In the quarter century since, his erstwhile electronic bookstore changed nearly everything about publishing, retail, computing and how to run a company. It has ever-growing fleets of airplanes, drones, trucks and robots; it is moving deeper into entertainment, health care, groceries, advertising, home security, artificial intelligence and more. “This is not only the largest river in the world, it’s many times larger than the next biggest river. It blows all other rivers away,” he said, according to Stone. Employees would be organized into groups of fewer than ten people — the perfect number to be satisfied by two pizzas for dinner — and were expected to work autonomously. Teams had to set strict goals, with equations to measure their success.
The stock fell 96% during the Dot-com crash, hitting a low of $5 in 2001. There have been cases of positive reviews being written and posted by public relations companies on behalf of their clients90 and instances of writers using pseudonyms to leave negative reviews of their rivals’ works. It was a novel set in the future about an engineer who steals a rare interactive textbook to give to his knowledge-hungry daughter, Fiona. The team that worked on Kindle prototypes thought of that fictitious textbook as the template for the device that they were working on. “Communication is a sign of dysfunction,” Bezos said. “It means people aren’t working together in a close, organic way. We should be trying to figure out a way for teams to communicate less with each other, not more.”
Bezos liked to move incredibly fast, which often created chaos, especially in Amazon’s distribution centers.
Those equations were called “fitness functions,” and tracking those goals is how Bezos managed his teams. So that summer, Stone writes, Bezos and MacKenzie, who is now his ex-wife, decided to brainstorm on a bunch of new names for the company. The husband-wife duo resigstered several domain names including Awake.com, Browse.com, Bookmall.com and Aard.com.
History of Amazon
- He purchased a $40,000 skeleton of an Ice Age cave bear and displayed it in the lobby of the company’s headquarters.
- Next to it was a sign that read “Please Don’t Feed The Bear.” It’s still there today.
- Plus, when you were on the phone, people sometimes heard “Cadaver” instead.
- All articles are regularly reviewed and updated by the HISTORY.com team.
- The Kindle got its original name from a book called “The Diamond Age” by Neal Stephenson.
Jeff Bezos originally wanted to give the company the magical sounding name “Cadabra.” In the time before Google Search ruled the internet, being at the top of alphabetical lists still mattered. That’s what led Bezos to awake.com and another name, “Aard.” Sign up now to learn about This Day in History straight from your inbox.
He purchased a $40,000 skeleton of an Ice Age cave bear and displayed it in the lobby of the company’s headquarters. Next to it was a sign that read “Please Don’t Feed The Bear.” It’s still there today. According to Brad Stone’s book “The Everything Store,” “Cadabra” was a reference to “abracadabra,” to suggest using the store would work like magic. The Cadabra name didn’t stick around for long, though.
Articles with the “HISTORY.com Editors” byline have been written or edited by the HISTORY.com editors, including Amanda Onion, Missy Sullivan, Matt Mullen and Christian Zapata. Other possibilities were slightly more esoteric—like MakeItSo.com, an earlier suggestion from Bezos’s colleague Jeff Holden that was inspired by the catchphrase of Star Trek’s Captain Jean-Luc Picard. And Aard.com, from the Dutch word for earth (aarde), which would all but guarantee that Bezos’s company would sit atop any alphabetically arranged list.
Expansion and Growth: Beyond Books
The couple at one time also considered naming their company Relentless.com but they decided against it. Employees would be organized into groups of fewer than 10 people — the perfect number to be satisfied by two pizzas which of these companies was first named cadabra inc for dinner — and were expected to work autonomously. Those equations were called “fitness functions,” and tracking those goals was how Bezos managed his teams. Originally, it was an online bookstore called Cadabra.
Every employee had to take a graveyard shift in the fulfillment centers to meet orders. They would bring their friends and family and would often sleep in their cars before going to work the next day. The US Military has embraced private enterprise like never before to rejoin the space race. Foreign threats are on the rise, led by Russia and China.
You want their names to mean something interesting, something meaningful. Yet you want to keep it simple to avoid spelling errors and pronunciation mistakes. Yet you also don’t want other kids to make fun of them because of their names. That shift from “Jet City” to “Cloud City” has been good for business, for recruiting employees, and “for the morale of the Pacific Northwest, and civic pride,” Selipsky said. Alberg, co-founder of Seattle investment firm Madrona Venture Group, said Seattle was lucky that Bezos chose the city over Portland or the Bay Area to launch his startup. “A lot of the political conversation a hundred-and-some years ago was around what role should the federal government play in regulating or creating a balance to these incredibly powerful companies,” she said.
The story of how another tech giant, Apple, got its name is somewhat similar. “He walked into the garage one morning and informed his colleagues of the company’s new name…and he registered the new URL on November 1, 1994,” Stone wrote in his book. Yet Stone writes that CEO Jeff Bezos’ first lawyer pointed out that the reference was too obscure. Plus, when you were on the phone, people sometimes heard “Cadaver” instead. Accounting for the companies 3 share splits, all coming before Y2K, the stock closed its first day of trading under $2. It raced to a then all-time high, just over $100, in 1999.