This Was the First Job Listing Jeff Bezos Ever Posted For Amazon

It was posted 24 years ago.

jeff bezos
Founder/chairman/CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, speaks onstage during 'The Prime of Mr. Jeff Bezos' at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on October 20, 2016 in San Francisco, California. (Michael Kovac/Getty Images for Vanity Fair)

Twenty-four years ago, Jeff Bezos posted a job ad looking for a computer programmer. The salary for the job included significant equity, but it was for a company that wasn’t even called Amazon yet. Bezos was looking for “extremely talented” software developers to “help pioneer commerce on the internet.”

Amazon now has a $908 billion market cap, and Bezos is one of the wealthiest people in modern history.

Bezos posted the listing on Usenet, a pre-internet message board. Amazon at the time was going to be called “Cadabra,” “Awake.com,” “Browse.com,” or even “Relentless.com.”

Soon after the posting, according to Business Insider,  Bezos hired Shel Kaphan as the company’s first employee and CTO in charge of building the company’s technical infrastructure.

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