Amazon is one of the biggest companies around today. It’s often grouped together with Apple, Microsoft, and Alphabet, which is the collection of all services supported by Google. These conglomerates are shaping the world, and they all started out from a small garage. They’re the epitome of what it means to live the American dream.
They all started small, and they got massively big in less than fifty years. Now, we’re going to look at a couple of things that most people don’t know about the Amazon company, as well as some fun facts about the founder, Jeff Bezos. Click here to read more.
The start
Jeff Bezos was one of the earliest adopters of the internet. He had an idea in mind that would shape the world of eCommerce. His first entry into the world of entrepreneurship was selling books online. That’s the reason why he started the website on the fifth of July in 1994.
That date changed everything. However, most people don’t know that Amazon wasn’t the original name of the company. The first name was Cadabra. Since Bezos’s idea was to make a store that would sell everything, this seemed like an appropriate name.
It’s the shortened version of Abracadabra, which is what magicians say before they do a trick. However, one of his earliest lawyers convinced him to change it to something else because it sounded like a cadaver. Older phones weren’t so good at eliminating noise, and that’s what it sounded like at the start. Next on the list was another named, Relentless.
That’s just like his vision for the company that pushed through for more than 25 years. Even now, if you go to the domain of Relentless, it would point you to Amazon. After he realized that the first two names wouldn’t cut it, he decided on Amazon, which is the largest river in the world. The first logo is a river too. Visit this link for more info https://www.bbc.com/news/business-48884596.
The sales
Whenever you talk to someone successful, they always look back on their early days with nostalgia. That’s the beauty of success. Every millionaire and billionaire looks back on the early mornings and the long nights that were filled with passion.
The same thing is true about Jeff. Whenever a sale happened online, the initial team rang a bell. Then everyone would flock to the computer to see if they knew the person. Of course, this ritual was abandoned after a couple of weeks because the ringing wouldn’t stop.
His wife was also his biggest supporter. Since everything started in a small garage, Bezos couldn’t fit a team inside. Instead, he invited everyone over to Barnes and Noble, and they held their meetings there. Additionally, the servers for running the company were placed inside his own house. After a while, the power consumption got so high that they couldn’t turn on a vacuum cleaner without a fuse blowing out.
Communication
You can’t be the best in the world at something without having a few flaws, right? When it comes to communication, Jeff thought that it was one of the earliest signs of dysfunction. That goes against everything that’s new and modern in leadership.
However, his stance on this topic is unchangeable. For him, a team should be of a maximum of ten people. That’s the perfect number for sharing two pizzas between the employees. This group will be like a unit, and they had specific tasks to finish, which were called fitness functions.
Most employees hated these functions since they caused a lot of stress, especially during the holidays. Now there is a full service Amazon agency that does the work. When it comes to the small team idea, Bezos might be on to something. Most companies fail when they start growing.
Since there needs to be a hierarchy in each one, the idea of teams being responsible for particular spheres of a company makes sense. However, each team needs to communicate with one another to see if everyone has the same shared goal in mind. Here’s another fun fact. During the 2000s, some of the managers encouraged their employees to shout their lungs out to them as soon as they completed a difficult goal.
These primal screams let the employees spend all of their anger and frustration that came during the difficult teams, and Jeff Wilke said that a few of those screams were so loud, they almost blew out the hardware.
Company complaints
If getting a direct email from your boss sounds stressful, imagine getting one from the richest person in the world. That would be devastating. In the early days, customers had access to the email Jeff, and they could message him some of their complaints.
As soon as he read the complaint, he forwarded the mail to the person who was responsible for the mistake and added a question mark. Getting a question mark from him meant that you need to solve the problem as soon as possible. That means that you have a couple of hours before all hell breaks loose.
Most employees thought of the question mark email as a ticking time bomb. The reason why he got so frustrated is that he wanted to do everything in his power to make the voice of the customer the main thing that was heard in the startup. Click on this link to read more.
Kindle
As CEO, Bezos still thinks that books have the power to shape the world. That’s why they created the Kindle. However, it was originally supposed to be called Fiona based on a character from a book. The novel “The Diamond Age” was the inspiration behind it because an engineer from the future finds a similar-looking object and gives it to his daughter to read and find the secrets of the universe.
This was the main idea behind it, and all of the members that were working on it wanted to keep the name, Fiona. However, Bezos always had the final word, and he decided on Kindle, which causes you to think of lighting a fire. Now, everyone has the power to invent something new and distribute it to millions of people. This proves that a single idea can shape the world.
