Shel Kaphan

“And so Shell had to basically invent this way for users to maintain favorited items or a shopping cart without leaving a cookie. And so how do you do that without cookies or sessions? He invented this really insane engine. It's basically a rendering engine cal…”

“I don't think Amazon would exist today if it weren't for Shell, and I think that's sort of a widely acknowledged thing among the early team, including Jeff”

“It was a bake-off between two, and Shell basically was like, okay, cool, what database software am I going to procure? And the choices were Sybase and Oracle, and Sybase did not return Shell's call, and so he chose Oracle.”

“Jeff and Mackenzie had done great at D Shaw. So they put in 95,000 dollars to start. Shell himself puts in 5000 dollars. This takes me back to the Walmart episode and gosh, so smart of like having your employees Actually invest dollars in the business. Jeff's …”