Shel Kaphan was the first employee hired by Amazon, starting in 1994 as vice president of research and development and leaving in 1999 after being promoted to chief technology officer. he was pivotal in building the company’s technological infrastructure. In an interview for Achievement.org, Jeff Bezos once dubbed Kaphan “the most important person ever in the history of Amazon.com” for “[building] all of our early systems.”
“He had help from others, but he was the architect; he engineered them and just did a fantastic job,” Bezos added. Among other things, the aforementioned book, “The Everything Store,” notes that Kaphan was part of the development of Amazon’s “1-Click” ordering technology at a time when asking an internet retailer to hold on to your credit card information was unheard of.
In a 2011 interview for GeekWire, his first of note in the dozen years since leaving Amazon, he explained some of his reasons for leaving. “Two and a half years into the company, they hired two other tech managers, and basically, my job was divvied up between the two of them,” he recalled. “I was transitioned to being CTO and still in charge of architecture. But right away, the projects that the new managers were doing were having significant architectural effects that I was not involved in overseeing, being able to say no to anything or … instigate anything. I basically felt that I had been sidelined. There are other things that I probably don’t want to talk about.”
That more or less wrapped up a 25-year programming career, with Kaphan largely devoting his time to his charitable foundation and occasional consulting work since then. More recently, in a “FRONTLINE” documentary for PBS, he expressed concerns that Amazon needs to be broken up into different companies.
