Employee #1: Amazon • Hacker News Board

Re: Employee #1: Amazon

#91

Post by thecus » Wed, Sep 07, 2016, 2:28 AM UTC

Multiple people have asked about his wealth. In the S-1 it gives you a good overview of the minimum amount of wealth generation potential he had.

His agreement stipulated that he had ISOs for 709,568 shares at a strike price of $.001471.

http://www.nasdaq.com/markets/ipos/filing.ashx?filingid=3847...

"This Amended and Restated Incentive Stock Option Letter Agreement (this "Agreement") amends and supersedes paragraph 2(c) of the Employment Agreement between you and the Company dated October 24, 1994, regarding the grant to you of a stock option (the "Option") for the purchase of 709,568 shares (the "Option Shares") of the Common Stock of Amazon.com, Inc., a Delaware corporation (the "Company") at an exercise price of $.001471 per share (reflects stock split effected on November 23, 1996)."

Re: Employee #1: Amazon

#92

Post by wallacoloo » Wed, Sep 07, 2016, 2:33 AM UTC

Benjammer wrote: post #54

mikeleeorg wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So true. So, so true. So true that I often question technical interviewing practices that look solely for ability to memorize complex algorithms exactly, vs ability to seek out an even better solution and apply it effectively.

I recently went through a final-round interview process, and a large piece of the technical part of the interview involved handing me a laptop connected to the internet and the interviewer saying "Build a REST API that can handle these 4 curl requests and respond correctly. Use any technology you want. You have access to Google and anything else you can find. You have about an hour, I'll be back to check on you in 20…

Oh man, I'd probably spend the first half of that time adjusting to somebody else's development environment, and the second half troubleshooting all the runtime errors caused by various ':w's and 'u's scattered throughout the code (unless it were an OS I was familiar with, I'd hesitate to implement this in a language that requires configuring a compiler & build system. Fortunately, most web software seems to already be written in portable languages).

Re: Employee #1: Amazon

#93

Post by peter303 » Wed, Sep 07, 2016, 3:17 AM UTC

thecus wrote: post #91

Multiple people have asked about his wealth. In the S-1 it gives you a good overview of the minimum amount of wealth generation potential he had. His agreement stipulated that he had ISOs for 709,568 shares at a strike price of $.001471. http://www.nasdaq.com/markets/ipos/filing.ashx?filingid=3847... "This Amended and Restated Incentive Stock Option Letter Agreement (this "Agreement") amends and supersedes paragraph…

A lot of people would haved bailed during the dot.crash of 2000. Amazon lost was high flyer and lost over 80% of peak value. Who knew it would become atop ten most valuable company.

Re: Employee #1: Amazon

#94

Post by somedangedname » Wed, Sep 07, 2016, 4:01 AM UTC

pault wrote: post #48

mikeleeorg wrote: post #17

Craig : How did you troubleshoot? Today I use Stack Overflow constantly. What would you do when you ran into a bug that you couldn’t figure out? Shel : Stay up late. Hahaha. I remember building an online art gallery back in 1996. It was for an internship. I got it because I bluffed and said I knew HTML. After I was hired, I purchased a book on HTML. Turns out, the company's "CTO" did the same thing. We both learned o…

I taught myself to code in the early 2000s, coming from a graphic design background, through javascript and actionscript[1]. It took me years of sitting in my bedroom after work, reading dense paper manuals with very few resources for clarification. The mailing lists were often intimidating and took days to get an answer, if it all. You can imagine how stressful that was when working on a deadline and hoping that som…

> ...and could be spoon fed the information I fought so hard to unearth!

Yesterday HN introduced me to a short story - have a read if you haven't already. You'll get a good laugh out of it.

http://www.inf.ufpr.br/renato/profession.html

Re: Employee #1: Amazon

#95

Post by bbcbasic » Wed, Sep 07, 2016, 4:12 AM UTC

kamaal wrote: post #19

AstralStorm wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beautiful example of Peter principle and how to promote someone into uselessness and inefficacy.

No, he was likely promoted because he wouldn't cause much trouble as approving authority. This is sort of being politically nice is rewarded in every institution. People like this are not given any genuine power per se. But since they listen to the powers and more or less do exactly as they say, they are put in positions where they can't be much trouble and are rather useful the higher authorities political goals.

Like Nelson “Big Head” Bighetti

Re: Employee #1: Amazon

#96

Post by vinhboy » Wed, Sep 07, 2016, 4:13 AM UTC

skaphan wrote: post #39

strangetimes wrote: post #5

I was hoping Shel would talk about using Lisp in the early days of Amazon. https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/tour-de-babel#TOC-...

It was used only in the form of Emacs Lisp, as a set of tools for customer service folks to make replying to typical email easier for them. They pretty much built all that themselves (and they didn't start out as programmers).

I don't think people have caught on who is commenting here.

Re: Employee #1: Amazon

#97

Post by bbcbasic » Wed, Sep 07, 2016, 4:15 AM UTC

pault wrote: post #29

I have a friend that got an offer to be employee #15 or so, but turned it down because "nobody wants to buy books online!".

Ironically there is some truth in that, with moving towards ebooks, selling other shit and of course AWS

Re: Employee #1: Amazon

#98

Post by bbcbasic » Wed, Sep 07, 2016, 4:17 AM UTC

BatFastard wrote: post #78

BatFastard wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unquestionably! Lets say he had a typical 5%, no conservatively lets guess 1%. So 1% of 366 billion! Let you do the math. On the other hand if he had 10% which would not be unreasonable, he would be very rich.

So I got down voted on this for WHAT reason?

Maybe because you are just guessing. Anyone can do that.

Re: Employee #1: Amazon

#99

Post by boulos » Wed, Sep 07, 2016, 4:43 AM UTC

skaphan wrote: post #47

nocarrier wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was more Lisp influence than just the CS macros you mention here. Eric Benson was a major contributor to Lucid Emacs and many early Amazon engineers had Lisp experience. SICP was practically issued to every new software engineer--it was that popular. The template language for Amazon's website at the time (catsubst) was a Lisp-inspired prefix notation language with a relatively small number of functions. For exa…

EB and I both worked at Lucid, which produced a Common Lisp system, not to my knowledge a version of Emacs (though maybe so after I left in 1989?). Some other early employees knew and liked Lisp, but we didn't use it on any core functionality. The text substitution logic you mention, that I wrote, was really simple and not particularly Lisp-like. Though again, after I handed it off, who knows what happened.

My understanding from others (second hand) is that there was lots of Perl. (And that this persisted for quite some time). True?

Re: Employee #1: Amazon

#100

Post by phonon » Wed, Sep 07, 2016, 4:50 AM UTC

erubin wrote: post #90

phonon wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. http://www.secinfo.com/dr6nd.818y.s.htm#1stPage http://www.geekwire.com/2011/meet-shel-kaphan-amazoncom-empl... "So, after five years were up — and my stock was all vested — I probably would have left a little earlier if that had not been the issue. So, did you hang on to all of the shares because Amazon hit a rough patch just after you left? “I don’t know what the effect on morale inside the company was since…

A lot of money to be sure, but he'd have an order of magnitude or two more if he were the last cofounder instead of the first employee.

Well, he was given the option to put up some money with Jeff at the beginning and declined. I'm guessing that would have doubled his eventual stake...

It was all done on a threadbare budget. At first Bezos backed the company himself with $10,000 in cash, and over the next sixteen months, he would finance the startup with an additional $84,000 in interest-free loans, according to public documents. Kaphan’s contract required him to commit to buying $5,000 of stock upon joining the company. He passed on the option to buy an additional $20,000 in shares, since he was already taking a 50 percent pay cut to work at the startup and would, like Bezos, earn only $64,000 a year. “The whole thing seemed pretty iffy at that stage,” says Kaphan, who some consider an Amazon cofounder. “There wasn’t really anything except for a guy with a barking laugh building desks out of doors in his converted garage, just like he’d seen in my Santa Cruz home office. I was taking a big risk by moving and accepting a low salary and so even though I had some savings, I didn’t feel comfortable committing more than I did.”

(From "The Everything Store")