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" plus 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 since become entrepreneurs. Others went on to other major companies. A few are happily retired. Here's what they're all doing now, more than two decades after Amazon got its start.
Jillian D'Onfro contributed to an earlier version of this story.
SEE ALSO: 15 fascinating facts you probably didn't know about Amazon
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: Benson is now retired.
Benson 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: Susan Benson served as a board member at Town Hall Seattle, a nonprofit devoted to arts and education, until 2016.
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.
According to Amazon's first employee, Shel Kaphan, Benson was the one who got Amazon on Netscape's "What’s New' and "What’s Cool" pages when she worked there.
"...because the name started with an A, it was above the fold so lots of people saw it," Kaphan said in an interview with the Y Combinator blog. "That was, in my opinion, a super important connection for us. It might have happened without the personal connection, but who knows, maybe not."
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: Strauss is a business intelligence training developer 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."
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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