As the current largest online marketplace in the world, Amazon is a trillion-dollar American corporation​. Founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994, the company is based in Seattle, Washington​. Aside from Bezos, however, there was another face of development. That face is Shel Kaphan, the first employee of Amazon.com. In a 2011 interview with GeekWire, Kahan reveals his own story with the eCommerce empire.

The start of Amazon began as a small online bookshop based in a garage in Bellevue. During this period, Kaphan was hired to create the base software with the second employee, Paul Davis. They both worked together to write code for the software and decide what database systems were going to be used for creating the infamous Amazon.com. Kaphan’s first title was VP of R&D, later becoming CTO.

While being the first employee of such a massive company is a great story to tell, there were complications in Kephan’s tenancy. Despite being the one to move Amazon from an idea to reality, Kephan was not given any founders’ stock and didn’t find it worth an argument at the start of the business. To this day, he doesn’t particularly enjoy attending stockholder meetings despite his owned employee stock. 

While Kaphan was awed by the success of Amazon, his primary goal was to provide books to everyone- an effort that has been sidetracked by the plethora of other products on the website that he doesn’t particularly care for. Kapan stayed within the company for 5 years but felt as if he had been sidelined two years in and lost any control after the company hired two new tech managers.

Currently, Shel Kaphan is retired and lives with his wife, Erica. He left the working world relatively early due to feeling burnt out, and now is the president of The Kaphan Foundation, which provides grants to various causes, including criminal justice policy, environmentalism, and technological development. Kaphan is no longer in contact with Bezos, but calls him a brilliant businessman and is amazed by how large the company has gotten.

^{Image Credits: Christian Wiediger}