Vincent Van Gogh once wrote: "Great accomplishments are not the result of a single impulse, but a series of small events that have developed together." The birth of a business looks like a clean slate in many ways - with the first brushstroke, which is always difficult to decide on, the idea acquires certainty and begins to develop either into a wonderful final product or into a disaster that is quickly consigned to oblivion.
It is especially interesting to turn to the humble origins of global companies, which subsequently thundered all over the world. It usually starts off on a small scale, with a simple show of tenacity from the founder of the business, and this cannot but inspire optimism.
Jeff Bezos founded Amazonin 1994 and for this he left a high-paying job in a financial company from New York. His boss did his best to dissuade him from taking this step, mainly because Bezos was a good employee and was worth holding on to, but also because he considered the whole idea utterly stupid. The boss has watched talented people get sucked in by the doomed startups.
Almost everyone knows how everything went on. But let's turn to the part of the story that most people don't know - the first sale of the company.
The path to the first sale
Jeff spent a year testing the site before making his first purchase. In the past, he studied mathematics and economics, so he used to base his decisions strictly on reliable data. When the product finally went live, it was first tested by the company's employees. The initial version of the site, to put it mildly, did not boggle the imagination, but for that time such an appearance was standard:
And then John Wainwright enters the scene. He was a San Francisco Bay Area programmer and a longtime friend of Shel Kafan . Both worked on a joint Apple and IBM project called Kaleida Labs. In 1994, Shel told John, “I'm thinking of moving to Seattle and partnering with one guy, Jeff Bezos. We will sell books over the Internet. "
Like many others, John decided that Shel was probably out of his mind to leave a good developer position at a well-known company. But Shel did just that and ended up becoming Amazon's first employee and first CTO. In the long term, his decision paid off, and today he is a very wealthy person, which, of course, will not surprise anyone.
First outside purchase
When it came time to test the service, a closed pilot program was launched first. As was the custom of the tech companies of the period, only the families and friends of the founders participated in the program.
Kafan and Wainwright were still friends, even though they parted ways. In the summer of 1995, Kafan e-mailed Wainwright asking him to create an Amazon account and order some books. Later, in an interview with Marketwatch, Wainwright admitted that he signed up with the expectation that he would get the books for free, and was surprised when they took money from him.
Placing an order was not easy back then. Amazon was throwing errors and was not saving payment card details. But Wainwright got along with him somehow. True to his dignity as a Silicon Valley techie, he chose Douglas Hofstadter's book Flexible Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of Fundamental Thought Mechanisms. It was a collection of essays on artificial intelligence from the nineties. Reading is not easy.
In case someone wants to buy it too, the book is still available for ordering on the website.
Unexpected complications
Since the book was specialized literature, Amazon did not have a copy ready to ship. At that time, their warehouse area was small.
Jeff Bezos managed to find a way out that saved him from having to go to buy the book himself. The company's suppliers had a minimum order quantity of ten books. However, one of the suppliers introduced the following rule: if the required books were not in the warehouse, they sent one, and returned the money for the rest. So in the end it happened. It would be great if Jeff Bezos delivered his first order with his own hand, but the story doesn't always turn out the way we want.
Today Wainwright is the CTO of Kollective. He still keeps the book along with the purchase receipt.
He also remains an active Amazon customer and, in his own words, makes at least half of all his purchases there. Interestingly, the history of his purchases on the Amazon account can be scrolled back up to that very order in 1995. Another interesting point: an entire Amazon campus in Seattle is named after him:
Well, in the end, if I may, I want to add a few words about myself. I was curious: what was my first purchase on Amazon? This can be viewed in the list of orders if filtered by year. Try it, it's pretty fun. My first order was placed in 2012 and turned out to be extremely economic:
Anyway, okay, let's summarize what was said: in the summer of 1995, a very intelligent programmer, not related to Amazon, ordered a solid-sized book on artificial intelligence from them. Mr. Wainwright, we thank you for keeping this book intact. Too bad you were forced to pay for it. But if that’s any consolation, I suppose you could have paid more for it now than the $ 19.99 you paid then.