I feel it's a pretty objective look at languages.
parrish 10y ago
I was wishing for the same when I saw the title.
skaphan 10y ago
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).
- nocarrier 10y ago
  There was more Lisp influence than just the CS macros you mention here. Eric Benson was a major contributor to Lucid Emacs and many early Amazon engineers had Lisp experience. SICP was practically issued to every new software engineer--it was that popular. The template language for Amazon's website at the time (catsubst) was a Lisp-inspired prefix notation language with a relatively small number of functions. For example, there was an add macro but not a subtract macro, so to do A-B, you had to say ${add A -B}. I might have the exact syntax wrong since it's been 20 years.
  - skaphan 10y ago
    EB and I both worked at Lucid, which produced a Common Lisp system, not to my knowledge a version of Emacs (though maybe so after I left in 1989?). Some other early employees knew and liked Lisp, but we didn't use it on any core functionality. The text substitution logic you mention, that I wrote, was really simple and not particularly Lisp-like. Though again, after I handed it off, who knows what happened.

abc_lisper 10y ago

The most important question left unasked : Did he make enough money to retire after it?

gumby 10y ago
You could just look him up in the S-1 to answer the question. I have talked to him a couple of times and although I have no idea what the sum is yes, he made enough over the years to retire.
- abc_lisper 10y ago
  Thats cool.
kensai 10y ago
His LinkedIn account says that the occupation is "Philanthropy". That probably means he has more than enough to retire. :D https://www.linkedin.com/in/shelkaphan https://www.linkedin.com/in/shelkaphan
BatFastard 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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-employee-1/ http://www.geekwire.com/2011/meet-shel-kaphan-amazoncom-empl...
  - nevir 10y ago
    No founders stock doesn't imply no stock of any type.

mikeleeorg 10y ago

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 10y ago
http://imgur.com/gallery/SZPjHwz http://imgur.com/gallery/SZPjHwz https://twitter.com/thepracticaldev/status/716390583217029124 https://twitter.com/thepracticaldev/status/71639058321702912...
- mikeleeorg 10y ago
  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.
  - grahamburger 10y ago
    At a previous job I put this in to practice. I would give interviewees a short list of questions on a piece of paper and after the interview they could use a browser and take as much time as they needed to answer the questions. Some were logic type questions that would be difficult to Google, some were just process questions that very few people would know off the top of their head but should be able to Google. The idea was to see if someone could find answers when they ran in to problems. Got some great hires using that technique (and avoided some hires that might have been disastrous!) HR killed it, though.
    - 0xmohit 10y ago
      Open book exams are known to be tougher! I don't mind giving candidates access to language reference manuals, man pages and such.

linkmotif 10y ago

Woah that last question and answer...

phonon 10y ago

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."

Radle 10y ago

"Shel Kaphan was the first employee at Amazon. He is currently pursuing personal interests and still living in Seattle." Yes bro, live the dream.

ahmetyas01 10y ago

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

Twirrim 10y ago

> 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.

DINKDINK 10y ago

>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 10y ago
Not true. Washington has a high sales tax rate. Washington won out because of its smaller population.
- RyJones 10y ago
  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/

georgewsinger 10y ago

> 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 10y ago
The "idea for Amazon" being "bookshop" + "on the internet" is not a something that can or should be owned or protected.

creeble 10y ago

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!

enahs-sf 10y ago

Go Banana Slugs!

thecus 10y ago

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=384706 http://www.nasdaq.com/markets/ipos/filing.ashx?filingid=3847... "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 10y ago
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.

amzn-336495 10y ago

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.

Osiris30 10y ago

Prior discussion from the Geekwire article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2975122 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2975122