When Jeff Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie, started driving northwest from Texas in 1994, they were setting off on a journey to create one of the biggest e-commerce sites in the United States, based in Seattle. Although they took that first long road trip alone, it didn't take Bezos — with his grand vision and boisterous laugh — long to start pulling in talent.
Brad Stone's book "The Everything Store" along with a conversation with early employees Tom Schonhoff and Mike Hanlon helped us figure out the names of some of Amazon's first critical employees. (The first 10 employees are listed in the order they were hired, though the others are not. If you know someone else who was there in the earliest days, let us know!)
Some early Amazon employees have become entrepreneurs. Others are angel investors. A few are happily retired.
Eric Benson and his wife, Susan, joined Amazon together.Date worked for Amazon: 1996 - 2001
Most recent Amazon title: Engineer
What he's doing now: Retired
Benson he joined the company as an engineer. He and Susan, his wife, would always bring their dog Rufus to work with them because of the long hours. The corgi fast became something of a fixture at the company.
One of the many things Benson worked on was the site's "Similarities" system, which recommended books based on what users had already read. He completed the preliminary version in only two weeks.
The Bensons are still together today, living in Washington.
Date worked for Amazon: 1996 - 2001
What she's doing now: Board of Directors of Seattle's Town Hall
Benson was part of Amazon's editorial staff (employees wrote all the first reviews) and she would eventually win the title of editor in chief. She told Stone that, in the early days, the assumption was that employees wouldn't even take a weekend day off of work.
She and the rest of the editorial team were responsible for crafting witty messages for site visitors recommending new products that they might be interested in, a job that became nearly obsolete when Amazon built an algorithm called Amabot that automatically generated recommendations in a standard format.
Nick Strauss did a little bit of everything at Amazon.
Date worked for Amazon: July 1996 - 2001
Most recent Amazon title: Catalog specialist
What he's doing now: Business intelligence trainer at T-Mobile
Strauss had a variety of jobs at Amazon, including answering customer service calls, writing code, packing books, giving presentations, and "anything else you can imagine."
Barrie Trinkle was a National Spelling Bee champion before she joined the company in 1996.
Date worked for Amazon: 1996 - 2001
Most recent Amazon title: Site merchandiser / editor
What she's doing now: Trinkle is a writer, editor, investor, and volunteer
Trinkle won the National Spelling Bee in 1973 with the word "vouchesafe" and has served on the Bee's Word Panel since 1996, the same year she joined Amazon. After graduating from MIT, she spent more than a decade at NASA's Jet Propulsion lab before joining Amazon.
Rebecca Allen was an early Amazon engineer. She now lives on the East Coast.
Date worked for Amazon: 1996 - 1998
Most recent Amazon title: Software engineer
What she's doing now: Often writing about tech on her blog.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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