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Well-capitalized Seattle startup seeks Unix developers – Jeff Bezos (1994)
- postit 9y agoLooks like Jonathan Wolfson made the first HN comment ever. https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!msg/mi.jobs/9N2b9qj2nOc/Bwwtp60GoY0J https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!msg/mi.jobs/9N2b9qj2nOc/...
- scandox 9y agoThat should certainly cure anyone of using the expression "my two cents" ever again.
- unixhero 9y agoHahaha hilarious
- rsra13 9y agoThat comment is from 2003 :)
- rainbowmverse 9y agoIt's a joke. HN-type dismissals are older than HN.
- Symbiote 9y agoWere Slashdot dismissals the origin? ("No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." from 2001.)
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Luc 9y ago"If you want to hear a much better outlet for capital funding, my start-up company is involved in something called the XFL, which is sure to be the most successful enterprise of the decade." Wow. Who says things like that non-sarcastically?
- raverbashing 9y agoAnd today XFL is popular and e-commerce has proven to be a fad Oh wait, it's the complete opposite
- ryanmarsh 9y agoThank you for this. I'm going to print it out and frame it as a reminder and motivation.
- jordanb 9y agoTo be clear that comment is a joke. It was made in 2003, the XFL collapsed in 2001. Amazon was already a success in 2003.
- kafkaesq 9y agoSo - any data available on how well some of these people made out?
- LrnByTeach 9y agoconversation with Shel Kaphan, Amazon employee #1 http://themacro.com/articles/2016/09/employee-1-amazon/ http://themacro.com/articles/2016/09/employee-1-amazon/ Shel Kaphan compensation ISOs shares 709,568 given @ $.0014 based on FORM S-1 filed at the time of Amazon IPO https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/0000891020-97-000839.txt https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/0000891020-9...
- jamestimmins 9y agoSo that would have cost < $1000 to exercise at the time. Amazon appears to have had 3 stock splits (2x, 3x, and 2x) in the intervening years. Current share price is > $1100 dollars. Meaning 709,000 orig shares * 12x from splits * $1100/share > $9.3 billion in current value. Is there something I'm missing here? Obviously this is assuming that none of the stock was sold (unlikely).
- wdr1 9y agoIf your math is right, they were issued ~2% of the company, which is worth $535B today.
- gaius 9y agoHe's done very well for an employee #1 (vs a founder). Reminds me of a "startup" I worked for in the dotcom boom. I was good friends with employee #1, he brought me on board as something like employee #30. When we IPO'd the founders made hundreds of millions (which they subsequently lost all of in the dotcom crash lol). But we were talking and his equity package was basically the same as mine - we both made between 6 months and a year's salary in the IPO - a nice chunk of change to be sure, but my friend had worked just as hard as any of the founders and made sacrifices in terms of the comfortable corporate job he could have had... This is a story repeated time and time again. It very, very rarely makes sense to be an early employee. Be a founder, or come on board later.
- grabcocque 9y agoI mean, gosh. They’re using some interesting tech but they’re not gonna get anywhere using UNIX with Windows NT about to take off. Also books. I mean I like books but who reads books in the 90s? Really don’t bother. This company is going nowhere.
- andrewwharton 9y agoBehind Google sign-in 'pay-wall'...
- superkuh 9y agoI agree. It was bad enough when I needed to whitelist a handful of google domains to run the JS needed to display simple text. But this page just flat out won't even begin to load. After switching to a 'modern' browser I was able to get to the simple text which I've mirrored here, https://pastebin.com/fFJsPc56 https://pastebin.com/fFJsPc56
- dragontamer 9y agoIt should be noted that this is an archived "USENET" post. Usenet was a decentralized message board system, kinda similar to email. That means all of the discussions that took place here are for the most part, lost to the sands of time. There's no centralized servers in USENET, its all decentralized. Google Groups became one of the more popular USENET services in the early 2000s. But the archives of USENET posts are likely incomplete. Maybe someone with more knowledge of this early internet would be able to comment on where Google got their archives from. More info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet
- RunawayGalaxy 9y agoYou talk about it as if it's dead.
- dragontamer 9y agoI wouldn't say its dead, but today... people tend to join web-based social networks with more controls. Reddit, Facebook, etc. etc. USENET was the original social network. But moderation issues (ie: pornography, cracked software distribution) has made it more difficult to interact with raw USENET today unless you specifically pay for a USENET service. Universities have been closing down their public and free USENET servers in recent years. Overall, discussions online happen over Reddit, Facebook... and of course, Hacker News. I bet you an entire generation of readers have no idea what USENET is.
- andrewjw 9y agoI'm aware of it because it's the inspiration for the message system in _A Fire Upon The Deep_ (Vernor Vinge).
- CommentCard 9y agoThat's a great book. I remember when my old ISP provided access to a free usenet service. This was a standard practice that stopped 5-10 years ago.
- chabes 9y agoNice, they included a fax number
- jamestimmins 9y agoIt would be interesting if someone (maybe the TripleByte folks?) did an analysis of the words/phrasing used to recruit early employees, and compared that to the long term financial success of the company. I frequently see job postings that poorly articulate the company's purpose, or focus heavily on experience with specific technologies that are easily learned, and arguably unimportant from a hiring perspective. I suspect that there is a negative correlation between those postings and financial performance, but I'm curious if the numbers support that assumption.
- veddox 9y agoAlthough I don't see Bezos saying anything about what his company actually does... None of the modern "We're going to disrupt X industry" / "We're democratizing Y" / "We're changing the world for the better by giving people Z"
- jamestimmins 9y agoAlthough it does say "pioneer commerce on the Internet", which at the time may have have been taken as "we're selling physical goods online", as I doubt many digital goods we're getting bought or sold online at the time.
- Gaessaki 9y agoReminds me of Larry Page asking how to set the User Agent in Java back in 1996: https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!msg/comp.lang.java/aSPAJO05LIU/ushhUIQQ-ogJ https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!msg/comp.lang.java/aSPAJ.... We all start somewhere.
- raverbashing 9y agoI wonder if the proposed solution did work, or if it was unsolvable at that time
- em3rgent0rdr 9y agoThe responder "Joseph Millar" gets a claim to fame too for answering!
- raldi 9y agoWhy didn't he just google the ans- oh.
- em3rgent0rdr 9y ago"you should be able to do so in about one-third the time that most competent people think possible" I think (I could be wrong) that might attract the wrong type of applicants, such as people who are arrogant or think that building such systems are easy (and thus might not understand the complexities involved).
- senatorobama 9y agoIs there any point in joining a company like Amazon now?
- letlambda 9y agoYeah, they have a program that allows you to exchange your labor for capital.