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.
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.
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.”
Eric Knapp is retired and living in Oregon.
Date worked for Amazon: 1996 — at least 2001
Most recent Amazon title: Warehouse
What he’s doing now: Knapp is now retired.
Doug McDonald now teaches language arts.
Date worked for Amazon: 1996 — 2001
Most recent Amazon title: Editor, Books division
What he’s doing now: McDonald works as a high school teacher in Oregon.
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’s now a writer living 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.
Software engineer Ellen Ratajak worked on Amazon’s early IT.
Date worked for Amazon: 1996 — 2001
Most recent Amazon title: Director of IT
What she’s doing now: She’s a board member of Organically Grown Company, an organic produce wholesaler, and an independent IT consultant.
She and Shel Kaphan, Amazon’s first employee, shared an office and would sometimes blast rockabilly music as they hacked away on the site, even late on Friday nights.
She’s admitted that Bezos could be a “royal a**hole” with “irrational stubbornness,” but that it all came from his unrelenting desire to delight customers.
Scott Northrop was Amazon’s “Unix Shaman.”
Date worked for Amazon: 1995 — 2000
Most recent Amazon title: Unix Shaman
What he’s doing now: Owner of Stark Raving Foods, which makes gluten-free frozen pizza.
When Northrop joined Amazon way back in 1995, employees were allowed to put whatever they wanted on their business cards, so he chose Shaman.
“‘Wizard'” was way too old school, ‘Jedi’ wasn’t yet in vogue,” he jokes on LinkedIn. He wrote the code that did the automatic layout of Amazon’s packing slips and built the site’s payment system, which he notes scaled from “300 sales on a big day” to $1 billion a year while he worked on it.
Tod Nelson now mentors student entrepreneurs.
Date worked for Amazon: 1995 — 2001
Most recent Amazon title: Editor, Music and Video
What he’s doing now: Nelson now serves as executive director of CalPoly’s Center of Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
In the early days, Nelson used to be in charge of churning out book reviews for Amazon.com. He also worked as operations manager and eventually helped launch Amazon’s German site.
Jonathan Kochmer now works for a nonprofit and plays in a band called Two Loons For Tea.
Date worked for Amazon: 1995 — 2000
Most recent Amazon title: Information architect
What he’s doing now: Director of research and development at nonprofit Earth Economics. He’s also in a band called Two Loons For Tea.
While at Amazon, Kochmer helped develop the browse system for books and worked within the teams that