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Something I've always wondered - before there's prestige and an aura around the company, how are 'really smart' people drawn to join an upstart? These folks (w

Something I've always wondered - before there's prestige and an aura around the company, how are 'really smart' people drawn to join an upstart? These folks (who are "smarter than") usually have offers from everywhere in the valley, and without prestige or big salary, I'm curious to know if the conversion is primarily a vision or a 'reality distortion field' like story? Or was there any burden of proof for Jeff on progress towards the vision? Edit: just saw you said Jeff knew the vision at the start, how did he prove he was the one to do it early on (founder-startup fit)?

TrackerFF 6y ago
Probably a combination of good pitch / persuasion, first impression of the guy/gal pitching you, and the product itself. Also, keep in mind, Jeff came from a hedge fund, having worked/analyzed the (then) internet and consumer market - so it seems he had more than a hunch of its potential. And the fact that he was a tech guy (before banking), probably meant he could easily talk their language - in technical terms.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
  This is all true, but I think also irrelevant. We built Amazon without convincing anyone that Jeff was right, other than the sort of people mentioned in the article. By the time he started reaching out for VC money (Kleiner Perkins, but also Nick Hanauer who wasn't really VC), it was clear to anyone with half a brain that there was a sensible investment to be made. I remember that not long after we "opened the doors" to the public, we had a visit from some reps from either Ingram or Baker & Taylor, the US's two biggest book distributors (I forget which). Part of the reason Jeff had picked Seattle was that it was within the 1 day delivery radius for both companies. These guys came over to see what we were doing and they were completely flabbergasted. They could not believe that a few people in a small commercial building in Seattle had built what we had already done by that point. They had no idea of the technologies involved, they had no grasp of the vision. But we never had to convince companies like this - we just ordered books from them, as their customers, and then sold them to ours.
PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
Actually, this was a puzzle at the beginning, and I'm not sure when it stopped being so (though presumably it stopped being so long ago). In the early days, there were just two of us programmers, and we began to sense that there was a backlog of programming tasks that we just didn't have the time to get to. We proposed the Jeff that we hire a third programmer. He wanted someone with a PhD in CS from one of the top 5 CS schools. We said "Jeff, we're a tiny startup in Seattle (remember, this is 1994, Seattle was different), we're never going to hire people like that". He insisted. We interviewed several of those people - they weren't interested (as we predicted). We bugged him and bugged him and eventually he relented and let us hire a less qualified, less stellar guy, just to get some tasks done. In retrospect, Jeff had been exactly right. We should have held out for another A+ programmer, with the skills and vision to drive forward whatever tasks they were given (or self-identified). Instead we hired a capable, skilled person who needed a lot of hand-holding and encouragement (not to worry, I think he did pretty well for himself). Jeff knew we had made a mistake (albeit not a very big one), and asserted very affirmatively that the company would not do that again. When we started hiring editors, he wanted people with "multiple years experience at a major national publication". The two of us founding programmers didn't try to talk him down from that, and eventually he was able to recruit such people. I don't know how he convinced them to join Amazon, even to this day. Also, recall that in 1994, "the valley" wasn't what it later became. The people amazon was hiring in the 1995-1998 period weren't looking to the valley for alternative employment, for the most part.

TrackerFF 6y ago

Probably a combination of good pitch / persuasion, first impression of the guy/gal pitching you, and the product itself. Also, keep in mind, Jeff came from a hedge fund, having worked/analyzed the (then) internet and consumer market - so it seems he had more than a hunch of its potential. And the fact that he was a tech guy (before banking), probably meant he could easily talk their language - in technical terms.

PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
This is all true, but I think also irrelevant. We built Amazon without convincing anyone that Jeff was right, other than the sort of people mentioned in the article. By the time he started reaching out for VC money (Kleiner Perkins, but also Nick Hanauer who wasn't really VC), it was clear to anyone with half a brain that there was a sensible investment to be made. I remember that not long after we "opened the doors" to the public, we had a visit from some reps from either Ingram or Baker & Taylor, the US's two biggest book distributors (I forget which). Part of the reason Jeff had picked Seattle was that it was within the 1 day delivery radius for both companies. These guys came over to see what we were doing and they were completely flabbergasted. They could not believe that a few people in a small commercial building in Seattle had built what we had already done by that point. They had no idea of the technologies involved, they had no grasp of the vision. But we never had to convince companies like this - we just ordered books from them, as their customers, and then sold them to ours.

PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago

Actually, this was a puzzle at the beginning, and I'm not sure when it stopped being so (though presumably it stopped being so long ago). In the early days, there were just two of us programmers, and we began to sense that there was a backlog of programming tasks that we just didn't have the time to get to. We proposed the Jeff that we hire a third programmer. He wanted someone with a PhD in CS from one of the top 5 CS schools. We said "Jeff, we're a tiny startup in Seattle (remember, this is 1994, Seattle was different), we're never going to hire people like that". He insisted. We interviewed several of those people - they weren't interested (as we predicted). We bugged him and bugged him and eventually he relented and let us hire a less qualified, less stellar guy, just to get some tasks done. In retrospect, Jeff had been exactly right. We should have held out for another A+ programmer, with the skills and vision to drive forward whatever tasks they were given (or self-identified). Instead we hired a capable, skilled person who needed a lot of hand-holding and encouragement (not to worry, I think he did pretty well for himself). Jeff knew we had made a mistake (albeit not a very big one), and asserted very affirmatively that the company would not do that again. When we started hiring editors, he wanted people with "multiple years experience at a major national publication". The two of us founding programmers didn't try to talk him down from that, and eventually he was able to recruit such people. I don't know how he convinced them to join Amazon, even to this day. Also, recall that in 1994, "the valley" wasn't what it later became. The people amazon was hiring in the 1995-1998 period weren't looking to the valley for alternative employment, for the most part.