Shel Kaphan, every mention
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every year anyone David Rosenthal 17Ben Gilbert 17
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Shel Kaphan comes up
Amazon Web Services · Acquired
- ▶ 31:57 David Rosenthal They're focused on, there are a lot of problems within the company and arguably the biggest problem is that the code base of amazon.com that Michelle Kappen designed back in 1985 has been, you know, amazing.
Amazon.com · Acquired
- ▶ 36:12 Ben Gilbert Certainly, she was already doing work, I think, particularly on accounting, working with legal, kind of setting up the operations of the business, before Jeff hired Shel Kappen, who was the first engineer, the first sort of full-time hire…
- ▶ 1:00:38 David Rosenthal Let's talk about Shell Cap'n, and the first non-McKenzie employee of Amazon.
- ▶ 1:02:05 David Rosenthal Well, the fourth, you have to rewind a little bit to the recruiting of Shell.
- ▶ 1:02:11 David Rosenthal So, Shell, Jeff got introduced to, actually through a D.E.
- ▶ 1:02:16 David Rosenthal And Shell was a engineer, a programmer who lived in Santa Cruz, California, and had worked for a bunch of kind of early Silicon Valley startups.
- ▶ 1:03:37 David Rosenthal Yeah, so Shell was working there.
- ▶ 1:04:37 Ben Gilbert Alright, so, Jeff gets introduced to Shell.
- ▶ 1:04:40 David Rosenthal Shell's part of this deep legacy of everything.
- ▶ 1:09:40 David Rosenthal They've hired Shell at this point.
- ▶ 1:09:56 Ben Gilbert He was interviewing Shell about the early days about this, you know, house that Jeff McKenzie lived in, and they have the garage retrofitted to be an office, Amazon's first office, and Shell is programming sitting in that garage.
- ▶ 1:10:34 David Rosenthal Shell himself puts in 5000 dollars.
- ▶ 1:10:53 David Rosenthal They hire a couple more engineers to work with Shell, start building out the site.
- ▶ 1:11:32 Ben Gilbert It's worth pointing out at this point, so, you know, we sort of glazed over like, all right, Shell gets hired and he starts programming.
- ▶ 1:11:42 Ben Gilbert And Shell turns out to be the perfect hire.
- ▶ 1:11:46 Ben Gilbert 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, but there's not really like a spec.
- ▶ 1:11:57 Ben Gilbert Jeff, I think, coded up the first HTML web page himself, that sort of white one with the A with the Amazon River running through it that predates the logo, but when he starts describing it to Shell, Shell's pretty much like, okay, cool,…
- ▶ 1:12:27 Ben Gilbert Because Shell was not a database guy before this.
- ▶ 1:12:34 Ben Gilbert It was a bake-off between two, and Shell basically was like, okay, cool, what database software am I going to procure?
- ▶ 1:12:41 Ben Gilbert And the choices were Sybase and Oracle, and Sybase did not return Shell's call, and so he chose Oracle.
- ▶ 1:13:48 Ben Gilbert But Jeff tells Shell, hey, people are gonna wanna access this store via two different methods.
- ▶ 1:14:09 Ben Gilbert And Shell kind of just ignores the email thing.
- ▶ 1:15:27 Ben Gilbert And so Shell had to basically invent this way for users to maintain favorited items or a shopping cart without leaving a cookie.
- ▶ 1:16:49 Ben Gilbert as “Shell”
- ▶ 1:16:58 David Rosenthal So yeah, Shell is like, you're so right.
- ▶ 1:17:41 David Rosenthal So Shell and the early team of engineers that they bring on working together, they get a beta built like pretty fast.
- ▶ 1:18:13 David Rosenthal Shell's friend John Wainwright makes the first purchase on April third, 1995, a book called Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies by Douglas Hofstetter.
- ▶ 1:21:27 David Rosenthal So, ah, all that context you had on Shell, oh, this makes so much more sense now.
- ▶ 1:21:38 David Rosenthal And Shell's like, guys,
- ▶ 1:24:44 Ben Gilbert But one thing that was very clear is that Shell and the team were building things at a very low level of abstraction.
- ▶ 1:58:51 David Rosenthal It would be hubris of Jeff and Joy and Mackenzie and everybody and Chell at Amazon to just say, okay, and not do anything about it, but this is Amazon and they know this is a problem.
- ▶ 2:05:33 Ben Gilbert You know, when you listen to these interviews with Shel Kappin, or reading all the stories on Greg Linden's blog, who was an early engineer, or all the interviews Glenn Fleishman has given, it really is about adapting technologies that…
- ▶ 2:06:20 David Rosenthal There were the technologists, Shell in the early days, and the freaks and geeks, but then that evolved into a world-class technology organization over time.
- ▶ 2:56:53 Ben Gilbert Did you know Shell wrote that over a weekend in 96?