> In the early stages of a company, a single superstar hire can mean the difference between success and failure Shel Kaphan, the brilliant engineer who built A

> In the early stages of a company, a single superstar hire can mean the difference between success and failure Shel Kaphan, the brilliant engineer who built Amazon.com "The nature of the technical challenge was much more straightforward than many other things that I had done in the past. It wasn’t something where we had to work for years and then find out if the thing we were building would actually work or if anybody would care. It had a lot of pieces, some of which were not easy. Like constructing a catalog out of a lot of non-authoritative sources, none of which was designed to be easily built into a database. At that point, there wasn’t anything like Ruby on Rails or anything where you could slap together a Web site with some dynamic behavior in 10 minutes." http://www.geekwire.com/2011/meet-shel-kaphan-amazoncom-employee-1/3 http://www.geekwire.com/2011/meet-shel-kaphan-amazoncom-empl...