A nice Bezos tribute from @stratechery: https://stratechery.com/2021/the-relentless-jeff-bezos/

I want to correct/revise one minor side point…

. @benthompson writes: “That Amazon was even considered a tech company, at least for its first decade, was in many respects an accident of timing: there simply weren’t very many online businesses when Bezos got started, so anyone with a website was a tech company.”

Actually, whether Amazon was a tech company was a major point of debate and disagreement in the early days! Both internally and externally.

Internally (I worked there 2004–07), we would debate “are we a tech company or a retail company?”

I finally concluded that we were both, that you couldn't understand Amazon without understanding both sides of that.

These days we have the term “full-stack startup” with lots of examples like Uber/Lyft, Airbnb, and Flexport. But back then leveraging technology to provide a superior non-tech service was novel. Amazon was the original full-stack startup.

Externally, the perception that we were “just a bookstore” or “just a website” made it more difficult to hire engineers who wanted to work at a highly technical organization.

But there was much more to Amazon than met the eye, even in the early days: maintaining an enormous database of products, scaling a web site (before “web scale” was a thing), personalization (before that was a thing), A/B testing (before that was at thing), etc.

Amazon had to invent an enormous amount of stuff that tech startups today take for granted. There were no web frameworks, no Ruby on Rails, no jQuery, no GitHub, etc.

But overcoming the perception of “just a bookstore” took years, and AWS is a big part of why Amazon is now undeniably a tech company.